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
In August 2024, the Ivy+ Faculty Advancement Network received support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a one-year project in collaboration with The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard University, the 2040 Strategy Group, and Story As. Details on the effort, which involves focus groups, a survey, and “storytelling for impact” workshops among other activities, will be published after the work is fully underway.
In 2023, FAN was awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch the Ivy+ Mellon Leadership Fellows program, which aims to increase the representation of humanities faculty members occupying the highest administrative offices in the academy. Nine FAN members together appointed a cohort of tenured faculty as Ivy+ Mellon Leadership Fellows to undergo a comprehensive program of equity-minded skill development in academic leadership and governance over a period of at least two years.
Participating members include Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, UPenn, and Yale.
Across our member campuses, a cohort of 50 Fellows have been selected 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.
Prior Collaborations
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, audit, 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.