The Downside of Formalized Faculty Mentoring

Thanks to Al Brophy and Dan Filler for inviting me to guest blog.  I've enjoyed The Faculty Lounge for a long time so it's great to be a part of it.  I'm also thrilled to be blogging alongside my friend and last-semester colleague at Case, Eric Chaffee.

For my first post, I wanted to raise an interesting perspective on formalized faculty mentoring programs that a colleague described to me last week.  To put it in context, I should explain that a couple of years ago my school adopted a more formalized mentoring program for junior faculty than we had had in the past.  It involved assigning two mentors to each new tenure-track hire outside of the promotion and tenure process.  These people were charged with helping the new folks with issues relating to teaching and scholarship, without having to pass formal reports to the P&T committee.  The mentors would ideally be people who taught or wrote in the same area as the new hire.

Whether or not this is a particularly good idea, I was pretty sure it wasn't a bad idea.  In other words, the addition of two particular mentors to the standard tenure-track processes seemed to have no distinct downside from the point of view of the new faculty member.  However, a colleague pointed out to me that there could indeed be a downside if other senior faculty, now aware of the mentoring program, felt less obliged to take an interest in helping/mentoring new junior colleagues.  They might just leave it to the mentors to do all the work.  I was interested in this perspective because I have always assumed that in an ideal world/school, a majority of senior faculty would take mentoring of junior faculty as an obligation of the job, regardless of what other avenues were put in place to assist new teachers/scholars.  I hope my colleague's view is not, in fact, reflective of senior colleagues at my school or any other school, but would certainly be interested in others' thoughts. 

I'm also interested in how people view the role of "mentoring" junior colleagues versus "judging" their progress towards tenure in the promotion voting context.  I have never felt these two duties to be particularly inconsistent, but I know there are concerns out there about the conflicting nature of mentoring versus evaluating junior colleagues.