Mutual Mentoring for Early-Career and Underrepresented Faculty: Model, Research, and Practice

In the beginning, Mutual Mentoring was little more than an idea, a hopeful vision of the future in which a new model of mentoring could serve as a medium to better support early-career and underrepresented faculty. Over time, Mutual Mentoring evolved from an innovative idea to an ambitious pilot program to a fully operational, campus-wide initiative. This article describes the conceptualization, design, implementation, and evaluation of a Mutual Mentoring initiative from 2006 to 2014. Findings indicate that faculty members who participated in this initiative were more likely to regard mentoring as a career-enhancing activity as well as to develop mutually beneficial mentoring relationships than were their non-participating peers.