Basic Guidelines for New Faculty and Mentors

We hope that new faculty members will make long-term collegial connections with the mentors assigned to them through this program, but we do not require formal meetings beyond the first year.

Please arrange to meet approximately once a month for the first semester and at least twice in the second semester of the new faculty member’s appointment.

The Center for Teaching Excellence has a Maine Card that the mentor can borrow to purchase lunch and coffee several times. Please call 581.3475 to borrow a card. Do remember to get it back to the center as soon as you can.

We want everyone to be comfortable with these pairings, so we are asking all to keep meetings collegial and professional.

Appropriate topics of conversation are research programs, hopes, contacts, funding, planning, etc.; University policies, missions, and governance; teaching experiences, lore, theory, and innovations; service experiences and opportunities; time-management and priorities in the probationary period; Maine and its communities, cultural opportunities, issues, and needs.

It may sometimes be appropriate to talk about the context of the professional life (i.e. one’s life as a person) in terms of time-management and priorities. A collegial level of this kind of personal talk is also appropriate if both are comfortable with that.

Both parties should feel that anything said to the other will be kept in the strictest confidence (unless it is something that must be reported for reasons of safety).

If either member of a mentor pairing wants to end it, he or she should contact the Supervisor right away. We will honor that wish, inform the other faculty member, and ask the other person to not pursue the reasons.