Announcing the UIC Campus-Wide Mentoring and the UIC Dialogues Taskforces

Dear faculty, staff and students,

Welcome back to campus! I hope this message finds you enjoying the start of the new term.

I write to you today to announce the formation, membership and charge of two newly assembled taskforces whose work is underway and will continue during the 2024-25 academic year: the UIC Campus-Wide Mentoring Taskforce as well as the UIC Dialogues Taskforce. View additional information on the Provost Taskforces and Committees webpage.

Campus-Wide Mentoring Taskforce

As an R1 public urban university that serves an undergraduate population where the majority of students receive the Pell grant, UIC is uniquely positioned to do impactful work and to attract and retain top faculty, researchers and students. In light of this, the need for centralized mentoring activities exists to empower faculty to be more competitive when applying for grants that advance UIC’s research mission; to help promote a mentor mindset in our faculty, students and researchers that enhances academic excellence; to support workforce development; and to foster a climate that encourage collaboration and thriving outcomes across campus.

Understanding that a campus mentor program would fulfill these needs and that a mentor training program would align with and continue to advance UIC’s mission to provide “the broadest access to the highest levels of educational, research and clinical excellence,” I have assembled the UIC Campus-Wide Mentoring Taskforce to formally address these needs, which are presently being responded to through decentralized and one-off opportunities.

Co-chaired by Miquel Gonzalez-Meler, associate vice provost for faculty affairs and professor of biological sciences; Nancy Freitag, professor and head of the pharmaceutical sciences department; and Lauren Woods, associate director for teaching development pathways and CIRTL@UIC in the Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence, this taskforce (see list of members on our website) will tap into the collective knowledge and experience that exists among faculty, staff and administrators to identify and inventory existing mentoring programs for faculty, staff, postdocs and graduate and professional students across campus. In addition, the taskforce will research best inclusive practices and models as well as collaborative opportunities in order to support recommendations to my office for a campus mentor program at the end of the academic year 2024-25. As part of its work in the coming weeks, the taskforce will distribute a survey to faculty, academic professionals, staff, deans and department heads, chairs and directors, graduate and professional students, as well as postdoctoral fellows and residents, to develop a better understanding of the current offerings and their impact as well as the perceived needs from individual perspectives with regards to mentoring training on campus. This survey will be disseminated in early September.

Dialogue Taskforce

For more than a decade, the Dialogue Initiative has been helping the UIC community to engage effectively and thoughtfully across differences. Featuring the first-year dialogue seminar as a keynote of the program, the initiative represents true collaboration across UIC administrative units, faculty and staff. The initiative began as a collaboration between Student Affairs and the Office of Diversity, Equity and Engagement in 2011, and later included the University Library, and it was adapted from the University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations to reflect UIC’s uniquely diverse campus.

Strong communication and engagement across differences are integral to our relationships at every level, and teaching students skills in dialogue and civic discourse positions them to more actively, effectively and empathetically navigate academic, social and professional environments.

As such, the Dialogue Taskforce, chaired by Jess Joslin, assistant vice chancellor for diversity initiatives, and Tom Moss, associate dean for student affairs in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, has been charged with exploring how the Dialogue Initiative can expand to support the campus community in having thoughtful and compassionate conversations and advance our collective skills in engaging productively in our diverse world. This will include exploring options for expanding first-year dialogue experiences so that all our undergraduate students have an opportunity to participate, and considering ways that dialogue and civic discourse practices can be modeled and incorporated into other aspects of faculty, staff and student work and interaction to best serve our community.

The taskforce comprises faculty and staff with direct experience working with the Dialogue Initiative and other dialogue models being piloted at UIC. The taskforce membership (please see list of members on our website) demonstrates a strong commitment to serving our students and collaborating effectively to contribute to their sense of belonging, engagement and success.

These working groups and their members will welcome input and collaboration from the UIC community over the course of their work. On behalf of the taskforces and my office, thank you for the collaborative spirit with which I know our community will meet this work.

Thank you,

Karen J. Colley
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs