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 annual changes to that Agreement or to other sources of authority could result in changes. 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 faculty members holding the academic rank of Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Professor (includes Eminent Scholar) in one of the colleges or academic departments and who may not be re-appointed beyond a seven-year maximum unless awarded tenure (tenure is not awarded at the instructor and assistant professor ranks). These faculty members are commonly described as “ranked faculty,” although the “Instructor” rank is no longer utilized. All other faculty members are either described as non-tenure-track or “specialized faculty.” The “specialized faculty” group includes the “rank equivalent” faculty (applies to the various levels of Teaching Faculty, Research Faculty and Curator), the various librarian ranks, and the faculty positions that carry no assigned rank.

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.