"Promotes a culture of hazing"

I was forwarded an article by a friend titled, "Sink or Swim" by the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity founder and CEO, Kerry Ann Rockquemore.  First - who knew there was actually a center for faculty development and diversity?!?  And second, why am I just hearing about this now?!? (waiting anxiously for  final word on tenure and promotion to come down from on high...tap..tap..tap...).

We all know the background.  The climb toward tenure is shrouded in mystery, the poorly marked path changes with no notice, and there are frequent, unexpected hurdles that everyone has to figure out how to overcome on their own.  Senior faculty view their own progress toward tenure as having been miserable, thus if younger faculty can't suffer through the same misery, they don't deserve to be here. Sink or Swim.

Kerry Ann's article makes a convincing argument that the old "sink or swim" model of early faculty years is simply bad business. From Kerry Ann: 

Sink or swim is... "inefficient because it takes time and energy away from actually doing the jobs they were hired to do. It's ineffective because whether people are good at navigating organizational structures and politics has little relationship to the quality of their research and teaching. Sink or swim also fails the most basic cost-benefit analysis because the time, energy and resources required to replace a faculty member who may have been a great researcher but failed the test of "figuring things out" far exceeds the cost of providing new faculty with mentoring and support they need. And it is organizationally unhealthy because it sustains a hazing culture where people respond to their own painful initiation experiences by reproducing them on others."

That last part really got me. It sustains a culture of hazing.

The damage to me has been done. My P&T journey is at an end one way or the other because Sink or Swim culminates in  Up or Out.  But now that I am a mentor - Am I reproducing the same culture on my trainees?  It's sort of like bad parenting.  How do you break negative patterns and stop passing on the damage to your own kids?

More important still, how do we change the academic culture away from a model where Sink or Swim arbitrarily whittles down the faculty ranks to one where a deliberate decision in made to invest in people?

Check out NCFF . It seems like a great place to start.