There are two primary ways to categorize types of faculty service (Fear & Sandmann, 1995; O’Meara, Terosky, & Neumann, 2008; Ward, 2003). First, there are service activities that take place on campus at the departmental, school, or institutional level. These local activities tend to focus on operations necessary to getting things done on campus. Second, professional service activities include those with professional organizations, scholarly journals, and other activities that support the work of the discipline. In today’s post, I want to share the two types of service that are critical for higher education and playing the important role as academic citizen.

 

Institutional Service

Institutional service may take the form of anything from committee meetings with an ad hoc faculty group to deal with some issue in your department to regular standing committees for admissions or curriculum. In addition, you will be expected to attend regularly scheduled faculty meetings monthly or less frequently depending on the department.

In addition to committee work and meetings, institutional service also requires service with students, particularly if you teach undergraduates. You will receive many requests for letters of recommendation, or you may be asked to serve as an advisor for a student organization.

Remember: At the end of the day, the primary purpose of institutional service is to keep the trains running on time.

Someone needs to meet with prospective students, organize seminar series, help with assessment, and represent the department on the strategic planning committee.

Professional Service

For professional service, you use your scholarly expertise to support the operations of your discipline in activities ranging from peer review to work with scholarly organizations.

These entities require faculty to support their work, and ask them to serve as presidents, on awards committees, or chair sessions at professional meetings.

Professional service, in particular, can significantly benefit your tenure case. It may support your scholarship or build a network of colleagues and institutions across the country. This can advance your career, helping you meet potential external reviewers or find research collaborators.

A strong professional network also increases the visibility of your scholarly work and contributes to establishing your national reputation, a valuable currency in the tenure process.

Professional service typically occurs in two forums.

Organizationally, the work of your discipline takes place in a scholarly professional association. You may become active within a broader discipline-based organization such as the American Sociological Association, the American Educational Research Association, or the American Chemical Society. Or you may find yourself in one or more specialized fields or disciplines that have their own associations.

In either case, these professional associations will prove a significant vehicle for your professional service. Service in professional associations include opportunities such as serving in officer and board positions, joining association committees, and assisting with annual meetings as part of the program committee or in various smaller roles as part of a conference.

Beyond service in professional associations, you will be called to share your expertise as a reviewer for journals, conference, grants, and publishers.

Peer review is vital to the academic publishing process and to improving the quality of work published (Lee, Sugimoto, Zhang, & Cronin, 2013).

Reviewing can keep you up to date on recent research and trends in the field. Also, as top journals request your services, your reviewing activities can increasingly evidence your expertise.

However, you must keep reviewing activities in check with your other responsibilities, as they can eat up time. And unlike departmental colleagues, editors have no idea about the other activities demanding your time.

As a result, you alone are in the position to know if you can accept a review assignment or if you are overloaded and should decline it.

In addition to reviewing responsibilities, you may serve on the editorial board of a journal in your field. The responsibilities of editorial boards vary tremendously by journal, but with a limited workload serving on one can help you learn about the work in your field and make connections with senior colleagues on the board.

As you can see, professional service can often be tied to networking and publishing (Boice, 2000). Thus, this type of service not only benefits you by showcasing your active citizenship in your discipline, but it can also support your scholarly work.

Of course, there are other activities that may be considered service at your institution that also support your discipline and leverage your professional expertise.

Consulting work, paid or unpaid, enables you to share your expertise with groups outside your institution.

Public education and sharing of expertise is another area of service. A scientist may visit a high school to share her research, for example, or a business professor may give a talk at a lunch about the state of the local economy; these are examples of how faculty share their scholarly expertise and experience with the public.

These activities, although they may be related, do not fall neatly into teaching or research categories, and thus are typically considered service. Like most service these activities, in appropriate moderation, can support the case for consideration as a strong, productive, well-rounded academic citizen.

(This post originally appeared in How to Get Tenure:  Strategies for Successfully Navigating the Process)