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Professional Development Committee Meeting
September 29, 2000

Anne Mayhew reported on changes in the Grad School Professional Development program. Highlights include the following:

• At most $150,000 is available this year for professional development awards.
• Grants are no longer available to support summer stipends. € Contingent employees are no longer eligible to apply for awards.
• Beginning this year, proposals may be submitted throughout the year, with no one deadline. Awards will be announced in the middle of each month.
• Awards will range from $1,000 to $5,000 and will fall into two categories: 1) Planning and seed money grants, which are meant to encourage faculty to apply for outside finding such as NEH or private money. 2) Grants for professional training in research or to develop new courses. This category should be especially useful to faculty members whose scholarly careers have been languishing.
• The Foreign Language Aquisition and travel program will no longer be funded by the Grad School, and its $3,600 cost will instead be used to fund a graduate fellowship. Anne suggested that our committee recommend that faculty members who wish to attend a faculty-only language class support it by paying their share of the tuition (perhaps 1/20 of the $3,600). The grad school would arrange for a teacher to be hired through the Modern Foreign Language Department, so that the teacher could receive benefits. The travel portion of the program will not be supported.
• Anne suggested that our committee might ask for briefings by Zoe Hoyle of the Research Office and/or Dwayne McCay [sp?], VP for Research and Info. Technology, concerning resources available to faculty, such as databases of available funding sources.

     Our first job is to discover what is being done on campus.
     A flyer has been put out by the University of Tennessee GTA mentoring program, detailing specific duties of mentors etc. The address for more information is mentoring@utk.edu
     Benita noted that Jo Lynch chairs a committee on mentoring for the Commission on Women. Betsy will ask Jo to share her material with us.
     Elizabeth volunteered to contact deans to determine what programs are already in place in the departments and colleges. We agreed to use e-mail to refine into a workable list of questions the ideas that we generated at the meeting. One suggestion was that we should aim for about eight easily codable questions and one open-ended question. Please e-mail all recipients with any suggestions.
     Here are the ideas that we generated:

• Do you have a mentoring program in the bylaws?
• Do you have a mentoring program currently in operation?
• What are the requirements and expectations of mentor and mentee? Do they include attending each other's classes? Accompanying the mentee to professional meetings? Advocating for the mentee at tenure and post-tenure evaluations? Advising on or managing the mentee's written applications?
• Is there any other linkage beteen mentoring and evaluations of the mentee?
• Does quasi-mentoring occur? If so, what does it involve?
• Does mentoring address research, teaching, and service?
• Do you have a procedure for monitoring the success of the mentoring program?
• What are the most successful and the least successful aspects of the mentoring program?
• Do you (deans) have any recommendations for improving these questions?

Jon Coddington volunteered to be our liaison to the Task Force on Contingent Employment. Anne recommended that GTAs be excluded from the category of contingent employees. Benita noted that some permanent employees, like curators at the museum, seem to fit under the definition. She suggested that the category be subdivided more finely, listing, e.g., adjunct faculty, non-faculty librarians, curators. Jon noted that the professional development needs and problems of contingent employees may differ between those in professional and academic departments. Elizabeth noted that contingent employees at Catholic University are called 'Associates of the Faculty.'

Jon suggested that our committee send out a questionnaire to people who have participated in the language and travel program to see how their teaching or research has benefited. He alo suggested that we find out what programs our peer institutions have in place to promote professional development. (We did this, to some extent, in our research last year on professional leave programs. After we refine the questionnaire for Elizabeth to send the deans, perhaps we will want to discuss whether and how to use it to poll other institutions.)