CRL is focused on faculty mentoring. Ample evidence suggests that faculty mentorship is a valuable resource for imparting career guidance, transmitting social and cultural capital, creating robust structures of support for institutional processes, such as tenure and promotion. A small but consistent body of research reveals that mentoring plays a critical role in the promotion and retention of historically underrepresented faculty. However, research also suggests that faculty from underrepresented backgrounds are less likely to receive mentorship, highlighting the need for intentional support that is both validating and inclusive.
CRL contributes to filling this gap by building and incubating research-based mentoring programs that do three things: (1) improve performance, belonging, and well being for underrepresented faculty at UCSC; (2) catalyze cutting edge interdisciplinary research that leads to large external grants; and (3) inform programmatic design that can be scaled across UCSC and, subsequently, nationally.
The research-based design of our programmatics is informed by the leadership of CRL’s Associate Director for Research, Prof. Rebecca Covarrubias, whose groundbreaking research explores interventions that improve performance, belonging, and well-being of dominant and minoritized group members in school settings. We deploy an incubator model, which draws on this cutting edge theoretical work to: (1) create pilot programs that apply these theoretical interventions empirically; and (2) build culturally relevant assessment models to evaluate the success of our pilot interventions in improving performance of students and faculty participants in our programs.