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- Nader Kabbani said he would share his rather recent experience of mentoring. He is part of a small department where senior faculty are not required to mentor and, with two senior and six junior faculty, it would be difficult to mentor everyone and to match research interests.
- At first, he didn�t think he needed mentoring, but after some stumbles, realized that he did. But most of his mentors now are outside AUB.
- There are three types of mentoring:
o Institutional Mentoring is university-wide and includes new faculty orientation, teacher training, and faculty development. This is done well here with orientation, faculty development grants, and workshops.
o Academic Mentoring is personal and includes help with teaching, research, and networking. This is important but not formalized at AUB. Senior faculty can help junior faculty by passing along information about conferences, establishing networks of contacts, introducing around the university or at conferences, and sponsoring to appropriate associations. There needs to be more emphasis on having senior faculty helping junior faculty in this regard.
o College Mentoring is also personal, but has more to do with information, such as promotion criteria, bureaucratic procedures, identifying committees on which to serve, and reviews of progress such as annual reviews. This is important but inconsistently applied at AUB. |
Institutional:
�Have an ombudsman, someone outside the decision making process, to go to for advice.
�Have more workshops (e.g. on publishing papers or books)
Academic:
�Assign senior faculty to mentor junior faculty.
�Institute policies on mentoring.
College:
�Actually hold annual reviews for faculty.
�Explicity add these to the duties of dept. chairs. |
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- Mentoring at AUB is informal and left to chance.
- As a new department chair, he didn�t know what his responsibilities were; there were no guidelines on mentoring.
- Department chairs and peer mentors have different responsibilities.
o Department chairs are sources of information: they can give department and faculty bylaws and procedures, information on academic reviews and advancement, and matters related to the university�s structure, processes, climate, and culture.
o Peer mentors, outside the decision-making chain, can help with developing teaching skills, research and publishing efforts, establishing professional networks, preparing for promotion and reappointment reviews, providing constructive criticism and encouragement, and establishing visibility within the university and in the profession.
- Some issues and questions to consider:
o There is no consistency across the university in terms of expectations for mentoring.
o How does the absence of a tenure system impact the establishment of a mentoring system?
o How can mentoring be organized in small departments?
o What if new faculty don�t want to be mentored?
o Should mentoring be part of a chair�s job description?
o Should mentoring count towards a faculty member�s record of service? |
�Establish a well-thought-out mentoring system.
�New faculty need opportunities to become more visible on campus and professionally.
�Need to match those who want to be mentored with those who want to mentor. |
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- Dean Zurayk said that when she joined AUB in 1974 there was no orientation, but she came in with three colleagues who helped and talked to each other. Mentoring does not have to be all senior to junior faculty; you can learn a lot from peers.
- Later she became part of network of regional researchers where she learned from people outside AUB and had many enriching experiences and opportunities to grow.
- In 1987, she joined the Population Council, where it was her pleasure to bring together junior and senior faculty. But when she came back to AUB as a dean, what had been a pleasure became a duty as she was part of the decision-making process.
- Some mentoring can be made formal, such as giving information, monitoring progress, having annual performance reviews, and assisting with networking.
- Other aspects of mentoring should be left informal. It will happen naturally if we develop a culture of mentoring and reward faculty for doing it.
- Women faculty members, especially those with small children, face distinct issues. We need to help them balance family and professional responsibilities. It is especially important for male colleagues to be supportive of their female colleagues� needs and to try to be flexible.
- For intellectual guidance, collaborative research can be a type of mentoring. |
�AUB should encourage interaction with regional scholars
�Some elements of mentoring should be formal and structured (information and monitoring progress) while other mentoring activities kept informal.
�Develop the culture and establish a reward system to foster mentoring.
�Be supportive of different needs of women faculty members.
�Encourage collaborative research. |
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- Khadijah Lakkis, as coordinator of new faculty orientation, said that, as of 2000, they started developing guidelines for what mentors and mentees should and shouldn�t do and asking chairs to assign a senior faculty to mentor new faculty members. This has been successful to an extent.
o The biggest weakness is lack of contact. One reason is that people are not around during the summer.
o But, of those that did have contact, several new faculty said it was good to have someone they felt comfortable asking questions of and to help them understand the department, university, AUB students, etc.
- Saouma Boujaoudeh said this is not a well-thought-out system and we shouldn�t say we have a mentoring system if we don�t.
- Waddah Nasr said that this is to help new faculty and should not be thought of as a coordinated mentoring system; it is voluntary and depends on the department.
- Qaisar Sultana said that there they have three interrelated programs:
o New faculty orientation: a 3-day program that includes information about university procedures and policies as well as physical orientation.
o Professional development: through the Teaching and Learning Center, this includes workshops, information on conferences, and funding for development.
o Mentoring: new faculty are assigned a mentor in their department for at least one year. Mentors� responsibilities include helping new faculty members prepare for their annual review. |
�Electronic mentoring, eMentoring, could resolve the problem of lack of contact. (May Mikati)
�The university needs to think in broad terms, not piecemeal solutions.
(Boujaoudeh) |
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- Colin Smith said one problem with establishing a mentoring system is that at a small university, and in small departments, no one person can know all the things and function in all the roles that have been suggested. Another problem is how to match personalities of mentors and mentees. He has found that if he needs information, he needs to find it himself. Given this culture it seems unlikely that the ideal state of mentoring can exist at AUB.
- Marj Henningsen said that she agrees with two ideas that have been suggested. Some people don�t want to be mentored and others don�t want to be mentors. Also, there should be a place one can go with serious issues to get help outside of the chain of command (i.e. chairs and deans).
- Samir Khalaf said that if mentoring is made formal and professors are required to mentor, then real mentoring will stop. Real mentoring is a spontaneous and natural activity. In his view, AUB was started by �mavericks�, by the 1960s mavericks were rare and were replaced by �colleagues�, and then the university began to be controlled by �comrades�. Now there is too much focus on doing only what is necessary to get promotion. A university is who we recruit, who we sustain, and who we reward.
- Waddah Nasr responded that we can�t recreate history. We�re trying to make sure AUB stays alive and viable and that the assistant professors we recruit get the help they need.
- Saouma Boujaoudeh said that we need to learn from history, but live in the present and future.
- Nadia El Cheikh said that there has been immense improvement in quantity and quality of research. But it was three years after she came before she knew she could apply for a URB grant.
- Nader Kabbani said that perhaps senior faculty should not be assigned to junior faculty in a structured way, but the culture of mentoring could be encouraged by putting it into words. Also, collaborative research is another way to mentor or be mentored. But collaboration is not encouraged because collaborative publications get you less credit.
- Colin Smith said the problem is with assigning points based on number of authors instead of the quality of the publication. Marj Henningsen asked if this is really what happens and Huda Zurayk said it is different in different faculties.
- Marj Henningsen said that the problem is with mixed messages: she was told that collaborative research is encouraged, but people didn�t know how to deal with a collaborative grant proposal.
- Huda Zurayk said that the faculty coming into Health Sciences are excellent and we need to keep them. The question is, do we need a formal mentoring system to support them?
- Saouma Boujaoudeh said we need to facilitate it at the start. How can a culture of mentoring be created without something formal and university-wide? It can�t just be left to chance.
- Waddah Nasr said there are some concrete things we can do; e.g., make sure everyone has an annual performance review.
- Nadia El Cheikh said that the �institutional� type of mentoring�information giving�is already being done here and can be further developed. But the other types may be more difficult. The university should first rethink promotion criteria and tenure.
- Qaisar Sultana said that they decided it was better to invest heavily in mentoring to retain faculty rather than spending that money on recruiting.
- Colin Smith said that if we can�t agree on everything, we could start with a minimum structure: mentors for information.
- Saouma Boujaoudeh said that it is important to support the people we hire in order to keep them. This forum was to start the conversation on mentoring, but we need to keep it going.
- Amal Bou Zeineddine agreed that this Forum was meant to start a dialogue on mentoring and hopefully can get to a place where faculty will want to be mentors. It would be of significant importance to have a consistent mentoring system at AUB in the future available to faculty who choose to be mentored . |
�Create a handbook for new faculty for what to do, for example, when a light bulb blows out after hours. (Smith)
�Establish a way for willing mentors and mentees to match up.
�Establish an ombudsman�s office. (Henningsen)
�Need to remind all faculty of the resources (new and old) that the university is providing.
�Put into words the importance of mentoring. (Kabbani)
�Change system to reward collaborative research.(Kabbani and Zurayk)
�Set up a mentoring system for information, but for other mentoring, just encourage the culture. (Zurayk)
�Facilitate mentoring at first with formal, university-wide effort. (Boujaoudeh)
�Make sure annual reviews are done. (Nasr)
�Rethink university promotion criteria and tenure-track system before establishing formal mentoring system.
(Prof. who came in 1992)
�Start with mentors for informational content who could point to other mentor possibilities (Smith)
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