This week, Elon launches the largest fundraising campaign in its history, focusing on the priority of building the university’s endowment. Today, E-Net details plans to expand support for professorships and faculty development.
Elon seeks to provide faculty with more of the precious gift of time to study, create and perform, which will allow them to become even better teachers, models and mentors to one another and their students. Elon’s distinctive style of engaged learning depends on time-intensive interactions between students and faculty.
Through the year 2014, Elon plans to increase annual expenditures for faculty development by $2.75 million, providing additional travel and research grants for the summer, and other forms of faculty support. One common marker of quality is the percentage of faculty awarded sabbaticals each year; Elon’s goal is to reach 10 percent, up from the current 6 percent, to match selected peer universities.
Elon must secure its ability to recruit and retain young faculty of great promise, while recognizing and supporting those talented scholars who have since gained prestige in their fields. Investing new endowment in this area will provide new named professorships for senior faculty. Term professorships lasting several years will be awarded to emerging teacher-scholars. The university plans to double the number of annual sabbaticals available to the entire faculty for professional renewal. Endowment funds also will provide stipends for research—often in the summer and often with students—and for new course development.
Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning
In conjunction with those investments in its faculty, Elon also seeks endowment for Elon’s extraordinary Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning—a center designed to stimulate and nurture Elon’s culture of creative teaching and transformative student learning, while operating as a national focal point and model. Elon’s ongoing exploration of new approaches to teaching and innovative settings for learning will receive greater national recognition through the publications and conferences spawned by the center and spur widespread adoption of new teaching techniques.