BU Launches New Faculty Development Office
A conversation with Vincent Stephens, who will lead the office with a mission to advance the intellectual growth and professional development of faculty
Vincent Stephens, leader of BU’s new Faculty Development office, says it will help faculty, whatever their rank, with research, teaching, and publishing questions, as well as increase their sense of community.
BU Launches New Faculty Development Office
A conversation with Vincent Stephens, who will lead the office with a mission to advance the intellectual growth and professional development of faculty
In September, Vincent Stephens became Boston University’s assistant provost for faculty development and success, leading the University’s new Faculty Development office. Stephens brings broad academic, classroom, and administrative experience to the job, most recently as associate dean for diversity and inclusion at the College of Arts & Sciences. Before coming to BU, he ran a center for race and ethnicity at Dickinson College and a multicultural services office for students at Bucknell University. Stephens recently discussed with BU Today how the new office will support faculty.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q&A
with Vincent Stephens
BU Today: How will the Faculty Development office advance the University’s priority of fostering faculty excellence?
Stephens: President Melissa Gilliam has identified faculty development as a key pillar for the University’s advancement in supporting and elevating the work of our current faculty, as well amplifying the reputation and the profile of BU. Our mission is to advance the intellectual growth and professional development of faculty by offering impactful educational practice opportunities across ranks, disciplines, and colleges—addressing research and scholarship, pedagogy, leadership development, opportunities related to awards and grants and funding. We are part of a network of offices and academic centers that are devoted to elevating and supporting the needs of our faculty.
BU Today: Why is this office so important now?
At BU, faculty development has largely been the domain of our individual colleges. But the schools and colleges are different, and their faculty may need different things. We really should invest in centralizing certain resources. Part of it is just an equity issue. The School of Hospitality Administration has 10 full-time faculty, whereas the College of Arts & Sciences has hundreds. The resources and the scope of that are just going to operate differently.
We have been meeting with folks at nearly every college at the University over the last few months. What’s important is being able to bring those folks together as a community and talk.
If you’re a new faculty member, we’ll be able to offer you onboarding, so you can learn more about the resources at the University and to help you think about what teaching is going to be like for undergraduate and graduate students. If you are new to the professoriate, what are the most effective ways to balance pedagogical responsibilities and research? For example, in the College of Communication, we have folks who are screenwriters, filmmakers, journalists—not academically trained. Are we helping them transition to the classroom?
It’s important to have an office devoted full-time to helping faculty understand what’s needed for promotion—whether they’re on the tenure track or not—as well as retention. We should offer our faculty an experience that’s so supportive and engaged that they want to stay.
BU Today: Do you have a personal approach to faculty development you can talk about?
Our faculty are not a monolith. We have faculty who are primarily in the role of a lecturer; teaching is the primary expectation. We have folks who are clinical faculty, research faculty. Faculty in our military education program have a very different experience because they are both employees of BU and of the federal government. Colleges like Metropolitan College and COM have part-time and adjunct faculty. They’re working professionals [off campus], whether they’re a financier or journalist or whatever.
Being attuned to those nuances is important. How do we demystify things? How do we make tenure or promotion more visible? How do we help them feel connected to the community? For me, everything that we do has to be educational.
I decided we’re going to have a new-and-early-career faculty resource fair. In the fall, we had our first event at the Photonics Center, with 19 different academic centers and offices. It was an opportunity for folks to learn about Foundation Relations, Disability and Access Services, the Institute for Excellence in Teaching & Learning. I would love for it to be an annual opportunity. It was well attended. I would love to offer something similar on the Medical Campus.
I am very invested in relationship-building. It’s one thing to send out an email and say, We have this office. It’s something else to really talk to people, to learn who they are, what they need, what they’ve experienced, and build that trust.
BU is large, and sometimes people don’t engage. Our job is to make it smaller, to bring people together.
BU Today: What can people expect from Faculty Development in the coming months?
The office will have a director focused on mentoring, onboarding, and professional development. We will also have two faculty fellows; one will focus on STEM and one will focus on the social sciences or humanities. I, the director, and most likely the fellows will offer consulting hours, when a faculty member just needs to talk.
We are going to launch our own mentoring institute to support and complement [the schools’ and colleges’ mentoring], to create opportunities for folks who want to mentor, to learn what it means to be an effective mentor. We’re also going to create opportunities for mentees to learn what’s expected of them—how they maximize mentoring opportunities—as well as building a community for them.
We’ll have a comprehensive onboarding program for our new and early-career faculty to offer workshops that relate to research, such as grant writing workshops, workshops on writing books or articles.
The Institute for Excellence in Teaching & Learning is developing a course-design institute. We will partner on that. Sometimes faculty have been teaching a course for years, and they need to refresh. We have folks trying to make sure that their courses fulfill objectives from the BU Hub. We’ll work with folks to think about that and about best practices in pedagogy.
Once folks achieve tenure or promotion, they need a space to pause. What if you’re, say, an associate professor and want to be a full professor—when should you start thinking about the seeds for that next step? Or you’re a senior lecturer—what do you need to do to work to become a master lecturer? A post-promotion retreat, for folks to talk, to think about how might my teaching change? How might my research change? Are there awards, funding opportunities, fellowships, grants, that I should consider to elevate my work? To be promoted to full professor, the expectation is that you have broadened understanding and recognition of your contributions. Folks often need some scaffolding to get there.
BU is large, and sometimes people don’t engage across disciplines, across colleges. Our job is to make it smaller, to bring people together.
There will be an opening ceremony for the Faculty Development office (755 Commonwealth Ave., Suite 102) on Thursday, February 5, from 10 to 11:30 am, with remarks by President Melissa Gilliam and Provost Gloria Waters.