Baltimore

In the 23 years since Dr. Dre released the song below about the events following the Rodney King verdict, he has gone from “Gangsta” rapper to near-billionaire Apple employee. Unfortunately, the rest of the country hasn’t changed nearly as much.

On a related note, a symposium about intellectual activism, social justice, and criminalization is being held at noon today at the University of Maryland and can be streamed at this link.

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Don’t ask the new guy

Following my advice regarding faculty mentoring, here is another piece of advice for the colleagues of new faculty members: when you need a volunteer for a campus event, don’t ask the new person. Beyond the fact that the new person is probably naive enough to say yes as senior colleagues ignore these requests entirely, there are two reasons why this is a bad idea: The new person is not supposed to be doing service this year and the new person doesn’t actually know that much about the curriculum (at either the college-level or the department level). This can’t work out well for anybody other than the senior colleagues who do not have to spend a nice spring evening on campus.

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Signs of spring

-Longer days

-Warmer temperatures

-Decreased class attendance

-Increased difficulty of obtaining a quorum at faculty meetings

Signs of spring are apparently shared between my current and former institutions.

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Faculty mentoring

Tenured Radical’s latest post states:

The other day I read a comment on Facebook to the effect that, after changing jobs, many academics experience a moment of intense regret. The author of the comment timed this moment of regret at about six months into the new job, when the losses and the difficulty of the transition becomes truly apparent.

Like her, I am not experiencing regret, but it have been noticing certain differences as I get settled in. In some cases, such as mentoring, these differences have given me an even greater appreciation for my former colleagues.

It is not that my new colleagues are particularly bad at mentoring, but one particular colleague at my former institution regularly went out of her way to ensure that I knew what was going on. Unlike mentoring undergraduates or graduate students, at the faculty level I think that successful mentoring is mostly about keeping new colleagues in your thoughts so that you can tell them when you have to do something that a new faculty member might not know about. An example of this is submitting final grades. When the end of the semester nears, a good faculty mentor will not only think, “I need to submit my final grades,” but also, “John might not know how grade submission works here, so I should stop by his office and show him.”

As faculty members it is easy to get caught up in our own grading, students, and deadlines. I think that successful mentoring of other faculty members requires an external focus that our daily work does not. Hopefully I will remember this if I ever get the chance to mentor a new faculty member myself.

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“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to get updates and other posts via your news feed. Then share it with a new colleague.

 

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