Why Faculty Mentoring Still Isn’t Working (And What We Can Do About It)

mentoring

Author: NCFDD If you ask most faculty whether mentoring matters, the answer is almost always yes. But if you ask whether their mentoring experiences are actually helping them thrive? That’s where the conversation shifts. Many faculty enter academia expecting mentorship to be a meaningful part of their growth. They’re told they’ll get guidance on research, … Read more

Mentoring Up: Pro-actively Engaging With Your Mentors Begins With Assessing Yourself

Author: Steve Lee, PhD In an upcoming workshop, I’ll be offering some strategies to help faculty find and manage relationships with mentors. My approach has been to encourage faculty to “mentor up”, i.e. to learn how to pro-actively engage with their mentors, which is based on Gabarro’s and Kotter’s original concept of “managing up”. When Gabarro … Read more

Don’t Talk About Mentoring

women talking

Author: Kerry Ann Rockquemore, PhD Originally published on Inside Higher Ed. I was recently in a meeting with a president, chief diversity officer and dean at a small liberal arts college. The president launched our conversation by confidently insisting that while lots of people talk about the importance of mentoring, nothing really works, nobody has figured … Read more

Mid-Career Mentoring

women talking

Author: Kerry Ann Rockquemore, PhD Originally posted on Inside Higher Ed. In the spirit of continuing to question the tired and dysfunctional myths about mentoring that are pervasive in the academy (the meaning of mentoring, sink or swim, the limit of anecdotes, and mentoring underrepresented faculty) let me move to one that is both organizationally ineffective and individually debilitating: once professors … Read more