2024 Delphi Award winners announced by USC’s Pullias Center for Higher Education

Top public research universities Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) have been selected as the two winners of the 2024 Delphi Award by the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, in partnership with the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U).

Each university will receive $15,000 cash awards to continue their work to support contingent, also called VITAL (Visiting, Instructors, Temporary, Adjuncts and Lecturers), faculty in promoting student success. In addition, the Delphi Award committee selected two finalists this year, the University of Delaware (UD) and San Jacinto College (SJC).

"Each year I continue to be impressed by the applicants and the continued efforts to support VITAL faculty within every type of higher education institution in the country. The work of unions to support reforms was especially prevalent among this year's applicants and winners, showing that unions are a strong advocate and partner for change," stated Professor Adrianna Kezar, director of the Pullias Center and primary investigator on the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, an initiative of the Pullias Center.

As in past years, the Pullias Center’s Delphi Award committee identified winners that represent key, specific changes that they believe should be in place to support higher education VITAL faculty across the country.

MSU’s College of Arts and Letters was selected as a 2024 Delphi Award winner for their dedicated work to include their VITAL faculty and academic specialist staff as full partners through its ‘Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership’ (CPIL) initiative. Informed by the College’s Culture of Care, the core of the work focused on the creation of career pathways and contract stability, salary equity, promotion categories and a mentoring program. Working in tandem with the College’s Union of Non-Tenure Track Faculty (UNTF) and the college Advisory Committee’s Non-Tenure Track Task Force on Career Pathways, the College’s efforts also included key wins for VITAL faculty such as retirement and remote work agreements, grant writing support, faculty awards and leadership opportunities in professional development and governance.

"Over the past seven years, we have collaborated across MSU’s College of Arts & Letters with our contingent faculty and academic staff partners to enact equitable and inclusive policies and practices that bring professional visibility, respect, and greater job stability,” said Sonja Fritzsche, associate dean for Undergraduate Studies and Administration. “We are thrilled to be able to share the work we have done guided by the CPIL Initiative, a values-enacted framework for transformative change. These efforts are also finding resonance across Michigan State University, and the policies and programming can be easily adapted by other institutions."

2023 Delphi Award finalist UMass Amherst continued to build on their previous work and long-standing commitment to VITAL Faculty and was selected this year as a winner of the prestigious Award. “Supporting VITAL Equity and Inclusion” is a university-wide initiative that reflects a significant investment in supporting VITAL faculty. Working in partnership, the UMass Amherst administration and faculty labor union created comprehensive policies, practices, and programming supporting VITAL faculty. These include salary parity and promotion steps, workload accommodation and professional development, job security and a full range of benefits, including medical insurance, a generous leave policy and retirement benefits. UMass Amherst’s policies, practices and programs ultimately resulted in a faculty job satisfaction survey that showed 80% of VITAL faculty are satisfied with the university as a place to work.

“It is an incredible honor for UMass Amherst to receive the Delphi Award,” said Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, provost and senior vice chancellor for Academic Affairs. “This recognition truly reflects the importance of bolstering programs and policies that support inclusion and success for VITAL faculty, who make significant contributions to our core mission of teaching, research and/or service.”

KC Culver, the Delphi Project’s associate director and an associate professor at the University of Alabama noted, “This year's winners and finalists reflect the full spectrum of approaches for improving working conditions for VITAL faculty. These approaches include centralized efforts by university administration and more localized work being done at the college level. They also demonstrate that smaller faculty committees and VITAL faculty self-advocacy groups can also affect meaningful change.”

This year, two finalists for the Delphi Award were selected from a competitive applicant pool of more than 15 public and private institutions.

UD's “Empowering Educators, Enriching Students: A Program for Continuing Track Faculty” highlights the 2016 creation of the Continuing Track (CT) Caucus, a volunteer organization that each VITAL faculty member belongs to, unless they choose to opt out. The Caucus promotes a fair and equitable work environment for VITAL faculty, advocates on behalf of them and students, and collaborates with other groups and caucuses on issues of common concern. The CT Caucus has been a key voice in efforts to improve hiring practices through the development of guidance documents, voting rights, promotion and performance review processes, helping chart a path forward for systemic change.

Texas community college SJC employs the same number of full-time faculty as part-time faculty. Using Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success materials and guides, as well as others, SJC developed and revised a number of supports for their VITAL part-time faculty. Within their Center for Effective Teaching and Learning (CETL), the college created a new full-time position focused on supporting new and part-time faculty, and also introduced a committee dedicated to supporting part-time faculty. Other programs designed specifically for part-time VITAL faculty include a suite of professional development opportunities, including an online orientation, mentorship and orientation, networking and appreciation opportunities, and significantly, increased pay to this VITAL group.

The winners of the Delphi Award will be honored for their work at AAC&U’s annual meeting on January 22–25, 2025. “The Delphi Award recognizes that student success is dependent on the engagement of all faculty, and it draws attention to the need for colleges and universities to play a leadership role in advancing equity,” said AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella. “AAC&U congratulates this year’s winners and finalists, and we thank them for their outstanding work.”

The Delphi Award is supported by the TIAA Institute, which helps advance the ways individuals and institutions plan for financial security and organizational effectiveness. Surya Kolluri, head of the TIAA Institute, notes “The innovative faculty engagement models highlighted by the Delphi Award and the important work of the Pullias Center align well with TIAA’s intentions to help colleges and universities meet the unique needs of their diverse and multi-faceted workforce—throughout their careers and into retirement.”

This is the seventh year for The Delphi Award, an initiative of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success at the Pullias Center. The Award is an extension of the Delphi Project’s mission to better support faculty off the tenure track (also known as VITAL faculty) while helping create new faculty models for postsecondary institutions to adopt. The USC Pullias Center has worked in partnership with AAC&U on the Delphi Project since the Project’s inception in 2012, developing reports and resources, collecting models and conducting research and advocacy on this issue.

Instructional faculty in American higher education is mostly comprised of VITAL professionals responsible for teaching the vast majority of college and university classes. These instructors are typically hired on shorter notice, on short-term or no contracts, and paid less than tenured or tenure-track faculty, while offered little or no orientation or mentoring, professional development or voice in governance. As a result, VITAL faculty are often tasked with balancing heavy teaching loads at multiple institutions despite limited time to prepare courses and limited support their curriculum design or pedagogy—factors shown by Delphi Project research to correlate with lower student success rates.

Additional tools and resources from the Pullias Center and the Delphi Project to assist campuses in supporting non-tenure-track faculty include Departmental Cultures and Non-Tenure-Track Faculty: A Self-Assessment Tool for Departments and Non-Tenure-Track Faculty on our Campus: A Guide for Campus Task Forces to Better Understand Faculty Working Conditions and the Necessity of Change. Case Studies of all Delphi Award winners, including 2023 winners Loyola Marymount University and the University of Arizona, and finalist the UMass Amherst, are also available on the Pullias Center website.