Research funding expectations as a function of faculty teaching/administrative workload

Persistent faculty shortages at US pharmacy schools make faculty recruitment and retention a perennial priority. The literature indicates that a key retention issue is whether the faculty member's scholarship is compromised because of a heavy teaching or service workload.

Assess US pharmacy faculty perceptions concerning their views of appropriate expectations of research grant support given their teaching/administrative workloads.

Data and opinions were collected using a multiple-choice, cross-sectional survey instrument (SurveyMonkey®; Menlo Park, CA), e-mailed to 1047 faculty members, randomly selected from all Accreditation Council of Pharmacy Education (ACPE)-accredited US pharmacy schools. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS® (Chicago, IL) for Windows, Version 17.0.

Of the researcher respondents, a majority felt that the amount of teaching expected was too much to be a competitive researcher. Teaching commitment was found more likely to increase than decrease after achieving tenure. Reported new faculty start-up funding was well below that typically found at nonpharmacy research schools.

This information is anticipated to help pharmacy faculty members gauge their workload and productivity relative to a national peer group, and to help pharmacy schools improve in faculty recruitment and retention. The survey findings may assist pharmacy schools in clarifying reasonable teaching and funding expectations for pre- and post-tenure faculty, which in turn may help attract more pharmaceutical scientists to academic pharmacy positions.