• Economic Development/Workforce Demand
  

  i. The proposed faculty member will be able to teach General Education Physics courses, which are required by all majors in STEM fields.
  ii. Physics Bachelor’s students that go on to work in the private sector in STEM earn a starting salary between $40,000 and $60,000. Physics Bachelor’s students have the lowest unemployment rate out of all of the natural sciences. Approximately 60% of all Physics Bachelor’s students continue on to graduate school. The mid-career median salary for Physics majors is $101,000, which is the highest of all science degrees and ranks above Mechanical Engineering.

• Florida Board of Governors Areas of Strategic Emphasis      
  

  i. Physics and Physics/Engineering are both disciplines that are listed as areas of strategic emphasis. This faculty line will support all areas of strategic emphasis as the responsibilities will be focused on designed General Education natural science lecture and lab courses, specifically General and University Physics I and II.
  ii. With the start of the Mechanical Engineering program, the Physics Department will need to drastically increase enrollment in these courses and a qualified lecturer will be necessary to prevent any faculty member from being overloaded with multiple large enrollment courses.

• Accreditation Requirements
  

  The Physics Department is currently operating at a high student to faculty ratio. Moreover, the Department has been heavily dependent on adjunct faculty, who taught 64.7% of the student credit hours offered by the Department in the 2013-2014 academic year. This will have a strong negative impact on the SACSCOC accreditation as the number of permanent faculty are taken into account in their review. Furthermore, with the upcoming addition of Mechanical Engineering, the Department will need this hire to handle the large student influx as requested by the Dean’s office. Without this hire, the University can expect that the student to faculty ratio and the number of courses taught by adjuncts to continue to increase. The result would be an increase in the DWF rate and a drop in student 4 year graduation rate, which are both key elements in the SACSCOC and Florida BOG metrics.
  
  The Department is already moving to a model of large enrollment sections at the lower division level, with enrollment numbering at approximately 160 students per semester in each section of a General Education science course. The student to faculty ratio will drastically increase when this change occurs, which will dramatically increase the DFW rate.

• Community/Visibility
  

  i. Part of this faculty member’s duties will be service to the Department, University and Community through outreach activities. He or she will take a leading role in the University Open House, advising, visits to local schools, visits by local schools to the Department, and other community activities, such as science fairs and the Science Olympiad, etc.
  ii. Since the duties for this position are focused on service courses, such as General Education science lectures, this faculty member will teach courses that virtually all STEM majors will take.

a. At present, the Physics Department is unable to meet its obligations due to being understaffed. This semester, 2 faculty members are in an overload, and it is expected that at least 1 faculty member will need to be in an overload every semester for the foreseeable future.
b. Because of the department is understaffed, the department cannot guarantee being able to offer the introductory astronomy course, which is a large enrollment General Education science lecture course that peaked at 90 students per semester and is expected to continue to grow due to community and student body interest. The loss of FTEs will severely impact the Physics Department and lower the University’s bottom line.
c. Due to the low staffing, the Physics Department will be forced to move to a model where all General Education courses are offered as a single, large-enrollment section. This will have a negative impact on DFW rates, even when high impact teaching practices are utilized. It is expected that this will raise the current DFW rate from about 20-30% to the national average of 40%.
d. Qualified adjuncts to teach general studies labs and/or lectures is difficult because we do not have local industries that employ physicists with graduate degrees. With the exception of Dr. Wooten (former adjunct Astronomy teacher), adjunct faculty that the Department has used to teach General and University Physics I & II have had high DWF rates and substandard student evaluations. In the absence of qualified adjuncts in the community, the department must look externally or be prepared to utilize senior undergraduate physics majors. This position will attract a highly qualified individual so that the department and university do not have to grossly lower our educational standards.

A typical semester workload would be two large-enrollment sections of either General or University Physics I or II and two corresponding labs or one large-enrollment section of General or University Physics I or II and three corresponding labs.

The department is meeting the workload by having half the faculty on overload and through heavy adjunct usage.

All specializations with fewer than 15 majors have already been deleted.

The Physics Department does not currently offer any graduate degree specializations.

* Does not include non-degree specializations (indicated with a † above)