Calls for leadership development and associated supports for faculty members are growing in prominence in higher education. Yet, traditional leadership development efforts in higher education fail to account for both individual and institutional needs as critical to fostering a leadership pipeline with multiple entry points. This manuscript offers succession management and onboarding as important and necessary steps to facilitating a more deliberate, strategic approach to supporting the next generation of institutional leaders – mid-career faculty members.
Described as the “bridge between faculty generations” (Baldwin and Chang,
Liberal Education, 92
(4), 28–35, 2006), mid-career faculty members play an important role in colleges and universities. Mid-career faculty members serve as mentors to early career colleagues and occupy critical leadership roles, formal and informal, on their respective campuses (Baker et al.
Developing faculty in liberal arts colleges: Aligning individual needs and organizational goals
. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017a, 2018). Yet, mid-career faculty members often assume these roles with little to no support to be successful in these roles and often to the detriment of their own career advancement (Baker, Lunsford, Pifer; Ward and Wolf-Wendel,
Academic motherhood: How faculty manage work and family
. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012). Despite the importance of mid-career faculty to a thriving academy, there is an opportunity for those tasked with faculty development responsibilities to better understand the experiences of their mid-career faculties, particularly women and other underrepresented academics, and to provide appropriate and adequate career-stage-specific supports. An important question arises: how can colleges and universities better support their mid-career faculty? This chapter presents a meta-synthesis of four decades of research and practice focused on mid-career faculty and offers an agenda moving forward to better serve this faculty population.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.