Attention to advising students at colleges and universities has increased in the last decade in part because of the work done by the National Survey of Student Engagement. An organization of growing influence among academic administrators, the NSSE conducts surveys annually to determine the most effective ways to increase student engagement in learning.  Students and faculty from 1,452 colleges and universities have participated in the NSSE annual survey since 2000. Among the five “Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice” (BEEPs) that the NSSE has identified is “Student-Faculty Interaction” (or SFI). The NSSE abbreviates every word it can. The BEEP of SFI includes interaction outside the classroom and stresses the need for teachers to become “role models, mentors, and guides for continuous life-long learning” (NSSE website).

The NSSE is an immense apparatus of information that relies on abstractions, as its drive to abbreviate rather than to define words suggests.  In its well-chosen list of what a teacher can become to a student outside of class—model, mentor, and guide—the word that has caught on at universities (understandably given the word’s history) is, as we know, mentor.  Most departments in the humanities now have mentoring programs at every level, or programs in which professors are assigned undergraduates to advise in the major, graduate students to help navigate the graduate program and apply for jobs, more graduate students to mentor as teachers and observe in the classroom, and junior colleagues to help advance in their careers. At a large university, a professor may well be assigned twenty or more undergraduates, several graduate students, and several younger colleagues to mentor.

Given that the modern use of the word mentor is “a wise and trustworthy counselor or teacher” (American Heritage Dictionary), it is difficult to imagine how even the most conscientious professor could perform this honorific roll with so many students. It goes without saying that the true mentor cannot be mechanically assigned, that the student must choose the professor as much as the professor chooses the student. Why evoke a Greek word like mentor and benefit from its gravitas, if the mentor’s role is merely functional? The word derives from the figure in The Odyssey who is friend of Odysseus and advisor to his son Telemachus. Odysseus places Mentor in charge of Telemachus and of Odysseus’ palace when Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War. Years later, when Telemachus’ mother Penelope is beset by suitors, the goddess Athena takes the disguise of Mentor to hide herself from the suitors. As Mentor, the goddess inspires Telemachus to stand up against the suitors.

What does it mean that this word, embedded in this story, has survived as the quintessential definition of wise counsel to youth? If we take Penelope to represent an ideal or any ideal worth preserving and the suitors to represent any collective that may threaten that ideal, Mentor’s advice is to challenge false authority. To ‘stand up against the suitors’ or to resist the forces that undermine our ideals is one of the first tasks of adulthood. It is dangerous counsel indeed, but then Mentor has been placed in charge of the palace as well as the youth. Far more dangerous, both to Ithacan society and to the young man, would be not to give such counsel.

The appropriation of the word mentor for the purposes of merely monitoring the affairs of students, then, erases its history and leaves us with no word to address what is really at stake in the relations between generations: the need of the less experienced for serious and even at times disruptive counsel from the more experienced. The creation of the contradictory term “peer mentoring” drives yet another nail into the coffin of the concept of mentor. Yet the most decisive transfiguration of the concept in our time is revealed in the grammatical distortion of the word, the shift from noun to verb, from mentor to mentoring. In the myth, Mentor is a person, not a practice. He is not an apparatus but a man. The history of the word apparatus itself suggests the ease with which the function becomes the man. The word apparatchik derives from the word apparat, which the Soviet government of the early part of the twentieth century used to refer to the political machine. Have today’s mentors become – and I am speaking only of the humanities here – merely academic apparatchiks?

 

In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University,

published in 2010, Harvard professor Louis Menand connects data on the poor job placement rate of Ph.D.s in the humanities to the intellectual and political conformity of professors. If, on entering graduate school, your chances of ending up as tenured faculty are one in four, you not only learn to “talk the talk,” as he puts it, you learn to “walk the walk” (153). Menand wisely shifts attention away from the tired question of political correctness to focus on the pressures of conformity itself in any market where there are so few places at the table. “The higher the barriers to entry in an occupation, the more likely there are to be implicit codes that need to be mastered in addition to the explicit entrance requirements” (140-141). As a result, there is almost no “ferment from the bottom” and the anxieties over placement and tenure “do not encourage iconoclasm” among young professors. “The academic profession in some areas is not reproducing itself so much as cloning itself”(153).

The institutionalization of the “mentor” as career strategist and teaching supervisor is partly responsible for this situation. The hearer/inspirer dyad of Platonic love that is traditionally conceived of as the basis for any transformation of the self through education has been reconfigured by the proliferation of mentoring programs. The mentor is now himself little more than a functionary who merely assists students or younger faculty in adjusting to the apparatuses of the academy. At a large, highly regarded university on the east coast, for example, a procedure is now in place to ensure that every assistant professor be assigned two or three mentors. The names of the mentors are put in the files of the person in question, and mentors are required to report to the dean of their college on their younger colleague’s professional development. The purpose of a mentorship program such as this one, then, is less to guide than to govern the next generation of scholars and teachers, and it accomplishes this by strengthening the academic hierarchy.

Nor is such governance always as effective as we imagine it to be. Some years ago I served as director of the freshman writing program at a large university, a program composed of graduate student instructors, newly minted Ph.D.s and veteran teachers of writing. Every semester each instructor was assigned a new mentor from the tenured or tenure-track faculty whose task was to help the instructor to become a better teacher by observing classes, discussing his or her impressions with the instructor, and writing an evaluation. When I assumed the directorship, some instructors had had as many as ten different mentors.  In most cases, the mentor was unknown to the instructor beforehand and dialogue after class visits was minimal because of the mentor’s demanding schedule. The written reports were rarely seen by their subjects and were primarily used to evaluate the teacher when contracts came up for renewal.

I asked teachers what they thought of the mentorship program and they invariably said it was fine. Since all teachers were on short-term contracts, anxious about renewal, I wasn’t confident that everyone was being candid, so I sent out a questionnaire inviting people to let me know anonymously what they thought of the mentorship program. I will never forget the response of one teacher: “I would like to hang my ‘mentors’ from a lamppost.”  Others were no less offended by the unnecessary disruption of their teaching that repeated visits from strangers had occasioned. Informed they were to be observed and evaluated, teachers would adjust their teaching plan so as to put on display the sort of instruction most likely to win high marks from a newcomer: a straightforward class discussion in which all of the students participate, a class in which the so-called “learning outcome” is readily apparent. Yet, as any serious college teacher knows, the best discussion is often unpredictable and fugitive in its movements, and not necessarily one that benefits from universal participation. That “indefinable tentative process, requiring a study of individual aptitudes, and a perpetual variation of means and methods, to attain the same end” (Thomas Carlyle’s definition of education, 1829, p. 65) that can take place in a class that is truly improvisatory, searching, and alive, this sort of class gets postponed. Such an experience is unlikely to take place with an observer in attendance whose main function is to gather data to write a report.  Is it surprising that these teachers experienced the infantilizing apparatus of the mentoring program as a kind of punishment?

I’m not suggesting that the mentoring program I have described was in itself punitive, although it certainly caused a lot of misery in beginning teachers who would have benefited from a more intelligent system. My point is that it was a profoundly disingenuous system. With all the best intentions, mentors had allowed themselves to become merely qualified functionaries and instructors were so busy demonstrating they were good teachers they were forgetting how to teach. Moreover, if I had not sent out the anonymous questionnaire I never would have realized there was a problem. Because the apparatus was working so silently, it escaped my attention.

No one can doubt the practical value of a teaching and career advisor to graduate students and assistant professors. The professor who is not mindful of the practical challenges and difficulties facing those trying to enter the profession is negligent. Proofreading job letters and giving practice interviews for jobs is and should be a part of the graduate school agenda in today’s academy.  But there is another sort of practicality that might be questioned. The professional academic who dampens the idealism of a student in the interests of promoting his or her vocational success – for example, in advising a graduate student to pursue a subject that is more marketable than one the student is really interested in – exemplifies the conformity Menand describes. If graduate students are merely instructed to “enter the conversation” of a given field of inquiry (a common phrase used among humanists to define the goal of a dissertation) or to work within the purview of an already established idiom, what are the chances of their producing scholarship that redefines or disrupts “the conversation”, opening up new areas of thought?

In the words of the great German critic Walter Benjamin, “a student is only a student” because the problem of spiritual life means more to him than social practice. A student is only a student because he/she demands a “synthesizing life,” a life in which her whole being finds expression in the community (Benjamin, 1914-1915, p. 201).  Many professional academics in the humanities today would curl their lip at such high-mindedness, denying themselves access to a key element of hopefulness in the corporatized academy of the present: the troubled, passionate minds of students themselves. 

To summarize the main point of this paper: Mentoring programs often serve to strengthen the academic hierarchy, rather than to do what they should be doing, which is to stimulate the intellectual development of members of the next generation. Having lost an essential component of its traditional meaning, the word mentor often stands for the opposite of what it was intended to mean. Instead of urging mentees to be intellectually independent, the mentor often merely assists in the mentee’s conformity to the apparatuses of the academy. The good intentions of administrators who press to strengthen the practical mentoring apparatus are not in question. What is needed at universities is less obedience to the apparatus and more critical attention to what younger faculty and students are actually experiencing and producing under its procedures.  How can this be accomplished?

 

1.Anonymous questionnaires should be sent to the mentees in mentoring programs on a regular basis to find out if mentoring is really benefiting the mentee both intellectually and practically. The imbalance of power in humanistic disciplines, with a minority of secure tenured professors on the one side and an army of potentially jobless graduate students and assistant professors on the other, makes anonymity necessary.

2.Mentors should never be assigned; the mentoring relationship must develop organically. The mentee might begin by consulting with the chair of the department and selecting the person he/she would like as a mentor. He/she may choose not to have a mentor but instead to rely on the advice of the chair for career advice, and so forth. At any time, a mentee who is dissatisfied with a mentor can revert to the chair as mentor or request a new mentor.

3.Guidelines should be established to clarify and limit the responsibilities of teaching mentors. For example, graduate student teachers should not be required to agree to more than one class visit per semester unless they request it.

4.Chairs should meet with their departments to define the purpose of mentoring, including dissertation direction – specifically, how the very necessary task of giving practical advice to graduate students and assistant professors can be combined with the task of developing the mentees’ intellectual independence.

 

REFERENCES

Benjamin, Walter. “The Life of Students.” Early Writings. Edited by Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. 197-210. [Originally composed in 1914-1915.]

Carlyle, Thomas. “Signs of the Times.” Selected Writings. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1971. [First published in 1829.]

Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. New York and London: W.W.Norton & Co., 2010.

NSSE (National Survey on Student Engagement) website: http://nsse.iub.edu/pdf/nsse_benchmarks.pdf