We’re excited to announce that we have now finalized updates for the 2021 edition of the Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey, which we will be fielding nationally and with a number of college and university partners this fall.

As with previous cycles of the survey, the instrument will explore the research, teaching, and publishing practices and perspectives of scholars at four-year colleges and universities. We have also expanded several areas of coverage within the questionnaire to cover instructional support services, equitable teaching practices, perspectives on non-traditional scholarly outputs and open access models, and faculty capacity and evaluation. Especially in light of major disruptions and transformation to the higher education sector in the last year, we are eager to provide the higher education and scholarly communication communities with an updated snapshot of how faculty behaviors and attitudes have changed over the past three years since our last national survey.

Through a series of cognitive interviews, we examined not only these newly-crafted questions, but also those from previous survey cycles to ensure their continued relevance. Interviews were conducted with nearly a dozen faculty last month from a variety of institution types and disciplinary contexts. After testing both new and refreshed areas, we have now finalized the 2021 questionnaire.

We invite you to run the same questionnaire on your campus this fall to gain insight into the needs of your faculty as you make updates to library collections, services, spaces, and cross-institutional initiatives. And, when you field the local faculty survey in the 2021/22 academic year, in addition to your own institution’s findings, we will provide you with a report from the US Faculty Survey 2021 specific to your institution’s Carnegie classification for benchmarking.

The deadline to sign up to field the local faculty survey concurrently with the national survey this fall is Monday, August 16. If you are considering running the survey or would like to see the finalized questionnaire, please contact me in the coming weeks at nicole.betancourt@ithaka.org