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

ivy plus MELLON LEADERSHIP FELLOWS: ADVANCING HUMANITIES LEADERSHIP

ivy plus fellows: an institute on inquiry, equity & Leadership in the academic department

Across our member campuses, a cohort of 50 Fellows have been selected each year by Provosts and Deans to join a series of world-class scholars in higher education to help us examine academic routines, center equity in policies and norms, and ultimately lead more inclusive departments. This collaboration cultivates 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.

Our digital assets—recorded modules, facilitators’ guides, worksheets—will be available to FAN members and other partners in accordance with our consortium’s mission.

The Institute launched early in the 2022-23 academic year. Click here for a glimpse at our launch event held at Yale University. Six “inquiries” follow 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 reconvene to design and propose interventions likely to yield systemic improvements in diversity and inclusion in the American professoriate.

Participating members include Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, UPenn, and Yale.

Click here for more information.

Prior Collaborations

INCLUSIVE LEADERSHIP WORKSHOPS

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

• The Prepared Faculty Leader

• Advancing Racial Diversity: What Academic Departments Likely Can (Still) Do, Whatever the Supreme Court Decides

• 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

• Mentorship: New Approaches for a New Professoriate

• Revisiting Mentorship: Strategies for BIPOC Early Career Faculty

• Keeping Afloat: Strategies for BIPOC Junior 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

• Engaging with Students Around Race and Racism

Altogether, more than one thousand faculty and administrators have attended our programs, with more to come.

Click here to access more details about FAN’s Inclusive Leadership Workshops, including streaming videos and downloadable resources.

shared principles for measuring faculty diversity & inclusion

FAN fostered conversation and cooperation among our diversity, faculty, and institutional research (IR) leaders on shared 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” 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, DEI, 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.