Our investments confront our common challenge: supporting a thriving professoriate to advance and sustain the excellence of American research universities at scale.
In our flagship program across 10 of our member campuses, a cohort of up to 60 Fellows is selected each year by provosts and deans to be led by world-class scholars in interrogating 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 focused Fellows on local climates and cultures “where faculty live” and where chairs have the greatest discretion to make improvements that last beyond their appointments.
Starting in 2025, the Institute is helping Fellows find a voice, individually and collectively, to articulate their own values and those they share with faculty across the academy.
Participating members have included Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, UPenn, and Yale.
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 skill development in academic leadership over a period of at least two years.
Participating members include Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, UPenn, and Yale.
A moment of levity captured during FAN’s Inclusive Leadership Workshop on navigating sensitive topics.
Since the unprecedented 2020-21 academic year, FAN has been hosting virtual dialogues oriented toward supporting faculty, administrators, and staff across the consortium’s member institution, including sessions on navigating sensitive topics with students, difficult conversations with colleagues, and explosive crises facing faculty leaders.
Altogether, more than one thousand faculty and administrators have attended our programs, with more to come.
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. The deliverables include workshops, an asynchronous course, and a “story bank” of faculty-told narratives about their values in the academy.
If you wish to propose a collaboration of consequence for FAN’s members, please contact us with your idea and funding strategy.