The Manuscript Completion Workshop: Supporting Professional Development of Tenure Track Faculty Members.

SUPPORT AND ONGOING professional development for faculty members are critical to the well being of any college or university. Higher education institutions take some calculated but necessary risks when tenure-track faculty members are hired (e.g., a candidate might not ultimately fit well within a program or department or will be unable to attain tenure), but there is an expectation that the institution's financial investment will pay dividends when newly-appointed faculty members are tenured, promoted, and retained.Many research institutions are striving to increase faculty grants and publication productivity (Ali, Bhattacharyya, & Olejniczak, 2010; Chval & Nossaman, 2014). To help ensure new faculty successes, a number of higher education institutions have created faculty development programs and support services that vary in degree of formality, structure, and content. Faculty development programs may be provided by a centralized faculty development center or office, or may be developed and delivered by an academic administrator, such as an associate or assistant dean or department chair. In whatever form such programs may be delivered, they all have in common the goal of assisting new faculty members in becoming successful, productive teachers, scholars, and members of the academic community.A variety of faculty development and support programs that have been implemented, which include new faculty orientation programs (Bensimon, Ward, & Sanders, 2000); peer-mentoring (Jacelon, Zucker, Staccarini, & Henneman, 2003) and peermentored research groups (Colling, Grabo, Rowe, & Stravena, 1998); scholarship symposia (Pifer, Reisboard, Staulters, Li, Gozza-Cohen, McHenry et al., (2014); and varieties of writing groups (Page, Edwards, & Wilson, 2012) and focused writing retreats (Girardeau, Rud, & Trevisan, 2014), as well as NSF-funded ADVANCE programs (National Science Foundation, n.d.) and leadership preparation programs (American Council on Education, n.d.). The challenges to faculty development are even greater when an institution commits to raising its research profile from, for example, a "moderate research" (R3) to a "highest research" (R1) activity institution, based on the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education (2016). Faculty members at research institutions generally have reduced teaching loads with correspondingly increased expectations for scholarly productivity in terms of grants and published research articles.Tenure track faculty members who are caught in the middle of an institutional effort to increase research productivity may feel stressed, if not overwhelmed, by the challenge to do their part through grant writing, management of their funded projects, and the need to publish research articles that contribute to satisfactory progress toward tenure and promotion. Nearly 71% of faculty in a poll conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute (Hurtado et al., 2010-11) reported feeling stressed due to institutional expectations for research or publishing.Institutional leaders at West Virginia University, a land-grant flagship institution, identified a goal to move the university into the highest research activity tier of the Carnegie system-a goal that was recently achieved, with the publication of the Carnegie classifications in 2016. The individual colleges of the university were, of course, expected to collectively contribute to this effort. The College of Education and Human Services has historically focused on preparing teachers and human services providers (e.g., school counselors, clinical mental health counselors, and speech/language pathologists) and expectations for scholarly publications and grants have been modest. However, this standard changed in recent years with the charge to move the university into the top tier of research institutions, and it was anticipated that faculty members' research activities would increase accordingly. …