UMass Amherst Named Finalist for Delphi Award Recognizing Higher Education Practices in Support of Contingent Faculty

The Office of the Provost has announced that UMass Amherst has been recognized as a 2023 Delphi Award finalist for the university’s successful work toward supporting non-tenure track, contingent and/or adjunct faculty.

For the past six years, The Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, in partnership with the American Association of Colleges & Universities, selects two Delphi Award winners and acknowledges one finalist each year.

The Delphi Award is an initiative of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success and is an extension of the Delphi Project’s mission to better support faculty off the tenure track while helping create new faculty models for postsecondary institutions to adopt. The award is supported and funded by the TIAA Institute.

UMass Amherst was selected for its entry, “Policies, Practices, and Programs to Support Equity and Inclusion of Non-Tenure Track Faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.” Its core belief is that full inclusion of contingent faculty with respect to working conditions, employment policies and benefits, governance structures and professional development programs benefits the mission of the campus to deliver a world-class education to their students. UMass Amherst’s policies, practices, and programs ultimately resulted in a faculty job satisfaction survey that showed 80% of contingent faculty are satisfied with the university as a place to work.

The application was led by Christiane Healey, biology senior lecturer and Office of Faculty Development (OFD) faculty fellow, with participation from the Massachusetts Society of Professors, the Provost’s Office, and the OFD.