Evaluating and Rewarding Institutional Service

Scholarship is relatively easy to evaluate – we know about how long it takes to write an article, and the relative pecking order of journals.  Teaching, also, is easy to measure, at least at the extremes – student evaluations and teacher-of-the-year awards flag the great and the awful.  But how is institutional service evaluated?  And are there effective ways to reward it?

Assessing institutional service can be difficult.  Deans don’t typically serve on many faculty committees, and so have no basis for evaluating the performance of individual faculty members.  The success or failure of a committee is one measure, but the end result can turn on variables that have nothing to do with faculty effort or competence (think faculty hiring), and most committees -- successful or not -- contain some faculty members who go above and beyond and others who free-ride.

The problem with institutional service is that there usually are neither positive incentives for faculty members who do good institutional service, nor negative ramifications for faculty members who avoid institutional service or perform it badly.  To the contrary, the incentives are perverse:  a faculty member who works hard on a committee or chairs a successful one is “rewarded” by being given more of such work; a faculty member who shirks or performs badly is passed over the next time a difficult or important assignment comes along.  Meanwhile, the shirkers are free to do scholarship (which, unlike institutional service, is rewarded on the lateral market) or to spend their extra time on R&R.

In the corporate world, an institutional service shirker would be shown the door unless s/he more than makes up for it in other contributions to the institution.  Does your institution have an effective way of identifying overachievers and shirkers on institutional service?  I’m all ears. 

Rick Bales