Recognizing Professional Service in an Academic Setting The Distinguished Service Academy By Loriene Roy, Jen Moore, and Rich Reddick PROFESSIONAL SERVICE IS OFTEN EXPECTED OF FACULTY, INCLUDING ACADEMIC TENURE-TRACK AND CLINICAL/NON-TENURE-TRACK LIBRARIANS. Faculty may perform service at the department/school, university, and/or to the profession. This academic service typically includes work on committees, reviewing manuscripts, and appointments to local, statewide, regional, national, or international committees. Service in higher education can often be described as invisible or almostinvisible work, the behind-the-scenes action that keep institutions of higher education functioning (Applegate, pp. 302-303). For librarians, their daily work in librarianship is equated with service (Hartnett, Arant-Kaspar, and vanDuinkerken, p. 283). And, because librarianship is often considered to be a feminized profession, it is likely that librarians are called on to do more service and teaching (Neigel, 2015; Rosa and Henke, 2017). Librarians of color are called on to do more service in the area of diversity-equity-inclusion as well as in mentoring (Catterall, Mickenberg, and Reddick, 2019; O’Meara, Culpper, Misra, and Jaeger, 2021). While much attention is given in the academic workplace to research and teaching roles, service is not
well defined. There is evidence the approach to service and its value may be felt differently among librarians as compared to teaching and research faculty. Walters (2016) summarized this difference by stating “service is central to the work of academic librarians. In contrast, most faculty regard service as considerably less important than either teaching or research” (p. 819). However service is demonstrated and defined, it is important to consider examining new approaches to recognize those who excel and exceed in their service commitments, just as those who excel in research and teaching are acknowledged. The paper covers the goals of establishing, in 2020, a Distinguished Service Academy (DSA) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) as “a formal organization of distinguished tenured and senior nontenure track (NTT) faculty members with extraordinary achievements across their portfolios and in particular in terms of their excellence in mentoring and service to their college, the university, the state of Texas and the nation” (The University of Texas at Austin, 2020). The paper will cover eligibility to serve on the DSA, the nomination process, selection of DSA cohort members, communication within the DSA and with the University
administration, DSA activities to date, and DSA members’ expected continual service. BUILDING A FIERCE ACADEMY: ELIGIBILITY, NOMINATION, AND SELECTION On September 16, 2019, the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at UT Austin, hereafter referred to as the Provost, sent an email to all faculty, announcing the launch of the process to select a new Provost’s Distinguished Service Academy (DSA). The DSA was founded in response to advice from campus committees, including the Gender Equity Council and the Council for Racial and Ethnic Equity and Diversity (CREED) to implement initiatives that recognized faculty community service. The DSA would serve as a sister recognition to UT Austin’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers. The DSA would elevate service work by providing selected faculty with a title, compensation, and recognition. It would build trust among the faculty as a whole that such efforts would be noticed and in alignment with the work of faculty at the state’s flagship university (Reddick, 2020). The email invited nominations or direct applications from candidates among the tenured and non-tenure-
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