FAQs

The Faculty Portfolio System (FPS) is Syracuse University’s official repository for information about faculty work and accomplishments. It is a database that allows for a holistic view of faculty activities—research/creative work, teaching and service—in a manner that is useful, consistent and shareable. The FPS is used in decisions related to annual faculty merit reviews, as well as tenure, promotion and contract renewal reviews. It is also used to generate dossiers for faculty review and institutional and discipline-specific accreditation reports, and it feeds some school/college website faculty directories.

The FPS supports equitable, transparent and fair evaluation of faculty by providing comprehensive and accurate data about faculty workload and performance and a standard way to report faculty activities, achievements and contributions while being responsive to the specific norms in various fields and disciplines. The input fields in the FPS provide faculty members with clarity about evaluation parameters. As all faculty members submit materials to the FPS, decision-makers gain insights into faculty workload equity, faculty performance, and other aspects of faculty experiences.

The system is not an open database and cannot be searched on the internet.

Many institutions have adopted similar systems; some use the term Faculty Information System (FIS). More than 400 institutions use the same platform as Syracuse, which is offered by the vendor Watermark.

The FPS is a centralized, online platform where faculty can input, manage, and access information about their teaching, research, service activities, and professional credentials. The FPS is automatically populated by other systems of record at Syracuse University, including those that capture teaching and externally sponsored research records. Faculty can also input specific portfolio information and review, verify, add, and edit their portfolios.

The FPS creates and facilitates review of documents and dossiers associated with faculty evaluation and promotion, including the CV update, the Report and Recommendation form for tenure-track faculty, promotion and tenure dossiers, and other key materials. The FPS also helps department chairs, school directors, and deans make more informed decisions about faculty evaluation, merit raises, reappointment, and promotion.

Faculty can view and modify their portfolios and generate reports on their own information. Department chairs and school directors can view portfolios and generate reports for faculty in their department/school. Similarly, deans and associate deans can view portfolios and generate reports for faculty in their school/college. Access to workflow submissions like CV updates and promotion and tenure dossiers follow University, school/college, and departmental policies and by-laws governing the relevant review process.

The FPS saves faculty time and effort in multiple ways. Publicly and institutionally available information about faculty work and accomplishments is automatically added. Templates and reports—for example, the FCAR resume, reports to support grant funding, and connection to ORCiD—are available for faculty use. The FPS eliminates the need to re-populate CV updates and other standard forms each year. In some cases, faculty bio pages on school/college websites are automatically updated by the FPS.

Watermark can access individual faculty data only when specific support or troubleshooting is required. Watermark follows the principle of least privilege, which is a fundamental cybersecurity and access control concept stating that users, processes, systems, or devices should be granted only the minimum level of access rights, permissions, or privileges necessary to perform required functions and no more. Key aspects of this principle include Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), an access control methodology that assigns permissions to users based on their organizational roles rather than individually.

Administrative accounts for the FPS are strictly managed by the Office of Academic Affairs and in accordance with Watermark’s guidance. The system uses state-of-the-art access control and aligns with University authentication protocols. Access is removed promptly when a user is no longer employed by the University, in line with institutional policy.

Watermark may compile aggregated statistics (e.g., number of users) from Syracuse University’s FPS, but these statistics do not identify or link to Syracuse University or end users and do not contain any identifiable information.

To ensure protection of University data, all Syracuse University IT contracts include rigorous security terms, and implementations follow ITS security protocols for communication and authentication.