In June, 1977, I was flushed with excitement over my first full-time professional job as an academic pediatrician at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children and the John A Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM). I had just completed my fellowship in Neonatology with one of the foremost US pioneers of Neonatology, Dr. Louis Gluck. But my entrance into the in Honolulu academic medical scene was chaotic and challenging. As a result, the experiences that both buttressed and stymied my early academic journey subsequently sparked the choices and direction of my nearly 50-year career. While I am now technically retired, as a professor emeritus, I continue my involvement with helping faculty members achieve their goals for scholarship and promotion in 2026.
Upon my arrival, I sought help from the JABSOM basic science faculty to advance my research career: promises were plentiful, but they went mostly ignored or conveniently forgotten. It took another 18 years before I identified a suitable mentor, Fred Greenwood Ph.D, and he was not even in the medical school. This and subsequent observations left a lasting impression: the lack of any formal mentoring and or coaching program, the apparent lack of concern for junior faculty career development, and the siloed, narrowly focused mentality of the medical school faculty. This disengaged culture, especially as it related to the clinical versus the basic science faculty was in part due to the location of medical school clinical departments in several outlying community hospitals, while the basic science, administrative offices and laboratories were isolated to the Manoa campus in the Biomedical Science Building. You needed to earnestly make an effort to get to know one another to foster a collaborative and collegial working environment. Apparently, JABSOM had other pressing priorities in those early years closer to its establishment.
While I participated in both clinical and laboratory research throughout my career, it was my leadership roles on several major NIH grants and in the Dean’s Office that provided the broader exposure to JABSOM’s junior faculty members in need of guidance, mentoring and research funding. Thanks to Dr. Greenwood who recruited me for the role of Program Director for a new NIH sponsored Clinical Research Center at JABSOM, my role positioned me to support several hundred clinical studies, by vetting and funding seed grants to junior faculty over the subsequent 13 years. A few years later, another opportunity came my way called the Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN) which expanded JABSOM’s research infrastructure, facilitated research proposal development and submission, and later was the rationale to establish a JABSOM Grants Development Office as well as a satellite Office of Research Services at the Kakaako campus. It was also the forerunner to the IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) infrastructure grant, now in its fifth five-year cycle of funding.
My career continued into more complex administrative, research, and research infrastructure roles that are irrelevant to the focus of this present essay. For now, I ask the question - Is there any obligation, tacit or mandated, that senior and seasoned academic faculty members contribute to the academic well-being of their junior faculty? The fact that I had little to no help on my entry to academics at JABSOM begs the question of how siloed the JABSOM faculty was at the time, and whether any of them felt even a nominal sense of obligation to assist the emerging junior faculty. This gesture and support not only help individual faculty members in need, by its nature and emerging culture, it also contributes to the overall progress and future of the medical school.
My journey into assisting faculty members with their research proposal development started when I was Director of the Clinical Research Center over 30 years ago. But it was in the last 10 years of my career that I dove head first into the role of career development counseling and faculty promotion. Most Universities have laborious and time-consuming application procedures that require faculty members who are seeking promotion to document their achievements as well as to provide the necessary documentation. At UH Manoa, a Statement of Endeavors (SOE), ranging from nine pages to not more than 15 pages is required. But the construction of the SOE, the content, the hyperlinks necessary to document accomplishments, and particularly all of the student, resident, fellow, and faculty evaluations of teaching covering the critical period since the last promotion can be an arduous task to compile especially if faculty members have not been keeping track of their teaching sessions and evaluations. In short, the SOE is the most important component of the application when seeking promotion. How faculty members, who are already consumed by their daily obligations, have little to no experience in this realm, author this document is critical to its success. My role was not to adjudicate the merit of the faculty member’s quest for promotion, but to help them get the job done at their request. In the end, although unwittingly, I was responsible for discouraging many of the faculty members who came to me seeking assistance who clearly did not have the accomplishments needed for promotion. Sadly, more than a few faculty members thought that all you needed to do was remain in good standing for a reasonable number of years for promotion to automatically be granted.
Promotion at UHM is a laborious five-step process. Vetting proceeds as follows: first in the respective Department, then the Department Chair, the Dean’s Promotion Committee and Dean, the Tenure and Promotion Review Committee (TPRC) situated on the Manoa campus, and the Chancellor who all have to review and approve of each application. Applications are due in early October and the faculty members are notified about the outcome about 9 months later.
My passion to help junior faculty members was driven by a junior faculty member who found their way to me on another faculty member’s recommendation. She was situated in the JABSOM basic sciences. English was not her first language and she had previously applied for and was denied promotion. She wanted to contest this decision and provided me with a poorly written rebuttal that would have most certainly failed in its original state. She was more than qualified to be promoted in my assessment but for some reason, a disagreement and a deep misunderstanding with her Department Chair led to his failure to recommend her, which subsequently trickled down to the Dean’s recommendation to not support her promotion request as well. This was in conflict with the TPRC who felt her accomplishments were sufficient to recommend her for promotion. For my part, I rewrote the rebuttal document for her and she was subsequently promoted. Was it wrong of me to do this? Some might consider it overreach, and I am somewhat conflicted about how much rewriting I end up doing when helping faculty members compose their SOE. This situation has gone unresolved at least in my own mind.
I haven’t kept ongoing records of how many faculty members that I counseled on career development and or promotion. However, my best estimate is it was many more than the roughly three dozen faculty members I helped write their SOE’s and other dossier documents. Except for one faculty member who brilliantly wrote her SOE in near final form in three weeks, the rest of the faculty members I helped needed months to complete the job, as well as a considerable effort on my part to finalize a polished, convincing, and well documented SOE.
My effort extended way beyond offering comments, helping to clarify, rearrange, or rewrite confusing or poorly written sections, and/or correcting simple typos. Each faculty member had their own preference on how the feedback would be delivered – in person, in edited versions of drafts of each of the 4-5 sections of the SOE, or a combination of both. At least one meeting was held to initiate the process and to allow me to appreciate the general sense of the faculty member’s values and aspirations. In general, my contribution to the SOE was substantial. Twenty or more edited versions could pass between us in its development. I could easily spend 50-100 hours, although I’m not certain whether this approximation is an under or overestimation. Faculty members were typically from the Department of Pediatrics or the Department of Medicine, although I have assisted faculty in other departments both in and out of JABSOM including the College of Engineering. The majority of the faculty members were applying for promotion to associate professor although about 15% were applying for full professor. Moreover, since my promotion dossier preparation support lasted about a decade, I assisted two faculty members at UH Manoa with both their associate and full professor promotion applications.
At first, I was simply motivated to help faculty members in need, recalling that I received very little to none at their stage of development. However, the SOE included sections that introduced the faculty member’s background and educational and career development, described teaching philosophy, and showcased some of the positive reviews that faculty members receive for their teaching and mentoring. Callously believing that faculty members my junior would seldom measure up to the accomplishments that I along with other senior academics had accomplished, I was shocked by their interesting histories, their backgrounds, their interests, abilities, and prior achievements! Indeed, it was very soon thereafter that I realized how much I derived pleasure and joy and tremendous respect for the faculty members that I assisted in the process.
While I continue to ask myself whether my contribution sometimes constituted an excessive overreach, I have no doubt that almost all of the faculty members that I helped were worthy of promotion. Some faculty members naively came to me thinking all they needed for promotion was to fulfill the minimum employment requirement. That was disheartening, especially since it was sometimes left to me to instill some stark reality into this notion. Scholarship was usually the main shortcoming of the clinical faculty, and again, it was left up to me to suggest strategies to boost their publications by working with residents and medical students or in collaboration with basic scientists at JABSOM or beyond. One faculty member wanted to go up for promotion but had no chance of success. Each year this faculty member would return without any major progress to showcase, but with a persistence that seemed out of touch with reality. Finally, after several years of rejecting this plea and some progress in advancing academic accomplishments, I agreed to help. In the end, this was one of two faculty members that I helped that I felt didn’t deserve promotion. I still feel this nagging truth when I think about my overall positive experience. In any case, my success rate remained at 100% throughout the decade of my faculty promotion support.
A few faculty outliers deserve mention. One was recruited to JABSOM as an associate professor and amassed over 120 publications over a twenty-year period before deciding to apply for promotion. Another productive faculty member who easily qualified for promotion had a midcareer stretch of several years with little to no publications. When we explained in the SOE that this was due to a temporary refocus of attention from academics to her conflicted teenage daughter, we successfully dispelled any notion that she was not legitimately fulfilling her duties as a faculty member. It also served as a wonderful example of how academic productivity need not trump one’s responsibly to family since her publication productivity was exceptional both before and after that interlude.
It’s difficult to judge the overall effect of my contribution. Indeed, it’s not clear whether my contribution dictated the outcome between promotion and rejection. Most of the faculty members lacked the wherewithal to properly understand what should be included in the SOE, as well as the writing skills for this type of a document. Some felt a need to air out their dirty laundry, others went off on tangents that were off the mark. With a few exceptions, faculty members underplayed their contributions and status at JABSOM. To be sure, having a senior faculty member interpret each of the faculty members achievements as a disinterested party facilitated a more realistic and appropriate representation of a faculty members accomplishments.
I had my own biases in writing the SOE that I passed on to the faculty I was assisting. Composing a document that is entirely narrative is often boring to read. Inserting a few tables of learner reviews, glowing comments from student learners, and even a relevant graph or cartoon makes the document a lot more readable and interesting. The introduction should be more than a recap of historical landmarks, sprinkled and highlighted with references to important events that shaped one’s life, the influence of family, and outside interests and talents that may be relevant to one’s perseverance and fortitude such as being an accomplished musician. I counsel the faculty that a beautifully written introduction is all that is needed to bias the reviewer in favor of promotion.
Regarding the central question posed in this essay: Should senior faculty members be obliged in any way to assist junior faculty members with career development activities? Of course, I would answer affirmatively to this question. Speaking for myself, and including my decades of clinical work, research experience and leadership roles I have occupied in my near ½ century tenure at JABSOM, the role I played assisting the faculty in career development and promotion activities was immensely rewarding and a fitting final chapter to a long and challenging career.
Finally, I must confess that my involvement in faculty development and promotion was much more than an academic exercise, or in just fulfilling my stated role at the time. For each promotion application that I assisted with, I experienced a strong comradery with the faculty member I was assisting (with few exceptions), and a great sense of accomplishment. Moreover, every time our efforts were rewarded with success – promotion, I felt I was vicariously being promoted as well. It made me truly happy and my memories of all of the grateful faculty members continues to linger brightly on my aging brain.
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