 UMass Gets Mellon Grant to Promote Mentor Networks for New and Underrepresented Faculty
Sept. 7, 2007
AMHERST, Mass. – A pilot mentoring program for new and underrepresented faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has proven so successful that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York has awarded the campus a three-year, $400,000 grant to expand and develop these professional support networks across the institution and the Five College Consortium.
The Mellon Mutual Mentoring Initiative is seen as an important complement to other faculty recruitment and development efforts, according to Charlena Seymour, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs at UMass Amherst, who is the principal investigator, with co-principal investigator Mary Deane Sorcinelli, associate provost for faculty development, and co-principal investigator Jung Yun, director of new faculty initiatives.
“This is an extraordinary opportunity for UMass Amherst to support its young faculty with one of the most active and innovative mentoring programs in the country,” says Seymour. “How grateful we are to the Mellon Foundation for working with us over the past two years to craft an initiative that truly respects and supports the power of faculty-driven, context-sensitive mentoring.”
Studies of faculty development and retention have shown that starting an academic career poses many challenges for new faculty, including managing expectations for performance and the tenure process, finding collegiality and community, and creating a balance between professional roles and also between work and family life. For women and faculty of color, the barriers can be particularly acute, say the studies.
Other studies have also demonstrated the effectiveness of mentoring in launching academic careers, but instead of relying on the traditional top-down, one-on-one model, UMass Amherst’s Mellon Mutual Mentoring Initiative advocates a non-hierarchical, network-based approach.
As a result, new and underrepresented faculty members can draw upon the expertise and support of a wide variety of mentors, such as peers, senior faculty, librarians, and administrators. Mentoring approaches range from one-on-one relationships to small groups to online connections.
Under the initiative, mentoring will be encouraged at three levels: individual; department/school/college/interdisciplinary; and campus-wide.
At the individual level, projects funded by small grants will be used to encourage faculty to create self-selected networks. Larger grants will be made to encourage teams to create networks among departments, schools and colleges, interdisciplinary initiatives and across the Five Colleges. At the campus-wide level, programs sponsored by the Office of Faculty Development provide mentoring around issues of new faculty orientation, scholarly writing and productivity, tenure preparation and time management.
More than 90 percent of the Mellon award will go to the two faculty grant programs and a Five College professional network to be administered by the Office of Faculty Development. “The Mellon Foundation has made an incredibly generous investment in UMass Amherst’s future, and we believe the best place to further invest these funds is with the UMass faculty and their colleagues from the Five Colleges,” says Sorcinelli.
During the past year, UMass Amherst used a $47,000 planning grant from the Mellon Foundation to study the challenges facing new and underrepresented faculty on campus, at the Five Colleges and nationally. Other efforts focused on identifying best practices for mentoring and planning a full-scale mentoring program. In addition, small pilot grants were awarded to departments and programs to develop Mutual Mentoring-based networks, including anthropology, history, psychology, women’s studies, and “Blacklist,” a support group for female faculty of color.
“So many faculty members have shared their ideas with us about what they want and need in terms of mentoring,” says Yun. “We’re thrilled the Mellon grant will be able to create such opportunities for them and support their innovation.”
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation makes grants in higher education and scholarship, scholarly communications, research in information technology, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. Collaborative planning by the foundation and its grantee institutions, whose experience qualifies them to work particularly effectively in these areas, precedes all awards and is an integral part of grant-making. The foundation seeks to strengthen institutions and their capacities rather than encourage them to take on ancillary activities, and it seeks to stay with programs long enough to achieve meaningful results. These considerations require thoughtful, long-term collaboration with recipients.
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