The Associates

Our town hall presenting the findings of the recent faculty survey on career/job satisfaction led to a great set of reactions from the faculty attending. We plan to have another to reach other faculty who couldn’t make that one.

My last post discussed one area of concerns raised by faculty in the survey–perceived lack of clarity about tenure and promotion processes. There may be related findings in a set of items about the nature of mentoring at Georgetown.

The scholarly life of a faculty member often has ups and downs. There are periods of great productivity and creative bursts as well as periods of difficulty. The hard times often occur in winnowing down optional next steps in a line of research, trying to balance what are important questions to answer or developments to attempt, on one hand, with what next steps have high likelihood of success. Should I go for a big leap or play it safe?

At those moments, our colleagues, especially those with more experience than ourselves, are often valuable resources. When they know their fields well, when they have our best interests at heart, they can offer wise guidance. When they themselves are successful scholars, they can draw on their own life lessons to help guide decisions on next steps.

Sometimes the best mentor is a colleague in your own department; sometimes it’s someone in another department; and sometimes it’s a colleague at another university. For some faculty, their PhD committee chair acts as a mentor deep into their careers. For those who do team-oriented research, there can be effective peer-mentoring among team members.

There are many alternatives, but the value of interacting with others about where their field of inquiry is going, what are the major next steps that the field might take, what are the unexplored topics or techniques–these are the kinds of things that are important topics of a mentoring relationship. Such relationships work when the mentor cares for the mentee as both a scholar and a fellow human being and when the mentee has absolute trust in the good intentions of the mentor.

Some of the ratings from Georgetown faculty, especially tenured Associate Professors, express less satisfaction with their access to such mentoring than we should expect of Georgetown. There also seem to be mixed messages being received about the timing of the decision to seek promotion to full professor. There are hints of the same group having more concerns about the level of service work they shoulder. These reports from Associate Professors stand in contrast to those of Assistant and Full Professors.

At the town hall, we discussed how we might mount small group discussions of faculty members, assisted by a third-party facilitator. These could be designed to dig deeper into the concerns of Associate Professors that the survey seems to indicate. I’m hopeful that if we could create a safe environment for Associate Professors to identify the root of their concerns, we might be able to construct effective mentoring processes, and strengthen the promotion processes, in order to address some of these concerns.

In all fields of endeavor, promotion processes are anxiety provoking because, by definition, not all candidates for promotion will succeed. We want to make this process as clearly delineated and explicitly documented as possible to increase the clarity of the process as much as possible. We want to create an environment in which all faculty have equitable prospects of demonstrating their accomplishments to garner the promotion.