• Economic Development/Workforce Demand
  

  For this position, the Psychology Department seeks a person with general expertise in Counseling or Clinical Psychology who can also add specialized expertise in learning theory (teach Advanced Behavior Modification, Behavioral Medicine, etc.), to supervise graduate students in Counseling Psychology and fill critical gaps in our growing undergraduate program. This faculty position will expand and strengthen our undergraduate curriculum in which students establish the foundation of high level skills that employers seek for workplace success, as defined in the Psychology program ALC. These include analytic skills, written and oral communication skills, problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills, project management skills, and interpersonal and teamwork skills. Specifically, this position will focus on courses that emphasize understanding of the personal attributes that contribute to effective interpersonal relations and ethical behavior in a wide range of education, public service and healthcare professions. At the graduate level, this position will support the training of masters level mental health professionals who typically remain in the northwest Florida region in both the private and public sector. In recent years, community mental health needs have increased and there is currently a high demand for well trained mental health professionals, especially at the masters level.

• Florida Board of Governors Areas of Strategic Emphasis      
  

  The National Science Foundation (NSF) has classified Psychology as a STEM discipline, with a strong foundation in the biological sciences and with research methods and statistics at its core. This position, focused on Counseling or Clinical Psychology, will contribute to a rigorous curriculum that emphasizes the importance of a scientific approach to solving human problems. Resolving such problems involves application of the scientific method to systematically analyze human behavior and develop empirically sound solutions. A complete understanding of human behavior requires a firm foundation in the scientific analysis of the biological, cognitive, emotional, and sociocultural factors that comprise human experience.

• Accreditation Requirements
  

  Our graduate programs in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Counseling Psychology are among only 22 programs nationally and are the only programs in either Florida or Alabama that have received accreditation by the Masters in Psychology and Counseling Accreditation Council (MPCAC). We completed our re-accreditation site visit in the fall of 2012 with a strong endorsement of the quality of both programs. However, the issue of faculty work assignment overload was noted in the site visit report with acknowledgment that the faculty are stretched beyond the limits of reasonable work assignments. The positive site review noted our intention to conduct a search for both an I/O and a Counseling faculty member as an important factor in support of re-accreditation. Which we did, and hires were made.
  
  We completed a SUS program review in the spring of 2012, that also noted that Psychology is trying to do too much with too little faculty resource and strongly recommended that Psychology needs more faculty. While a new faculty member was hired to start in the fall 2014, another faculty member in counseling Psychology just announced she will not be returning to us in the fall 2014, leaving us still short a faculty member.

• Community/Visibility
  

  Our Counseling Psychology faculty and students work closely with the local and UWF community. For instance, our graduate students complete internships at such places as the Escambia County Jail, Favor House, Lakeview Center, and the UWF Counseling and Psychological Services, some of whom take permanent positions at these locations. These typically unpaid interns provide valuable mental health counseling to people in need, often to those who are most in need, but can least afford treatment. They could not provide these services without qualified faculty supervision.

While the number of graduate students in psychology has declined since 2009, the number of undergraduate psychology majors has increased by about the same amount. In addition, the number of graduate degrees awarded in that time period has doubled, while the number of undergraduate degrees has risen slightly. The Department of Psychology has a history of average class sizes that are consistently among the highest on campus (see data in item #7). Lower division average class sizes over the past 3 years have been over 75, while the upper division classes have ballooned to around 50 which is inconsistent with the small class size message that UWF promotes. In addition, the graduate class sizes are over 15 with a relatively large student to faculty ratio. I recently surveyed several psychology masters programs about their student to faculty ratios and received 17 responses. Other than a couple of online programs, UWF had the highest ratio at 7.1:1. Only Xavier and Goddard College came close at 7:1, with Texas A&M at 5:1, and all others (e.g., James Madison, Marist, IUPUI, Augusta State) at 4:1 or less. This growing imbalance between the number of students and number of faculty makes it difficult to promote faculty-student interaction and active student engagement throughout the curriculum as a factor in recruitment and retention at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In addition, the general education reform has identified introductory psychology as one of the 5 courses to meet the social science area requirement and we anticipate higher demand for this course as a result.

The 2012 MPAC re-accreditation report emphasized the importance of graduate courses being taught by regular faculty vs. adjunct instructors. With increasing enrollments without commensurate increases in faculty resources, Psychology is again in a position of high reliance on adjunct instructors (see data in item #7) which threatens not just discipline accreditation, but SACS accreditation. With one of the largest graduate programs on campus, the regular faculty have an extraordinarily heavy load of unscheduled and uncompensated teaching in the form of graduate capstone projects (thesis and internship). Two senior faculty members retired in the past two years, and while we hired two back, a junior faculty member in the area of need just resigned. We are in desperate need of faculty in tenure-earning lines to supervise graduate capstone projects.

Last year, the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology (COGDOP) conducted a survey of graduate Psychology programs across the country, most of which are doctoral institutions. The survey assessed number of undergraduate and graduate students compared with the number of faculty FTEs in each program. Of the 65 programs that responded, only 5 were institutions similar to UWF, granting only the masters degree in Psychology. The table below presents the data for those 5 schools, the data for a UWF aspirant school (Appalachian State University), and the data for UWF Psychology:

School---UG Majors---Faculty FTE---UG Majors/FTE---Grad Students---Grad St/FTE
Schl #1-----180---------07.5------------24.00----------30--------------4.00
Schl #2-----200---------15.0------------13.33----------37--------------2.47
Schl #3-----450---------28.0------------16.07----------50--------------1.79
Schl #4-----600---------32.0------------18.75----------NA---------------NA
Schl #5-----781---------31.0------------25.19----------NA---------------NA
App St-----1003---------35.0------------28.66----------69--------------1.97
UWF Psyc----555---------15.0------------37.00----------98--------------6.53

The aspirant university has a large doctoral program that affords an additional resource of doctoral student teaching assistants, a resource that we do not have here. Our ratio of student to faculty FTE is dramatically higher than all the other schools at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The two schools with similarly sized undergraduate programs have approximately twice the number of faculty FTEs that we have. The one school with the same number of faculty FTEs has less than 1/3 the number of undergraduate majors and graduate students that we have. Additionally, none of the other programs comes close to the number of graduate students that we have in our graduate programs. These data clearly document the reality that we are in a fairly critical resource deficit mode when it comes to number of regular faculty in tenure-earning lines, in comparison to other comparable institutions.

The new faculty line will carry a traditional 3:3 teaching load covering courses at both undergraduate and graduate level. The work assignment will also include assuming a heavy load of unscheduled and uncompensated teaching in the form of supervising graduate theses and internships, as well as undergraduate service learning and directed independent study. There will be a standard expectation for productivity in a research program of sufficient merit to earn tenure and promotion, with an expectation to engage students in the research program. Finally, the work assignment will include an expectation to engage in meaningful service within Psychology as well as in the college and university.

We are in need of immediate help to cover our classes. We have two faculty members who were granted full year sabbaticals for 2014-15 AY. We shuffled the schedules around a bit, offered fewer courses, and were going to rely on adjuncts to cover the rest. However, I just learned this week that a tenure-earning faculty member is resigning. One of the faculty members on sabbatical and this resigning faculty member, both teach and supervise students in the counseling psychology graduate program. We've reached a critical point of need. With this departure, we need coverage for her 6 courses during the year. Given the time frame, it is not possible to advertise for and hire a tenure earning assistant professor before the start of fall 2014. Through word of mouth and connections through the faculty, if we are lucky we may be able to hire a visiting faculty member for the year as a short term solution. Otherwise, it is likely that we may need to cancel some courses. For the long term, a tenure earning spot is needed for the reasons stated above. A visiting professor for this year could plug the dam caused by the loss of 3 faculty members (2 sabbaticals, 1 resignation) long enough to advertise, search for, and hire a replacement.

The only programs with fewer than 15 majors are the two interdisciplinary programs, Diversity and Women's Studies. While Psychology has been able to increase enrollment in these programs, they are still very small and are being moved out of Psychology in the fall 2014 following the recommendations of last year's program review.

The Counseling Thesis-track program has been an option in the the counseling program, but is being phased out and is not taking in new students which is why enrollment has dropped below 10. While enrollment is down in the other graduate programs, they continue to be strong programs and as stated previously, have higher than recommended student to faculty ratios. With 2 faculty members on sabbatical for the year, lower enrollment for 2014 is essential (especially now with another faculty member resigning). Overall, enrollment in the graduate programs fluctuates from year to year, with an unusually high spike in 2011 and a low in 2013 (partially due to phasing out of one track option). Still, each of the three remaining specializations has not had less than 21 students in it at any point over the last 5 years.

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