The Role of Department Chair as "Mentor-in-Chief"
Contributors include:
Michael Bugeja, Charlie Dobbs, Carl Jacobson, Wolfgang Kliemann, Charlie Kostelnick, Jim McCormick, Jake Petrich, Mark Rectanus, and Jonathan Wendel
- Create an atmosphere in which new faculty can grow.
- Open door policy. Junior faculty have to know (and believe) that you are always available. Let these individuals know that you really do care about how they are doing and that you (and the department) are committed to seeing their success.
- Convey institutional knowledge. The chair is responsible for mentoring all new faculty members regarding institutional knowledge/processes. This includes expectations regarding scholarship, teaching/instruction, and professional/institutional service; aspects of professional behavior and integrity; the promotion and tenure process; and yearly evaluations.
- Message consistency is a key. Meet with all faculty mentors to make sure that messages are the same.
- Ensure regular meetings between faculty mentor and mentee are taking place. Get feedback from both parties on how things are going.
- Along with assigning a senior mentor, designate a peer mentor to show new faculty the ropes from the perspective of someone who remembers what it was like during their first year at ISU.
- Make sure the Position Responsibility Statement is thoroughly understood and refer back to it during the course of the year.
- Schedule longer meetings for annual reviews. Allow for sufficient time to cover a range of issues in depth.
- Make sure that annual reviews are instructive. It is the Chair's responsibility to state as honestly as possible whether or not the faculty member is on track for renewal and/or promotion and tenure, to provide encouragement if the answer is yes, and to suggest specific corrections if the answer is no.
- Develop a "five-year plan".
- Encourage junior faculty to attend workshops. (Chair or faculty mentor will frequently attend as well.)
- Feed them. Take new faculty out to lunch (individually). (Have them over for dinner.)
- Offer brown bag lunches where faculty from around the university come in and talk about their research (methodologies and ideas for funding). What are the most valuable resources that new faculty should know?
- Hold departmental seminars to talk about teaching – and bring in local stars to talk about best practices in the classroom. Give advice about specific teaching issues (e.g., plagiarism in the classroom). Point them in the direction of CELT, as well as to classroom gurus on campus for advice.
- Work with them from the outset on getting them published and remind them that the search for perfection can lead to a diminishingly small publication list.
- Help navigate departmental politics. This is a very subtle, delicate, and important duty. Not all of the faculty may support hiring a given candidate. This may be based on objective considerations or self-interest. Helping the new faculty member work his or her way through this byzantine labyrinth without infusing a sentiment of paranoia is an important role of the mentor.
- Provide advice on how to work with graduate students, especially those who are not making satisfactory progress in their research program. Nothing can be more damaging than one disruptive graduate student in an otherwise productive program.
September 12, 2008
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