Many Hands Make Light Work: Rethinking and Rewarding Faculty Service

Faculty service is an often ignored area where inequities have become more apparent in recent decades, particularly with women and faculty of color taking on more service that is undervalued and unrewarded. We were approached to participate in the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s 2024 Presidential Commission on Service to produce a report that focused on the importance of faculty service and to examine inequities revealed by the pandemic (Sallee et al., 2025). We accepted the invitation because we felt strongly about the relationship between service and being good academic citizens. We feel even more strongly now—when institutions are under attack from the federal and some state governments—that faculty leadership and service are crucial to the health of higher education and that it’s imperative for academic administrators to look with fresh eyes at their responsibilities as academic citizens.