JANUARY 29, 2027 | 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Eastern)
The unequal distribution of faculty teaching and service work is one of the most important, yet least talked about problems that shape the experiences of faculty members within colleges and universities. In particular, faculty from marginalized faculty face unusually high service, teaching, and mentoring workloads. It is important for departments and institutions everywhere to identify and dismantle systems that maintain unequal workloads that scholarship has shown to result in longer time to advancement, higher stress, increased burnout, and greater willingness to leave among women and faculty of color.
In this workshop, KerryAnn O’Meara, Provost and Executive Vice President for Faculty Affairs at Fordham University, shares her extensive scholarship on the challenge of making workloads fair. She will engage Fellows in discussions about how workload inequities emerge in "discretionary spaces" in their own work systems, and the evidence-based policies and practices departments can use assess faculty and university needs, and re-design workload with equity in mind.
Participants in this inquiry:
Interrogate the conditions that shape how faculty work is taken up, assigned, and rewarded in ways that promote equity and inequities in their departments and disciplines
Discuss specific actions a single faculty leader can take to foster more equitable workload systems.
Learn to anticipate resistance and how to manage/respond to it.
Leave with concrete examples and resources for designing fairer systems that will outlast their appointments.
INQUIRY Leader
KERRYANN O’MEARA
KerryAnn O’Meara, Fordham University’s Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, is widely recognized as a scholar specializing in academic careers and reward systems. She draws on insights from organizational behavior, higher education research, and behavioral economics to identify, test, and implement policies, practices, and interventions that embed transparency, clarity, credit, fairness, and context in faculty hiring, retention, workload, and evaluation policies and practices. Her work has been widely published, funded by the National Science Foundation, and shared with colleges and universities through research, reports, workshops, resources, and tools to create better places to work, learn, and thrive. In recognition of the rigor and impact of her scholarship and leadership, O’Meara was elected and served as president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in 2020. She also was elected an American Council on Education Fellow in 2022 and inducted into the American Educational Research Association as a fellow in 2025.
Among many publications, O’Meara is the co-author of Faculty Workload and Rewards Project and co-author of an American Council on Education report and set of evidence-based tools, shares what she learned with colleagues during this five-year, action research project aimed at promoting equity in how faculty labor is taken up, assigned, and rewarded.
Ivy+ FAN Virtual Colloquium:
Leadership of the Faculty
Dialogues for Ivy+ faculty who want to understand how their universities work and the roles faculty can play in helping them work better.