Faculty Personnel Policies

B1: Faculty Recruitment Procedures

a. Principles

As stated in the Articles of Incorporation, the purpose of Hope College is "to provide comprehensive literary and scientific courses of study, including related research and scholarly pursuits, and to do so in relation to the Christian faith with an overall goal of enabling students to grow and mature intellectu­ally, spiritually, culturally and socially and to prepare for positions of leadership in the nation and in the world."

 

Hope College seeks to fulfill this purpose by maintaining a scholarly learning environment which is characterized by freedom of inquiry and active participation in the higher education community and the academic disciplines, and in which the Christian faith provides an incentive for excellence, a context for values, and motivation for service.  For the campus community such faith embraces the search for truth and diversity in worship and practice.  The faculty is the key to developing and maintaining this environment.  Therefore, the College strives to have a faculty that shares this vision of academic excellence and faith and whose members are eager to be teachers and scholars in such a commu­nity.   The Board of Trustees (January 27, 1984) has directed the President, administration, and faculty to strive diligently, whenever persons are recruited to the faculty for tenure-track positions, to identify and recruit persons of outstanding ability and character who are dedicated to excellence in teaching and scholarship, and who have a mature understanding of and commitment to the Christian faith.  Although it is not required that the faculty should consist only of professing Christians, it is expected that the faculty as a whole will be predominantly Christian and that every member of the faculty will fully support the College's purpose.

 

Recruiting faculty involves a deliberate effort to identify such persons and to bring to their attention the nature and strengths of the College and the opportunities it offers for excellence in teaching and scholarship.  The College will provide equitable incentives and judicious encouragement for the selected candidates to join us at Hope.

 

More specifically, the qualities the College seeks in the persons it recruits for the faculty are:

• Demonstrated ability or potential as an outstanding teacher;
• Significant academic and professional achievement;
• The desire and ability to continue to advance as a teacher and as a professional through the pursuit of high quality scholarly and/or artistic work, and, if possible, to involve students in such work;
• A commitment to:
  • the ideals of liberal education;
  • encouraging students to develop a coherent value system for learning and for all of life;
  • the historic Christian faith and to fulfilling with excellence the purpose of the College as outlined above.

Ideally, these qualities are fully evident in every person recruited for the faculty.  In reality, these qualities exist in a unique combination in each individual with respect to both nature and degree. Therefore, there is a need to look with sensitivity at each candidate as a whole person, recognizing that someone who does not possess all of these qualities may have such strengths overall as to remain a viable candidate.

Thus, the goal of the search process is to identify truly outstanding candidates who can contribute positively to the College's mission, to select the best-qualified candidates, and to recruit them for our faculty.  The primary responsibility for evaluating the academic and professional qualifications rests with the department; all persons involved share the responsibility for evaluating the personal qualities of the candidates.

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