Mentoring graduate students in an era of faculty career restructuring

ABSTRACT

The past three decades have witnessed a major restructuring in faculty appointments and careers. Tenure-track and tenured faculty are declining as a share of the professoriate while non-tenure track positions, part-time and full-time, are soaring. Yet many in academia have an incomplete or simplistic knowledge of the nature of this fastest-growing segment of the professoriate and continue to mentor and prepare graduate students solely for tenure-track positions with distributed responsibilities in research, teaching and service. For us to become better mentors, we must understand the profound changes that are underway in the academic job market. This paper discusses the factors that have led to the restructuring of faculty appointments and careers, describes the nature of the new faculty positions, and provides guidance on how we can become better mentors to our graduate students seeking academic appointments.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• faculty careers
• graduate students
• geography

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the JGHE editorial board for the invitation to deliver the 2018 JGHE lecture on which this paper is based. I thank my colleagues Risa Palm, Jenny Zorn, and Lisa Armistead for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.