Faculty Profile

Augustana's Faculty

It's impossible in a few paragraphs to capture the diversity of Augustana’s faculty or the richness of their professional lives. We will provide three sorts of information that you might find useful: a quick demographic snapshot, highlights of the sorts of activities that the faculty typically engage in, and a link to profiles of those joining the faculty in 2009-10.

A demographic snapshot of our faculty shows:

• Augustana has 174 full-time faculty members. Not quite half are women. 94% of them have earned their field’s terminal degree. Their efforts are supplemented by 85 part-time and adjunct colleagues, most of who are hired for the special expertise they possess rather than as instructors for intro-level courses.
• 88% of the faculty report that they’d still become college professors if they could begin their career again. Based on the most recent analysis from the nationwide Higher Education Data Sharing (HEDS) report, our highest levels of job satisfaction were with "autonomy and independence" (89%) and "competency of colleagues" (80%).
• Augustana’s faculty salaries typically fall within the top third for all colleges, nationwide. Combined with the Quad-Cities’ modest cost-of-living and extremely affordable housing, those salaries allow the faculty to live quite comfortably. That’s reflected in the far higher than average overall job satisfaction that faculty report.

• All of us teach. Most teach seven courses over a three-term year. The teaching load for faculty in their first year is six courses. 60% of our classes have fewer than 20 students, less than 1% have 50 or more.
• All of us routinely evaluate our teaching with the faculty-designed, locally-normed Student Response to Instruction (SRI) survey. The college provides a lot of assistance to faculty who would like to strengthen their classroom work.
• Almost all faculty participate in interdisciplinary, college-wide efforts such as the Augustana General Education System (AGES), humanities and sciences honors tracks, and international study programs.
• Most faculty (about 73%) work collaboratively with students on research projects outside of class.
• Almost all faculty serve as academic advisors either in the First-Year Program or as part of the major.
• Many faculty advise or oversee co-curricular and extra-curricular programs like the Debate Union or Latinos Unidos. The faculty also actively participates in more than 180 community organizations.
• Many are also involved in ad hoc student projects such as fund-raising for domestic violence shelters or a Habitat for Humanity build.
• About a third of faculty have recently held office in their professional associations, 93% have recently attended disciplinary conferences (most were presented) and about half have been professionally active on the Internet (from maintaining website and discussion groups to submitting manuscripts for electronic publication).