Why the Faculty Forum? Why is Scholarship Mentoring Necessary?
Scholarship does not occur in isolation. Faculty today are often interested in participating in all kinds of scholarship, yet the necessary collegial support no longer exists. The Faculty Forum is a unique response to these changes in higher education. It fills a gap created in the past few decades by current economic trends.
Absence of Scholarship Mentoring in Higher Education Today
The scholarship mentoring once provided by close-knit academic departments has slowly disappeared. Universities increasingly rely on adjunct professors for budgetary reasons, who often only have time to show up to teach classes and have little role in or compensation for involvement in the school's departmental life or any extraneous activities beyond simple instruction. Junior faculty often have little contact with more experienced mentors of scholarship. In this current "silent revolution," a scholarship mentoring program such as the Faculty Forum is especially needed to replace the former naturally occurring scholarship guidance and ongoing support.
Scholarship Mentoring Helps All Levels of Faculty
The Faculty Forum works just as well for both experienced, senior professors as for novice professors who have never participated in scholarship. Since scholarship rarely occurs in isolation, the support of peers is often the single most important factor in determining whether or not a professor produces scholarship or not. All professors, including those who frequent present or publish and those who have never done so, can benefit from the feedback offered in the Forum's workshops and the information and support made available through the process of participating in the Forum.
For junior faculty, the Faculty Forum serves as a "how to" resource, with information coming from both contributing peers, the website, and the consulting services of P&P; for experienced faculty, the Faculty Forum serves as a motivating tool (deadlines and peer involvement) and a means to improve and perfect their work, though peer feedback in writing workshops.
Rose and McClafferty, who instituted a similar scholarship mentoring program for their graduate students at UCLA, note that the quality of scholarly writing in the academy today is widely criticized; the Forum's workshops provide professors the needed writing feedback as their work is in progress.
Scholarship Activity Benefits a Variety of Institutional Types
The activities supported by the Faculty Forum are beneficial to the institution as well as the faculty member - whether the institution is primarily a "teaching" institution or whether it already places a clear value on scholarship for its own sake. That's because scholarship improves education quality -- academic involvement in professors' respective disciplines and organizations improves and increases their content knowledge and professional currency, and reduces teacher burnout. Faculty publishing and professional presentations also improve an institution's "resume" to outside evaluators, and increases student respect and satisfaction. The Faculty Forum increases professionalization - professional organization involvement and discipline depth and currency - improving the quality of higher education overall.
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