A. The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) is a research-practice partnership based in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. COACHE studies the work lives of faculty with a focus on actionable data to support academic administrators. Studies are conducted in partnership with college and university leaders (both faculty and administrative) with an emphasis on using the data collected to improve the academic workplace. 

A. Yes!  For each survey completed by a faculty member, $25 was added to GVSU's Student Emergency Fund.  As about 2 out of every 3 faculty completed the survey, $15,500 was added in May 2024.

A. GVSU’s Steering Committee reviewed COACHE web sites at other institutions and noted that among the outcomes were improvements in promotion standards, new opportunities for flexible work arrangements, revisions to faculty mentoring programs, an initiative to address collegiality issues, and elevating “Faculty Affairs” or “Faculty Leadership and Success” as its own office within the purview of the provost.  Florida International University has a nice page of results and outcomes. 

A. No. The COACHE Steering Committee decided not to request the “unit data” of individual responses.  Although we could have used that data to conduct our own analyses, we decided instead to request a handful of customized reports from the COACHE program.  There were concerns that those in possession of individual responses could identify open-ended comments with their authors, which could affect trust in the survey process.  The consent page for the survey communicated that "raw data" would not be provided to GVSU.

A. From COACHE: Confidentiality and anonymity are assured in all COACHE analyses and reports. Your name and email addresses are retained solely for the sake of COACHE research, including reminding respondents to begin or to complete their survey and for limited and IRB-approved follow-up studies. When we submit the survey report to your institution, only the aggregate data is shown in the report. No identifiers are matched to reported responses, and no disaggregated data will be presented for any subgroup with fewer than five respondents. 

Please note that at the end of the survey, we may ask to retain your contact information for further studies. If you allow us to keep your contact information on file, COACHE will strictly protect the privacy and confidentiality of your personal information. The future studies would not be used for individual campus analysis and no one at your campus will be notified of your participation in future studies. 

A. See: https://coache.gse.harvard.edu/faq/what-will-you-do-data

A. The COACHE program notes that one dataset is available to qualified researchers.  More details can be found on this COACHE page. 

A. No. We are only participating in the COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey 

A. With sufficient participation, GVSU will be able to benchmark our faculty's experience of the academic workplace within both internal and national contexts. We will be able to compare our data against national results. The survey results will inform changing practices and policies on campus. 

A. Participation is voluntary, but we strongly encouraged all eligible faculty members to share their feedback. 

A. Full-time regular faculty, library faculty, and affiliate faculty were surveyed, following the rules from the COACHE program. Specifically, the survey was sent to all regular, library, and affiliate faculty, except for those in the first year of their appointment, in their terminal year after being denied tenure, or with a senior administrative appointment such as deans. 

The first email was sent from COACHE on Wednesday, February 7, 2024.  It had the subject line, "Help GVSU assess the academic workplace", and it was sent from "Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education", which is COACHE.  The email began with, "With the endorsement of Fatma Mili, the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) at Harvard University invites your participation in a survey of full-time faculty at Grand Valley State University."

For those faculty who did not complete the survey in the first two weeks, follow-up emails from COACHE were sent several times through early April.