Welcome to this two part webinar titled Navigating Academia. What's important here to know is, of course, we all start our careers as clinicians. Very few of us have ever had any kind of teaching experience nor any kind of education in teaching us to teach. I'm Judy Thompson. I've been a nurse anesthesia educator for almost all of my career as a CRNA. I was the director of a certificate program, which later became a master's program. And then in 2013, I started a program in an academic institution, in a school of nursing. At that time, I thought I was well equipped to handle the challenge, but I never really had met academia head on. And I didn't know as much about it as I thought that I did. In this presentation, we're going to look at a little data on our programs. And we're going to talk about some of the most recent data from the Council on Accreditation. Also look at the structure of the academic institution, academic rank, and who's who in academia. Currently, there are 128 accredited nurse anesthesia programs that are accredited by the Council on Accreditation. This is a very recent slide. This is from November 30, 2021. Currently, there are 123 that are already approved for doctoral degrees. Five are in transition, moving from master's to the doctoral degree. And currently, there are four programs in the process of closing, or have just recently closed. Of those programs that we have, educational programs, 98 of them are offering the DNP degree, Doctor of Nursing Practice, and 25, the DNAP degree. So you can see from this that most of our programs are going to be, or already are in, the College of Nursing. This chart here is just, gives you some data from 2015 to most recent data, which was November 30, 2021. It shows the turnover in programs for program administrators. And currently, it's about 10% to 11%, but that may be reflective due to the pandemic. In 2019, it was 23%, which was quite high. These numbers range from 2015 to 2021, which is really in the chunk of that time period where we were moving our programs into the doctoral, into doctoral education. This is a quote from Jeffrey Buller. Jeffrey Buller is a senior author. He owns a company, and he teaches academics to educators and to teach them to become academics. And I took this quote from the textbook, the Resource for Nurse Anesthesia Educators from Chapter 26, and I thought it was very fitting. In this, Dr. Buller says that most college professors begin their professional lives with only a vague idea of how their careers may develop. They are frequently unaware of the options that are open to them, the choices they'll need to make, and the different directions their professional lives could take. So I thought that was kind of interesting. We're going to look at the current models of nurse anesthesia programs presently. Many of them are university-based, which the university is the sole governance of that program. Some are hospital-based with an academic affiliate. That was the program where I had come from before going to a university-based program. Some of them are hospital and university with a shared governance, and that might be certain healthcare systems that work with the university together to have a nurse anesthesia program to have the governance. And then there are some freestanding programs, not many, but some freestanding programs are in the United States as well. The Carnegie classification, most universities are classified according to the Carnegie classification of institutes of higher education. And this looks at the degrees granted, the size of the school, and whether there's an academic or educational or research focus. Schools are also accredited by the American Association of University Professors. And if you look at your school's mission statement, you'll get a pretty good idea of whether your school is focused heavily on research or whether your school is focused more heavily on the academics. All academic institutions usually have a president who is the chief executive officer and is often the chief also ex officio of the board of trustees. This president may have many, many people underneath them. In some places, they're called vice presidents. In some places, they're not. But probably the one that you'll have most of your dealings with at all would be your executive vice president or provost. Certainly, the provost was the person that handled most of the things that I was involved in in the academic institution. And then there are officers that may be called vice president at your university, and they may be, you know, head of admissions, chief financial officer, etc. Universities usually have academic deans that would be the dean of the School of Nursing, for example, as the chief administrative office for their respective schools or colleges, may be the dean of health sciences, may be your dean. Department chairs fall under the deans, and those may be your undergraduate chairs, your graduate chairs, and there are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, and their job is to provide peer leadership in assuring the quality of the academic offerings in their departments. Many times, they will make the assignments. They will do the scheduling for the department, and they make recommendations. So they're kind of the go-between, the program director, for example, of the nurse education, anesthesia educational program to the dean. So usually, the department chair is the person that you might answer to. And then there's the directors, and that's where we fit in if you're the director of a nurse anesthesia program within an academic institution. This is kind of just an organizational chart that kind of shows you the same thing that I was just talking about, where the dean fits in, and then the faculty and advisors and coordinators that fit under the position of the dean. No educational presentation would be complete without a mention of Ernest Boyer. Ernest Boyer changed the way we teach in universities. He had a profound impact on them. He was an American educator. He was the chancellor of the State University of New York, and he was also the president of the Carnegie Foundation, and he received, which is sort of amazing, 140 honorary doctorates. And he really started the dialogue between educators and administrators, and he felt that universities should emphasize teaching more than research, and that teaching in universities, which used to be more research-based and faculty-oriented, should really be more student-oriented. So he was very, very influential, and many universities speak of themselves as teaching to the Boyer method. Ernest Boyer wrote a document that is kind of the goal that universities live by, or the Bible that they live by, and it was called Scholarship Reconsidered Priorities of the Professorate, and he challenged the current views at the university, and he created many debates in the country, and he was very influential, and he changed the way most universities now view scholarship teaching and academia as far as focusing more on students and less on research than in the past. And this kind of just gives you an idea of the various roles in academia, and we're going to talk about each one of those individually. Tenure track. When you're hired by a university, you usually come into the university as full-time faculty or as the director assigned to either the tenure track or the clinical track, and I'm going to talk about both of them. The tenure track is a professor's pathway to promotion in academic job security, and that's what I always thought until I read the handbooks, and I realized that it's not that somebody in the tenure track can just lock in their job. They have a number of other criteria that have to be met first before they get there, and also in order to remain a tenured faculty, and that is that they must, they represent their university, and anything that they talk about or teach or profess to must be something that their university approves of. They can lose tenure for things, speaking out of turn or speaking in a way that does not represent their university when they're speaking. So what you need to do is it's very important to look at what the handbook says about tenure and how to continue in a tenured position. The tenured position is an indefinite academic appointment, and it certainly does lock your job in in many ways, and it is the top of the ladder, but it can be terminated for causes I mentioned and under extraordinary circumstances such as incompetence or insubordination. To reach tenure, there's a limited period of time, and in many universities, that ranges anywhere from five to eight years. So it's important to look at the handbook to find out how long it takes to reach tenure and what is involved in reaching tenure. And this gives you a limited period of time to do published research because tenure-track faculty are expected to do publications, their ability to get grant funding, academic visibility, to be excellent in teaching, and also to do community service. So there's a limited amount of time that an academic has to reach tenure-track, and that must be accomplished within the timeframe set by the university. According to the American Association of Professors, only 30% of faculty are now in tenure-tracks across the U.S., and that number appears to be shrinking. The clinical track, also called the professor of practice, many of us will be hired into that track, and what that appointment involves is workloads that are heavily weighted with activities associated with clinical practice, clinical supervision of student practice, and administration of our programs. So the vast majority of people that I know in our field are hired by the university in the clinical track. Teaching faculty, some universities have teaching faculty. A teaching faculty's primary duty is just teaching. They're not required to do scholarship. Their main focus is on teaching. Some service to the university is also expected. They may be or may not be eligible for promotion, and I'm going to talk a little bit coming up about what the qualifications are to be an instructor or to be hired as a teaching faculty. Other faculty that are very important to the field of nurse anesthesia are adjunct faculty. Most places that I have reviewed have adjunct faculty. We certainly use them, and those were experts in a certain field. For example, we would hire somebody whose specialty was in obstetrics or specialty was in cardiac anesthesia, and they would teach those classes for us, and they were listed as adjunct professors. So their job was to just to teach that particular course, and it could be, and was usually, in most cases, on a part-time basis. Teaching assistants, some universities use them. Some don't. They're many times graduate students or fellows that may teach a simulation lab or may teach part of a course for the university, and the other faculty that you might encounter would be visiting faculty, and visiting faculty have limited contract. They can be full-time or part-time, and they don't necessarily stay on once the period of time elapses where they were hired to participate in the university. Instructors. Let's look at the rank for a minute. An instructor is somebody with a master's degree or post-baccalaureate certification, so they are not, many times, they are not doctorally prepared. It may be that somebody is hired in your department as an instructor, and you may be hired as an instructor when you go into academia if you're working on your doctoral degree, and then if you're hired on a full-time basis, once you attain your doctoral degree, you'll move into the tract of clinical or tenured faculty. So instructors are present in the university, but many times, they are somebody who is working on the degree, but they don't have to have a doctoral degree. They must demonstrate the potential to achieve excellence in teaching, and they also are expected to do service to the university. Assistant professor. Assistant professor does have a terminal degree in the academic institution. They will enter with a doctor of nursing practice, a DNAP. Some universities will have both or a PhD, and they will be expected to have a terminal degree. They must demonstrate the potential to achieve excellence in teaching and scholarly activities, even though if they're tenured, they're expected to do scholarly activities and publish. If they're clinical, most universities or many universities do expect their clinical tract to also speak and to do scholarly activities. This is the first step to a full professorship. Associate professor. This is the same degree requirements as an assistant professor. They must demonstrate excellence, again, in teaching. They're expected to do scholarship if the university expects scholarship, and they're expected to do service. Time to attain this rank varies with each academic institution. So if you are an associate professor, it may take you upwards of four or five years to get that rank. So do check the university handbook to see what's required for making the rank of associate professor. Professor, again, same degree requirements as the assistant and the associate, in other words, the terminal degree. Again, this rank is something that universities vary on when you can attain the rank of professor, but at the university where I'm at, it's usually anywhere between seven and eight years to reach the degree of full professor or the position of full professor. And I thank you for your attention, and I look forward to you staying tuned for part two. Thank you.

nurse anesthesia

academic roles

tenure track

Ernest Boyer

teaching transition