Described as the “bridge between faculty generations” (Baldwin and Chang, Liberal Education, 92(4), 28–35, 2006), mid-career faculty members play an important role in colleges and universities. Mid-career faculty members serve as mentors to early career colleagues and occupy critical leadership roles, formal and informal, on their respective campuses (Baker et al. Developing faculty in liberal arts colleges: Aligning individual needs and organizational goals. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017a, 2018). Yet, mid-career faculty members often assume these roles with little to no support to be successful in these roles and often to the detriment of their own career advancement (Baker, Lunsford, Pifer; Ward and Wolf-Wendel, Academic motherhood: How faculty manage work and family. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012). Despite the importance of mid-career faculty to a thriving academy, there is an opportunity for those tasked with faculty development responsibilities to better understand the experiences of their mid-career faculties, particularly women and other underrepresented academics, and to provide appropriate and adequate career-stage-specific supports. An important question arises: how can colleges and universities better support their mid-career faculty? This chapter presents a meta-synthesis of four decades of research and practice focused on mid-career faculty and offers an agenda moving forward to better serve this faculty population.
A Mid-Career Faculty Agenda: A Review of Four Decades of Research and Practice