NEW FACULTY INVOLVEMENT FOR WOMEN AND MINORITIES

I used variations of Astin's involvement model to guide a study of four cohorts of women and minorities as new faculty: two groups from a comprehensive university and two of them from a research campus. The two least demanding levels of inquiry for both interviewer and interviewee-unstructured and structured-provided rich descriptions of disappointments, problems, and values that distinguished nontraditional new hires from a matched sample of white male newcomers. More demanding levels of inquiry and analysis-a New Faculty Faring Index with 20 rating dimensions and a repeated exercise in career mapping-distinguished successful and unsuccessful new faculty in ways that suggest reliable sequences of career fault lines and specific interventions to avoid them. Thus, the most useful interviews were the most involving. Involvement notions also predicted the outcome of new faculty experiences: women and minorities tended to be less effectively immersed in their campuses and in self-help actions than were white males, but nontraditional newcomers who managed the highest levels of involvement evidenced the most promise for successful careers.