AGEP-Transformation: The CIC Professorial Advancement Initiative

The CIC Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate's Professional Advancement Initiative (PAI) was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 12-554) for the AGEP-Transformation (AGEP-T) track. The AGEP-T track targets strategic alliances of institutions and organizations to develop, implement, and study innovative evidence-based models and standards for STEM graduate education, postdoctoral training, and academic STEM career preparation that eliminate or mitigate negative factors and promote positive practices for URMs.

The CIC AGEP PAI is a collaboration between the University of Illinois-Champaign (UIUC) and Purdue University (PU) to partner with other university members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC): Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Alliance is creating a 'Professorial Advancement Initiativ' (PAI) with a goal to increase the number of underrepresented minority (URM) faculty members hired within the CIC partnering institutions. The PAI Alliance participants are URM U.S. citizen in STEM fields. The two objectives for this project are:

Objective 1: To create a pool of URM post-doctoral fellows, prepared and trained to enter the academy as tenure track facility.

Objective 2: To educate faculty and faculty search committees about unconscious bias and diversity hiring.

The objectives have the following measureable outcomes associated with them:

1. The number of URM postdocs recruited into the PAI.

2. The number of PAI applications submitted to the CIC partnering institutions.

3. The number of URM postdocs interviewed with the CIC partnering institutions.

4. The number of offers extended to URMs in the CIC partnering institutions.

5. The number of offers accepted.

6. The number of faculty mentors recruited to participate in the PAI.

7. The number of faculty members participating in PAI hiring committee training program.

The activities that contribute to the model for the CIC's AGEP PAI include implementing:

- A program of small group mentoring for URM postdoctoral fellows across STEM disciplines in the CIC partnering institutions;

- Interactive video-teleconferences for mentors and protégés (aka, the postdoctoral fellows); and

- A program for training faculty and hiring committees.

The proposal includes a social science research study focusing on determining how the mentoring environment, ranging from a micro-systems (e.g., peer-to-peer interactions, faculty-to-peer interactions) to macro-systems (e.g., broader social context), affects the self-efficacy and identity of postdoctoral fellows within their STEM disciplines. Specifically, the team is exploring answers to two primary questions that address the research goal of this project:

1. What is the influence of mentoring on URM postdoctoral fellows' self-efficacy and identities as STEM researchers?

2. How does the degree of importance that STEM postdoctoral fellows place on having a matched mentor background influence their self-efficacy and identities?

A third question explores the impacts of faculty bias on postdoctoral fellows: What is the influence of mentoring experience on faculty's subtle bias towards URM postdoctoral fellows' in STEM disciplines?