Faculty Renewal
SFU’s faculty and staff renewal is critical to advancing scholarly and creative excellence, and to the progression of SFU’s vision/mission. Recruitment, hiring and career incentives must anticipate and address the needs and priorities of tomorrow, as well as advance SFU’s equity and diversity objectives.
The goal for faculty and staff renewal is to ensure that academic hiring and career incentives advance excellence in scholarship and creativity, including the discovery of new knowledge and its application, the development of high quality academic programming and teaching, support services and engagement with the broader community.
To support this goal, SFU has strategies and activities in place, including:
- Continue to advance toward a three-year faculty renewal planning process that anticipates future needs and ensures succession that maintains and builds excellence and diversity in research and creativity, academic programming, teaching delivery and outreach.
- Ensure that search processes and practices are unbiased, far-reaching and will attract outstanding applicants.
- Ensure that faculty and staff renewal aligns with SFU’s equity and diversity objectives, including support for targeted hires where appropriate.
- Identify and remove barriers to the possibility of cross/joint appointments, grant-tenured faculty and professors of professional practice.
- Encourage the creation of awards and nominations for achievers and those who advance the institution’s core values. These awards, at the levels of academic unit, discipline, faculty, and institutional and external, will promote recognition of high-achieving faculty, staff and students at SFU as well as nationally and internationally.
- Build academic policy and practice to:
- improve hiring and retention of new faculty and staff
- support professional development, mentorship and knowledge-sharing among faculty and staff, including paths to academic leadership
- identify best practices in the faculty-student relationship, including mentoring, supervision and advising.
- Advance the planning and allocation of physical space and investment in research infrastructure to ensure that new and existing faculty have access to competitive, high-quality, research environments.
For more information, please refer to the Faculty and Staff Renewal section of the 2019-2024 Academic Plan:
