Editor’s note: In the “Ask the Chair” series, the author of How to Chair a Department writes about departmental leadership. Read previous columns in the series here.
Question: The department I chair recently completed a search for a new junior faculty member who will be joining us in the fall. It’s been a while since our department has had a chance to hire, so we feel fortunate both to have been granted the line and to be welcoming a new colleague.
I want to make sure this newbie gets off to a good start, and feels supported by the department, the institution — and by me personally. Can you share any advice about onboarding our newest faculty colleague?
Signed,
Readying the Welcome Wagon
Dear RWW:
Of the many terms and practices that academe has imported from the business world, “onboarding” is surely one of the most useful. The fact that we had to steal it highlights how, until recently, colleges weren’t very adept at integrating new hires into our campuses and often gave that only minimal consideration. Kudos, RWW, for recognizing that the success of new faculty members doesn’t just happen.
At a base level, most institutions have some kind of new-faculty orientation in place. A step up is a faculty-mentoring program to support new colleagues through their first couple of years. Those are important, of course, and will help introduce your new hire to the big-picture setting and possibly help them connect with other first-year professors from across the campus.
What’s often lacking is formal onboarding at the department level. As chair, your role is to take care of the more-local elements of their transition. To sketch in broad strokes, you should consider three broad areas of orientation: infrastructural, cultural, and social.
Infrastructural. How does a faculty member secure the resources in your department to teach and pursue their research or creative work? Some of these details are pretty foundational, like office space. In most institutions, department chairs have control over space assignments in their section of the building. This seems so common sense that I feel a bit silly writing it, but it happens enough to merit a mention: Make sure that the office you assign to your new colleague has been fully vacated by its former occupant. It doesn’t feel particularly welcoming when a new hire arrives in their assigned digs only to find dusty piles of someone else’s stuff.
If you have any flexibility, think about a good “neighborhood” for the recruit to move into. A certain amount of “redlining” is acceptable here: Maybe don’t put them next door to the department curmudgeon, or in some remote archipelago off the main grouping of faculty offices. Help the newcomer with the contacts for telecom and IT to get phone and internet set up; have your program coordinator order a new nameplate for the door; have their name and office number added to any posted building directory; and get them keys for their office, the department office, and any other shared faculty spaces.
There: We’ve got them set up in their department office. Or not quite: Probably they’ve got books and research materials to move in and, in all likelihood, don’t yet have friends and colleagues in the area who they can reach out to for help. If you are able, offer to help lug some boxes from the U-Haul into the new office. Or hire some student workers to help with the move, and provide some pizza.
Depending on your discipline, the new hire may have additional space — a teaching and/or research lab — assigned to them. Arrange a walkthrough for them with someone knowledgeable about the room’s tech. Take some time to make sure that the space meets their needs, that they know how to order equipment and supplies, and that they are briefed on safety and reporting procedures.
Cultural. A good office helps. But more important for long-term success is making sure your new hire understands department and institutional expectations for reappointment, tenure, and eventually promotion to full professor. Even trickier: How does your department understand “collegiality”?
Academic culture is pretty subjective and varies greatly from department to department, campus to campus, and faculty member to faculty member. I’ve taught in a department that thought there was something wrong with you if you were hanging around the office on a day when you didn’t teach — it meant you weren’t serious about your research. And I’ve been in a department where most professors were in their offices almost every day, with their doors open for conversations.
Being chair means you have at your fingertips a good store of institutional knowledge and experience, some of which will be helpful for your new hire as they begin to chart their career path. The burning question is: What insider info should you share?
In my first tenure-track job, one of the “helpful” insights that a faculty colleague chose to share with me was that another member of the department (on sabbatical at the time) was Bad News and To Be Avoided. I naïvely took that to heart; it was probably two or three years later before I realized that it was actually my informant who was Bad News, and the guy he warned me about became my closest friend in the department.
That troublemaker wasn’t chair of the department at the time, but the moral is the same: You need to be careful that you’re passing along factual information that will genuinely redound to your new colleague’s success — not simply passing along gossip about infighting and old feuds by proxy. I think of it a bit like advising students: I would never outright tell them not to take another department member’s courses, but I’m happy to warmly recommend the offerings of colleagues whom I know to be welcoming and invested in student learning. Likewise, I would never tell a new hire to avoid certain professors, but I would be ready with suggestions of helpful colleagues to consult in various situations. The new hire will have plenty of opportunities to pick up the gossip elsewhere, and if you’ve shown yourself to be an honest broker as chair, perhaps they’ll come to you for some perspective.
You must be even more careful in sharing advice on the department’s values and procedures. On this front, you will be greatly helped if your department has an up-to-date and detailed faculty handbook that spells out, for instance, the department’s service expectations and standards for reappointment and tenure. (I’ve become so convinced of the importance of this handbook that the next few columns will be devoted to walking chairs and their departments through the process of its creation.)
Norms and expectations around teaching vary greatly among institutions, and so does the level of classroom experience of new hires. Some have a good amount, having been in visiting or other one-year teaching positions before being hired as an assistant professor. Others come to your department directly from a Ph.D. program, which means their classroom experience is mainly as a teaching assistant.
“Real” teaching is a different kettle of fish, and some practices that may have become obvious to you over the years are things that you actually had to learn at one point. Some questions to answer for your new hire:
- What are departmental or institutional expectations around office hours?
- What standard language are they expected to include in their syllabi?
- How many exams, or how much writing, are typical for introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses in your department?
- Although academic freedom ensures that our grading is guided by our own expertise and standards, might there be a set of graded exams or papers, or instructors’ grading rubrics, that would give your new colleague a sense of the department’s standards? If your new colleague is going to be a maverick — using a different grading or “ungrading” approach — make sure that’s a decision they’re making consciously.
Social. Helping a new hire to navigate the interpersonal aspect of adjusting to a new position is the hardest part. You’ll want to provide low-stakes opportunities for your new colleague to get to know the department’s faculty and staff members, and its students. Certainly plan some kind of reception early in the fall term. By then, many professors and staff members will already have met the new addition, but new and returning students will be curious. Especially at small colleges (like mine), where students rely heavily on word of mouth, your new colleague needs to develop healthy course enrollments.
Some departments have (in addition to institutional programs) their own practice of assigning a faculty mentor to a new colleague. If yours does so, keep in mind that there are both professional and personal aspects to mentoring — assign a mentor who can not only show the rookie the ropes but also open some doors in the campus community. Some faculty members are just better at that than others: You know this already and know who they are in your department.
What about your own relationship to your new hire?
As hard as it is for most chairs to imagine, your new faculty member most likely thinks of you as their “boss,” not quite as their peer. Their relationship with you is a bit fraught; you can’t expect perfect comfort or candor because they’re not wrong to think that you wield a bit more influence over their future than some others in the building. With that in mind, try to make yourself available without overdoing it. Check in with your colleague: A simple opening question like “How’s everything going?” or “What are the students like in linear algebra?” allows the newcomer to choose whether to give you a brief or a more-involved answer. Be open to either.
And of course it’s very important that you set a supportive tone. Make it clear that, if this new colleague needs help, you have access to resources and are eager to answer questions or troubleshoot problems. You’ll have to work to earn their trust and overcome their initial (and quite rational) suspicion: Don’t get discouraged if it takes a little time. And don’t take it personally if the new recruit doesn’t immediately take you into their confidence. Most likely it’s because of your role in the institutional hierarchy, not because of you as a person. (Unless it is because of you as a person, in which case, I don’t know what to tell you.)
There’s much more, of course: The continuum running from faculty hiring through onboarding to mentoring through tenure, and then through promotion to full profession, could be a book in itself. But this might be enough to get your new colleague successfully started in the fall term. And of course, supporting a faculty member in their professional development isn’t a job for one person alone, no matter how wise or generous. To paraphrase a wise woman (herself paraphrasing an African proverb), it takes a village to support a faculty member.
As I write in How to Chair a Department, onboarding (and the related activity of mentoring) begins long before most of us are conscious that we’re doing it. If you run a job ad and get 200 applications, one of them (fingers crossed) is your next new colleague, and every communication you send — from the job ad and your acknowledgment of their application forward — has been telling the candidates things about you, your department, and your institution. Your new colleague has chosen to join your department (assuming they had a choice) and is looking to succeed. As chair, you must look out for their success, too, and don’t hesitate to be pretty obvious about it.
