Jena Martin (right), a professor of law at West Virginia U., listens as her colleague Amy Cyphert speaks at a meeting of their weekly writing group. Martin started the group after learning about how such support systems can help scholars meet their professional goals. Michael Henninger for The Chronicle
Three years after starting her job as an associate professor of law at West Virginia University, Jena Martin considered leaving. Her father had recently died, she was going through a difficult personal time, and she was thinking about finding a visiting professorship closer to family on the West Coast or in Canada.
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Jena Martin (right), a professor of law at West Virginia U., listens as her colleague Amy Cyphert speaks at a meeting of their weekly writing group. Martin started the group after learning about how such support systems can help scholars meet their professional goals. Michael Henninger for The Chronicle
Three years after starting her job as an associate professor of law at West Virginia University, Jena Martin considered leaving. Her father had recently died, she was going through a difficult personal time, and she was thinking about finding a visiting professorship closer to family on the West Coast or in Canada.
Around the same time, Martin, who is African-American and whose research focuses on business and human rights, was awarded a university grant designed to propel the careers of underrepresented faculty members to the next level. The grantee seeks out a sponsor at another institution who works in a related field and can help open doors. Martin’s participation led to a series of opportunities that helped her achieve tenure and a certainty that she wanted to stay at WVU.
The grant covered a stipend for her sponsor, Karen E. Bravo, a professor and now vice dean at Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law, and costs for a joint project. Martin organized a human-rights conference in Morgantown. A presenter there invited her to speak at the United Nations in Geneva. She and Bravo edited a book, for which they also wrote chapters. Martin earned tenure, has been promoted to professor, and now teaches a summer course in Geneva on human rights and trade.
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“It really has been career-changing,” Martin says.
How to retain faculty members — especially women and people of color — is a question colleges have been thinking about a lot in recent years. No one simple factor makes faculty members leave. They do so for a mix of personal and professional reasons. But universities are creating formal networks and support systems to help professors work at their fullest potential and thrive professionally and personally.
“I feel like we hire these brilliant faculty, and our job is to make it possible for them to do their best work,” says Eliza Pavalko, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs at Indiana University at Bloomington.
What forms that support takes depends on the institution, its goals, and what faculty members feel they need. At Indiana, that includes on-campus writers’ groups, and memberships in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. The center is an external organization that offers workshops, webinars, and online courses with coaching designed to help new and midcareer faculty boost their productivity, build their networks, and avoid burnout.
Other universities organize workshops that explain opaque processes such as promotion and tenure, how to negotiate for more resources, and how to write a successful book proposal. They offer peer networks, a whole group of mentors instead of just one, and leadership training. The NCFDD teaches campus workshops in how to navigate academic life when you are the only member of a particular group in your program — the only woman, say, or the only member of a particular minority.
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Many of these efforts aim to demystify the unwritten rules and systems of academe. “Making the implicit explicit” is how Kasi Jackson puts it. She is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at West Virginia who is focused on making the institution more inclusive. As part of that work, she is a co-principal investigator in the National Science Foundation-supported program called Advance that finances external sponsorships like Martin’s.
To recruit and retain diverse faculty, the University of Pittsburgh offers a number of programs designed to get more women into leadership positions, and to make clearer the tenure-and-promotion process. Especially popular are workshops for women about how to have difficult conversations and how to negotiate, says Doris Rubio, associate vice provost for faculty.
Retention Strategies
Universities are right to focus on retention and the reasons faculty members leave, says KerryAnn O’Meara, a professor and associate dean at the University of Maryland at College Park who studies faculty departures. Departures deprive a college of the professor’s talents and expertise. But they also represent a loss of investment beyond that — the resources that went into the faculty search, and the money given to the professor for start-up costs (a package that can range from $400,000 to more than $1 million for a new STEM faculty member). Less quantifiable but stinging all the same is the damage to faculty morale, the loss of a mentor to students, and sometimes a diminution in the program’s reputation.
We hire these brilliant faculty, and our job is to make it possible for them to do their best work.
A survey by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, based at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, is intended to offer a broader look at why faculty leave or stay, says Kiernan Mathews, the executive director. Universities often don’t track exactly why faculty leave, or the effectiveness of different retention strategies, especially if they are successful. And if only a few people leave an institution every year, individual data sets can be small. Data from a three-year study, which will include information from more than 30 research universities, should flesh out the trends and will be available in 2020.
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A pilot study by the collaborative (known as Coache) of six universities offers some preliminary insights. For one, it’s not just money that drives faculty members to look outside their institutions, Mathews says. Salary was not among the top reasons they gave for leaving their jobs, and when they did take higher-paying jobs, one in four did so with a base-salary bump of $6,000 or less.
Opportunities for professional growth and intellectual challenge were among the top factors for deciding whether to stay or leave, Mathews says. Having good colleagues also ranked high, with two out of three respondents in the pilot survey saying that was an important factor. Even as we become increasingly linked by technology, having a sense of on-campus community can be crucial to a professor’s happiness. The loss of social capital, having to start over with a move, is a factor that faculty members weigh, Mathews says, while peer-to-peer bonds can be a powerful draw to stay. And when faculty members get to know one another outside of their departments, those connections are potential catalysts for interdisciplinary work.
Networking and Motivation
Victoria Perez, an assistant professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, found community and a peer network both online and in person after moving to Bloomington from Philadelphia.
Perez took part in the NCFDD’s Faculty Success Program after a colleague suggested it during Perez’s second semester. The program wasn’t for everyone, her colleague told her, but Perez checked out the group’s webinars and found it a good fit for her, given that she likes to make lists and organize with color-coded binders.
The 12-week course, designed to help faculty members become “quick starters” with their writing and publishing, focuses on goal setting, accountability, scheduling, and long- and short-term planning. It puts them in a small group with peers from other colleges and a coach who answers questions and helps them progress.
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For Perez, the peers — Latina junior faculty in other disciplines — were especially helpful. One in California shared advice on how she decides which offers of collaboration to accept. Her rule: If she can do it in two weeks, she says yes; if it will take longer, no. Because Perez is expecting her second child at the end of the year, the California professor, who became a friend, has also shared advice about having a baby while on the tenure clock.
By having a resource allowing her to get broader questions about academic life answered, Perez said, she was able to make the most of her time with her department mentor, who could guide her in more particular aspects of her situation at Indiana.
Perez also joined one of the scholarly-writing groups Indiana offers. Faculty members across the university meet once a week for three hours. They sign up for a day and time, not a subject matter. The first part of the session is goal-setting and an accountability check-in, and then everyone writes for the rest of the time, says Pavalko, the vice provost. The program has grown in popularity — it started in two schools and expanded — and had 250 faculty members last semester.
Since the writing groups have started, the provost’s office has seen stronger tenure cases, with fewer candidates on the margin, Pavalko says. The university is continuing to expand its writing opportunities with a two-day faculty writing retreat. The groups are also a good way to meet people and get acclimated on a campus with 2,875 faculty members.
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In Perez’s first group, the faculty facilitator was also a parent at her son’s preschool. Talking with her, Perez was able to get advice on finding services for her son and helping him get settled. That sort of a connection helps both personally and professionally. You’re able to do better work when you’re not worried about your child, she says.
Not all writing groups have to be institution-created. At WVU, Martin has a group of supportive peers who meet weekly to set goals and check in on their progress. She started it after hearing Kerry Ann Rockquemore, who founded the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, speak about accountability groups. Martin and her colleagues meet once a week during their lunch hour and check in on what they’re working on and how they’re doing. They call themselves the Scholarly Avengers. Martin attributes their support and accountability structure with helping her have her most productive publishing year yet.
Overcoming Isolation
A sense of isolation in her faculty job was one thing that led Rockquemore to create the center. A sociology professor, she felt that she was failing at the demands of her job, unable to figure out how to accomplish and balance the requirements of teaching, service, and publishing, while also building a network. And she was too embarrassed to tell anyone, because she thought she was the only one who felt that way. Keeping those fears inside only increased her feelings of isolation and unhappiness.
Graduate students come into their first jobs expected to somehow magically know how to handle all the responsibilities of being a faculty member. They either figure it out for themselves, with or without some guidance from colleagues, or they flounder. That is inefficient and unnecessarily harrowing, Rockquemore says.
After studying what makes successful faculty members thrive, she created an online curriculum that grew into the current training and mentoring by the NCFDD. More than 100 colleges and universities are institutional members, and about 400 faculty members go through the 12-week Faculty Success Program during each of the three sessions it offers annually.
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The center’s success program also focuses on allowing faculty members to have a healthy life outside of work. Homework includes getting eight hours of sleep a night for a week, and letting go of an unnecessary expectation.
The 12-week course costs $3,950 per person. Some universities offer it to any faculty member who wants to join, while others may decide to offer a certain number of slots per session.
Mathews, of Coache, believes it is important for universities to offer their own retention and career-development programs and not rely exclusively on any outside program. Institutions should be accountable for retention and faculty satisfaction, he says. For institutions that feel too stretched, he suggests looking to consortiums or other partnerships to find efficiencies.
One major challenge, say people who work on faculty retention and departure issues, is cutting through the deluge of daily information to let people know about the career-development programs and opportunities available.
Graduate students come into their first jobs expected to somehow know how to handle all the responsibilities of being a faculty member.
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Many universities touch on development opportunities at orientation for new faculty members. West Virginia even mentions some of them in faculty offer letters for eligible faculty members. But it isn’t really until about six months to a year in, when new professors settle in a bit, that they realize they could use some career guidance or professional development, says Melissa Latimer, director of the Advance Center at West Virginia, which is dedicated to fostering diversity and equality in recruitment, retention, and promotion to leadership.
Post-Tenure Rejuvenation
Career development aimed at retention isn’t useful just for new professors. Seasoned faculty members, who may feel unmoored or burned out after reaching the tenure goal they had been solely focused on for so long, can also benefit from new opportunities and intellectual challenges.
Badia Ahad, an associate professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, is a coach with NCFDD’s Faculty Success Program and often works with associate professors who have achieved tenure.
In many cases, they are drained and can’t envision the rest of their career running the way it had leading up to the tenure application. They talk privately about wanting to leave academe because of the pressure and how it can feel like it takes over your entire life. Ahad herself remembers working all the time before tenure, on weekends and breaks, without rest or recharge. At times, she fantasized about having a 9-to-5 office job.
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“It’s unsustainable,” she says. As a coach, she helps participants learn how to write in smaller chunks instead of binge writing, and how to schedule their time so that they can have a life beyond academe.
Ahad went through one of the earliest iterations of the center’s accountability groups after she finished her Ph.D. program, then completed the Faculty Success Program in 2011, after she had earned tenure, paying for it out of her own pocket. She asked Loyola for several years to become a member of the NCFDD so that all faculty could have access to its resources. This fall the university is offering the memberships for the first time.
Interviews with faculty members of color and female faculty members revealed a desire for more organized, formal opportunities for mentoring, says Christopher E. Manning, Loyola’s assistant provost on academic diversity. Part of what made the NCFDD institutional membership attractive was that all faculty members, including non-tenure-track and graduate students, could take advantage of it, regardless of whether they were extroverts who had already developed a network on campus or introverts who didn’t form such relationships as easily.
Ahad teaches one of those NCFDD workshops on being the only member of a certain group in your academic sphere. One strategy is finding your own community. For her, that meant finding other faculty members of color. She began attending a weekly writing group in a Chicago coffee shop with faculty of color from various colleges across the city. And on campus, she connected with a group of fellow African-American women at orientation. The four of them, who all worked in different fields, supported one another as they worked toward their professional goals.
Over time, that peer network deepened into more, she says. “They are some of my closest friends now.”
Kathryn Masterson reported on the almost-$30-billion world of college fund raising for The Chronicle of Higher Education. She also covered other areas of higher-education management, including endowments.