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There is a need to support midcareer faculty who have demonstrated scholarly success but require additional development. The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of an initiative for “star faculty” at midcareer, with an emphasis on the role of exceptional others in their professional growth.

This is an exploratory, single-site case study of a midcareer faculty excellence initiative. Data sources include document/site analysis and individual interviews.

Findings reveal the value of “exceptional others” in professional growth among high-performing midcareer faculty. Perceptions about excellence at midcareer emerged as an antecedent to developing midcareer faculty members. Analysis generated themes in behaviors related to supporting midcareer scholars’ professional growth.

This study is an initial step toward refining concepts such as exceptional others, academic stars and scholarly advancement within the academy. There is a need for equity-minded research about these topics. In addition to replication across institutional and disciplinary contexts, there is also a need for longitudinal mixed-methods studies of midcareer faculty mentoring outcomes over time.

The study points to the role of the institution and its senior faculty in fostering midcareer scholarly excellence. Mentoring and development around individualized goals may be of value in addition to an emphasis on clarity around institutional expectations and norms in faculty performance reviews.

Midcareer faculty are a crucial component of the academy, yet they are often overlooked as needing career support, resources and development. This study focuses on mentoring and coaching for postsecondary faculty at midcareer and the role of exceptional others in facilitating faculty professional growth.

The purpose of this study, nested within a broader study about higher education leadership, was to generate knowledge about the ways in which doctoral education prepared people for leadership roles in postsecondary institutions within the USA. At colleges and universities, there is an interest in ensuring diverse leadership teams and welcoming campus environments. Yet, the research demonstrates challenges for and underrepresentation among higher education leaders. One point of intervention is doctoral programs in higher education and related fields, given the professional socialization, identity formation and knowledge acquisition that occurs through the doctoral journey.

By conducting interviews with women who hold doctorates in the field of higher education and who took on new leadership roles at postsecondary institutions in the USA during the global health pandemic, the authors identified specific areas for which doctoral-level training and experiences may be helpful in supporting leader development.

The authors identified specific areas for which doctoral-level training and experiences may be helpful in supporting leader development. Based on those findings, the authors offer initial propositions about how doctoral programs might support the development of equity-minded leaders in higher education, which should be tested and refined through further research, theory development and application to practice.

This paper contributes by providing a focus on the ways in which doctoral programs can equitably train and develop equity-minded leaders for a range of career goals including but not limited to academic appointments in higher education.

The aim of this conceptual paper is to explore Mentor-protégé fit as important to the selection and development of successful doctoral student–faculty mentoring relationships. We suggest that the student–faculty relationship in doctoral education is an additional and previously untested type of Mentor-protégé fit.

Generated from an existing framework of identity in the academy, we explore how three types of identity (professional, relational, personal) may influence students’ fit assessments as they seek to initiate and develop relationships.

We offer propositions for research to further explore the potential application of the proposed framework to knowledge generation about the doctoral student experience.

While the research about doctoral education has considered all three aspects of students’ identities individually, it has not explicated the ways in which these intersecting identities relate to students’ needs and expectations related to mentoring, their choices related to mentor selection, or the effectiveness and outcomes of mentoring relationships in fostering success and satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to understand faculty mentoring experiences across career stages and the influence of mentoring relationship quality on job satisfaction. The study participants were faculty members from a consortium of liberal arts colleges in the USA. The theoretical lens draws from scholarship on career stages, developmental networks, and working alliances.

The analysis is based on a subset of 415 faculty member responses about mentoring from a larger data set on faculty development. The online survey was conducted in Spring 2014. Frequencies, χ², regression equations, and confirmatory factor analysis were computed using R statistical software.

Over half the faculty members were both mentors and protégés; although, a sizable minority of faculty members did not engage in mentoring. Early-career faculty members were significantly more likely to have a mentor than were mid- or late-career faculty members. For both mentors and protégés, the higher they rated the quality of the mentoring relationship, the more job satisfaction they reported; this finding was greatest for mid-career (associate rank) faculty members. Participants reported significantly higher relationship quality with their mentors than with their protégés.

The results may not generalize to faculty members who work at other institution types, for example, research-intensive or two-year schools, or to non-US higher education contexts. Statements made regarding those who do not participate in mentoring are speculative on the part of the authors.

Institutions may need to develop support for faculty members who may not desire to engage in mentoring. More attention may be warranted to create individual and institutional supports focused on high-quality mentoring.

This study extends the literature on mentoring by establishing that many employees serve in mentor and protégé roles simultaneously. Further, employees engage in mentoring relationships across career stages as mentors and as protégés. The authors developed a reliable measure of mentoring relationship quality that may be used in future mentoring studies. Higher quality mentoring relationships were associated with significantly greater job satisfaction.

In this chapter, we review the ways in which scholars have conceptualized and relied on the notion of identity to understand the academic career. We explore the use of identity as a theoretical construct in research about the experience of being an academic. We discuss the individual and organizational factors that scholars have focused on when seeking to understand the role of professional and personal identity in academic careers, as well as recent and emerging shifts in the use of identity within this line of scholarship. Research suggests that if we are to understand the future of the academic career, we must understand the identities of its current and prospective members and, more importantly, how those identities shape goals, behaviors, and outcomes. We close with recommendations for future research and theory development.