Tips for Department Chairs, Deans, and Other Administrators

To-Do List for Getting Started

• Help manage new faculty members’ transition by providing an orientation to the department, including information on departmental expectations, policies for promotion and tenure, collegial culture, and the names and faces of departmental faculty and staff. Urge new faculty to attend school/college and campus-wide orientations (and accompany them if invited).
• Facilitate the acquisition of resources (e.g., adequate office, lab, and/or studio space; a computer) and staff support (e.g., research assistants, clerical personnel, technicians) to ensure new faculty receive timely assistance and can meet your department’s expectations.
• Assign new faculty courses that fit their interests and priorities and offer fewer courses or, at the very least, fewer preparations during the first year or two of appointment.
• Support a flexible leave program to allow pre-tenure faculty to complete scholarly projects before tenure review.
• Encourage new faculty to seek out research and teaching development activities beyond the department (e.g., teaching and learning center, office of research support, library, office of academic computing).
• Be especially mindful of women and underrepresented faculty to ensure that they are protected from excessive committee assignments and student advising prior to tenure.

Tenure and/or Evaluation Processes

• Sponsor a yearly meeting for all pre-tenure faculty during which you review the specific details of the tenure process, including the names of evaluators, timetables and deadlines, the kinds of information needed for tenure files, and what pieces faculty members are responsible for collecting and submitting (e.g., record of professional activities, names of outside reviewers). Be sure to invite the tenure review committee to the meeting.
• Give frequent, accurate feedback. Formally evaluate all early-career faculty at least once a year. Highlight what is going well, clarify what merits attention, and offer concrete suggestions for improvement through discussion and written comments.
• Encourage your pre-tenure faculty to explore options such as “stopping the clock” or counting previous work for credit to “early tenure,” based on individual circumstances.
• Encourage an ongoing discussion of the tenure process and the values that inform it through departmental meetings, written guidelines, seminars, etc.
• Engage the faculty in developing clear standards for the tenure process so standards don’t change when/if the tenure review committee experiences turnover.

Suggested Activities to Build a Mentoring Program

• Assess the needs of faculty (e.g., hold individual discussions or focus groups) to better understand the state of mentoring in your unit(s) and to inform planning, development, and modification of a mentoring program.
• Ask a broadly representative group of faculty to explore different mentoring programs and recommend a context-specific, workable model (e.g., assigned or self-selected mentoring partners, a mentoring committee for each new faculty, multiple mentors of limited term, mentors outside the department, etc.).
• Offer any program to all early-career faculty versus targeted groups. Women and faculty of color may be overrepresented in such programs because network-based mentoring models provide the type of nonhierarchical, relational, and reciprocal mentoring structure desired by these populations.
• Consider investing in faculty through grants with principal investigators. Grants are the coin of the realm in many colleges and universities, and faculty members are eager for opportunities to apply for them, even if the funds are modest. In addition, these seed grants often assist participants in later achieving significant career milestones such as major research grants, book awards, and grants for the development of innovative curricula.
• Encourage mentoring partners to set concrete goals, to develop a roadmap or specific steps for each meeting (how to get from here to there), and to measure their progress along the way.
• Help clarify the roles of mentoring partners early on. This guide can provide a useful starting point for such a discussion.
• Respect the important role of a senior faculty mentor but also make it clear that the faculty role is increasingly complex and that no single person or mentor holds all the knowledge and skills needed to be successful. All members of the academic community—peers, near peers, and senior colleagues—have something to teach and learn from each other.
• Build responsibility for nurturing new colleagues into the evaluation of faculty and seek ways to recognize and reward peers, near peers, and senior faculty members for the time spent working with their early-career colleagues.
• Check department/college schedules and the campus calendar to minimize scheduling conflicts, overlap in mentoring activities, and over-scheduling. Consider that attendance at early breakfast or dinner/evening sessions may be difficult for faculty with families.