Advancing Change in Faculty Evaluation: Pathways to Inclusive Evaluative Cultures and Structures

Dear Colleagues,

The academic work environment has and continues to experience numerous shocks. These shocks—political, social, financial, and cultural in nature—leave the academy, and the academics within it, increasingly vulnerable. From the public’s waning trust in the teaching and research that unfolds within the academy, the federal government’s devaluing and defunding of research, and attacks on academic and intellectual freedom, to the increased reliance on contingent faculty labor, the conditions under which most academics work look and feel far different than the academy of just five years ago.

Yet, research consistently shows that expectations, processes, and norms surrounding and embedded into faculty evaluation—defined here broadly as any activity wherein judgment about a faculty member’s legitimacy and merit is rendered—have not adapted to these conditions. As a result, the work of some is exalted, while the work of others is marginalized. Specifically, scholars have consistently documented how knowledge production that diverges from typical conceptions of and approaches to research are often subjected to heightened scrutiny. For example, research that defies the academy’s epistemic norms to embrace interdisciplinarity, community engagement, social change orientations, and/or foci on historically marginalized populations is viewed with skepticism, often before being devalued (Cech & Sherick, 2019; Gonzales et al., 2025; Settles et al., 2021). Further, studies consistently show that innovations and effort in teaching are often not incentivized or rewarded (Bull et al., 2025; Gonzales & Culpepper, 2025) and that faculty who contribute to the health of their departments and campuses through service, including activities associated with promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion for and among students, often face longer time to advancement or no advancement at all (Griffin et al., 2023; O’Meara et al., 2021; Misra et al., 2021). Meanwhile, many higher education institutions have failed to put in place and address evaluative processes for the nearly two-thirds of the academic workforce who are not tenure-eligible (Kezar et al., 2019).

Failure to change faculty evaluation has far-reaching consequences. Narrow definitions of scholarly legitimacy and merit undermine the academy’s ability to produce the most robust and inclusive knowledge possible. Such narrow approaches have always and continue to threaten the full participation of faculty who are from historically marginalized groups, contributing to persistent racial, gender, and class inequities in academe. Evaluation that devalues specific forms of academic labor contributes to burnout, disengagement, and lack of morale. Employment precarity for contingent faculty degrades student learning and success. And an evaluation system that has come to heavily rely on research productivity in the form of grant revenue has left many researchers, and the institutions in which they work, scrambling to redefine excellence in the wake of changes to federal funding.

In this Special Issue, we call for articles that consider how to advance change in the domain of faculty evaluation. We encourage research articles, opinion pieces and commentary, and practice pieces that examine barriers to changing faculty evaluation, the impact of current faculty evaluation approaches on faculty, and novel approaches to faculty evaluation. Pieces that feature studies and/or frameworks that encourage epistemic inclusion (i.e., the welcoming and validation of historically marginalized or invisibilized ways of knowing and/or approaches to research) are especially welcome.

We welcome articles that address one or more of the following themes:

• Historical, cultural, and empirical analyses concerning epistemic exclusion in research and scholarship;
• Faculty workload inequities exacerbated by COVID-19, threats to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and/or other external conditions;
• How evaluative committees, departments, and/or institutions are supporting faculty whose research agendas have been disrupted due to the federal government’s defunding of research, including science research and research concerned with diversity, equity, and/or inclusion;
• Approaches to changing or reforming faculty evaluation policies or practices addressing workload differences and inequities, such as differences stemming from varying appointment types or foci of faculty work;
• The relationship between faculty evaluation and the articulation of higher education as a public good;
• Promising cases of inclusive evaluation, especially concerning epistemic inclusion, innovations in teaching and learning, and recognition of service and leadership.

The relevant literature is cited above and also suggested below:  

Bensimon, E. M., & Bishop, R. (2012). Introduction: Why" critical"? The need for new ways of knowing. The Review of Higher Education, 36(1), 1–7.

Bull, S., Cooper, A., Laidlaw, A., Milne, L., & Parr, S. (2025). ‘You certainly don’t get promoted for just teaching’: experiences of education-focused academics in research-intensive universities. Studies in Higher Education, 50(2), 239–255.

Cech, E. A., & Sherick, H. M. (2019, June). Depoliticization as a mechanism of gender inequality among engineering faculty. In 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

Go, J. (2020). Race, empire, and epistemic exclusion: Or the structures of sociological thought. Sociological Theory, 38(2), 79–100.

Gonzales, L. D., Bhangal, N. K., Stokes, C., & Rosales, J. (2025). Faculty hiring: Exercising professional jurisdiction over epistemic matters. The Journal of Higher Education, 96(1), 28–53.

Gonzales, L.D. & Culpepper, D. (2025). A framework for change agents: Fostering equity-minded change within and across STEM teaching and learning contexts. Paper commissioned for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/28268/A-Framework-for-Change-Agents-Fostering-Equity-Minded-Change-within-and-across-STEM-Teaching-and-Learning-Contexts.pdf

Griffin, K. A., Bennett, J. C., & Harris, J. (2013). Marginalizing merit?: Gender differences in Black faculty D/discourses on tenure, advancement, and professional success. The Review of Higher Education, 36(4), 489–512.

Kezar, A., DePaolo, R., & Scott, D.T. (2019). The gig academy: Mapping labor in the neoliberal university. John Hopkins University Press.

Liera, R. (2023). Expanding faculty members’ zone of proximal development to enact collective agency for racial equity in faculty hiring. The Journal of Higher Education, 94(6), 766-791.

Misra, J., Kuvaeva, A., O’Meara, K., Culpepper, D. K., & Jaeger, A. (2021). Gendered and racialized perceptions of faculty workloads. Gender & Society, 35(3), 358–394.

O’Meara, K., Culpepper, D., Misra, J. & Jaeger, A.J. (2021). Equity-minded faculty workloads. American Council of Education.

Settles, I. H., Jones, M. K., Buchanan, N. T., & Dotson, K. (2021). Epistemic exclusion: scholar (ly) devaluation that marginalizes faculty of color. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 14(4), 493.

White-Lewis, D., Culpepper, D. K., O'Meara, K., Templeton, L., & Anderson, J. (2024). One Foot Out the Door: Interrogating the Risky Hire Narrative in STEM Faculty Careers. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 30(3).

Prof. Dr. Leslie D. Gonzales
Dr. Dawn Culpepper
Guest Editors

Wuqi Yu
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Publisher’s Notice

The Special Issue has been shifted from Section Teacher Education to Section Higher Education on 8 September 2025. At the time of the move, there were no publications in this Special Issue.