Collaborations of Consequence
These investments confront our common challenge: leading lasting, department-level change from university-wide roles. As these efforts get underway, FAN will continue to provide virtual communities of support and learning for faculty, chairs, deans, and others.
Faculty Empowered Against Resistance by Learning Evidence-based Storytelling Strategies
In August 2024, the Ivy+ Faculty Advancement Network received support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a one-year project in collaboration with The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard University, the 2040 Strategy Group, and Story As. Details on the effort, which involves focus groups, a survey, and “storytelling for impact” workshops among other activities, will be published after the work is fully underway.
In 2023, FAN was awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch the Ivy+ Mellon Leadership Fellows program, which aims to increase the representation of humanities faculty members occupying the highest administrative offices in the academy. Nine FAN members together appointed a cohort of tenured faculty as Ivy+ Mellon Leadership Fellows to undergo a comprehensive program of equity-minded skill development in academic leadership and governance over a period of at least two years.
Participating members include Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, UPenn, and Yale.
THE INSTITUTE FOR ivy plus PROVOST LEADERSHIP fellows
Across our member campuses, a cohort of up to 60 Fellows has been selected each year by Provosts and Deans to join a series of world-class scholars in higher education to help us interrogate how systems and strategies shape the academic profession and to understand the difference faculty can make in reshaping it.
From 2022 until 2025, this collaboration cultivated the opportunity for equity-mindedness at its institutional roots, one that emerged in FAN’s landscape analysis and is confirmed both by abundant scholarship and our own campus surveys: local climates and cultures “where faculty live” and where chairs have the greatest discretion to make improvements that last beyond their appointments.
A series of videoconference “inquiries” followed each launch, each directed by a scholar whose work brings to light opportunities faculty leaders have to make a difference in their discretionary spaces. At the end of the year, Fellows reconvened to design and propose interventions likely to advance and sustain diversity and inclusion in the American professoriate.
Our digital assets from that three-year cycle of Institutes—recorded modules, facilitators’ guides, worksheets—have been made available to FAN members and other partners in accordance with our consortium’s mission.
Starting in 2025, the Institute will be organized to help faculty find a voice, individually and collectively, to articulate their own values and those they share with faculty across the academy.
Participating members have include Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, UPenn, and Yale.
Click here for more information on the 2022-25 Institutes. Click here to follow progress on the 2025-26 Institute.
Prior Collaborations
INCLUSIVE LEADERSHIP WORKSHOPS
A moment of levity captured during FAN’s Inclusive Leadership Workshop on navigating sensitive topics.
During the unprecedented 2020-21 academic year, FAN hosted a series of virtual workshops on creating inclusive cultures across the consortium’s member institutions. In 2022-23, FAN invited scholars to expand our faculties’ and chairs’ capacity for inquiry, equity, and inclusive leadership in the academic department. Then in 2023-24, FAN turned to a series of conversations about navigating sensitive topics with students, difficult conversations with colleagues, and explosive crises facing faculty leaders.
Topics have included:
Navigating Sensitive Topics in Your Teaching and Research Spaces
How to Manage Yourself and Have More Productive Conversations with Colleagues
Actualizing Racial Equity throughout the Faculty Hiring Process
Supporting Your BIPOC Faculty Colleagues: Guidance for Senior Faculty, Chairs, and Deans
Churn: Life in the Increasingly Diverse World of Higher Education and How to Make It Work
Revisiting Mentorship: Strategies for BIPOC Early Career Faculty
Mitigating the Impact of COVID-19 on the Academic Progress of Underrepresented Faculty
Systemic Racism and its Impact on Creating a Diverse Faculty in Higher Education
Altogether, more than one thousand faculty and administrators have attended our programs, with more to come.
principles for measuring faculty diversity & inclusion
FAN fostered conversation and cooperation among our diversity, faculty, and institutional research (IR) leaders on principles for measuring our universities’ progress in faculty diversity and inclusion. A team of sense-makers inventoried, audited, and adapted definitions and measures for better understanding ourselves and “what works” to advance our goals.
We started with small data “sprints” that revealed where our faculty come from (What does hiring beyond the “usual suspects” of graduate programs look like?); how much hiring merely replaces the underrepresented scholars who have left (What is our “turnover quotient”?); and shared data definitions on variables that need not differ from university to university (Is there a “lingua franca” for measuring diversity in many of its forms?).
The consortium offered members mutual support and cooperation across IR, diversity and inclusion, and faculty success functions to pursue changes in how we collect and report on our data.
Participating members include Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, UPenn, and Yale.