Roughly 5% of full professors in the United States are Black, Hispanic or Native American (Ryu, 2008). Underrepresented minority (URM) groups hold about 10% of tenured faculty positions (Finkelstein, Conley, & Schuster, 2016), despite URM comprising more than 30% of the United States population. The main barriers to recruiting, retaining, and promoting URM faculty in higher education are isolation and lack of mentoring (Williams & Kirk, 2008). Successful URM faculty attribute their success in large part to the mentoring that they received from a senior faculty member (Williams & Kirk, 2008). In fact, the level of social connection to senior faculty predicts achievement of tenure and promotion (Williams & Kirk, 2008). Research suggests that what new URM faculty need most is one on one mentoring from senior faculty that includes encouragement and support in the area of scholarship, ideally with concrete opportunities for scholarship, and hands-on reading, critiquing, and revising of scholarly work (Zambrana et al., 2015).

The purpose of this project was to create a remote mentoring program for new URM faculty and to evaluate the experience of both mentors and mentees following program implementation. As part of the URM new faculty-mentoring program, new URM hires, as well as pre-tenure URM faculty were matched with tenured URM faculty. For four months during the fall and spring terms, URM faculty received monthly Skype sessions with their mentor. Each of the four-skype sessions had one area of focus: teaching and advising, research, service, and mastery of subject matter/continued growth. Mentors were given a list of topics and corresponding questions/prompts to help guide them through each skype session.

Faculty who participated in the mentoring program answered quantitative and qualitative questions about their experience at the start and end of the year. This paper session will report on the results of this intervention, as well as other research in the area of URM faculty mentoring, challenges and opportunities of conducting mentoring at a distance, and future recommendations for research in this area. Session attendees will come away with increased knowledge of the experiences of URM faculty in higher education, barriers to success, opportunities for mentorship, and how to make remote mentoring occur successfully. It is our hope that sharing results from this mentoring program will encourage program replication and support the retention and promotion of qualified URM faculty across SUNY and beyond.