New Tenure-Track Faculty Orientation
Caption: New Faculty Orientation at the Ferman Presentation Room
New Tenure-Track Faculty Survey Helps Introduce CSUN Faculty Hires to Students and Fellow Faculty
Director of Faculty Development, Whitney Scott, shares the process of new faculty orientation
When a new tenure-track faculty member comes to CSUN, they don’t just step onto campus and start teaching. There’s a historical process that, according to Director of Faculty Development Whitney Scott, includes a four-day orientation two weeks before the semester begins (August 13 to 16, 2024), a survey that includes questions about their terminal degree, research interests, and unique teaching methods, and a digital flip book available to CSUN students and staff.
And with 42 new tenure-track faculty starting at CSUN for the 2024-2025 school year, you can imagine the process was complex, and preparation for the orientation intense.
“It’s our biggest event of the year,” Scott says. “And it is so important.
“The top-of-mind objective for us—and what so many institutions actually do ineffectively—is to prioritize information critical for them the first few weeks at CSUN. We are trying to prepare them so that they can go into their first week with a sense of readiness, but not feeling overwhelmed,” Scott explains. “We realized that a ‘fire hose’ approach to information is not productive.”
Scott remembers a professor who told her that during their first week of classes, a student asked for help with campus resources, and the student was “in a state of distress,” she says. “The professor said that because of the tours at new faculty orientation, they were able to not only tell the student exactly where to go, they could describe what would happen when they got there.”
The objectives of the orientation also include providing clarity about the campus’ efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, and finally, focusing on the wellness and confidence of new faculty. “Because, after all, they’re not sleeping, they’re not eating, they don’t know where things are,” Scott says. “We make an effort to affirm the multiple identities of our community. We talk about gender and race and ethnicity throughout the whole event so people can find their communities. For instance, if you have children, who are the other parents in the room? If you have caretaking responsibilities, who might be a source of information and support around that?”
A Virtual Flip Book
Another time-intensive job is the annual “yearbook” Scott, her staff and students produce. “When I first started here, 22 years ago, we created a yearbook with photos and profiles of all the new staff,” Scott says. “I look at a copy of the 2013-2014 issue and these people are department heads now!”
It used to be a physical book, but starting with the pandemic, when the orientation had to be on Zoom, staff pivoted to a digital version of the yearbook. “It’s now kind of a digital flip book that we use information from the surveys to populate,” Scott continues, “Then on the final day of the orientation we put it up on the screen.”
Making the Most of Orientation
One standout new faculty member from this year’s orientation is Seven Bailey, from the Music Department, who was deeply involved in making connections with his colleagues, “meeting every single human at the resource tables, and really infusing himself into the community,” says Scott. “Then, when September came around, he got involved with an event called ‘The State of Hip Hop, Past, Present, Future’ within weeks of joining CSUN.
Then, there are the stories of Bianca Villalobos and Juventino Hernandez, who were both hired in the Psychology Department and then after they were hired, revealed to the reviewers that they are a married couple. And Nancy Perez, Associate Professor Department of Central American and Transborder Studies who got both her undergrad and masters’ degrees at CSUN, where she participated in the student activism during her time on campus, and who came back to us as a professor.
What’s evident is that the recently made changes to the hiring process, and the efforts to reflect the diversity of CSUN students in its faculty, is creating a faculty primed for success, and that leads to student success as well.