When Rachel Mordecai joined the English department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2008, several senior professors told her they had every interest in helping her succeed.
While Ms. Mordecai says those colleagues have been true to their word, they aren’t the only people she turns to for guidance. Fellow junior faculty members who are closer to gaining tenure have been equally powerful mentors for Ms. Mordecai, as have experts in her field, Caribbean literature, at other universities.
“The broadening of the idea of mentoring has been tremendously helpful to me,” Ms. Mordecai says.
The path to tenure can be a long and stressful one, so many colleges and universities have programs to help junior professors along the way. Most hold an orientation session for new faculty members at the beginning of the academic year, and many assign senior faculty as mentors to the newcomers around the same time.
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But an increasing number of universities now believe that a more-fluid approach to orientation and mentoring may help junior faculty better learn the ropes on the campus, gain confidence in their skills, and ultimately succeed in their quest for tenure.
Traditionally universities have tried to cram everything—including details about benefits, tenure requirements, and resources for research and teaching—into a one- or two-day orientation session at the beginning of the academic year. Yet many institutions now realize that such an information dump can be overwhelming for professors who may also be trying to find a place to live and create their first lesson plans.
Humboldt State University’s process typifies the changing approach. New faculty members still get the bare essentials at an initial orientation, but the remaining information—on such topics as how to juggle service, teaching, and research—is parceled out at catered weekly lunches during the first semester.
The weekly seminars also help new faculty members develop a network of friends, says Nikola Hobbel, Humboldt’s faculty-development coordinator.
“It’s important to have a happy life,” Ms. Hobbel says. “You can’t always control what happens with the colleagues in your department, but if you feel that there are other colleagues on campus who share your interests and understand you, you’ll be much more likely to stay.”
That’s also part of the rationale for the new approach to mentoring. Loyola University Maryland is one of many universities encouraging junior faculty to seek out mentors at all levels from other institutions. Timothy Law Snyder, vice president for academic affairs, says Loyola provides ample travel funds to new tenure-track professors so they can go to conferences and learn from junior counterparts who may be in similar situations.
“They can say, ‘My chair is crazy,’ and the person across the table may say, ‘Well so is mine, but here is how I am dealing with it,’” Mr. Snyder says.
Drexel University gives awards worth $7,500 each to six faculty members per year to find mentors outside the institution. Yuanfang Cai, an assistant professor in computer science, came to Drexel fresh from graduate school in 2006, and quickly identified experts at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard Business School who were working in her field, which examines the benefits of programming software in distinct components.
She used the $7,500 award to host a workshop that those scholars attended. That led to collaborations with the scholars, and ultimately, joint grant proposals. Ms. Cai has since received four grants from the National Science Foundation.
“The money for the workshop started my career,” Ms. Cai says.
UMass advocates using a variety of advisers for specific needs, rather than relying on a single mentor.
Ms. Mordecai turns to the mentor she was first assigned, a senior woman in the English department, for help in figuring out how to spend her time and for feedback on her writing. Experts on the Caribbean, including Anthony Bogues, a professor of Africana studies at Brown University, have helped shape her thinking as she turns her dissertation, about Jamaican literature in the 1970s, into a book. And more-experienced junior faculty members at UMass tell Ms. Mordecai where she needs to push, and where she should cut back, as she assembles a record that she hopes will be worthy of tenure.
“They’ve called me up and said, ‘You’re already on enough committees—don’t join any more,’” Ms. Mordecai says.
Top university officials are also encouraging deans and department heads to provide early and candid feedback to new professors. Loyola’s Mr. Snyder says junior scholars need to hear about their own shortcomings before it’s too late. “You can’t pat somebody on the back five times in a row and then the sixth time give them a pat while they’re on the edge of a cliff,” he says.
MANY young faculty members are more interested than their predecessors in a life that balances work with family and other interests, according to periodic surveys of junior faculty conducted by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, a 160-member consortium based at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
“Generation X faculty are allowing climate and cultural factors to influence their career paths more than the baby boomers did,” says Kiernan Mathews, the collaborative’s director. “It’s less about autonomy and compensation and structural rewards, and it’s more about work-life balance.”
Rebecca Spencer, an assistant professor of psychology at UMass-Amherst, says she was pleased to learn that her husband, a chemist, could take a paternity leave during their first semester at the university, in the fall of 2008, even though their baby was already 5 months old. Ms. Spencer has also used Sittercity, which provides babysitters in major cities throughout the country, to identify caregivers who can stay overnight with her children when both she and her husband are away at conferences. UMass has purchased a one-year trial membership to Sittercity for all faculty members.
“That’s the kind of thing that corporations often provide, but it’s rare in academe to get that kind of benefit,” Ms. Spencer says.
Yet even institutions that score well in surveys of junior faculty concede that the roots of satisfaction are often beyond their control. The University of Iowa was rated “exceptional” in five categories in a survey of junior faculty members at 127 colleges by the Harvard-based collaborative. Iowa does have faculty-friendly policies, including an automatic one-year extension of the tenure clock when a new baby is born or adopted. But Thomas W. Rice, Iowa’s associate provost, says the appeal of Iowa City—with its relaxed pace, highly regarded schools, and excellent medical care—may explain the high marks as much as anything else.
“You’re happier with your employer if you’re happy with the place you live,” he says. “We’re lucky that way.”
Universities can provide only so much support; junior faculty are ultimately on their own in figuring out how to endure the pressures of the tenure chase.
Robert Simmons, an assistant professor of education at Loyola University Maryland who is up for tenure in 2013, worries about how the many hours he spends team-teaching and conducting research at an inner-city high school in Washington, D.C., will be viewed. Although he believes his publishing record is also strong, he frets that professors in other disciplines may have different values than those in his department. Mr. Simmons is also aware that a single controversial statement in class could hurt his tenure bid. He’s a black man at a predominantly white university and teaches a course on race.
But he alleviates stress by reminding himself that he has never viewed a tenured academic job as the “be all, end all.” And he carves out plenty of time for his wife and kids and the occasional game of Madden NFL on his PlayStation.
“Whatever is going to happen is going to happen,” Mr. Simmons says. “I’ll do the work and let the chips fall as they may.”
SOME of the most content young faculty members may be those who have learned what they really want in the course of moving around from job to job. Rosemary Sherriff started her academic career at a campus of the University of Hawaii, and later moved into a tenure-track position in the geography department at the University of Kentucky. While jobs at research universities are prized by many young scholars, Ms. Sherriff and her husband, a hydrologist, itched to move west, and in the fall of 2009, she took a tenure-track position at Humboldt State. The location—Humboldt abuts a coastal redwood forest and the Pacific Ocean—was a better fit for Ms. Sherriff, who studies forest ecology and rural environments.
She was aware of the tradeoffs: Humboldt emphasizes teaching over scholarship, and provides faculty members with fewer resources for teaching and research than Kentucky did.
While the move was related to lifestyle, Ms. Sherriff still had some demands of her new employer. She wanted her own laboratory so that she and five undergraduate assistants would have space to analyze tree-ring samples. The geography department agreed to convert part of its storage room into her lab.
And last fall, Ms. Sherriff turned some heads when she applied a few years early for tenure. She learned this May that she had received it.
“I made a choice,” Ms. Sherriff says of her move to Humboldt. “In 10 years, am I going to regret it? Maybe some, but I enjoy this place. We are happier here.”
