Avenues of Mentoring
Revised November 2000 by the College of Arts and Sciences
It is the purpose of the College to do everything possible to assist faculty in preparing for the series of evaluations (reappointment, tenure, and promotion), which will determine their future at the University of Colorado. The Arts and Sciences "avenues of mentoring" policy is intended to provide all tenure-track, untenured faculty with the opportunity to get advice and career guidance from knowledgeable senior faculty. Because the kind of information that junior faculty need is extremely varied, there are two types of help and direction which are provided by the institution. The first, "professional guidance," is mandatory and should be supplied by the individual's department. The second, "mentoring," is more varied and is available through a range of programs at College, campus, and departmental levels. It is specifically designed to support and encourage junior faculty, but neither faculty nor units are required to engage in mentoring.
Professional Guidance
The most important orientation individual untenured faculty receive is through his or her academic department. The information provided should help prepare the faculty member for the separate levels of review leading up to tenure. This is related to but distinct from the annual merit process to determine raises. Professional guidance, by contrast, is intended to assist the faculty member in establishing a successful academic career. The advice given should be evaluative and convey the experience, culture, and traditions of the unit. This may be done orally or in writing. Departmental efforts will differ, but all will regularly (at least annually) review the progress of junior faculty in teaching, research, and service within the context of past and future career benchmarks (e.g., reappointment, promotion and tenure). A record of when the review and guidance occurred should be placed in the faculty member's file. Some departments have internal committees which meet and assess the faculty member's progress. In other cases, it might be sufficient to have the department chair and a senior faculty member selected by the untenured professor conduct this evaluation and convey the results to the faculty member. Each department should also have a document available to all faculty describing, as explicitly as possible, what constitutes acceptable performance in research, teaching, and service from the perspective of the department. Finally, all departments are encouraged to specify in their departmental documents, the need for regular peer review of teaching (not just in the semester prior to the personnel action) as well as limits on the service obligations of junior faculty.
Mentoring Options
These are non-evaluative programs intended to be of assistance to untenured faculty members who choose to take advantage of them. They exist at the levels of the campus, college, division (arts and humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences) and department. These programs will help to guide and support faculty members - especially those who may discover problems in their performance through professional guidance from the department as described above. Departments are encouraged to make their untenured faculty aware of the following mentoring opportunities.
The Faculty Teaching Excellence Program Areas Teaching Scholars Program is an initiative to give faculty occasions to engage in discipline-specific dialogues about teaching and learning, research, and the professorate. The single most important mission set out for this program is to help new faculty and assistant professors achieve success in teaching and in research, scholarship, or creative work.
This program brings together assistant professors and experienced faculty who are master teaching scholars, for more specific dialogues about particular and shared pedagogies within the different divisions: the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and engineering.
The Area Teaching Scholar for Diversity in Teaching, Scholarship, and Creative Work meets with new faculty of color and mentors them on specific issues such as dealing with controversial topics in the classroom which may arise in the humanities and social sciences, ways to establish a network of support both within and without the minority community, bridging the gap between traditional research and innovative research on diversity issues, providing information on university and community resources, and helping them "bond" positively with the institution during the formative years before the comprehensive and tenure reviews.
The Arts and Sciences Mentoring Program will be a new program in the College. Its purpose is to provide advice to junior faculty from all departments and divisions in A&S about the guidelines and standards for successfully gaining reappointment, tenure and promotion at the University of Colorado. A pool of tenured faculty mentors will be drawn from distinguished professors, teaching award winners, present and past members of the Dean's and Vice Chancellor's personnel committees and senior faculty volunteers in the College. Junior faculty members select a mentor to work with from this group. It is a one-on-one program in which senior colleagues provide support and counseling to untenured faculty about how to succeed at the University of Colorado.
The Women's Advisory Team is open to all junior women faculty who want to be paired with a senior woman faculty member outside of her department. Most of the senior women faculty on the "team" have served on College and Vice Chancellor personnel committees and want to share formal and informal methods of achieving success at the University of Colorado.
Although professional guidance is required, departmental mentoring efforts are optional. Many departments have internal, non-evaluative mentoring efforts to assist junior faculty. Some are structured so that the department chair assigns a panel of faculty to monitor and offer advice to each untenured faculty member. Faculty on these panels often are chosen because they share sub-field expertise with the untenured faculty member. In other departments, a pairing is arranged between the junior and one senior faculty member. This is also most often arranged by the department chair, who takes into account the interests of the junior faculty member and the willingness of the senior member to provide support and guidance. This support within the department is an important part of socialization to the unit within some academic departments. Other departments have other mechanisms to support collegiality. Junior faculty are encouraged to consult with their chairs and directors concerning the availability of mentoring within individual units. Junior faculty may elect not to participate in departmental mentoring efforts even when they exist.
