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

An end-of-year evaluation is too late to discover interpersonal problems and program pitfalls. Hence, we incorporated new faculty only gatherings in the early fall along with survey assessments and follow-ups with tenure-earning faculty. A policy of confidentiality informed the mentoring director’s communications with all participants, ensuring privacy as well as anonymity.

Improvements for Year Two

For the transitional period at the end of the first year and for the second year cycle of this program, all recommendations were satisfied. The 2005 spring data were analyzed in time to satisfy the participants’requests for recognition, information, and other program changes; some were made at the end of the inaugural year with additional changes implemented for the second year.

The suggestion that mentor training be financially supported was acted upon, with resources obtained for a luncheon that drew together all mentoring parties. However, no specification for payment to mentors was made.

Widespread commitment to support new faculty is also expected to evolve with combined efforts on the part of the NFMP leaders and faculty more generally. Through exchanges with the first year faculty as to whether they wanted to continue in the program, recognition came that formal mentoring is essential collegewide and prompted widespread buy-in. In fact, ninety percent agreed to extend their formal arrangements. Certainly, one test of formal mentoring success in any organization is for new faculty to want to continue to receive mentoring from senior faculty. These protracted arrangements will be examined at the conclusion of the second year, along with the new mentorships formed. Based on this extended mentoring opportunity, it will be possible to learn more about both formal and informal mentoring within a research university culture and its evolutionary process.

Another strategy for soliciting and extending collegewide involvement was to continue some of the same mentors into the second year, while some new mentoring triads were formed. Long-term goals are to involve as many willing and capable senior faculty as possible and to reap the rewards of a robust culture of mentoring not dependent on assigned relationships.

Additional improvements introduced in the second year of the NFMP were: (1) a training session identified as a“meet and greet”work luncheon, complete with other inclusive social events); (2) a written mentoring agreement for parties wanting to clarify what is expected, in addition to learning goal statements accompanied by specific responsibilities for the mentors and their mentees; (3) a new survey item with best-match variables, (4) library sessions focused on advanced database searches and citation indexes, and (5) conversion of the fall and spring surveys into a user-friendly, online instruments.

Life in the Evolving Village

We found that this formal mentoring experience not only potentially spearheads faculty bonding, but also better positions our“village”of scholars to generate widespread cultural change. The facilitation of collegiality and interdependence via formalized mentorships can even be thought of as a cultural reform strategy. Fullan (2006) persuasively argues in Turnaround Leadership that“all successful strategies [aimed at changing educational cultures] are socially based and action oriented”(p. 44). Attention to mutual commitment and interest, scholarly overlap, proximity, and diversity must be upheld in the making of good faculty matches. Another goal is for us to include the faculty mentors in all events focused on new faculty development, as well as to continue soliciting recommendations for improvement and, when advisable, acting on these.

The New Faculty Mentoring Program is obviously evolving. Modifications continue to be made based on faculty input. A few recent hires in our College of Education have actually requested, as part of the negotiating process, that they be allowed to participate in our collegewide mentoring program for tenure-earning faculty only to learn that they will automatically become part of it. Universities that function as mentoring organizations offer something that is relatively new (Forret, Turban,&Dougherty, 1996), yet mentor–protégérelationships ensure a bright future so they must be encouraged and facilitated. Finally, successful formal mentoring programs make a difference to new academics and even to seasoned faculty. Such support networks enable the exchange of experience and best practice, as well as desirable cultural change. No doubt, universities implementing formal faculty mentoring should be encouraged to share ideas and tips with respect to research-based faculty mentoring, so as to continue to improve the climate and culture for tenure and promotion of new faculty.

Author Notes

1Academic publishers are now recognizing the value of formal faculty mentoring programs, especially as concerns relevance for multiple university colleges, with the first-ever book on this topic recently appearing in print (Mullen, in press).

2This study received USF’s Institutional Review Board approval in 2005.

This essay treatment is of a larger empirical work: Mullen, C. A., Feyten, C. M., Holcomb, C., Kealy, W. A.,&Keller, H. R. (in press). Birthing a new faculty mentoring program in a research culture. In C. A. Mullen (Ed.), The handbook of successful faculty mentoring programs. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

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