Overview - Recruit and Retain Great Faculty and Staff

Take measures to enhance the University’s ability to recruit and retain great faculty and staff in order to realize its goals and fulfill its mission.

Original Goal Six Planning Document

Goal 6

 

How is Indiana State doing to date?

A win-win situation

Probably the greatest asset any university can hold is its people. The recruitment and retention of great faculty and staff has a direct impact on students, from getting them to choose Indiana State University as the place where they want to pursue their degrees to helping them achieve their educational goals. Investing in its people is an important goal of Indiana State University.

Just some of the new initiatives designed to help recruit and retain top-notch faculty and staff are:

 

  • A new staff salary structure
  • The implementation of staff and faculty target salaries
  • Compensation increases
  • A revamped orientation for new faculty
  • The continuation of events designed especially to welcome new employees
  • Faculty development activities that support faculty in utilizing experiential learning and community engagement in their courses
  • Faculty workshops that include strategies appropriate to the content areas involving experiential learning
  • Implementing staff training and development initiatives that create a more engaged employee, thereby increasing employee interest in community engagement
  • Enacting a community service leave policy that allows employees time to take a more active role in community volunteerism
  • Submitting an NSF Advance grant to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM disciplines

Working toward multicultural excellence

Diversity is understood as the spectrum of human differences including racial identity, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, age, socio-economic status, national origin, sexual orientation, disabilities and religious beliefs. A focus on diversity can spotlight
the uniqueness of identities and create opportunities for interaction, dialogue and analysis that build community. It can help create curricula and learning experiences that prepare ISU students to live and work in a diverse and global society. Diversity of faculty and staff contributes to a welcoming and rich environment for students and encourages openness and critical thinking. Indiana State is working to diversify its faculty with talented individuals so that the ethnic composition of the University’s faculty more closely resembles the makeup of its student body. This is being achieved through the development of deep, diverse candidate pools and active recruitment of candidates who meet the university’s high standards of excellence.

A safe and affirming place

Sycamore Safe Zone is an initiative through the Office of Diversity to help make the ISU campus a safe and affirming place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) students, faculty and staff. Sycamore Safe Zone workshops provide education on LGBTQ issues and enhance participants’ capacity to be allies to LGBTQ individuals. Sycamore Safe Zone is just one step of many being taken by Indiana State University to achieve its vision of embracing diversity.