CHAPTER 23: UNIVERSITY WARFARE: How Social Media Mentoring Helped Me Toward Tenure and Then Promotion

I never wanted to be a full-time college professor; I wanted to be a great school psychologist. The idea of teaching a course here or there was intriguing, and I did that from 2001 until 2007, but my first love is school psychology. More specifically, the actual work it takes to have the privilege of being witness to the change process inspired me. In that sense, teaching the next generation of school psychologists appealed to me. I supervised interns in the K–12 schools and taught at local for-profit, nonprofit, and public universities, but my eye was on what I would later learn to be “scholarship-of-engagement,” even though my colleagues in the academy value this type of scholarship the least. In this chapter, I will share my journey to the academy, my challenge finding a mentor, and how the social media group, R.A.C.E. Mentoring, helped me to earn tenure within the academy, which is an institution I have come to see as constantly at war.