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How Rush University Established a Mentoring Program for Women Faculty that Can Serve as a Model for Other Universities

Posted on by Brady Stanton

Susan Chubinskaya, PhDVice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Klaus Kuettner Professor for Osteoarthritis Research, Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics, Orthopedic Surgery, and Internal Medicine at Rush University Amarjit S. Virdi, PhDDirector of the Office of Rush Mentoring Programs, Associate Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Rush University The Challenge As a private, nonprofit healthcare institution offering certificate, undergraduate (very few), graduate degrees, and postgraduate training, Rush University (RU), an academic arm of Rush University Medical Center and Rush System for Health in Chicago, has almost 2000 faculty, and 52% are women. Since July 2006, we’ve been invested in developing systemic mentoring programs for our faculty, beginning with the Rush Research Mentoring Program (RRMP), which helps early career faculty develop and lead independent, extramurally funded translational research programs. Building on the framework of the RRMP, we’ve subsequently developed other mentoring programs, such as Rush Educational Mentoring Program (REMP), mentoring program for postdoctoral fellows through Rush Postdoctoral Society (RPDS), and, recently, our Rush Women Faculty Mentoring Program (RWMP). All these programs provide tremendous resources to faculty, offer continued education credits, and are optional, though participation in these programs is highly encouraged. Gender equity and diversity is one of […]

3 Ways to Rethink Career Services and Post-College Outcomes

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

Tracking post-college outcomes continues to be an urgent issue as students, parents, and lawmakers press colleges to quantify the value of a college degree. Tracking results, however, is only half the battle, says Branden Grimmett, associate provost for the Office of Career and Professional Development at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.  Institutions that want to make a difference in their post-college outcomes need to transform their career services to better meet the changing needs of students and employers. Grimmett led the transformation of career services at St. Olaf College at the highly acclaimed Piper Center for Vocation and Career. This June he accepted a position at Loyola Marymount University, where he will re-imagine their Office of Career and Professional Development. We talked to him to learn more about why institutions need to re-envision their career services office now, what revamped programming looks like, and what steps you can take to take to move the process forward. Career Services Restructuring Needs to be Done Now Grimmett lists four reasons to reinvent campus career services: Awareness, engagement, and reputation are just as important as knowing where students land when they graduate. At St. Olaf, the economic turbulence between 2007 and 2009 […]

Start a Young Alumni Council? Yes or No?

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

WHERE THIS ARTICLE BEGAN… Ashlyn Sowell was a faculty member at AI’s conference on Strengthening, Strategy and Growing Engagement for Alumni Boards. This article was sparked by conversation among schools at the event who were considering the next steps for adding a board or council to their young alumni programs. Some critical questions were raised; here, we start to answer them. Should You Start a Young Alumni Council? The Answer is Maybe Volunteer groups can be a great asset, but do require cultivation and meaningful work to engage with your institution. Here we will talk more about how Gettysburg College made its decision and what the outcome has been. Gettysburg College has a strong history with its alumni board, dating back many years. Around 2008, alumni relations staff began thinking about ways to engage young alumni who made up a large percentage of the overall alumni population and had  unique ways that they wanted to interact with their alma mater.  As such, a proposal was made to the Board of Trustees, and we created the BOLD Council (Burgians of the Last Decade), a young alumni council of 25 members. The council’s strategies include ways to engage alumni through communications, interaction […]

Making Summer and Special Sessions Successful: 4 Key Factors

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

A NEW SERIES This is the first in a series of articles from Ken Smith, Virginia Tech’s vice provost for resource management and institutional effectiveness. Smith has both chaired and staffed multiple committees charged with overall improvement of special sessions operations at Virginia Tech. He holds a PhD in Educational Leadership from Virginia Tech. You may also be interested in Smith’s recent podcast, “Approaching the Academic Calendar More Creatively.” More colleges are considering offering special sessions outside the traditional academic calendar. In some cases, institutions are moving beyond summer and winter inter-sessions to provide condensed terms in May (immediately following spring term) or August (immediately preceding fall term). There are even “spring break” sessions that offer opportunity for very compressed but innovative courses. Special sessions not only provide the institution with financial gains by generating additional tuition revenues; they also offer opportunities to improve student success, completion rates, and job readiness. For example: For faculty, special sessions can offer not only extra pay but also an opportunity to try out innovative approaches to teaching a course. Because of the shorter time frame, many special session courses are delivered with a mix of on-line and in person instruction.  Certain types of […]

Addressing Housing Overflows Proactively

Posted on by Greta Bell

At those residential institutions that are seeing enrollment growth, providing adequate student housing has rarely been more challenging. Sudden, unexpected housing overflows at residential institutions can prove both expensive and complex to manage. We turned to Lorinda Krhut, director of student housing and residence life at the University of Mississippi, for her advice on how institutions can put in place more proactive measures that will help make the process of managing housing overflows more efficient and less costly in future years. Moving Beyond Just Coping with a Housing Crisis Institutions that don’t guarantee housing for entering students have more flexibility during a surge in demand, but unexpected spikes in student housing raise difficult challenges for institutions that have a freshmen residency requirement and a limited number of beds. Solutions various institutions have tried when managing an enrollment surge include: A lottery system for returning students Contracting with off-campus apartments and living spaces, then moving upperclassmen to those facilities while charging them the same cost they would have paid for on-campus housing Krhut notes, however, that these solutions are not ideal. It’s better to have contingency plans in place before a housing crisis hits. There are two key strategies for achieving […]

High-Impact Faculty Development: How El Camino College Helps Faculty Implement Learning-Centered Techniques in the Classroom

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

Have you experienced this scenario? Your faculty members attend a professional development training and return to campus excited to try new ideas. Fast-forward a few months…and little has changed because pedagogical transformation was shunted aside in favor of day-to-day teaching and research obligations. When this scenario happened at El Camino College, a group of faculty decided to change it. “Life’s very, very busy so it’s hard to take this next step,” explains Kristie Daniel-DiGregorio, Professor of Human Development. Along with her colleagues, she noticed that faculty would feel “electrified” by training, but that afterward, techniques were only implemented in an ad hoc fashion. She and a team of her colleagues wondered what would happen if the college continued to support their professional development on an ongoing basis after the training concluded. El Camino’s Faculty Inquiry Partnership Program — FIPP — was created to do just that. And they’ve been tracking the results. Student success rates in courses taught by faculty who participated in FIPP are two percent higher than rates in courses taught by faculty who had not attended. More than 90% of students reported that the strategies faculty in FIPP employed helped them better understand the material and increased their […]

The 21st Century Academic Advisor: 3 Critical Skill Sets

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

This article is an excerpt from Sue Ohrablo’s acclaimed book High-Impact Advising: A Guide for Academic Advisors Being an effective academic advisor is like being an expert juggler. It is easy to drop a ball now and then. In this article, I examine strategies to keep all the balls in the air in order to effectively support our students and help them persist toward graduation. The role of the academic advisor is complex, requiring advisors to effectively communicate with students, understand and interpret policies and procedures, follow institutional protocols, maintain student records, utilize technology, and engage in problem-solving. These activities can be categorized into three distinct skill sets: interpersonal, operational, and analytical. To deliver comprehensive advising assistance, an advisor needs to blend all of these skills. Here are some strategies for developing these essential skill sets and maximizing your effectiveness as an advisor. Interpersonal Skills I have had the privilege of interviewing numerous advisor candidates over the years, some who are aspiring to this new role, others who are experienced in the field. Most often, when asked what is the most important skill an advisor can bring to the position, prospective advisor candidates respond, “working with people.” While I’m sure they think […]

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We Need to Value How Women Use Vision and Conceptual Thinking to Lead

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

It’s no secret that more women in the workforce has not equaled more women in leadership. Women opt out because they don’t feel their work is meaningful, they object to the direction their institution or institutional culture is headed, or they believe their contributions aren’t valued. Countering this requires a systemic approach. by Rosalind Spigel, Organizational Development Consultant and Leadership Coach, Spigel Consulting  In this sixth article in our series in Challenging Androcentrism in the Academy, we’ll look at one set of leadership traits and behaviors we identified earlier in the series: vision and conceptual thinking. We’ll examine: In preparation for this article, I was fortunate to have interview conversations with many women in higher education. In our conversations about conceptual thinking, I discovered a distinction between “big ideas” and “vision.” Big ideas tend to excite. Vision can also excite, but for the women I spoke with, vision also includes more mundane aspects of operationalization which then receive less than enthusiastic responses from their male bosses. I would like to add that there were women I spoke with who did not perceive themselves or others being marginalized for their conceptual thinking. Nonetheless, if an institution is interested in higher levels of […]

Communicating Conflicts of Interest to the Public

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

According to the Chronicle, one-fourth of private institutions do business with their trustees’ companies. Potential conflicts of interest involving board members or high-ranking officials certainly are not limited to private colleges, however; North Carolina State University’s termination of Mary Easley and the uncovering of the University of Illinois’ previous board’s interference in the admissions process each represent highly publicized examples. We asked Cindy Lawson, media relations expert and vice president for public relations and communications at DePaul University, for practical tips on what and how to communicate to the public when a conflict of interest involves a member of the board, in order to manage the impact on the institution’s reputation. Be Forthright and Specific “From my experience, the chances of an institution’s reputation remaining intact are far better when that institution is forthright and admits the conflict, shares as much information as it possibly can, and most importantly, describes the measures it is taking to ensure it doesn’t happen again, as opposed to trying to hide it, hoping that no one finds out, or worse — trying to deny it or cover it up once it is exposed.”Cindy Lawson, DePaul University In a case involving an unintentional conflict of […]

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