Newsletter Late Spring 2020

AdvanceRIT has prepared a variety of tip sheets covering many topics, including effective communication, mentoring, and unconscious bias. In this newsletter we are highlighting two of the tip sheets:

The Chair's Role in New Faculty Mentoring: This tip sheet provides a helpful checklist of what the chair’s duties are to new faculty hires. The checklist starts with preparing members of the department for the new hire’s arrival to then later on introducing and warmly introduce the new faculty member to students, and finally ensuring that professional-development workshops are being offered every year for faculty.

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Equity Issues for Faculty Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic

AdvanceRIT has been asked by Associate Provost Carmie Garzione to identify challenges arising for faculty related and suggest strategies for mitigating these issues.  COVID-19 has impacted faculty not only by making it difficult to support their students as they are challenged with a new online platform, but also they are faced with professional setbacks as they struggle to maintain research and deal with the “tenure clock extensions.”

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RIT Family Leave Task Force

The Family Leave Task Force was charged by Associate Provost Carmie Garzione in the Fall of 2019 with the purpose of ensuring that RIT’s Family Leave policies and practices promote the career success of faculty who utilize this leave. In a collaborative effort; the Office of Academic Affairs, the Parental Leave sub-committee of the Faculty Affairs Committee (FAC) of the Academic Senate, the Council for the Representation and Engagement of Women (CREW), and Human Resources assembled this Task Force to benchmark and review family and parental leave policies.

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2019 Academic Year Connect Grants-featuring overviews of two of this round’s projects led by Lindsay Schenkel(COLA) and Patricia Taboada-Serrano (KGCOE)

The Connect Grants program, currently in its 7th funding round, supports faculty career development and advancement as well as academic unit-level culture change initiatives and faculty recruitment approaches through awarding mini-grants.  Funded projects align with the goals and objectives of the AdvanceRIT program.  Connect Grants are offered through the AdvanceRIT program within the Office of the Provost with advisory support from Faculty Career Development, the Division of Diversity and Inclusion, and Sponsored Research Services.  The program’s target audience is all tenured and pre-tenured faculty at RIT.

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Message from outgoing AdvanaceRIT Founding Director and NSF PI; Professor Margaret Bailey, Ph.D., P.E.

The “Advance journey” at RIT that I have been able to witness and influence began sixteen years ago in 2004 at Java Wally’s when a group of women faculty and administrators brainstormed the term WE@RIT to represent what we imagined could be created within the college of engineering to address the severe under-representation of women engineering students.  At that point, the college enrolled less than 10% women undergraduates and yet this was the nation’s only engineering college named solely for a woman.

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A Message from the Director of AdvanceRIT; Professor Betsy Dell

Dear Colleagues, I am struggling to find the right words for the occasion as I step in to lead AdvanceRIT, in the midst of a national crisis and global pandemic. I understand that organizations like AdvanceRIT are not neutral players and our words need to be backed up by actions. The office issued a statement of solidarity with the Black community.  We have included this statement in the newsletter and encourage everyone to use the resources to learn, reflect and take action.

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