From the moment I became an MIT freshman many years ago, to my experiences as a graduate student, and throughout my time as a faculty member here on campus, I have loved the wonder and excitement, the shared collaboration and enthusiasm around problem solving that are a part of the MIT ethos. I have always appreciated my fellow faculty colleagues – the incredible work that they do, the unique perspectives that they each bring to every problem, and the amazing conversations and ideas that are generated when our faculty commune.

When I was asked to take on the inaugural role of vice provost for faculty, I was excited by the prospects of finding ways to better enable our faculty to perform at the highest levels, to achieve their professional goals, and to thrive at MIT. At the one-year mark of my service, there is much to share with you about the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty (OVPF), my role as Vice Provost, and the services that my office provides.

The OVPF consists of myself as vice provost, the Assistant Provost for Faculty Programs Donna Behmer, Director of Special Programs Rachel Beingessner, Senior Program Associate Yvonne Wong, Faculty Programs Coordinator Andre Dixon, and Executive Assistant Naglaa Elshamy. We will soon have an additional director joining us whose focus will include development and expansion of mentorship programs as well as other programming needs.

This team together develops all of the programming and informational tools for our faculty to support faculty advancement in many areas, ranging from early career needs to academic leadership training. As assistant provost, Donna Behmer not only leads much of our faculty programming, but supports individual faculty and departments in hiring, retention, and retirement. She designed and developed our existing Faculty Concierge website and service, which Rachel Beingessner now curates to offer a wealth of information regarding the Institute’s programs and benefits. Donna also leads our Faculty Partners Program, described in more detail below. She is an incredible resource and I encourage faculty to check out Faculty Concierge and to reach out to her or Rachel for deeper conversations about any of these topics.

Provost Cindy Barnhart introduced the vice provost for faculty position, and it is an expansive re-imagining of the former associate provost role in this context.

One of the first things that I did upon starting was to appoint a Faculty Advisory Council (FAC) consisting of faculty members from each of the five Schools and the College to work with me on a strategic plan for the office. This group of faculty members from diverse fields of study brings insight and thoughtful guidance, as well as perspectives from across the Institute, to bear in discussing key needs of our faculty and indicating where value could be added to the efforts of our office. The FAC has produced a strategic plan report that contains several strategies in the form of recommendations to accomplish the office’s three primary goal areas: Faculty Recruitment and Retention, Faculty Advancement, and Faculty Community. The report is close to finalized at the writing of this article and following review we hope to share it on the vice provost website.

Along with the FAC, I met with the faculty chair and associate chairs, deans and department heads at School Councils, and many of you who have reached out to share your thoughts and ideas over the past year. All of this input has helped to inform the priorities of the office, and we have already begun to implement several recommendations as a result. Below is a summary of our current offerings and emerging initiatives under each of the three focus areas. I hope that it provides some insight into my role and the range of services provided by the office.

Faculty Recruitment and Retention

MIT’s excellence relies on our ability to attract and retain the top talent to our faculty, and to establish an environment in which faculty can advance in their work and are more likely to be retained. I work to ensure that policies and processes support best practices, including those related to hiring; mentoring; tenure and promotion; and re-appointment and review.

My role includes working closely with department heads to assist departments on strategies for broadening the pool of faculty applicants to ensure we have access to the most highly qualified scholars from every part of the nation’s demographics and every corner of the world. By working alongside deans and department heads, I seek to complement their efforts at recruitment and ensure best practices in faculty searches and hiring.

As a member of the Provost’s Council, which includes the provost and the deans of the Schools and College, I work with Provost Barnhart to open discussion and reach convergence on policies that address the needs of our faculty. One example of this shared work with the council is the recent development of a more systematic and uniform approach to handling partner career needs and hiring during the recruitment or retention of faculty, and using a template developed in partnership with Assistant Provost Donna Behmer. This work has led to an update of our policies and should provide a more readily accessible service for our prospective hires in the newly named Faculty Partners Program. Additionally, I have been working with other members of the Provost’s Office and MIT Institutional Research (IR) on focus groups held across the Institute to understand pain points that faculty may be experiencing.

Department climate is also a critical factor in the well-being of faculty. As a former department head, I learned how impactful positive and collegial interactions within a department can be in laying groundwork for peer support, collaborative engagement and decreased likelihood of friction. As a thought partner, I work with academic leaders to consider ways to ensure healthy and inclusive department cultures.

Mentoring of junior faculty is a key component of faculty retention. At MIT, different departments handle mentoring differently, with many officially assigning senior faculty as mentors to junior faculty.

This practice, which has evolved over the past few decades at MIT, can provide an extremely valuable resource to pre-tenure faculty as it provides an opportunity to gain insight, discuss strategies for success, and openly talk about expectations for promotion and career advancement.

There is a great deal of heterogeneity in the nature and consistency of mentoring, and critical factors such as accessibility, alignment with or knowledge of research field, and degree and extent of communication vary both within departments and across the Schools and the College. Furthermore, there remain some areas in which senior mentors are not officially assigned, and informal mentoring can be ad hoc and irregular.

One of the areas of focus for my office as recommended by the FAC will be to work with DLC heads and deans to organize a set of principles around senior mentoring of junior colleagues to help set expectations and ensure junior faculty needs are met. It is also important to note that mentoring needs do not end at tenure, and that in fact it is useful to provide guidance and mentorship toward achieving the full professor promotion and beyond.

Ultimately, faculty benefit from the opportunity to learn from each other at every stage, and my office will be working toward building a culture of mentoring across the Institute that is inter-generational and works for faculty members at all points in their career. Examples of future potential programs include mentoring circles that involve a small group of faculty across different departments who are at various career points.

Faculty Advancement

The OVPF provides opportunities for the development of key faculty skillsets and enabling capabilities to enhance faculty professional growth and leadership qualities. In my role as vice provost, I guide and inform these offerings for faculty development and other Institute-wide programs that are provided by the OVPF. Some of the already existent and well-received programs offered through the Provost’s Office include: the New Faculty Program, Life With Tenure Program, Faculty Leadership – Professional Skills Development Program, a Group Coaching Pilot Program, and the Academic and Department Head Program.

The OVPF team will continue to develop and grow these programs, using attendee feedback, input from the FAC and other modes of feedback to continue to add relevant and critical content based on the interests and needs of our faculty. One example of changes that we have implemented include new additions to our department head training program that introduce new department heads to a range of skillsets and services for handling conflict and difficult situations, and panels on topics such as equitable resource sharing and establishing a strong and positive departmental climate. An upcoming change for offerings of our Faculty Leadership Program in future years will be a process for self-nomination for the leadership program that would be considered with the current nominations for the program provided by deans and department heads.

We will also add to this programming to address key gaps and needs for faculty advancement. For example, early career faculty can struggle with the generation of impactful proposals for research funding; providing a resource to help faculty, along with strategies learned from past successful proposals, could be very useful. The OVPF is collaborating with the director of research development in the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) on programming directed toward addressing this need.

Our first workshop, “Strategies for Competitive Proposals Part I: An MIT Faculty Insider View”, was offered on January 31, 2025. This workshop involved senior faculty panelists from all the Schools and College who had success with funding from a variety of sources pre-tenure, and who shared some of their perspectives and strategies for pursuing grants early in career. An upcoming Workshop Part II will focus on putting together a funding strategy and specific approaches to proposal writing. We also plan an offering later in the calendar year that will focus on how to launch and fund a large research center or initiative, a topic of interest to faculty at all points in career. We will put together informational sessions on the workings of MIT, with topics ranging from finances to governance, in collaboration with a range of different offices including the Executive Vice President and Treasurer (EVPT) and our Faculty Chair. These topics were of high interest based on a Pulse survey question that I submitted at the start of my role, and are the result of discussions and recommendations from our FAC.

Finally, with respect to establishing a culture of mentoring, one of the important determinants of success for faculty is the ability to advise, support and guide graduate students in their pursuit of knowledge and training.

The ability to advise, like the ability to teach, is not something that faculty are typically provided training or insight on – yet so much of the outcomes and success of faculty are reliant on graduate students, and regardless of field, the guidance and training of graduate students is an important part of our role and responsibilities as faculty. We have formally changed our policies and procedures to recognize graduate student mentorship as one of the factors to be weighed for tenure and promotion, and our Schools have begun adopting or are in active discussion about means of evaluating graduate advising in a manner that informs promotion decisions. In this setting, there is a true need to provide our faculty with some introduction to core principles in working with and advising graduate students as informed by research. The OVPF is creating workshops and mechanisms to prepare our faculty so that they can excel and succeed as mentors, just as we provide resources for success in research and teaching. In doing so, we help faculty learn how to incorporate best practices into their own mentoring style, learn some general principles that can make advising more effective and prevent escalation of crisis situations, while lowering difficulties and enabling more fruitful and positive experiences for both students and faculty.

In 2024, we introduced the first workshop on mentoring for junior faculty, offered in May and December, which focused on faculty in the Schools of Engineering, Science, and College of Computing. These workshops, led by CIMER-trained facilitator Jenny Frederick, associate provost at Yale, were highly successful in part because they emphasized faculty learning from each other as well as from the offered materials. In the upcoming year, we plan to expand this offering to include additional principles and concepts as part of a two- or three-workshop series. Here the idea is to form cohorts of faculty who have learned together and can relate to each other about mentoring perspectives as they advance in their career. We will be working with SHASS, SAP, and Sloan to also address mentoring needs in these Schools.

We have also initiated a Department Head’s program, in which CIMER-trained facilitator Bruce Birren of the Broad Institute and Maryanne Kirkbride from MIT’s MindHandHeart work together to connect with department heads to formulate workshops or activities tailored specifically to the department faculty, thus providing an opportunity for faculty within a department to engage with each other on topics of relevance to mentoring within their field.

Faculty Community

One of the important aspects of being at MIT is its unique ability to bring excellent people together across such a broad range of fields; our community embraces exchange, lively discussion, and investigation of new ideas in a way that can greatly enhance the MIT experience. As vice provost for faculty, a part of my charge is to advance climate, community, and culture-related goals for our faculty community.

A part of this charge involves creating more opportunities for faculty to convene – whether it is to address an important topic of shared interest or concern, to share each other’s scholarship, or to simply allow us the opportunity to share food and fellowship with each other. Examples of gatherings of community that the OVPF sponsors or co-sponsors include the Women Faculty Dinners, which have been a partnership with our Faculty Chair Mary Fuller that has enabled women across the Schools and at different career points to connect and spend time together.

This past semester we have newly introduced Junior Faculty gatherings, a partnership with a group of junior colleagues, led by Marzyeh Ghossemi, which has brought junior faculty together and provided opportunities for them to both provide me feedback on junior faculty needs and to spend time together, exchanging, and often building networks and creating added support structures for each other.

The OVPF is also happy to support important discussions on topics that may impact our faculty community, such as the information provided to faculty on the topic of the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard Supreme Court decision regarding undergraduate admissions. I can collaborate with faculty officers and other faculty groups to convene faculty around specific topics that are of high interest and relevance. More recently, I have also been working with the Office of the President on a new Presidential lecture series that will provide faculty a chance to hear exciting research topics from fellow faculty.

Another aspect of my role to advance climate and community is to act as a resource for faculty to address conflicts and develop constructive solutions.

As such, one of my charges is to understand the current faculty complaint systems and make recommendations for possible improvements. Here, the FAC has worked with me to engage with both key staff involved in handling of faculty complaint processes and with faculty to understand potential areas for improvement and have recommended that I work in partnership with the provost and chancellor, using input from external and our own internal expertise to examine processes at our peer institutions and consider best practices to inform aspects of our procedures. A separate recommendation from the FAC is to provide an alternative mode of conflict resolution between faculty that might be chosen as an option for the many cases when issues might be resolved through a mediative process. This alternative mode could take the form of a senior faculty advisory group of peers that hears complaints or concerns and determines proposed solutions. Additional approaches could include increased resources for approaches such as restorative mediation.

Finally, as vice provost I am often called to engage in committees or activities in which community needs are discussed or addressed. Examples include membership in the Ad Hoc Committee on Academic Freedom and Campus Expression (CAFCE), and participation in search committees for academic leaders and key Institute staff in faculty-facing roles.

Conclusion

Across these three areas as defined, there are connecting themes that are at the core of the office. These include: providing tools and skills for faculty to grow and advance in their career and to achieve their goals; building and expanding a culture of mentorship that provides greater opportunities for us to learn from and support each other at every career point and allow new generations of faculty to thrive; and finding means of increasing and enhancing our engagement, whether it is in a learning setting or a community gathering.

I have learned a great deal in what feels like a very short year. I am grateful to all those who have provided input formally and informally and who shared their wisdom and experience. I hope that you continue to share your thoughts and concerns with me, and that you are patient as the office expands into its new areas of growth and we begin to build out programs and efforts. I remain excited about this role and hope that it provides an opportunity to help make MIT an even better environment for advancing knowledge for our faculty.

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