Be a Mentor

We hope you'll be interested in serving as a mentor to one or more of your faculty colleagues. Mentoring faculty has benefits not just for the faculty who are mentored. It also benefits those doing the mentoring: in a meta-analysis of mentoring research, researchers found that those who served as mentors had greater personal and professional satisfaction, felt a stronger commitment to the workplace, and had better professional relationships than those who did not. (Ghosh and Reio 2013)

Mentoring uses a supportive environment to assist a faculty member in their professional development. A mentor doesn't have to be an expert on the mentee's area of specialization. Rather, mentoring is about the relationship between the mentor and mentee that explores the mentee's personal and professional goals, offers guidance on professional development and provides feedback on any issue the mentee brings forward.

Informal mentoring is assumed to be a part of everyday life at The New School. According to the Full-Time Faculty Handbook, the basic responsibilities of all principal faculty members include "contributing to a collegial and collaborative work environment"; more specifically, the section covering Service Policy Guidelines states that the baseline service obligations of all full-time faculty include the "mentoring of colleagues."

More formal mentoring, however, is an intentional pairing of faculty with others who are in a position to offer sustained guidance; it covers three broad but overlapping areas:

  • creating a sense of community, both intellectual and personal, across the university

  • assisting junior faculty and newly appointed faculty as they learn to navigate the university and expectations for performance in all categories of employment with an eye toward reappointment and promotion

  • assisting all faculty, including senior faculty, with long-term career management

Participation in Colleague to Colleague Mentorship, either as mentor or mentee, is voluntary. Service as a mentor is recognized as part of university service, functions as the equivalent of committee service, and should be reported in annual review conversations.

To volunteer to serve as a mentor, please complete the information requested here. Volunteer today.

To support your success as a mentor, we provide the following information: