Faculty Handbook - .pdf (Revised Feb. 2023)
Introduction
The Faculty Handbook provides an overview of the history and administrative structure of Florida State University. It also presents information on various processes and procedures you will encounter as a faculty member in your academic, administrative, or research roles. Please note that some of those processes are governed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the FSU Board of Trustees and the United Faculty of Florida, and that changes resulting from the bargaining process or to other sources of authority such as State of Florida legislation or Board of Governors Regulation may result in changes to those processes and procedures. The entire text of the .pdf document can be searched by using the Adobe find function (Windows: Ctrl + F; Mac: Command + F). As policies and procedures change, the most up-to-date information will be available on the Office of Faculty Development and Advancement Web site.
The term “faculty” has different meanings in different contexts. Florida State University Constitution defines “The General Faculty” as those persons who are appointed by the University in tenured or tenure-earning positions with the rank of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Professor in one of the colleges or other academic units of the University, and of those members of the Professional Staff to whom the President assigns an academic rank. The ”Specialized Faculty” consists of persons appointed full-time within the tracks of Teaching, Instructional Support, Research, Research Support, Library or Information Specialties, and Curator Specialties.
Faculty members hold various types of compensated appointments, such as regular, research, visiting, acting, provisional, or visiting in lieu of adjunct, as well as non-compensated appointments such as courtesy or joint-college. Adjunct instructors are not defined as faculty. Other terminology commonly used to describe faculty members includes:
- tenure-track (tenure-earning or tenured) or non-tenure-track (not tenure-earning and non-tenured),
- instructional or non-instructional,
- full-time (1.0 FTE) or part-time (below 1.0 FTE),
- funded from Education and General (E&G) recurring Legislative appropriations or from “soft money” [faculty, contracts and grants (C&G), sponsored research funds, grants and donations trust funds, or auxiliary entities],
- paid from salary or OPS (other personnel services) funds.
- in-unit or out-of-unit (referring to the collective bargaining unit; for the list of in-unit classification titles, see Appendix A of the Collective Bargaining Agreement).
Note that adjunct instructors and OPS researchers without faculty appointments are not considered “faculty.”
Some of the policies and procedures described in the Faculty Handbook apply only to certain types of faculty members, and the text will reflect this accordingly.