Application Form

Purpose:The Faculty Fellowship program is designed to stimulate and facilitate projects by faculty members to improve their teaching, to advance their scholarly and creative work, to enhance the University's academic programs, and to realize institutional goals.

Eligibility: Any tenured faculty member is eligible to apply. If a tenured faculty member has held a Faculty Fellowship in the past, he or she may apply again after the final report from the previous award has been reviewed and approved, except if retirement has been scheduled prior to the end of the fellowship period. In general, untenured faculty members are not eligible for Faculty Fellowships, except if the initial appointment is at the rank of Associate Professor and the faculty member has completed a satisfactory interim review or if the tenure decision has been so accelerated that the faculty member is not eligible for a pre-tenure leave.

Expectations & Rules:

• Up to twelve fellowships will be available each year. Each fellowship will extend for a three-year term.
• A Faculty Fellow will receive:
  • a salary supplement of $5,000 each year which is not added to the base pay;
  • a reduction in the teaching load, equivalent to four out of the twenty-four contact hours in an academic year to reassign the time to the project (10-12 hours per week for a whole semester);
  • a project development budget with a maximum of $2,000 each year.
• Faculty Fellows will be eligible for support from the Professional Conference Fund and Professional Development Funds; they may also apply for both SRF and Student-Faculty Summer Research Programs on projects related or unrelated to their fellowship.
• If faculty members are requesting funding for multiple projects (for example, both a faculty fellowship and a sabbatical), they should include a statement with each proposal explaining the relationship between the projects. The projects may be related but each project should have a distinct product.
• The specific details of each arrangement for the reduction in teaching load will be developed by the faculty member in consultation with the department chair and the Vice President for Academic Affairs.
• Recipients of Faculty Fellowships must also continue to fulfill normal expectations of teaching effectiveness, professional activity and professional growth, and departmental and University service during the three-year term as determined by the Vice President for Academic Affairs.
• Faculty members might receive these awards many times during their careers, but a recipient will be eligible to hold a new award only after one year has elapsed since the previous award. Holders of a Faculty Fellowship may not apply for a Fisher Fellowship or a Time-Out since the Faculty Fellowship has commitments of time and product that must be completed without delay. A holder of a University Professorship or Distinguished Professor Award that would overlap may not apply for a Faculty Fellowship that overlaps since the benefits are essentially the same in the overlap year. However, a holder of a departmental professorship that might overlap may apply for Faculty Fellowship. If the recipient of a departmental professorship receives a Faculty Fellowship, the otherwise overlapping benefits of those awards will be deferred until the successful completion of the Faculty Fellowship.
• Faculty members considering projects that involve technology should consult Faculty Instructional Technology Support (FITS) at least two weeks prior to the application deadline.

  Ethics-Related Faculty Development Awards: Faculty members may apply for ethics-related awards through the regular Faculty Development award process. These applications should follow the process outlined in this section.

• In order to be eligible for an ethics award, the project should attend also to ethical questions or issues in an integral way. A project may consist of empirical research, normative inquiry or artistic expression, but in all cases the description should make clear how ethical issues will be addressed within the project. Ethics is understood here in a very broad sense that can include all disciplines and programs at DePauw.
• Faculty members considering projects that involve a consideration of ethical issues are encouraged to look at the abstracts for funded projects related to ethics as listed on the Ethics Institute website. They also may wish to consult with members of the Ethics Advisory Committee.
• Faculty members with ethics-related leave projects are eligible to apply for office space at the Prindle Institute.
• To be eligible for support from the supplemental funding for the Ethics Institute, proposals must be highly-ranked for their ethics content by the Faculty Ethics Advisory Committee (a subcommittee of the Faculty Development Committee).

Types of Faculty Fellowships:

There are four areas for which an individual may apply: teaching/curricular development projects, scholarly/creative projects, service projects, and combination projects.

• Teaching/curricular development projects: Proposals in this area might include projects such as the development and teaching of a new area of expertise in the applicant's discipline, which might be shared with colleagues; several changes in courses, involving the addition of effective technology in courses at several levels; developing or reworking courses to incorporate new perspectives and concepts; development of new pedagogical methods, which might be incorporated into several classes and shared with colleagues.
• Scholarly/creative projects: The projects in this area might include substantive work on a manuscript or major new research; they could include projects in the creative areas as well, such as sustained work on performances or exhibitions. Some examples here include working on a book-length manuscript, a major research project or performance, or preparing an entire new body of artwork for a one-person exhibition.
• Service projects: Projects involving a substantive idea that would improve an existing program,create something new at DePauw, and/or provide a needed complement to support faculty work. Fellowships will not be granted for routine service. Proposals must include a practical plan.
• Combination projects.

See the Faculty Development Coordinator for further suggestions or to discuss ideas.

Evaluation of Faculty Fellowship Proposals: The quality of the proposal is the over-riding consideration. The first six awards will be divided evenly between those proposals with focus on teaching and those with focus on scholarly/creative projects. If fewer than three awards are granted in either category, the remainder may be held until the next round to encourage future applications in the area.

A. Criteria for Evaluation:

1. Scope of the Project: The breadth of the project should be comparable to that of a one-semester sabbatical; this is a major grant and the resultant project should be worthy of the time and financial investment. The fellow should expect to spend 10-12 hours per week on this project in each semester in which the reassigned time has been granted. This time should be guarded carefully in order to guarantee real progress. There is no expectation that summer time will be expended on this project, but the fellows may work on their projects in the summer if they choose. In contrast to the larger scope of Faculty Fellowships, summer stipends and Fisher Time-Outs are generally appropriate to support work on an article or a paper for a professional meeting; similarly, these more limited grants are appropriate for preparation of artwork for a group exhibition. Designing one course would not normally be considered as an adequate project for a Faculty Fellowship.
2. Unity of the Project: These awards will be granted for a single project requiring and spanning the full three years. Each year could be spent on a different "chapter" of a larger project, but there must be continuity between the sections. One cannot apply for three one-year long projects.
3. Clarity and Completeness of the Application: The application should include defined goals and should be written in language understandable to your colleagues on the Faculty Development Committee. It should be detailed and contain a full explanation of the applicant's process and product.

B. Procedure for Evaluation:

1. Proposals will be reviewed by members of the Faculty Development committee. Any members of the committee who apply for a Faculty Fellowship will be temporarily replaced.
2. Proposals will be ranked by each member of FDC using three categories: strong, marginal, and weak.
3. If, in their first reading, the committee members decide that there are not 12 acceptable proposals, they may decide to approve some applications, reject some, and return marginal application with comments from the committee. Marginal applications may be revised and resubmitted. Ordinarily a maximum of two weeks will be permitted for revision. Under no circumstances, however, will the revised proposals replace the previously approved fellowships.
4. A summary of the committee members’ comments will be returned to the applicant if the proposal is not funded.

Reporting Process: For the first two years of the fellowship, a report is due on the first Wednesday in May; the final project report is due on the first Wednesday in September after the third year. Failure to submit a satisfactory report by the deadline or to show adequate progress on a project after either of the first two years could lead to suspension or loss of the fellowship. The final report must be judged acceptable by the committee in order for the faculty member to remain eligible for any Faculty Development funding. Each report will be read and commented upon by members of the Faculty Development Committee, and the fellow will receive a response to each report.

Reports should be addressed to the chair of the Faculty Development Committee and should include a narrative outlining the work done and the order in which it was completed. You should refer to the timeline and the yearly product you promised in your original proposal and show how the funding enabled you to meet your goals and advance your professional development. Include evidence of the work accomplished toward completion of the product; such evidence might include examples of preliminary data collected, samples of presentation materials, copies of manuscripts in progress, revisions of course syllabi, an annotated bibliography, or a summary of data collected and analyzed.

The report should focus on the Faculty Fellowship project; however, other relevant overlapping work should be described as necessary to help the Faculty Development Committee understand what you have done. If the time-line has changed in any way, please explain and submit a revised time-line for the remaining years of the project if any. When plans or circumstances change along the way, it is the responsibility of the faculty member holding the fellowship to request committee approval of a revised proposal before the change is made. The final report of the fellowship should be a wrap-up of the entire project.

Please submit your report electronically to Terry Bruner in the form of a WORD or PDF document (tbruner@depauw.edu).