
Becoming an Informal Faculty Mentor
Think for a moment about your faculty colleagues who have generously shared their time and talents to help you thrive in academia. Much of your current success may be due to faculty mentors.

Think for a moment about your faculty colleagues who have generously shared their time and talents to help you thrive in academia. Much of your current success may be due to faculty mentors.

In January, Mary Ruskell (a high school senior) wrote about her experiences with generative AI for CNN. She writes eloquently about the existential questions she is facing as this technology makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. Generative AI has made mistrust

Higher education faculty work with a wide range of adults, from first-year undergraduates to advanced graduate students to faculty colleagues and other professionals. Since learning can happen anywhere, at any time, our roles vary as mentors, facilitators, and coaches. Ultimately, our students are all considered

Geniuses are inherently fascinating. The notion that a lucky few have innate abilities to push the boundaries of what’s possible and rise far above us mere mortals gives hope that humankind can progress to unimaginable levels, even as it reminds most of us that we’re

Recently, a student sent me a political news article with the comment “Things are falling apart.” I didn’t reply right away, because I sensed they were looking for reassurance—and deep down, I felt that no matter what I said, they wouldn’t believe me. It’s hard

In teaching, unaddressed countertransference has profound implications for educators and students alike. Consider the story of my past student who experienced heart-wrenching life circumstances during the semester: He lost both parents and became the primary caregiver for his younger siblings. Naturally, his GPA fell significantly

Just ahead of the spring semester’s start, I received an email from a colleague who had been on a yearlong sabbatical, and the subject read, “Returning, somewhat trembling, to that brave new world.” The body of the email went on to acknowledge the growth of

“Did you hang up my Hamlet drawing yet?” my 11-year-old daughter asked me. “I sure did!” I replied. “Right on my office door.”
Just months earlier, my answer would have been markedly different. But this was the beginning of 2024, and my mentoring goal for

Over the past several years, I have had the deep privilege of participating in The Way of Remembering (WOR), a spiritually grounded journey to Benin that looks at intergenerational trauma and healing through the lens of African ways of knowing. Benin is a beautiful country

I’ve often felt that a teacher’s life is suspended, Janus-like, between past experiences and future hopes; it’s only fitting, then, that I’m preparing for this new year by looking back. Here’s a countdown of last year’s gratitude journal entries that reminded me how kind, clever,