Joining and Renewing the Mission: New Faculty Mentoring and Institutional Vitality

Abstract

Mentoring of some sort is always part of the socialization process as new faculty members join the life and mission of a university. One type of mentoring is informal in nature. Newer members of a community pick up on the ways of an institution through “water cooler” conversations, casual interactions with colleagues, and even the unguarded comments of those who have been haunting the halls of the institution for much longer. Although it is inevitable and can be valuable, such informal mentoring also involves potential pitfalls. Accordingly, this article argues for the importance of formal mentoring programs. These formal mentoring structures require attentiveness to their built-in assumptions about new faculty members and about the institution itself. Formal, structured mentoring can easily default to the goal of initiating new faculty members into a static establishment. It is also possible, however, for mentoring programs to invite and empower new faculty to contribute to the institution and its mission in creative and revitalizing ways. In proposing an “invitational” ethos for formal mentoring, this article reports on early findings from participants in a mentoring program for newer faculty at Calvin University.

Keywords:

• Faculty mentoring
• institutional mission
• faculty development
• mentoring programs

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The category of “informal” mentoring can be parsed even more finely. Here I am focusing on the effects of informal socialization on new faculty, especially when that socialization flows from messages from those with longer experience and more power at an institution. We could distinguish that very informal version of informal mentoring from a more formal kind of informal mentoring—namely, when relationships serendipitously emerge between new faculty and more experienced faculty that amount to a protégé/mentor partnership. Some of the literature on mentoring of new faculty gives significant attention to this quasi-formalized yet not institutionally structured form of mentoring (e.g., Bode, 1999; Turner, 2015; Turner & González, 2015).

2 Another issue, not to be pursued further here, is that there is reason to believe that assigned formal mentoring partnerships often are not as beneficial as serendipitous informal mentoring partnerships (see Bode, 1999; Boice, 1992).

3 Notably, research on faculty mentoring often focuses—perhaps for good reason—primarily on the new faculty member’s individual experience at a new institution (e.g., Bode, 1999; Boice, 1992; Laverick, 2016). There is less direct attention to how approaches to mentoring can affect the overall health of an institution, except perhaps by assumption and implication. For example, all of Laverick’s (2016) suggested topics for mentors and protégés to talk about together are rather prosaic—items such as writing a syllabus, securing supplies, grading policies, and securing a parking permit (p. 25). Such things are, of course, extremely important. But in the list there is little that cuts to the core of the formation of a new faculty member as person and scholar, nor anything pertaining to the institution and its mission. A striking exception to this generalization is Simon et al. (2003), which will figure heavily in what follows here.

4 The questions asked were:

What was most beneficial about your conversations with your Companion Scholar?

How did your time with the Companion Scholar shape your understanding of Calvin as an institution, as well as your sense of your own role within Calvin?

How did the picture of Calvin that you were receiving from your Companion Scholar compare to messages about Calvin you were receiving from other colleagues (e.g., within your department, on committees, the administration, etc.)?

Were there negative elements of the experience that could have been avoided?