The ADVANCE adaptation project, Moving Beyond Boundaries to Promote Inclusive Faculty Success, enabled Marquette University to foster a community of practice approach to development of faculty support that is grounded in evidence-based best practices. This has led to specific outcomes during the grant period as well as sustainable activities that will continue to improve support for faculty success.  Activities focused on two primary goals: building effective long-term faculty recruitment practices and improving the workplace experience and policies that support faculty.  Over the course of the project, our ADVANCE programming also responded to the changing needs of faculty due to the pandemic and the challenges created by rapidly evolving landscape for higher education.

Campus programming included a series of events that drew from both external and internal experts on a wide range of topics related to faculty experience and best practices for inclusive faculty success.  The Marquette ADVANCE program also sponsored workshops and other training opportunities for individual departments as well as department chairs and other institutional leaders.  

Marquette ADVANCE adapted long-term relationship-building strategies and approaches developed at other ADVANCE sites to foster a culture of use of conference travel as a way to connect with faculty and students from other institutions, even when a department is not actively recruiting for a specific position.  Faculty who participated in this program shared their experiences, creating a community of practice among multiple departments across the colleges that house STEM and social, behavioral, and economic sciences departments. In addition, our ADVANCE Advocates and Allies group created a best-practices fact sheet for hiring committees.  The Advocates and Allies group also helped spearhead discussion among the members of the University Promotion and Tenure Committee that resulted in an advisory statement on avoiding bias to promote fairness in promotion and tenure decisions which was approved by the University committee and is now part of the materials for preparing dossiers for promotion and tenure.

Specific activities targeting faculty climate issues included analysis of the 2020 University climate study and creation of departmental and area (STEM and social/behavioral/economic sciences combined) dashboards for use in local-level evaluation.  Workshops and individual meetings were held to share insight into common challenges and best practices.  A follow-up involved use of a survey tool from the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics, KINDER, by the ADVANCE departments.  The Marquette ADVANCE program also contributed to the literature on faculty workplace experience and its relationship to student retention through a research study that built a novel theoretical model connecting faculty perceptions of human resources policy and reported campus workplace experience to create a shared perception of departmental diversity climate.  The study demonstrated the relationship between faculty experiences and graduate student perceptions of campus climate and students stated intent to stay in their program, contributing to the intellectual merit of the project as well as demonstrating broader impacts of faculty support on student retention.

In response to faculty challenges, particularly following the pandemic, a new approach to communities of practice was developed by our ADVANCE program to create sustainable institutional change on key priorities.  Identified as AMP (Advancing Marquette Priorities), two workstreams were developed with the goal of creating effective collaborative approaches to problem-solving.  The inaugural AMP workstream focused on improving grant post-award service, recognizing the importance of understanding both faculty and staff concerns and collaboratively building solutions.  The AMP post-award support project engaged with faculty and staff to define initial priorities and resulted in the development of a new user-friendly grants dashboard.  This initial success has led to building post award process improvement into the University’s new strategic plan in order to continue to collaboratively work on additional campus needs. 

The second AMP workstream, Building a Mentoring Culture, was launched in recognition of the need to collaborate across colleges and academic offices/centers to better support faculty mentoring.  Colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Improving Mentoring in Research (CIMER) presented two workshops on campus and a campus mentoring community of practice group has continued to collaborate on development and piloting of mentoring programs that will best meet the needs of our faculty.

Last Modified: 01/23/2025
Modified by: Jeanne M Hossenlopp