• Economic Development/Workforce Demand
  

  For this position, the School of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences (SPBS) seeks a person with general expertise in Counseling or Clinical Psychology who can also add specialized expertise in either developmental theory or learning theory to 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 SPBS 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 a period of economic distress, community mental health needs have increased and there is currently a high demand for well trained mental health professionals, especially at the masters level.

• Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)
  

  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 21 programs nationally and are the only programs in either Florida or Alabama that have achieved the only accreditation available for masters level programs in Psychology. 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.
  
  We completed a SUS program review in the spring of 2012, that also noted that SPBS is trying to do too much with too little faculty resource and strongly recommended that SPBS needs more faculty.

• Niche programs with growth potential
  

  The SPBS took responsibility for both the Interdisciplinary Diversity and Womens Studies programs in the summer of 2010 with an agreement that we would have a few years to revitalize them. Both programs suffered from low enrollments and were in danger of being eliminated although both have potential to grow and serve the needs of graduates in the global community. In particular, the Womens Studies program aligns well with the NSF ADVANCE grant secured by SPBS last year to promote advancement of women in the STEM disciplines.

Enrollments and degrees awarded in SPBS have steadily increased over the past 5 years (see data following item #4 below). Yet, the number of faculty FTEs in non-tenure and tenure-earning lines has remained relatively steady over the past 5 years (see data in item #7). Additionally, SPBS has a history of average class sizes that are consistently among the highest on campus (see data in item #7). 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. The impending general education reform is likely to identify an introductory psychology course 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, SPBS 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). A senior faculty member retired as of Dec. 31, 2012 and another will retire at the end of 2013. We are in desperate need of faculty in tenure-earning lines to supervise graduate capstone projects.

Earlier this 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 SPBS:

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 SPBS----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 SPBS as well as in the college and university.

The data following this item and in item #7 below document pretty clearly how scheduled instructional needs are being met, with heavy reliance on adjunct instructors (37% to 46% of courses taught by adjuncts in the past 3 years). This is compounded by the commitment of SPBS faculty to service in the college and university, some of which is buffered by release time for internal administrative duties. Additionally, in recent years SPBS faculty have successfully secured grant funding to buy out of course assignments. Though we encourage such professional service and scholarly activity, with limited faculty resources, our commitments in those areas have left us in a position of over reliance on non-tenure earning and adjunct instructors in high enrollment courses. This, however, has not relieved the extreme pressure point of the unscheduled and uncompensated teaching that our regular faculty have borne over the last several years, since adjunct instructors are not eligible to supervise capstone projects.

The only programs with fewer than 15 majors are the two interdisciplinary programs, Diversity and Womens Studies, both of which have shown substantial proportional growth in recent years. We committed to assuming this responsibility in order to promote and develop those programs to realize their potential and we anticipate continued growth of these programs.

We have no graduate programs with fewer than 10 students and all of our programs are well above that threshold. Overall, our graduate programs have experienced increased enrollment, but in two specific programs (I/O and Counseling), we have had to limit admissions due to a decrease in faculty in those programs. We are currently conducting a search for an I/O position and need to fill a Counseling position in order to justify maintaining current enrollment levels or even any enrollment increase in these programs.

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

# of FTE Faculty by Tenure Status
	Fall 2008	Fall 2009	Fall 2010	Fall 2011	Fall 2012
Tenure & Tenure Earning	13.5	12.5	13.5	14.0	15.0
Non-Tenure Earning	1.0	2.0	1.0	1.0	1.0

‡ Data not yet available for this term

# (%) of low enrollment courses (undergrad: <20, grad: <15)
	10/11	11/12	12/13
Undergraduate	3 ( 3.5%)	10 ( 11.6%)	2 ( 2.9%)
Graduate	9 ( 37.5%)	9 ( 42.9%)	20 ( 76.9%)

Average Class Size
	Fall 2010					Fall 2011					Fall 2012
	Reg	Adj	TA	ESC	All	Reg	Adj	TA	ESC	All	Reg	Adj	TA	ESC	All
Lower	99.0	83.3	26.5	0.0	75.8	55.8	95.9	0.0	0.0	82.5	66.1	106.8	0.0	0.0	83.6
Upper	48.6	35.3	0.0	0.0	44.7	41.7	39.8	0.0	0.0	41.1	51.7	51.6	0.0	0.0	51.7
Graduate	15.6	0.0	0.0	0.0	15.6	17.7	19.5	0.0	0.0	18.0	14.7	12.3	0.0	0.0	13.9

Percent of student credit hours taught by instructor type
	10/11				11/12				12/13
	Reg	Adj	TA	ESC	Reg	Adj	TA	ESC	Reg	Adj	TA	ESC
Lower	29.4%	62.3%	8.3%	0.0%	25.7%	74.3%	0.0%	0.0%	44.0%	56.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Upper	71.4%	28.6%	0.0%	0.0%	65.7%	34.3%	0.0%	0.0%	68.9%	31.1%	0.0%	0.0%
Graduate	95.5%	4.5%	0.0%	0.0%	84.4%	15.6%	0.0%	0.0%	81.2%	18.8%	0.0%	0.0%
Total	60.5%	37.0%	2.5%	0.0%	53.6%	46.4%	0.0%	0.0%	59.4%	40.6%	0.0%	0.0%