Dive Brief:
- A new University of California initiative seeks to pair students with faculty members sharing similar backgrounds and pathways to education, Inside Higher Ed reports.
- Faculty members who were the first in their families to go to college are being encouraged to identify themselves with buttons, t-shirts and the like to allow first-generation students to identify individuals on campus who are like them and can help foster an increased sense of belonging for these students.
- Students are already expressing their appreciation, and one long-term goal of the initiative is to encourage a deeper conversation about student success that moves beyond a deficit narrative often projected on first-generation students.
Dive Insight:
Role modeling has proven to be extremely critical to student success, particularly around encouraging underrepresented students to enter into certain fields. But consideration must be given to how a faculty member's workload could be impacted. Many first-generation faculty, who are most often professors of color, often feel compelled to take on a disproportionate share of mentoring, club advising and other social functions because they feel a greater sense of personal responsibility to students, attributing most of their own success to the impact of mentors.
But these tasks take away time from researching and publishing, and typically negatively impact tenure and promotion evaluations — and data already shows these individuals are overrepresented in the contingent workforce and underrepresented in the tenured or tenure-track positions. It is important, then, for department heads and college administrators as a whole to consider the total impact of a faculty member's contribution to not just their field, but the campus climate when evaluating promotion applications to ensure that such initiatives do not perpetuate cycles of inequity among faculty while trying to alleviate them for students.