What are faculty assistant permissions?

Most faculty information systems give one answer to who can act on a record: the faculty member it belongs to and administrators. However, faculty assistants routinely maintain material their faculty member is formally accountable for. They keep CVs current, update publication lists, assemble submission materials, and track which forms are due when. This isn't clerical work off to the side. It's the same information a faculty affairs office needs for credentialing, annual reviews, and promotion and tenure.

Assistant permissions define which faculty members an assistant supports, what the assistant can do for each one, and for how long. 

Why this is hard to get right

Delegation in faculty systems usually takes one of two forms, and each one has tradeoffs.

A proxy role gives the assistant a fixed set of permissions over named faculty. Administrators set those permissions, not the faculty members, so even if faculty want very different things from their assistants, everyone has the same scope.

Impersonation goes the other way. The assistant signs in as the faculty member, which erases the distinction between the two people. Access can't be narrowed, and the record can't tell the professor's entries from the assistant's.

Both common approaches fall short. Under a proxy model, visibility is usually all or nothing for each item. Blocking an assistant from a sensitive filing also blocks them from tracking its deadline. Impersonation has the opposite problem. Because the assistant is acting as the faculty member, nothing stops them from completing a filing the faculty member should complete personally, such as a conflict of interest disclosure. Nothing stops them from seeing information the faculty member would rather keep private, either.

Neither approach models the unique working relationship between a faculty member and their assistant. 

Our customer’s problem

One of our customers, a leading law school, wanted assistants to log into Scholarly directly to do the administrative work for the faculty they support, with no one re-keying it. The school set two conditions.

1. The first was control. What an assistant handles varies widely from one professor to the next, both in scope and in how much they're trusted to own. So the school wanted each faculty member to set their own assistant's permissions and not have one institutional rule for everyone.

2. The second was separation. An assistant using a professor's login can reach everything the professor can, and no one can tell later who entered or signed off on what. The school wanted assistants to sign in as themselves, so their access stays limited and every entry can be traced to the person who made it.

What we did:

At the law school, assistants sign in as themselves and are assigned to the faculty they support. Each assignment has its own start and end dates, so the system records coverage during a leave, a reassignment, or a gap between assignments. No one has to remember it. The assistant's dashboard shows deadlines for every faculty member they support, which is what the person keeping track of those deadlines needs.

Each faculty member decides what their assistant can do on their behalf, and the assistant can see which permissions they've been given. That matters because working relationships vary so much that any single institutional rule would be wrong for most of them.

An assistant doesn't need to see inside every filing. They do need to know what's due and when, because keeping faculty ahead of deadlines is much of the job.

Scholarly’s setup can keep “seeing” and “opening” separate. An assistant can see that a restricted filing is due but can't open it. They keep the faculty member on schedule, and the contents stay private. Sensitive document folders work the same way. The client institution didn't have to trade privacy for deadline tracking.

What makes Scholarly's approach different?

The assistant has their own account. No shared password and no impersonated session. Assistants sign in as themselves, so their access stays limited and every entry shows who made it.

The faculty member sets the terms. The person whose record it is decides how much help they want and what that help can reach. Alternatively, administrators can manage access levels. 

Seeing and opening are separate permissions. A restricted filing can show an assistant that it's due without showing what's inside.

Each assignment has dates. Coverage during a leave, a reassignment, or a gap is recorded, so access ends when the assignment does and doesn't linger.

The bottom line

Most faculty affairs software is built for two roles: the faculty member who submits and the administrator who reviews. The person who prepares much of the material is left to make do with someone else's login. Scholarly treats the assistant as a third participant with their own account. The faculty member defines what the assistant can do, and sensitive filings stay personal. Faculty assistant roles are built based on how faculty work actually gets done.

About Scholarly

Scholarly is a modern faculty information system that centralizes faculty data and streamlines the manual work that buries administrators and faculty, so your team spends less time wrangling documents and spreadsheets and more time supporting faculty. Book a demo or reach out to sales@scholarlysoftware.com to learn more