3.8 It takes a village to raise new faculty: implementing triangular  (Page 3/4)

Faculty Mentor Support

Most established faculty members were willing to provide the new professors with much-needed guidance and support. In relation to their academic careers, faculty mentors provided protection and visibility, for example. Mentors also provided guidance and support in terms of psychosocial aspects, such as role modeling and counseling functions as well as providing for their direct interests, such as grants development and teaching feedback (see Kram, 1985/1988). The quality and regularity of mentoring varied across college and departmental mentorships. Meetings with internal mentors were, as could be expected, less formal, more frequent, and more unit-focused. Office and campus proximity was identified as crucial to the regularity and success of mentoring.

A different level of expectation should probably be held for the off-campus or college mentor role. The college and department mentoring arrangements functioned somewhat differently. As confidantes, college mentors mostly offered a safe haven, providing objective viewpoints on issues involving promotion and personalities, while department mentors focused on relationship-building and problem-solving. Over time, then, the college mentors served more of a careerist, preparatory function embodying a long-term view, whereas department mentors seemed more local in their emphasis, helping with daily or weekly survivalist approaches to their work. However, the mentoring functions of both college and department efforts naturally overlapped, regardless of physical location, with all serving as functional mentors, offering career and psychosocial benefits ranging from help with adjustment to a new place to assistance with scholarly development.

Certainly, both mentoring groups fostered the career and psychosocial functions of mentoring. Perhaps because a mentoring mindset and climate were established in the college, nonappointed faculty and chairs also provided assistance in at least two cases unofficially assuming the role of mentor. Validation of the program and its centerpiece, the triangular mentoring relationship, was confirmed and, significantly, a budding mentoring culture was established.

Importantly, both college and department mentors reported that a growing sense of collegiality with their mentees significantly influenced the relationship. Mentoring parties located at a distance, then, could feel genuine concern for one another, which in turn built a sense of collegiality and helped to ensure support. On the other hand, physical distance and time stood out as significant barriers to successful mentoring for some parties. Distance had less to do with whether the mentor was situated outside the new professor’s unit, and more to do with whether this individual was located at a different campus. The new professors who were situated at the regional campuses, as opposed to the main campus, were inevitably challenged. As one solution, most of the newly hired regional faculty agreed to be mentored by three mentors, with at least one from their own site and another from the main campus. Because promotion and tenure for all affiliated regional faculty are handled through the main campus, one of their mentors needed to be located centrally.