Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Good morning everybody.
Iím Judy Singer,
I'm the Senior Vice Provost for
Faculty Development and Diversity,
And I want to welcome everybody here
to a university conversation about mentoring
We see this as a unique opportunity to bring together,
several different types of groups of people
who donít normally cross paths.
So, one particular feature of this event
is that itís across the university
We have people from the Longwood area
who are both medical school
and the school public health who are here,
and we have people from all across
the Cambridge campus joining us.
This conversation was also designed to be a cross-cohort,
so we have both distinguished senior mentors
and senior faculty who want to learn
more about mentoring
and what they can do,
as well as some tender track faculty
who are hopefully,
willing to share with us their perspectives
on what would be helpful.
One of the things you learn when you
start to think about mentoring
is the people who want to be helpful
donít actually know what it is
that they can be doing to be helpful
and weíre hoping that this conversation will stimulate ideas.
I want to say a few words
about why weíre focusing on mentoring.
This is actually the first of three
faculty development events
weíre holding over the next few weeks
The other two are focusing
on book publishing and media training:
learning how to talk to reporters
and people in the media.
Weíre starting out with mentoring
because we are using that to focus
on the renewed commitment of the university
to a tenure track system
and thatís something thatís a C-change from the old Harvard
I was at a conference last week down in Washington
and I saw a faculty member
who is now at the University of Michigan,
who used to be a faculty member
at one of our professional schools,
who we tried to keep but who left
And I asked how things were going
and whether we could possibly lure him back
and he said, ìWell, where I am is much better.
It was much better for junior faculty."
And I said, "Well no, Harvard has a tenure track system now."
And he said, "What happened to the eight-year
Post Docs they used to give people?"
We actually see this as a commitment
to the development of people that we hire,
that we hope to be promoting up through the ranks.
And we need mentoring programs
because if we actually commit to this kind of system,
we need to make sure that our tenure track faculty can succeed
as they move up the ladder.
In my own career,
mentoring has been keenly important.
In fact as I walk into the faculty club,
I am always reminded of my first encouters here
which were breakfast
with my graduate school thesis adviser, Fred Marstellar.
And we would meet for breakfast in the main dining room
at the ungodly hour of seven oíclock,
which to me was likeó
I coudn't believe it
But Fred would very kindly take me aside
and sort of talk to me about
my own professional development.
when i was hired
I actually knew I didnít want to be a professor
because of the way I saw Junior Faculty
and the Harvard Statistics department being treated.
In fact the department has just tenured last year,
its first person from within in about 45 years,
just to recognize the kind of C-change.
But I saw Junior Faculty
and they were treated like rotating day laborers
and it just didnít make a very attractive career.
The reason I ended up going into academia
was because of mentors for people who took me aside
and said, ìJudy, youíd be really good at this.
You donít really understand as a graduate student
what life as a faculty member is like
and so why donít you applyî
in fact for the only job I ever applied
was an Assistant Professor
at the Graduate School of Education,
where my faculty position is now.
And there too I was fortunate enough
to have mentors who really helped me
and helped me understand.
And that was at a time when there were
very few women at the university.
Pat Graham was my dean
and she was the first woman dean at the university,
appointed in 1981 by President Bach
She was the thirteenth female
tenured faculty member at the university.
I mean, people used to know their number,
just to put it in perspective.
And when she joined the faculty
and came to the faculty club,
she had to go in through back door
because that's where women went
I tell those anecdotes just to say that this is a new Harvard,
or as Martin Minot said in a recent interview in the New York Times
about Harvard five years
after Larry Summers infamous comment on women and science:
ìThis is not your fatherís Harvard.î
And what I hope today
is we can actually have a conversation about
how Harvard can support all faculty
in their professional development.
So with that, Iím going to turn it over to my colleague,
Ms. Cariaga-Lo, Assistant Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity,
whoíll do some housekeeping matters
and also introduce our distinguished panel.
Thank you very much.
Good morning everyone
and thank you all for coming this morning.
We are so delighted with with the response
that we got when we sent out the mentoring invitation
In fact, the response was so large
that we were unfortunately unable to meet everybodyís needs
and so we actually had to turn away some people.
But we hope to have additional conversations
around mentoring at the various schools very soon.
Just a few housekeeping notes:
So, you all received a packet.
The green packets are actually Sciences packets,
so the articles are slightly different.
The purple is a Humanities and Social Sciences packet
and the only real difference is really the research articles
that weíve included in there
to help you think about mentoring
from the perspective of your disciplines
and fields. In addition, in the packet,
we provided some tools
that we hope will help you think about mentoring,
not just for faculty in your department
but also thinking about mentoring in different perspectives
and through various opportunities
that you might find yourself in,
whether itís working with young faculty
or working with trainees
or working with students
So, I hope that you find that useful.
In addition,
as you think about mentoring in your departments,
we do hope that you will allow us to assist you as needed.
If you are thinking about developing mentoring programs
in particular for your tenure track faculty,
we have some wonderful experts in the room
and I hope that you will use them today
but also beyond that,
to be in touch with them
as you begin to think about developing
mentoring programs for your faculty.
Today we are very honored actually,
to have in our midst leadership from the schools,
four individuals who actually have been instrumental
to developing mentoring activities at the various schools.
And I am honored to have them come with us today,
some of them just flying in early this morning from Chicago,
John Reid and others
who are also just running in and out of meetings.
So, we are grateful to them
for taking the time to come here.
Our four panelists this morning,
who will speak from the perspective of leaderships
in the schools around mentoring are: Cherry Murray,
Dean of Harvard Universityís School of Engineering
and Applied Sciences and the John A
and Elizabeth Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences,
Julio Frank, Dean of the Faculty
and T&G Angelopoulos Professor of Public Health
and International Development at the Harvard School of Public Health;
Joan Reede, Dean of Diversity and Community Partnership
and Associate Professor at the Harvard Medical School,
as well as Associate Professor of Society,
Human Development and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health
and Michele Lamont, Robert I Goldman Professor of European Studies
and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies,
as well as the Senior Advisor and Faculty Development
and Diversity in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Thank you all for coming today
and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on mentoring.
So, we will start with Dean Murray and then Dean Frenk
and Dean Reede and then Professor Lamont
Sure. So, Iím glad to see so many people here interested in mentoring.
So, I was asked by Judy to talk a little bit
about my own personal experiences
and what Iíve done at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences,
which we call SEAS.
So first off,
Iíve been here at Harvard for exactly six months,
so I donít know Harvard that much
but Iím learning a lot about it.
And I have been having lunches with the tenure track faculty
at the School of Engineering
Weíre a growing school
and so we actually are hiring quite a fewó
by that I mean, we have only 70 FTE facultyó
and weíre hiring in proportion to that,
quite a few people.
And so Engineering is moderately new at Harvard,
that is to say,
itís been around for hundreds of years
but it's a brand new school since 2007
and so itís the last school
and the first in 70 years that is a new school in Harvard.
And so weíre kind of getting ourselves together as:
what is this school going to be?
So, let me first talk a little bit about
my personal experience with mentoring.
So, I went to MIT, got a PhD in Physics
and was recruited by Bell Laboratories
and went to Bell Laboratories
just immediately after graduate school.
And my first week at Bell Laboratories,
I had an anti-mentoring experience.
Someone from the department came in and said,
ìSo youíre here. What are you going to do?î
And so I said, ìHereís the kind of stuff I was planning on doing.
Iím going to set up these experiments.î
This is what I told people.
And the reaction of this person was,
ìWell, youíre never going to survive here.î
So, that was my anti-mentoring experience,
which I did not consider to be very positive.
and when I became
I got on the leadership council,
which is very much like the faculty council here.
I actually went around to all of the new members
ot technical staff in the research area
and asked them,
"Would you like a mentor?"
And 100% of them,
whether they are male, female,
under-represented, didnít matter, said yes.
And so I set up a mentoring program at Bell Labs
which actually worked quite well.
Then as I got up higher in management there,
I was assigned a formal mentor
who was the head of a business unit,
which I found to be extremely useful
when I was a department head,
which is like the third level of management
Bell Labs did not do very well
until we actually put in a mentoring program for the young people
but by the time you got in to management,
they did extremely well.
So when I arrived at Harvard,
I discovered that we did not have a mentoring program.
That is to say we had an informal mentoring program,
where the former dean had said,
ìWhy donít you go mentor this person too?î
But the person didnít know
they were being mentored and it was quite...
So, what I set up is mentoring networks which isó
we donít have departments in the school
so I had to assign an associate dean
to each tenure track faculty member
so nobody fell between the cracks,
and then they are in charge of a
mentoring developmental committee
So, we all sat together as associate deans
and suggested names of people
for each of the tenure track faculty
and then the associate dean
sits with the tenure track faculty member and asks,
ìWhich of these people would you like?
Are you thinking of someone else as your formal mentors?î
So, three or four people are on this mentoring committee,
and I have a meeting every quarter with the associate deans,
with the chairs of these mentoring
committees to see how people are doing.
So Michele asked me today,
ìHow is this going?î
And actually itís going very well
except some of the tenure track faculty were on leave,
either maternity leave
or some other leave
and they kind of fell between the cracks.
That is to say,
all of the associate deans
at the very beginning
went out when I asked them to,
to talk to their tenure track faculty
but the ones who werenít there at the time,
they kind of forgot about it.
So, I reminded the associate deans again.
And now Iím having lunches
with the tenure track faculty
and asking them how itís going,
and I think it's going a whole lot better.
So, I guess the story line about this
is keep following up
if youíre setting up a mentoring program,
keep following up with both the mentors
and the mentees to make sure itís working.
Thanks.
Good morning to everyone.
My name is Julio Frenk.
I have been Dean of the
Harvard School of Public Health
for twice the amount as Cherry,
for about a year.
So you have the table here of new deans,
at least on this side of the table.
But thank you very much for inviting me
because mentoring is really
a topic that is very,
very near and dear to my heart,
probably stemming from the opposite:
a very, very fundamental
mentoring relationship I developed,
first as a graduate student
and then as a junior faculty member
with Avedis Donabedian
who was actually a graduate
of the Harvard School of Public Health
And I went to the
University of Michigan
to study with him
and under him
and then I joined the faculty with him.
And I think it was probably
not just one of the most informative
but one of the most
formative experiences of my life.
So, I think having benefited
from what a good mentoring relationship is,
Iím a strong believer in that,
because academia is
a highly competitive environment
and it is not obvious,
even after having been
there in the student role,
how to navigate those waters
without the sort of very,
very personal guidance.
Fortunately, the Harvard School of Public Health
has had a long tradition of
emphasizing mentoring,
particularly my predecessor
Bary Bloom already in the year 2000
fromed a committee to assess
junior faculty mentoring.
And based on the recommendations
from that faculty committee,
each department was then
required to develop it's own
strong mentoring policy,
which included assigning
each new faculty member
a mentor at the time of
the faculty memberís appointment.
So, the school in additionó
although it looks like a play on wordsó
you have to monitor mentoring.
Monitoring mentoring is a key aspect.
So, there is what is called
a bi-annual mentoring survey
and through that weíve learned
that a lot of progress
has been made but also,
thereís a lot of
much more needs to be done.
So, since I began my tenureó
because I had the privilege
of spending the full term
of 2008 already being appointed
but not yet having taken officeó
I spent those four months
coming every month for a week, to Harvard.
And mentoring was one of the topics
that emerged right at the top
of my early conversations
with department chairs
and with faculty members.
So, I made this one of my priorities
particularly because
the way Iíve expressed
not so much the vision
but the ambition for
the School of Public Health
is to make it the first school
of public health of the 21st century,
the first both in time and in quality.
and you can only build
the school of the 21st century
with the generation of the 21st century
and that generation
is the generation of
the junior faculty members.
So, the only way to be effective
in realizing that ambition
is to actually invest in junior faculty.
So among other things,
weíve established for the first time,
an office of an associate dean
for research that funds SEAT grants,
provide scientific editorials report,
external review of grant proposals
and a number of support mechanisms
for a school that's heavily dependent on research
and where promotion is
heavily dependent
on research productivity.
Probably my diagnosis
is that a lot of progress has been made
but the remaining challenge
is heterogeneity across departments.
So, the quality of your mentoring relationship
should not have such variation
because then also in the networks of the faculty,
the realization of very different experiences
is a factor in demoralizing some people
that donít get the quality that they see peers getting.
So, trying to achieve
some uniformed standards-
high standards is one of my priorities,
so some school-wide mentoring guidelines have been established.
And under these new guidelines,
each new junior faculty member
meets with a chair of the department
soon after arriving at the school.
At that time, a primary mentor is identified.
Sometimes thereís also a secondary mentor.
The mentors meet with the mentees
at the beginning of their appointment
and then at a minimum,
they have to meet
at the end of each academic year
to review academic progress
and plan for the next year.
So, thereís a formal structure
but I think itís also very important
to stimulate informal
mentoring relationships.
So in a sense,
itís a multi-tiered strategy with primary,
secondary and informal mentors
and in addition,
members of the leadership
of the academic administration
of the school,
particularly the senior associate dean
for faculty affairs
and the associate dean
for research that I just mentioned,
meet with the junior faculty
at critical points in their careers.
So, itís this three layers of the chair,
the formal and informal mentors
and then the school-wide academic leadership.
But let me end
because they did ask us to talk a little bit
about personal experience.
And I thought what I would doó
and this would take literally a minute.
When my beloved mentor Avedis Donabedian passed away
after a very, very productive
and rich life, I wasó
having been his student and pupiló
to speak at his memorial
and I reflected on the relationship.
So, let me quote two paragraphs fromó
just a very brief mention to what I said there.
And this is what I said:
Ours, referring to Avedis and me,
was the pragmatic mentoring relationship.
In our age of mass education,
the mentor has become an
endangered academic species.
A mentor teaches you
but is much more than a teacher.
A mentor befriends you
but is much more than a friend.
A mentor guides you
but is much more than a guide.
What a true mentor does
is one of the greatest gifts of generosity.
He, I was talking about Avedis
but we would say
heís or she sows in your mind
and in your soul,
the seeds that will nourish intellect
and spirit for the rest of your life.
So to me, this is the nature of the mentoring relationship.
And letís not forget where this word comes from.
Itís actually an individual--
a figure in Greek Mythology (Mentor)
who is entrusted with the care of Telemachus
when his father has to go to the Trojan wars.
So, although in this marvelous plasticity of the English language
weíve turned it into a verb and an adjective,
let us not forget that the root of the word refers to an individual,
and itís this personal dimension,
this very, very profound,
deep relationship that I think
holds both to the enormous potential
and also the great rewards of mentoring.
Thank you.
Good morning.
So like others,
Iíve been asked to give
both a personal perspective
but also part of a perspective
from Harvard Medical School.
And so Iíll say personally
in terms of mentoring,
as you look through the literature
and you hear people talk about it,
they talk about issues
such as matching on gender
and matching on race ethnicity
and how important those things are.
And what I would say is,
is if I look at my career
and my progression
if I were to find the perfect mentor
that was matched on all of my dimensions,
the only person that could mentor me is me.
And so for me, I have had multiple mentors.
The idea of a network of mentors
is the only way I have survived,
and they have crossed race ethnicity,
and gender, and discipline.
They have been individualsó
and as you talked about the anti-mentoringó
that have protected me
from what Bill Silan calls,
the dementors and the tormentors
and they continued as I moved forward in my career,
critical elements for my success and my balance.
And those are the individuals who early on,
when I was at Harvard Medical School
and Harvard School of Public Health
and my interests were very different from others,
told me to pursue my interests
and backed me in pursuing my interests
and creating my own space
for what I thought was important,
and actually showed me
that there was a value to advancing academically.
Before then I had not thought that
there was any value to it
and it was my mentors
who told me that there was
and were able to show me the way.
I want to give you an example
of some of the things
that weíve actually done
at the medical school.
And the first begins with
everyone saying that mentoring
is critically important
but not really recognizing it
and our faculty affiliate
really wasnít recognized.
So, in 1995 our office
established a mentoring award
for the school that has grown over time.
It is an award that was
establish in 1995 but has grown
and since then,
over 3700 nominations have come in
for close to 1200 individual faculty members.
Itís grown from an initial award
that was named the Cliff Barger award
to having three categories of Cliff Barger award
for those who have been in service
for a minimum number of years,
a final award for those
who have been in service
for more than 20 years,
and what we call a young mentor award
for those who have been
in service for less than 10 years.
To date, there have been 122 awardees.
What I find important about this
is when we did our new promotion criteria
for the school,
these awards were recognized within the promotions.
And so how do you start to recognize mentoring,
and recognizing the way
that it starts to show up on individuals CVs,
itís taken into consideration for promotion,
recognized throughout our environment.
Other ways in which it has been recognized
include CHAD which is a consortium
or committee across the Faculty Development
and Diversity offices
at the various Harvard affiliated institutions
with the medical school.
And they actually offer
a mentoring course,
led by Jean Emmons who is here,
who was a silent mentoring awardee.
There is also a task force
on Faculty Development and Diversity
that will be coming out
with a report in the next few months
and one of the three main committees
of this task force deals with mentoring,
again chaired by Jean Emmons.
When we look at mentoringó
because I want to mention some of the other people that are hereó
and oftentimes, we get an image of a sage,
white man with white hair and blue eyes
and all the other kind of things
that go along with that.
And important part of this
is recognizing that mentoring
occurs all across our faculty.
And one of the people that we have here
that I really want to point out
is Jessica Henderson Daniel,
who is the first woman
and the first person of color
to win the mentoring award
at Harvard Medical School
and recognizing it across the board.
And Jessica, you should go like thisÖ
So, there are many ways I think in which
we are trying to advance mentoring.
The last part is actually taking from those individuals
who have won the mentoring award,
and now there is a council of mentors
that is actually meeting and looking at
what is going on with the mentoring in the school,
ways in which we can improve mentoring
but itís taken from the best across our campus
and across disciplines.
Thank you.
Well, I was appointed
a year ago to this new role
as Faculty Advisor
on Faculty Development and Diversity,
and one of the reasons
I agreed to do this
is because I thought
there was a really nice theme in place
with many people committed
to creating cultural change in FAS
and this is not a minor thing.
FAS is a very large part of the University.
Itís 40% of the faculty
forty-two departments
and these departments
are very different in their culture.
Some of them have never promoted,
some of them have been promoting regularly
over the last few years,
so itís really a complex mosaic.
First my experience with my own mentoring:
Iím Canadian,
I went to Paris as a graduate student
at a very young age
and there was no mentoring.
It was a pure swim or sink system
and that was very difficult,
it taught me resilience.
And in 1983 I went to
Stanford as a Post Doc
and I discovered a word
that was totally unknown to me.
I felt those students were
unbelievably lucky,
privileged and also
they were getting extremely good training.
Then in í87 I was hired
at Princeton in Sociology
where I was for 15 years
before coming here in 2003.
And Princeton at the time
still had a system where
only one person in six approximately,
got tenure and that was
also a little bit baptism by fire.
I really felt that they were
not taking very good care of us and many,
many of my friends left when we got tenure.
All my friends were gone basically.
And then I came here in 2003.
My scholarship is on Culture and Inequality.
I am presently working on
anti-racism in France and the US,
I really have a long-term commitment
to trying to understand
how collective definitions
of worth influence
for production of inequality,
so my involvement in this
is very much driven by my own scholarship.
I also happen to have a significant other
who also studies diversity.
And actually in the Globe this weekend,
there was a big article on his work
which basically shows that he studied 800 corporations
looking at which one have been
most successful at favoring diversity.
And he finds that what is
most effective is structural change:
that is appointing people who actually have as a responsibility
or appointing task force
who are in charge of overseeing diversification
and also using carrots and stick to really create change.
And mentoring is a very big part of the equation.
So, with all this backgroundó
my predecessor Liza Martin had resigned in 2005,
after having created a mentoring program
where women were matchedó
only junior tenure track facultyó
were matched with mentors in other departments,
which was a very good idea,
because you can actually ask advice to people
who will not be involved in your promotion
where you can look more vulnerable
than the people who will be one day be in charge
with looking at your work.
Departments were asking FAS
to report on their mentoring activities
but there was just an enormous amount of informal mentoring occurring.
And the literature shows us that informal mentoring
mostly benefits people
who are entitled and many,
many people did not benefit from it.
So, the idea was really
to create a new system
that was launched this fall,
where weíre asking both departments
and individuals to create mentoring plans.
And actually, we donít use the word mentoring,
we use the word development network,
drawing on the work of David Thomas
who is an expert on the question,
who works in the Business School
and Monica Higgins
who works in the School of Education.
And the idea is that
tenure track faculty
create a network of people
with multiple nodes
that will answer various needs
and the needs that are evolving
as they move through the tenure track system.
And the word mentoring itself
is not that great a word
because in fact,
what most people are seeking
is intellectual exchange
that is the ability to get
people to read their work.
When we work in my department to launch
our mentoring plan this fall,
this is what they want.
They know that the faculty
are unbelievably busy
but they want us to really understand
that weíre supposed to set aside
few days a year to read manuscript
and give them feedbacks
so that they will be able
to improve their work
on which they will be judged
when they come up for tenure.
So, departments had until March 1st
to turn in their mentoring plans
and many of them have. I'm very pleased.
The cultural change is veryó
the purpose in fact is not to create these mentoring plan.
Itís really to create a cultural change.
And creating a structure in itself
is probably the easiest part of the challenge.
What will be much more of a challenge
will be to monitor in a year,
what has been happening.
And there, Iím certainly going to email my co-panelists
to learn more about
the tools that they have put in place.
I think that at Harvard,
where thereís such a
strong culture of excellence,
diversity is often viewed as a pollutant
or even claiming aid-help
is viewed as a pollutant
because we all are supposed to be so talented
that the cream will rise naturally.
Well in fact everyone who gets tenure
gets a lot of help:
they get their colleagues to read their work,
they present their work at colloquiam, et cetera.
So, the idea is that
to acknowledge that getting help
is crucial to the raising of the cream
but we want more of an even playing field
where more people get the help
that they need
to become all they can be.
And Harvard is I think,
a little bitó
if we think of whatís
happening at Stanford or at Yale
our peer institutions are fully engaged in this.
Stanford has its motto:
Diversity and Excellence Together.
And we are very much moving in the same direction
though FAS made a very important statement
last week to this effect.
So, I think that
a lot of people are pushing
in the same direction
and Iím personally
quite optimistic
for the future.
Thank you.
Panelists, we are in factó
as an FYIó
we are in fact
videotaping this section of this event.
And so we hope to be able to have your faces
on our website soon,
so that others who are not able to attend
can be guided by your wisdom.
So, thank you.
We are privileged on many fronts here at Harvard
but I think that our human capital at Harvard is unsurpassed
and we do indeed stand on the shoulders of many giants here.
And often, we donít recognize how they profoundly change our lives
and how they profoundly change our academic community.
So, today we wanted to be able to acknowledge
some of these individuals,
and I hope that we can do more of this,
as Joan had mentioned,
we can do more to recognize the mentors
and those who support us-
those who help us through
the difficult challenges ahead
as we try to develop careers here at Harvard.
So, I would like to have Professor Scott Edwardsó
as I call your name,
if you could please stand in the front
so that we may embarrass you further.
Professor Scott Edwards,
Professor Jean Emmons,
Professor David Golan,
Professor Virginie Greene,
Professor Ichiro Kawachi,
Professor Michele Lamont,
Professor Everett Mendelsohn,
Professor Joan Reede
and Professor Marianne Wessling-Resnick.
For many years
these individuals have toiled
at many levels to support mentoring,
not just in their schools
but in the University.
Some of them have established awards to honor those colleagues
who have done mentoring in their departments
and in their schools.
Others have simply
developed their own
informal mentoring programs
without virtue of resources
and often at the expense of their own personal scholarship.
So, we are very grateful to them
for the work that they do
and I hope that you will enjoy meeting them
in your discussion groups
because they will serve as guides,
as you think about the questions
that we have posed for these discussion groups.
So, on behalf of the university,
we thank you for your profound contributions to mentoring
and hope that we can gain insights
and guidance from you in the years ahead,
as we think about mentoring in the academy.
Letís give them a warm round of applause.
So, we keep on having to cut off the conversation,
but that the conversations want to continue
I take as a very good sign.
And in particular,
the cross-schools conversations
and the cross-cohort conversations
are very eye-opening in some cases
with some concrete ideas
about things that we might be able to try
in our own environments
and in some cases
some very challenging problems to address.
I have the pleasure now
of introducing our Provost, Steve Hyman
who is going to share with you
some University perspectives on mentoring.
So, please join me in welcoming, Steve.
Thank you.
Let me start by thanking you,
Judy and Lisa
and the staff of your office
and the Bach Center
for organizing this very,
very important event.
And let me thank in absentia those deans
who either have been here or will be here later
because a high-level
commitment is necessary to this activity.
Those of you,
whether you are tenure track faculty
or people who have leapt over
that hurdle at some time in the past,
recognize the importance of mentoring
and at the same time,
recognize that it is often thankless
and that the rewards have to be internal
because you know youíve done the right thing.
As a university,
we often donít find adequate
ways to thank people
for their extraordinary efforts,
for their citizenship,
for their caring.
At least at a time of famine and dirt,
at least we have muffins for you
and unhealthy things
like bacon to express our thanks.
But in all seriousness,
this is such an important area
for the University.
And before I launch into my remarks,
I want to particularly recognize some of you here
who have won mentoring awards
and Iíve seen some of you already:
Everett Mendelsohn from Arts and Sciences,
Jean Emmons from HMS,
Ichiro Kawachi from Public Health,
Marianne Wessling-Resnick from Public Health,
Scott Edwards who I saw from Arts and Sciences
and Professor Virginie Greene from FAS,
who I also saw a few minutes ago.
You areóand I hope Iím not missing other names
but you are really exemplars.
I also again, want to thank members of the leadership team
and tenured faculty who are here to talk about this
Although the president of the university
is the person who actually confers tenure,
I chair half of the tenure cases
except for the medical school,
where actually Iím the last signature on all of them.
I mean, the good news is
that at this last step of the ad hoc
the success rate is very, very high.
But all too often,
we see people for whom the case is
closer than it should be,
despite their brilliance
and their effort and sometimes,
people who really should have made it donít make it.
And in some sense
there are many reasons for this but often,
I thought to myself after a difficult case,
that had there only been the right kind of mentoring,
this would have had a different outcome.
And often, people are left to fend for themselves
or they have sort of glancing,
intermittent mentorship
and also from the point of view of the mentors.
Itís important to engage in groups like this
and stay up-to-date
and understand
what the different schools
are looking for becauseó
for example in many other schools,
Arts and Sciences in particular,
teaching which at one time
was considered to be something
that you had to do
but it wasnít worth all that much
is now an important part of tenure cases,
we just saw a new criteria
from the School of Public Health
that made teaching important.
So, each school has a different
culture and different weights.
And while tenure track faculty
shouldnít enslave their energies
and their interests to some plan
for what it takes to achieve tenure,
obviously people have to follow their loves
and their intellectual leads.
Still, it is so important
that people understand the system
and have the kind of helpful
engagement in every stage
so that we can achieve what we want
which is the success of all
of our tenure track faculty.
So in that sense,
Iím really happy to see this room full,
and the only thing
I could wish for is to see many,
many more rooms full.
Because in the end,
we have committed ourselves
as a University increasingly
to a tenure track system
or in some of the professional schools,
something like that without a name.
And what that really means
is that we want to be committed to our tenure track faculty,
we want to get them through these set of processes.
But this is not a matter of magic,
this is a matter of effort and engagement
where mentoring is particularly important.
And I think many of us
think back to the importance of senior faculty
and mentors in our own careers
and itís something though
that just has not been adequately institutionalized.
And so I commend everybody for being here.
I wish you all a productive and useful day
and I hopeó especially those of you
who are already tenuredó
I was told itís no longer PC to talk about senior and junior faculty.
But those of you who are senior faculty,
I hope youíll be evangelists for the importance of mentoring
in your schools
because frankly
as I said at the outset,
this is not enough recognized
or enough rewarded
but it is absolutely critical
if we are going to succeed as a University
in one of our most important goals,
which is to help our tenure track faculty make it over this bar
and permanently join our community.
So, thank you very, very much.
Well, I was in a group
that included senior faculty
and tenure track faculty
in the Social Sciences and the Humanities
but across different schools
in the Kennedy School FAS
and the Harvard School of Public Health
and the medical school,
and we had a really interesting conversation,
a troubling one too.
Because some of the tenure track faculty who were thereó
I would say three of themó
described context
where they were really caught between two chairs,
in the sense of having an appointment in a school
where the discipline is not marginalized
but not dominant discipline,
what path to follow
when basically your chair is very busy
and is not immediately available to give you feedback
about whether you should publish in your own field
or publish for your school.
Another case where a department hasnít promoted since 1950
and the person basically,
doesnít know if his FTE will be in one department or another,
another case where the output of the scholar
is a very unconventional one by Harvardís criteria.
So for me in my role,
Iím thinking we really need a kind ombudsperson
to whom people could go
and raise a red flag early on
to try to understand better,
the criteria by which they are going to be evaluated.
A second issue that was raised
is that of variation in the faculty
in how much weight they put on various criteria of publication:
what kind of publication books versus articles,
service and teaching.
And Judy Singer who was there,
mentioned an experiment they did in the School of Ed,
where they asked all the faculty
to attribute 100 points to the various dimensions
they used while looking at their file.
And they found it was a very teachable moment
when the results were distributed and
the faculty came to the realization
of how much difference
there was in how much weight
they put on the various criteria,
which really made me think
about the importance
of spending much more time
among the senior faculty,
thinking much more explicitly than we do,
about what do we do when we are evaluating.
We have now in Affairs,
a situation where some departments
have never promoted,
others have promoted regularly.
And I think among the more senior faculty
who have been here for 40 years
and those who have come over the last 10 years,
there are different expectations
about what a Harvard faculty should be
and this really needs to be talked about
much more explicitly.
So, thatís a second central theme in our conversation.
A third one was how to find good mentors.
Members of our group mentioned the importance of gossip
and of hanging out in hallways,
and really how much good ideas come at the most unexpected time.
... who was trained in New Zealand
was regretting the good habit of drinking tea together
three times a day for 15 minutes,
so we concluded,
I think we should just institute that here in all schools.
Thatís basically what came up.
I donít know if any of our group member
would like to highlight any other point
that I did not mentionÖNo.
So, we had a very active discussion,
raising first the fact that there are very different rules
and ways of looking at "ladder faculty"
so that we didnít necessarily share a common language
from the medical school,
the hospitals, FAS,
the School of Public Health
and therefore as mentoring goes forward
at Harvard overall
and to make sure that the language is more global
and more really accepting of the entire group.
And so just in terms of the common language,
the issues of promotion versus career satisfaction
and really accepting some heterogeneity
in the definition of what we want for mentoring.
It was clear that there should be expectations Harvard wide,
of a change of culture
that mentoring was important
across all career trajectories.
A lot of interest in mentor
and mentee training,
so that again there was more uniformity
both in our senior faculty of knowing how to really
effectively mentor
but for our junior faculty to have more information
on how to be a great mentor and what to expect.
And this could be in the form of
part of the boot camp thatís part ofó
apparently when the new faculty come to FAS
and some other areas, perhaps orientation at the hospitals
so that thereís sort of a module that explains some of the ways
that one can think about being a mentee.
The other issue is to certainly leverage the infrastructure
of already the hospitals, the departments, et cetera
and just to make it part of the
faculty discussions, part of sort of every area,
whether itís a faculty meeting,
perhaps you can do mentor training
because the faculty are already there at the faculty meeting
and theyíre not likely to show up at other places sometimes.
And then we talked about some of the various models
which could be junior faculty doing peer mentoring.
There could be a senior person there or not there,
so it could serve a networking focus
and also to help the junior faculty develop skills.
There was a sense that many of the junior faculty were told,
ìWell, donít mentor anyone because that will ruin your own career.î
And so weíre giving sort of an early message
and thatís not really what we want to develop in the long run.
And then Jessica brought up some issues
around serial mentoring.
You may think of it from the adolescent point of view,
which is where I think of it,
which is serial monogamy.
But certainly, to think about the fact that
one needs developmental networks that Kathy Graham
and David Thomas and Monica Higgins
and others have really thought about
in terms of a more broad-based issue for our faculty.
Whatís interesting is the word Career Mentors
is used very differently.
In some places itís the scholarly
or research mentoring
and in other places itís somebody worrying about your career,
whoís not your division chief.
So, I think if we can develop some common terminology,
at least when we have these meetings
weíll know what each one is talking about.
But it was a very good discussion.
Weíd still be there in the living room
if you hadnít brought us back upstairs.
So, thank you.
I need to be mentored in a most effective way
to weave from back to front
and take the least amount of time.
We had a very good discussion.
We had representatives from FAS,
from Harvard School of Public Health
and the medical school.
And from the medical school,
from both hospital
and the medical school itself.
And Iím going to go over lots of discussion,
lots of ideas thrown out.
But going down across the questions
in terms of what are some of the critical needs.
Some of the areas that were discussed were:
increasing knowledge about multiple career paths
so that thereís not only one path;
being able to help people with their transitions;
helping and encouraging individuals to take risk
and understanding that advancement requires risk;
this idea that all that weíre focusing now on
are those who are on the ladder
and understanding that we need
the mentoring across the spectrum,
and that many of the people
at the early stages of the ladder
transitioning to more senior positions
and they need that same kind of advice and mentoring.
So, keeping something in place across the spectrum.
There needs to be a mechanism for acknowledging
and dealing with anti-mentoring.
And the other one was:
the mentees and whatís needed for them
is this network of those both inside and outside.
So, much of our focus today
has been on the mentoring within our institution but equally,
thereís a need to create the networks
and the supports outside of our institutions.
In terms of some of the roles
and responsibilities for mentors and mentees:
with regard to the mentors,
they talked about a cultural competence
and a holistic approach;
knowledge for the mentor themselves,
that you just donít need one mentor
but you need multiple mentors,
and this issue of it being quality
and not quantity in terms of the mentor.
And for the mentees:
this idea of paying it forward at all levels,
that someone can mentor someone else
who is coming behind them.
In terms of some of the policies and practices,
we talked about something called mentor domains.
Somebody mentioned mentor domains
and they talked about four domains practice
or what I call part of the scholarship or discipline;
second being promotion
and understanding the system there;
the third academic productivity
and the fourth, environmental
and things such as work life balance.
The other component dealt with
more of the institutional aspects
and what institutions or departments could do.
We talked about ways in which departments
or institutions could support the mentoring
by offering other programs.
It was mentioned from the Psychiatry Department
where these writing seminars
and what they call charisma conferences.
We also talked about faculty development sessions.
It was mentioned that there was a need for mechanisms
to make matches for individuals
to be more aware of whoís in the environment
and who may be able to help them.
And Harvard School of Public Health
talked about their going to put in a mentor registry.
We talked about the need for
rewards or rewards for mentoring;
having mentoring resources available,
something that might be online;
the training and teaching of mentors.
And then they talked aboutó
and it was alluded it to an ombudsó
somebody early on alluded to an ombudsó
but it was stated that in
and of itself would not be adequate.
Anybody from our group that has other things,
that I might have left out?
Thank you.