Introducing the MAVEN Leadership Training Initiative to diversify the scientific workforce

Addressing gender and racial-ethnic disparities at all career stages is a priority for the research community. In this article, we focus on efforts to encourage mid-career women, particularly women of color, to move into leadership positions in science and science policy. We highlight the need to strengthen leadership skills for the critical period immediately following promotion to associate/tenured professor – when formal career development efforts taper off while institutional demands escalate – and describe a program called MAVEN that has been designed to teach leadership skills to mid-career women scientists, particularly those from underrepresented groups.

Creating Dangerously

Universities and scholars have long wrestled with the types of impact they want their work to have on the world. This narrative explores the challenge of impact from the perspective of a recently tenured professor reflecting on his case for tenure and his struggle to fit his activist scholarship within the genre of the tenure case, which requires candidates to explain their work and its impact. Through an examination of this struggle, the author identifies three challenges that universities need to confront if they want to enable more community-engaged scholarship: 1) The problem of expertise, 2) the problem of genre, and 3) the problem of focus. If and when the academy begins to address these challenges, the author argues, activist scholars will no longer have to hide the nature of their community engaged work and their scholarship will be able to better reach larger audiences beyond the academy.

Community Colleges

Community psychologists typically work in various settings, such as universities, community-based organizations, and/or as independent consultants. This chapter describes the experiences of one community psychologist who found a niche within a community college, including some material on his transition from graduate school to community college faculty and progression to tenured professor. This chapter describes how some community psychology values and competencies (i.e., human diversity, advocacy, mentorship, community-building) are practiced in this unique setting.

A Tenured Professor

by John Kenneth GalbraithReviewed by Michael W. Popejoy

What’s Wrong with the Study of China/Countries

In this paper the thesis is submitted that there is something fundamentally amiss in Western Sinology (Zhōngguóxué, as distinct from Hànxué, which is a kind of old-fashioned philology): ‘China experts’ either pretend to be knowledgeable about everything related to China, in which case they cannot be taken seriously, or–– eventually––admit not to be scientific all-rounders with respect to the country, in which case they cannot be called ‘China experts’. The author expects no tenured professor of Chinese Studies/History to share this view. Having exposed the weakness, indeed the scandal of old-style Sinology, he also points out the way junior Sinologists should go. The fork in that road is two-pronged: translating or collaborating.