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Connected Colleagues Program

Overview: The Connected Colleagues Program of the CST provides a structure through which tenure-track faculty members in their second year can connect with senior colleagues outside their departments to learn more about the college, its history and culture, and develop a better understanding of the complexities, challenges and satisfactions of our professional lives as teacher/scholars at Macalester. This program is not intended to take the place of mentoring within the department, but rather to complement and broaden it.

Program Goals: The goals of the Connected Colleagues Program are to enhance faculty retention and strengthen the relationships that form the basis of a strong academic community. We hope to do this by:

• Assisting new faculty in becoming successful teachers, scholars and college and disciplinary citizens
• Providing opportunities for new faculty to feel more connected to the Macalester community
• Helping new faculty cultivate satisfaction in their work, discovering ways that Macalester can be a good place for them to do their life’s work.

Background: In 2004/05, as their institutional project for the Academic Leadership Seminar Karine Moe and Karen Saxe interviewed all pre-tenure faculty at Macalester and their chairs to assess the current mentoring environment. The mentoring experience of pre-tenure faculty at the time varied widely across departments, with some faculty reporting frequent interaction with senior colleagues on topics that helped them become oriented and welcomed to the department and profession. In contrast, other faculty reported little or no such interactions. In some cases, the perceptions of pre-tenure faculty and their chairs on the quality of mentoring in the department differed significantly. Most pre-tenure faculty reported that they believed that information and assistance was available to them, but that they were always in the position of having to ask for it. They said they would value a more pro-active mentoring program where mentors took the initiative to reach out to them.

The 2007/08 Program: After further discussions with department chairs about their role in the mentoring process, and discussions with members of the New Faculty Seminar, we created the Connected Colleagues program, which will be piloted in 2007/08. The program began in the spring term, 2007, with the selection of senior faculty as Connected Colleagues by the members of the New Faculty Seminar who wished to participate.

Eight Connected Colleagues and the department chairs of the 2nd year faculty members were invited to attend a workshop on mentoring junior faculty members in the early Fall, 2007. Faculty pairs (a second-year faculty member and his/her senior faculty connected colleague) may request funds for program-related expenses. The program’s success will be evaluated at the end of the fall and spring terms to determine whether it should be continued and, if so, how it might be changed to enhance its effectiveness.

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