Mentoring Senior Faculty & Post Tenure Review?

So in my continuing obsession about faculty mentoring, I've decided to shift focus to senior faculty mentoring for this week and see if I can solicit any views/advice about what happens to mentoring and career planning post-tenure. I think as a group we law professors tend to focus on pre-tenure mentoring because the path to obtaining tenure can be so tricky and the costs of failing to obtain tenure so great. And I'm not suggesting here that we have all done as much work as we should have in developing effective strategies for mentoring pre-tenure folks - or for that matter, even non-tenured folks such as many clinical and writing faculty. I just thought it might be interesting to think a little bit about post-tenure mentoring programs and strategies, see if they even exist and, if so, whether we could obtain some trickle-down effects that would help junior faculty. Or vice versa ie if these programs don't exist, could we learn something useful about junior faculty mentoring that we might apply to senior faculty mentoring? In particular, I'm interested in whether schools with post tenure review use that as a form of mentoring/career development for senior faculty, or rather regard it is a shaming mechanism to avoid deadwood in the top ranks? My school doesn't have a formal system of post-tenure review although we have talked about it on occasion. We have never been sure what form it should take other than an annual review meeting with the dean(s). Nevertheless, I'm sure there are issues that we all face post-tenure about career development on which we could use plenty of advice from our colleagues. Questions I've been thinking about recently include: What kind of writing should post-tenure folks be doing? Should it be predominantly the same as pre-tenure writing or is it good for us and our institutions to do all those things we may have been discouraged from doing pre-tenure e.g. shorter, solicited symposium articles? op-eds? blogs? joinly authored work? books? Should we be more experimental with our teaching post-tenure, and in what ways? Co-teaching? Trialling new technologies? Joint projects with classes at other schools (either domestically or internationally)? More interdisciplinary teaching? AND of course the big professional development question. Where do we see ourselves individually in 5-10 years? Presumably some of us would like to move up the ranks to a higher-ranked school or perhaps to a school where there are greater opportunities for developing things we are interested in? Some of us may be guilty of toying with the idea of trying our hand at administration - associate deaning, center development, or moving on to some central university committees perhaps? Some of us may be looking to have experiences in organizations or boards outside of our home institutions and may need advice on how to get connected. So what do senior faculty do about these things? Presumably the obvious trick is to identify one or two good mentors early on who can help and assist throughout a career with these kinds of issues. Of course, many people are in the situation where they are the only person or one of only a few people at their institution in a particular area - so for advice about external issues, they will have to find outside mentors. And, on the other side of the coin, how do we tenured folks feel about mentoring our more senior colleagues? Presumably most of us feel obliged (and hopefully delighted and inspired) to mentor tenure track people. But how seriously do we take the obligation to mentor each other post tenure? Again, I don't really know - just interested in how people feel on this question and what strategies people are adopting to deal with these post-tenure career issues. Are there formal structures in place or are informal structures the norm? Would it be better if we had more formal structures? And should the role of post-tenure review (where it exists) be more of a mentoring exercise or merely a check that senior folks are still being productive. In other words, are these programs prescriptive (eg "When are you going to write your next article and what will it be about?") or more collaborative (eg "Where do you see yourself in 5 years and what resources/help/advice do you need from the school and your colleagues to get there?")