This document serves as a supplement to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty Standards of Competence and Performance to provide additional expectations appropriate to the department’s discipline. It serves to clarify how the collegiate standards can be applied and evaluated within the department.

Department values statement

The Department of History is a community of active researchers and teachers with a commitment to scholarly and pedagogical excellence across a broad sweep of time, place, and disciplinary approaches. In a wide variety of venues, we communicate our research findings and expertise to our scholarly peers, to our students, and to public audiences in Iowa, the nation, and the world. Through our scholarship and our teaching, we aspire to instill in students a passion for learning about the past, thus enabling them to gain a better understanding of the world in which they live and preparing them to meet the challenges of citizenship in a complex, interdependent and rapidly changing world.

This vision, and these values, rest on our collective and individual commitment to both clear baseline standards for competence and performance, and aspirational horizons of excellence in research, teaching, and service.

Tenure-track faculty expectations

All tenure-track ranks

Teaching

  • The department endorses the basic collegiate expectations as to curricular responsibilities and practices.
  • While faculty at all ranks are expected to mentor and advise undergraduate and graduate students, we recognize that such opportunities (especially the direction of doctoral research) will vary by field or specialty, and that contributions to graduate education may take other forms.

Research

  • The Department expects all faculty maintain an active and original program of research marked by publication and presentations in appropriate venues, a national reputation, and external funding.
  • To promote the highest standards of scholarly excellence, the department recognizes the risks, rewards, pace, and scale of research demanded of scholars in what remains overwhelmingly a “book” discipline.
  • While it may take years to complete a major project (conventionally, but not exclusively a scholarly monograph), faculty are expected to sustain a regular pattern of publication and presentation demonstrating progress and/or preliminary findings.

Service

  • The department endorses the basic collegiate expectations as to service.
  • Active participation in department service includes peer mentoring, especially when requested to do so by the DEO as part of the departmental mentoring system.

Assistant professor

There are no additional or unique expectations beyond those outlined in the CLAS Standards of Competence and Performance those specified above for all faculty and for all tenure-track faculty ranks.

Associate professor

Research

  • The core expectation is the completion of a second major (book) project. While such a project may take years to complete, progress should be marked by internal and external funding, regular presentations or invited lectures, and publication of preliminary findings.

Full professor

Research

  • Full professors are expected to sustain an active research program marked by internal and external funding, regular presentations or invited lectures, and publication.

Instructional-track faculty expectations

All instructional-track ranks

There are no additional or unique expectations beyond those outlined in the CLAS Standards of Competence and Performance, those specified above for all faculty.