In the January 2003 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics, Kristen Monroe published a brief description of the general goals for the APSA Task Force on Mentoring (93–96). Monroe stressed the importance of a mentoring program designed for all political scientists, but focused on the particular needs of women and racial/ethnic minorities. The Task Force activities will include linking and maintaining a list of mentors and mentees and hosting open sessions at regional political science conferences and at the APSA annual meeting. I applaud this effort to link graduate students and junior faculty with senior members of the profession who can help them develop successful and meaningful careers. Such relationships are crucial to new scholars who hope to gain recognition and integration into the field of political science. Missing from the original policy formulation was the concept of peer mentoring. In this article, I explain why the Task Force has decided to incorporate the concept of peer mentoring into its program.

Peer mentoring benefits political scientists at all stages of their careers. Graduate students, junior faculty members, senior faculty members, and those nearing retirement can all benefit from a peer mentoring program that links them with a colleague in the same stage of his or her career. Moreover, peer mentoring has particular benefits that cannot be obtained through the traditional mentor-mentee relationship. In this brief article, I describe the distinct benefits of peer mentoring by contrasting this relationship with the traditional mentoring relationship between a graduate student or junior faculty member and a senior colleague. I argue that young scholars, particularly women and people of color, should combine peer mentoring with traditional mentoring to insure maximum personal and professional satisfaction and accomplishment.

As Monroe stated in the previous issue of PS, mentoring programs can provide the “scaffolding for effective career development and professional integration” (94). Traditional mentoring programs, which link more experienced political scientists with younger scholars at earlier career stages, are generally designed to benefit the new scholar. Mentors often view themselves as experts who are providing a service to their less experienced colleagues (Bona, Rinhard, and Volbrecht 1995; Kanter 1977; Kram 1985). However, such traditional mentoring relationships can, in fact, benefit both the mentors and the mentees. As Monroe explains:

The benefits of such a relationship for new scholars cannot be over-emphasized. Established scholars and teachers can provide newer members of the profession with important information, insight, and advice about teaching, publishing, grants, honors, awards, networking, tenure, and promotion. They can also provide feedback, answer questions, and establish additional professional contacts to help a new scholar succeed in her teaching, research, and service commitments while gaining recognition for her contributions in each of these areas. Mentors also benefit by developing new links with potential collaborators and new colleagues. However, there are limits to the traditional mentoring relationship—limits that can be overcome by combining the benefits of traditional mentoring with those of a peer mentoring relationship.

Traditional mentor relationships are limited in several ways. Access to traditional mentors is a common problem in university settings. For women and minority faculty this problem is compounded by the fact that there are few same-background traditional mentors available (Bowman, Kite, Branscombe, and Williams 1999; Caplan 1995). This may result in a deficit of women and minority faculty who recognize opportunities for professional promotion and development (Martinez-Ebers 2000; Valian 1998; Viernes and Myers 2000). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals face the same problem (Eliason 1997; Feltey 1997). The Task Force will help combat this lack of mentoring by allowing young scholars access to mentoring outside of their home institutions. However, as more people seek advising through the APSA mentoring program, there may be competition for a mentor's time and a shortage of mentors interested in working with students or junior faculty.

Moreover, mentors face competing pressures to advise, teach, and conduct research. This may be particularly true for minority faculty who may feel responsible for representing their group on academic committees and community organizations (Bowman, Kite, Branscombe, and Williams 1999; Murrell and Tangri 1999). The time commitment will also be particularly difficult for tenured female mentors who typically carry heavier service and teaching loads than male tenured faculty and untenured faculty of both sexes (Blakemore, Switzer, DiLorio, and Fairchild 1997; Hall and Sandler 1983). These time commitments may dissuade some faculty from volunteering for the mentoring program or limit the time they have to mentor those outside of their own classrooms and university. Thus, it is wise for interested young scholars to seek multiple mentoring relationships.

Even if the program succeeds in matching new scholars with generous, enthusiastic mentors willing to devote a substantial amount of time to mentoring activities, young scholars should still seek peer mentoring relationships. The traditional mentoring relationship is generally one in which “help, power, and resources tend to flow in one direction, from the mentor to the protégé …” (McGuire and Reger 2003, 56). Traditional mentors can help their mentees develop a professional identity and internalize occupational values and norms (Bowman, Kite, Branscombe, and Williams 1999; Kram 1985). They can also provide moral support, affirmation, and encouragement (McGuire 1999; Thomas 1990). Yet, the unequal power dynamic in the traditional mentor relationship often makes it difficult for graduate students or junior faculty members to be completely honest and open with their senior mentors. This is particularly true for graduate students who are extremely dependent on their faculty mentors. For this reason, it makes sense for these students to seek external advisors through the APSA Task Force. However, even seeking advice outside of one's own institution may be difficult for junior faculty members who are worried about the external review process and may fear exposing any selfdoubt or weakness as they try to impress higher status members of the profession. In addition, a traditional mentor's focus on intellectual and professional development means that the protégé's non-academic responsibilities and goals tend to be ignored in the relationship (McGuire and Reger 2003).

In contrast, forming a mentoring relationship with a peer who is at the same stage of her career has distinct advantages. A peer mentoring relationship can provide an egalitarian relationship in which two people can explore personal and academic dilemmas while offering mutual advice and support. In a recent article criticizing the traditional model of mentoring in academia, sociologists Gail McGuire and Jo Reger describe an alternative model of co-mentoring grounded in feminist principles. They conceive of a model of co-mentoring that “fosters an equal balance of power between participants, seeks to integrate emotion into the academic professional experience, and values paid and unpaid work” (54). As graduate students, the two formed a comentoring relationship, meeting (or telephoning) twice each month to discuss their accomplishments and goals. Before each meeting, they recorded their accomplishments and goals in a journal. During the meeting, they shared two lists with each other: one of their successes over the last two weeks and one of their goals for the next two weeks. They further divided each list into two parts: academic-related items and nonacademic-related items. Non-academic items included such things as exercise, social activities, political activism, and family time. They took turns reading through the lists, listening carefully and offering occasional comments. They took care not to interrupt to share stories of their own research, teaching, or personal lives. They then helped each other edit these lists.

McGuire and Reger report that the process usually involved helping each other add successes, decrease goals, and prioritize items. In fact, they learned that they often produced unreasonable goals on their own—overestimating what they could accomplish and underestimating what they had achieved. Meeting every two weeks gave them an opportunity to review their work and to set reasonable goals. By creating and prioritizing manageable lists, they were able to remind each other how much they had achieved, to support and motivate each other to overcome hardships and shortfalls, and to increase their own feelings of success. It is important to point out that comentoring or peer mentoring is not intended to replace traditional mentoring relationships. High-status mentors can provide mentees (protégés) with resources that peers cannot. Yet, a properly designed, non-competitive peer mentoring relationship can also provide important benefits to scholars at the beginning stages of their careers. In their reflections on their co-mentoring experience, McGuire and Reger stress the importance of establishing a non-competitive relationship. In a graduate school setting, students often experience intense competition for resources and attention. Isolated groups can face additional marginalization as they build barriers among themselves or work against one another in a predominantly white, male department (Caplan 1995). One way to reduce the competitive nature of the relationship is to find a peer mentor who does not have the same dissertation advisor or department chair. Peer mentors would be wise to select someone who is not working on the same (narrow) research topic. Finding a peer mentor outside of one's home department, academic institution, or workplace may also increase the sense of cooperation and confidentiality. This could be achieved through the APSA Task Force on Mentoring. In addition to seeking traditional (senior) mentors, graduate students, junior faculty members, and practitioners could seek peer mentors outside their home institutions.

When structured to avoid both hierarchy and competition, a peer mentoring relationship can facilitate intellectual development as well as a better balance and integration between one's professional and personal lives. McGuire and Reger put it this way:

Peer mentoring offers distinct advantages to all political scientists, especially graduate students and junior faculty. Yet, the benefits of peer mentoring are particularly important for women and racial/ethnic minorities. Previous studies have found that members of underrepresented groups in the academy receive fewer benefits than dominant groups from traditional mentors. Such benefits include help with publications and increased departmental respect and visibility (Fox 2001).

However, the benefits of peer mentoring are not limited to members of underrepresented groups, or even to graduate students or junior faculty members. In fact, one of the most exciting things about the relationship is that they allow senior scholars, traditionally relegated to the role of “expert” in a “power-over” relationship, to become co-mentees. Senior colleagues can learn from others who are facing the same struggles balancing the demands of teaching, service, and research. They can consult with others who share their desire (or recent decision) to move into a new phase of their career. They can discuss the decision to move into administration, to apply for full professorship or to leap into an important leadership position in the discipline or within the university hierarchy. Those near retirement can share their fears, hopes, and dreams, while discovering ways to maintain links to the profession or to continue their commitment to teaching, service, and/or scholarship. While the mentoring program is designed primarily to increase retention rates of junior faculty members and graduate students—particularly those from groups currently under-represented in the profession—the program and its benefits need not be limited to a specific segment of the discipline. New members of the academy are most likely to lack the type of professional contacts, information, and networks that senior mentors can provide—resources critical to their retention and success. However, all members of the discipline can benefit from a relationship in which they are both teachers and learners—a relationship in which they are free to share their concerns, celebrate their accomplishments, work toward mutual achievement, and learn to find a better balance between their personal and professional goals.