Celebrating Faculty Excellence

The Conference USA Presidents and Chancellors believe in the importance of recognizing, honoring
and advancing exceptional achievements of institutional faculty members at the conference level. The
C-USA Faculty Achievement and Professor of the Year Awards were established to highlight and
celebrate those distinguished contributions within the academic community of the membership. The award honors institutional professors who demonstrate a record of outstanding teaching, scholarship and creative activity, service and/or scholarly activity within their academic discipline.

  • The candidate must demonstrate an outstanding record of scholarly contributions in teaching, scholarship and creative activity, and professional service and/or scholarly activity within their academic discipline. Please refer to individual teaching, professional service and scholarship and creative activity awards for examples of accomplishments that might be included as evidence.

    The candidate must also indicate their regional, national, or international recognition for contributions or achievements within the discipline. 

  • Any full-time teaching faculty is eligible to be nominated for the award. Administrators with faculty rank are ineligible for faculty awards (i.e., receives a Contract for Faculty Ranked Administrators). Previous award winners of this award are not eligible to apply again. The award recipient must be under contract at KSU when the award is presented.
  • Each award consists of $5,000. The winner of the C-USA Faculty Achievement Award will be the institution's nominee for C-USA Professor of the Year. The faculty member chosen as the C-USA Professor of the Year will receive an additional honorarium ($15,000) for this distinction.
  • Up to one (1) award may be presented annually, selected based on the qualifications of nominees.

Nomination Procedure

Each college is responsible for creating the process by which their nominees are chosen. College deans or their designees submit nominations. There are no limits on the number of nominees each college can submit. The selection committee can reactivate nominations submitted for 2 years after the original submission.

Nominations packets should include:

  • A completed Cover Sheet with signatures
  • A 3-page, single-spaced impact statement by the nominee using 12-point Times New Roman font with one-inch margins. The statement can address the following (in the order indicated) but are intentionally broad to ensure all faculty, regardless of discipline, have a framework to articulate their merits for selection
    • Area(s) of expertise
    • Significance of work in the field
    • Teaching
    • Mentoring of students or other faculty
    • Service and engagement
    • Professional recognition, awards, and honors
    • Other (e.g. community engagement, relevant personal accomplishments)
  • A curriculum vitae limited to five pages; highlighting recent scholarly publications
  • A support letter from the nominee’s academic home chair; jointly appointed faculty may submit a joint letter from both chairs or two separate letters
  • Any other appendix materials useful to build the case
  • All materials must be compiled into a single pdf file

Evaluation Criteria and Procedures

The selection committee will look for an outstanding body of professional activity that has gained national and/or international recognition. 

Nominations will be evaluated by a university committee, including one member from each of the degree granting colleges, the Faculty Athletics Representative, the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee President, and the Executive Director for Faculty Development and Recognition. Since members serving on this committee may not be experts in the nominee's field, it is important that nominations be submitted in language understandable to faculty in other disciplines.

Submission Procedure

To submit a nomination, the college dean or their representative should:

  1. Prepare each nomination application as a separate file, ensuring the correct cover page for the award is attached as the first page of the file
  2. Click on the name of your college below to access the OneDrive folder where you will upload the nomination packet(s) for your college
    (If access is denied, please contact CETL at cetl@kennesaw.edu or 470-578-6410)
  3. Click on the Upload button at the top of the page in OneDrive to upload each nomination file

Only the college dean or their designee will submit on this webpage. Individuals should reach out to their supervisor or the dean's office to determine your college's nomination process​.

The college dean and each nominee will receive a confirmation email for their nomination within the next business day following the deadline for submissions.