Date:               February 14, 2023
To:                   All full-time faculty
From:               Lester Sandres Rápalo, Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs
Re:                   Helping Our Faculty Succeed through Participation in COACHE’s Job Satisfaction Survey

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to inform you of an important opportunity you will be offered to participate in the COACHE Faculty Satisfaction Survey, which will be administered from today, February 14 through April 7, 2023. This survey research is part of a national program called the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), which has been operating from the Harvard Graduate School of Education since 2003. Participation will entail completing a 25-minute, web- based survey and your unique link to the survey will be emailed to you from COACHE in the coming days.

This survey was designed to determine their current job satisfaction compared to faculty at peer institutions in the following areas:

–             Nature of Work – teaching, service, and research;

–             Shared Governance;

–             Resources and Support;

–             Appreciation and Recognition;

–             Interdisciplinary Work, Collaboration, and Mentoring;

–             Department Engagement, Quality, and Collegiality;

–             Tenure and Promotion;

–             Retention and Negotiation;

–             Institutional Leadership

Past survey results have been used to improve mentoring opportunities for promotion, to increase faculty participation in college governance and to increase transparency of tenure and promotion.

Your views are especially important to us as we strive to attract and retain the best and brightest scholars and teachers, increase the satisfaction of all faculty, and to make BCC a great place to work.

In a process approved by Harvard’s and Bronx Community College’s Office of Institutional Research (IR), COACHE will provide our campus with their summary analysis, as well as the confidential unit-record database, stripped of names and e-mail addresses. The data provided to BCC will be received and kept on a secure server by Chris Efthimiou, Director of Institutional Research and Testing. Neither I, nor any other administrator, staff or faculty member outside the Office of Institutional Research at BCC will have access to the unit-record data. The Office of Institutional Research will explore and analyze broad patterns in the data to assist with planning and developing improved academic policies and practices across campus. To protect confidentiality and guarantee that the results of this survey cannot influence personnel decisions about individual faculty members, IR staff will disseminate survey results only with data aggregated in cells of five respondents or more, so that individual faculty and individual departments cannot be identified.

We welcome this opportunity to learn from an independent, research-driven, comparative study. We believe that BCC has the potential to be one of the best places for faculty to work, and with your help we can learn how best to support that goal. However, data from the Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey will be meaningful only if we have broad participation.

An invitation to complete this web-based survey will be emailed directly to each of you in the coming days from COACHE (coachefaculty@abtsurvey.com), directing you to the online survey. The survey is easy to complete. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact Dean Luis Montenegro at luis.montenegro@bcc.cuny.edu or (718) 289-5939, or COACHE at coachefaculty@abtsurvey.com.

Thank you in advance by helping us through participation in this study.