St. John's has again partnered with the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) to identify the drivers of faculty success and implement informed changes, guided by our principles of our six core values: truth, love, respect, opportunity, excellence, and service.
Page last updated
1/24/2023
A Message from The Provost
Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to inform you of an important opportunity you will be offered in the coming days to participate in a survey of faculty job satisfaction. This survey research is part of a national program called the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), which has been operating from the Harvard Graduate School of Education since 2003.
Participation will entail completing a 25-minute, web-based survey; your unique link to the survey will be emailed to you from COACHE in the coming days. COACHE will not use any name or email address for any purposes except for this research.
While there are many surveys that faculty are asked to complete, this one was designed entirely to determine current job satisfaction compared to faculty at peer institutions. Your views are especially important to us as we strive to attract and retain the best and brightest scholars and teachers, increase the satisfaction of all faculty, and make St. John’s University a great place to work.
In a process approved by the Institutional Review Board at Harvard and St. John’s University, COACHE will provide our campus with their summary analysis, as well as the confidential unit-record database, stripped of names and email addresses. Neither I, nor anyone outside of the Office of Institutional Research at St. John’s will have access to the unit-record data. The Office of Institutional Research staff will disseminate survey results only with data aggregated in cells of five respondents or more, so that individual faculty and individual departments cannot be identified.
Data from the Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey will be meaningful only if we have broad participation. Within a week, you will receive an email from COACHE([email protected]), directing you to the online survey.
If you have any questions about this survey, please contact Christine M. Goodwin, Ed.D., Director, Office of Institutional Research, at [email protected] or 718-990-1993, or COACHE at [email protected].
Thank you in advance by helping us through participation in this study.
Sincerely,
Simon Geir Møller, Ph.D.
Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
About the COACHE Survey
The COACHE survey evaluates faculty perceptions in the following themes:
- Nature of Work: Research, Service, and Teaching
- Resources and Support
- Interdisciplinary Work, Collaboration, and Mentoring
- Tenure and Promotion
- Institutional Leadership
- Shared Governance
- Departmental Engagement, Quality, and Collegiality
- Appreciation and Recognition
- Retention and Negotiation
- Diversity & Inclusion
Survey Benefits
The goal of this survey is to obtain data on the satisfaction of full-time members of the faculty. This data will help us in several key ways.
We will gain valuable insights through a customized, adaptive report that includes thoughtful data segmentation.
We can now benchmark the St. John's faculty experience of the academic workplace within both internal and national contexts.
We can compare data against a self-selected group of peer institutions, as well as COACHE's pool of national results.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) is a national effort coordinated through the Harvard Graduate School of Education to gather data and feedback on areas of institutional strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. In other words, COACHE is a survey to understand faculty satisfaction.
Data is compared to peer cohorts. The COACHE team performs the statistical analysis and provides a report and aggregate data to St. John's.
Feedback from this survey will help us foster a workplace where faculty feel supported and valued for their contributions to the university. The goal of this survey is to obtain data on the satisfaction of full-time members of the faculty.
Your participation is voluntary but encouraged. The survey provides us with a unique opportunity to hear directly from faculty and importantly, center faculty voices as we develop a plan for the future. While we know there are endless demands on faculty time and it seems as if there are already too many surveys, this is the first major faculty satisfaction survey of its kind conducted on this campus. Led by an independent research team at Harvard Graduate School of Education, the COACHE survey instrument gives us benchmarking capabilities, lending important context to the data. Your responses will provide evidence of things that we do well and things that we need to do better. Ultimately, your participation will help guide priority-setting and planning for the future.
We are fully committed to protecting the privacy of all participants. An independent team of researchers at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education leads the COACHE survey and is responsible for instrument development, implementation, and importantly, data collection.
During the recruitment phase of the survey, your name and email addresses are retained by COACHE (not anyone from St. John's) solely for the sake of COACHE research. When COACHE submits the survey report to St. John's University, only the deidentified data is shown in the report. This means, no identifiers are matched to reported response, and at no time will any personnel on St. John's campus have access to any data containing identifying information. No disaggregated data will be presented for any subgroup with fewer than five respondents within a demographic group within a unit. COACHE also ensures participant anonymity in all output, including data released and correspondent reports. This is all meant to protect the identity of respondents.
This survey is IRB-reviewed and approved by both Harvard University and St. John's. Visit https://coache.gse.harvard.edu/faq for more information related to privacy concerns.
Faculty should check their Inbox and Junk Folder for a message with subject line, "Help St. John's assess the academic workplace.”
If you have not received the link, please request a new one at any time by contacting [email protected].
If you are having difficulty with this process, please contact [email protected].
Review COACHE’s tips for accessing the link. If you are still unable to access the survey, please contact Christine Goodwin.
The survey takes approximately 25 minutes to complete.
The survey will close in April 2022.