Apportionment Policy

Guidelines for Faculty Apportionment
Revised, October 2013

The College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) is dedicated to promoting excellence in research and creative activity, teaching, and service in the humanities and natural and social sciences. Tenured and tenure-track A&S faculty members’ primary roles are research, classroom instruction, other forms of student engagement, and leadership/service. The distribution of an individual’s effort among those roles can be different for different types of appointments and can vary over a career and across disciplines. The College must be appropriately flexible in responding to the diverse needs of different departments and faculty members while establishing normative standards for equitable distribution of effort across the faculty. These policies describe the normal expectations within the College.

A&S comprises over 30 departments and programs with over 350 tenured and tenure-track faculty members across a diverse range of disciplines with different but equally important missions. Consequently, there is no standard A&S apportionment policy for all faculty members. All A&S departments and programs should have written apportionment policies which outline guidelines for faculty workloads that comply with the College’s policies. These policies are informed by national norms within the various disciplines. Each department’s policy is discussed and approved at the College level. The overriding principle is that in all cases the assignment of a faculty member should result in a full-time effort. It is important that all faculty members fully understand their workload and performance expectations. These should be described in the initial letter of offer and should be updated as they change during a faculty member’s career. Annual evaluations should reflect these expectations, and departments should develop salary review policies that take into consideration the individual’s workload distribution and quality of contributions to research, teaching, and service.

Tenure-track/Tenured Faculty

As seen in College of A&S Apportionment chart 1.A, there is no standard apportionment across the tenure- track/tenured faculty. While the majority of faculty members teach a 2-2 load over the course of an academic year, departments in the natural sciences routinely have normal loads of 1-1 or 2-1 while some departments in the humanities have a 3-2 load. Beyond differences in course loads, the differentiation of apportionments across department workloads represents the varying emphases that each department places on these various activities.

Professors of Practice

In keeping with University guidelines, faculty in the professor of practice ranks must have the majority of their apportionment in instructional activities or practice and their teaching apportionment must be above the norm assigned to faculty on the tenure track. Other professor of practice responsibilities--assigned at the discretion of the department/college--can include apportionment in service and/or professional development, and/or minimal requirements to meet academic qualification for accreditation.

Adjustment of Apportionment

Tenured and tenure track faculty are expected to successfully undertake the full set of research, instruction, and leadership/service roles. The flexibility to alter faculty workload by negotiation is an important mechanism for altering faculty effort to reflect changing career aspirations and expectations as defined at the time of hire. While variable apportionments mean that not all faculty members have the same proportion of time assigned each semester to teaching, research, and service, all faculty members are expected to contribute some portion of their efforts in these three areas. Adjustment of apportionment recognizes the shifting emphases in faculty members’ contributions to the overall missions of the departments and the University.

In the spring of each year faculty members have the opportunity to review and change their “Areas of Efforts Weights” or apportionment in consultation with their chairs. These categories include research, teaching, service, outreach, and administration and are used by the departments and the college for annual merit calculations.

The following illustrate the types of apportionment alterations typically made:

• Increases in teaching or service loads are appropriate when faculty members are not sufficiently productive in their research to justify their research apportionment
• Increases in teaching apportionment are appropriate when a faculty member takes on significantly larger than normal teaching activities over an extended period of time.
• A faculty member with an outstanding program in research and education may warrant reduced teaching or service responsibilities.
• Advising or administrative roles may substitute for a course assignment, but the full set of assignments should result in a full-time effort.

Mutual Agreement on Adjustment to Apportionment

In compliance with the University’s Apportionment Policy [Bylaws of the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska (Section 4.3)] and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor’s Policy Memorandum on Apportionment the college has established the procedure to be followed if a faculty member and the unit administrator are unable to reach mutual agreement on changes in apportionment.

The College Promotion and Tenure Committee will serve as the elected faculty committee in the college to consider the positions of each party with consideration for the faculty member’s overall areas of professional competence and expertise and in the context of the departmental and college missions. The committee shall decide whether the apportionment of the faculty member’s responsibilities should be changed and, if so, in what matter. The committee decision is to be delivered in writing. The committee decision is final, subject only to review by committees delineated in Sections 4.13, 4.14 and 4.15 of the Bylaws of the Board of Regents.