A task-oriented working group with a public research record.

Mission

The group brings together academic leaders from a2ru and beyond — deans, chairs, associate deans, and faculty — around a shared research and action strategy. The public charge is to develop ways of making the intellectual and creative contributions of arts- and design-based faculty legible in research universities, where current models such as Academic Analytics represent that work poorly.

The work underway includes a field scan of what academic leadership already captures, a landscape of where that capture falls short, and a toolkit for senior leaders. In parallel, the group is planning a larger faculty survey, with data scientists, to catalog awards, exhibits, publications, performances, and other forms of creative and collaborative scholarship.

a2ru already keeps a Tenure and Promotion Policy collection and a reports and publications library. The tenure collection includes a reading list, a 2018 research brief, workshops, a canvas worksheet, and a member-only pool of external reviewers. The reports include SPARC interview syntheses, the arts-integration case, and the Michigan arts-data pilot. Academic Metrics points to that work and adds what the group is learning now about faculty activity systems. The aim is to document pathways to impact, so an exhibition is described on its own terms.