The ADVANCE Initiative—Changing the Face of Michigan Tech

In September 2018, NSF awarded a $1 million ADVANCE Adaptation grant to a team of Michigan Tech faculty: PI Adrienne Minerick (SoT) and Co-PIs Sonia Goltz (SBE), Audrey Mayer (SFRES), Patricia Sotirin (HU), and Andrew Storer (SFRES). The three-year grant will focus on adapting programs from other ADVANCE institutions to fit the Michigan Tech culture in order to promote faculty success, promotion, and retention. Michigan Tech has been a participant in the NSF ADVANCE vision of STEM equity and campus-wide faculty advancement since 2006. See ADVANCE at Michigan Tech for activities, programs, and policies 2006-2016.

• Early Career Management program (ECM)—Adapted from the University of Michigan’s STRIDE suite of faculty mentoring and faculty development programs. The ECMs involve first-year support teams for new faculty. The teams engage the issues particular to each faculty member’s successful management of research, teaching, and service responsibilities.

• Diversity Literacy Online Workshop—a mandatory faculty bias literacy workshop introducing concepts of implicit bias, accumulation of disadvantage, and micro-practices that encumber selection, hiring, and promotion processes. The Workshop also includes a Legal Aspects training component.

• Michigan Tech Allies and Advocates—Adapted from North Dakota State University’s FORWARD Allies and Advocates program. This highly successful program uses restorative justice and broad engagement to change university culture. It does this by training men as allies and advocates who can influence from within the faculty. An invited seminar by Roger Green, North Dakota State University, inaugurated this program at Michigan Tech and additional workshops are planned.

• Advanced Career Management (ACM)—ACM is directed to associate professors and will offer several programs designed to enhance career development. These include workshops addressing possible career tracks (e.g., administration, Fulbright, publishing, grant-funded research, etc.); coaching, mentoring, and networking opportunities; and information resources supporting career advancement. The ACM activities are planned to begin in Fall 2019. ACM is adapted from the University of Michigan’s LIFT program.

• Advanced Matrix Process for University Programs (AMP-UP)—a Lean Continuous Improvement (CI) process to dynamically identify, plan, implement, assess, and adjust policies, practices, and programs to enhance faculty success and increase retention. This is a pilot project to implement a transformative and sustainable process of improvement in academic processes.

• Professional Development Training (DET)—Adapted from Iowa State University’s ADVANCE Department Enhancement Program (DEP), which combines a departmental level quantitative and qualitative deep dive assessment and a yearlong professional development program for department chairs to learn how to recognize and respond to intersectional inequities and cultivate positive climates.