JUNIOR-FACULTY GROUP GIVES YOUNG SCHOLARS A WAY IN

Associate Provost Suzanne Spain meets a lot of promising young scholars. She coordinates searches for tenure-track faculty members and postdoctoral fellows, and she personally interviews candidates for leave-replacement and adjunct positions.

"I'm so impressed by these young faculty members," Spain says, "and my hope is always that they thrive at Bryn Mawr, whether or not they are here for the long term. Their appointments at Bryn Mawr are often their first experience of life on a faculty, and it's the College's privilege to help them make the transition from graduate student to professor."

The Bryn Mawr faculty includes some outstanding mentors for academic neophytes, Spain says, and the College offers numerous resources for new faculty members who want to learn more about pedagogical issues, balancing work and family, or simply the ins and outs of Bryn Mawr's campus or governance structure. Unfortunately, access to those resources is not always evenly distributed across departments or even across geographic space on campus.

Melissa Scott Murphy

In the summer of 2004, Spain met a freshly minted Ph.D. who helped her change that. In an interview for an interim position in Bryn Mawr's anthropology department, Melissa Scott Murphy, Haverford '94, asked if the College had a mentoring program for junior faculty members.

Spain pointed her in the direction of some of the opportunities on campus, but the question inspired her to think about the role of the Provost's Office in fashioning full-fledged faculty members out of new hires and postdoctoral fellows.

"We usually asked the academic departments to help orient them to faculty life," Spain says. "Sometimes it has worked out wonderfully, but sometimes — especially in very small departments or when their office space was geographically isolated — they got a bit lost in the shuffle. Since they are likely to perform better if they're happy, it's in our interest as well as theirs to help them adjust to the College. I thought our office should take responsibility for making sure they had the company and the guidance of their peers."

To that end, Spain asked Murphy to help her organize a program that would combine guidance in professional development with opportunities to form personal relationships with other people who were embarking on academic careers.

"We had a brainstorming session," Murphy says, "and I helped her identify some topics that were likely to be of interest to new faculty members.

"Some were topics of general interest — adjusting teaching strategies for different class sizes, how to teach classes that contain both seniors and first-year students, and job-search strategies, for instance," Murphy continues.

"Others were more specific to Bryn Mawr, or to the small liberal-arts college environment: teaching in a women's college, for example, or managing a level of intimacy with students that isn't likely to occur at the large research universities where most of us have taught as graduate students.

"Bi-Co students are very bright, enthusiastic and engaged," Murphy notes. "It's inspiring to teach students like that, but it's also challenging. They're constantly raising the bar."

Having created a list of topics, Spain and Murphy recruited several more-experienced members of the Bryn Mawr faculty to give brief presentations and lead a series of discussions last fall.

This spring, the program has sponsored lectures in which some of the postdoctoral fellows have presented their research. The talks are part of an effort to prepare the fellows and interim faculty members for job interviews and campus visits, but Keck Postdoctoral Fellow in Geology Catherine Riihimaki notes that they serve another purpose, as well.

Catherine Riihimaki

"One of the most interesting things about this group is that it gives me a chance to see what issues are arising in the humanities and the social sciences," Riihimaki says. "It is a great way to make connections across disciplines, and, in a true liberal-arts sense, it helps young faculty members become more well-rounded.

"When you're first starting out at Bryn Mawr, you may not know about all the campus institutions and structures that bridge disciplinary boundaries, so it's nice to have a group where those connections are made from the get-go. This program has fostered friendships among young faculty members from across the disciplinary spectrum, and we sometimes attend their lectures or other events sponsored by their departments because we want to know more about our new friends' interests."

Murphy agrees. "One of the things we expected was that junior faculty members would get to know each other better, and I think the program has been very successful in that regard," she says. "It's been very helpful for all of us. If you're the only younger member of your department, you can feel somewhat isolated, as if you're the only one struggling with the issues people face at the beginning of an academic career. It's great to be able to talk with other people who are in the same position."

Equally valuable, Murphy says, was the chance to make connections with senior faculty members who could offer the perspective from the other side of the tenure hill.

"It's been inspiring to meet senior faculty members who have established themselves and become successful," she says. "They've been terrific, and we've gotten a sense that there are a lot of different ways to be successful as a teacher and as a researcher."

Spain says that she has learned from the program, too. "I was surprised to see how regularly the same issues in pedagogy arose," she says. "There are individual wrinkles, of course, but most of them can be easily assigned to one of a few categories. Now that we know what these issues are, we can more accurately predict what kinds of support young faculty members need.

"It will help me set next year's agenda for the program."

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