A COMMON RATIONALE AND ONLINE EVIDENCE

I suspect that no faculty member, if asked, would be opposed to what she understands to be mentoring. Mentoring matters to junior faculty and graduate students because it imparts knowledge about how the profession operates and builds mentees’ confidence that they can be competent contributors to their departments and the discipline. Yet, as the editors detail in the symposium introduction, there is now greater awareness that the opportunities provided through mentoring have not always been available equally to everyone in academia. Groups such as women, LGBTQ people, and people of color can be “added” to and “counted” in an organization but still not really included. The attention to mentoring reflects a motivation to not only hire a more diverse workforce but also to proactively assist members of these groups to understand the ins and outs of organizational life that can never be detailed in policy. Formal mentoring programs explicitly seek to redress the problems with informal mentoring—that, too often, straight white men have not mentored new hires who differed from them in terms of race, sexuality, and gender.

In my own career, I can identify individuals who offered support and guidance from my undergraduate years through to achieving tenure. They were clearly acting as mentors, although I would not necessarily have used that specific term at those times. They helped me to see academia as a possible path, encouraged me at key moments, and nourished my intellectual capacities. Throughout undergraduate and graduate school, the only mentors available to me were white men; as an assistant professor, this group expanded to include women, with the associational women’s caucuses providing welcoming spaces where I met new collaborators and understood my political science self in new ways.

When the dean at my university began a formal mentoring program, I had already had a number of informal mentoring relationships both inside and outside of the department. Throughout the years, I have especially enjoyed working with graduate students; in 2012, I was nominated and then selected for a university-wide award for mentoring graduate students, which I was honored to receive. As the recipient of that award, I was asked by colleagues and others about my “philosophy of mentoring.” To my chagrin, I had never had a good answer because mentoring had seemed like a normal activity, something I engaged as a faculty member—participating with others in the “life of the mind,” which involves, necessarily, a number of pragmatic activities, such as getting on programs at conferences, exchanging manuscript drafts, etc. This is not knowledge any of us is born with but I had not acquired it through formal training. Rather, I had learned it by osmosis, from the academic culture around me; and, having learned it, it seemed only natural to share it with others who were themselves learning. That produced a puzzle: If I did not have a mentoring philosophy and if the activity seemed to me to be a normal part of the job, what had I been doing out of the ordinary to receive a mentoring award?

I addressed that question by examining various websites on mentoring at my own institution, the Mentoring Institute, and elsewhere. Even as I was aware of mentoring efforts within my university, much of what I encountered was new to me, and resources and guidance on mentoring appear to be widespread. For example, the resources page at the Mentoring Institute (see https://mentor.unm.edu/resources/online-resources) has 14 links under the categories of “general,” “education,” “professional,” and “youth.” The University of Michigan has a 47-page booklet, How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty (see www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/publications/Fmentoring.pdf). A general search for “mentoring” on the University of Utah website produced multiple links to programs across campus, from the LGBT Resource Center to the medical school.

Some of the available information includes in-depth discussions of various aspects of this human relationship. Yet, there also is evidence of the kind of formalization that produces a checklist approach to mentoring (tables 1–4). My purpose in presenting these examples at length is not to single out any particular institution for praise or blame, nor is it to imply that all of what appears within such lists is necessarily banal. There are some useful points within these lists from the perspective of either a mentor or a mentee. Informal mentoring practices that I had absorbed from academic culture early in my career might be improved through such explicit attention.

A CRITICAL TURN

Yet, a close reading of these lists does give pause. What do such texts imply about mentoring relationships? What do proponents, especially university administrators who invest in such texts and associated programs, expect them to accomplish? The general answer to these questions can be found in corporatized university practice and associated culture. I use evidence in tables 1-4 to examine corporatization’s effects on mentoring, focusing on three points.

First, explicit teaching of mentoring practices constitutes a formalization compared to how it occurred in the past—that is, informally, without explicit training, through socialization into academic culture. Although formalization has been motivated by a desire to genuinely include those previously excluded, the sort of step-wise checklist for a meeting (see table 1) hardly seems welcoming. What has happened to the academic environment when how to have a conversation needs to be described in such excruciating detail? Are faculty under such time pressure that they must refer to the bullet list of the One-Minute-Mentor (see table 3) as they interact with the individual in front of them? Do not most human beings—even in the “get-down-to-business” US culture—understand that they should “check in” (i.e., acknowledge the other person) when they sit down for a conversation (see table 3, step 1)? And, if someone needs such advice, would we want them mentoring at all?

Table 1

Mentoring Checklist

Note: Available at http://www.iths.org/wp-content/uploads/Mentoring-Checklist-List-of-topics-to-structure-meetings.pdf; accessed January 3, 2019.

Table 2

Top Ten Tips for Mentors [Section Titles Only]

Note: Available at http://research.xxxx.edu/mentoring/faculty/mentors.php; accessed June 22, 2018.Footnote ²

Table 3

MTP [Mentoring Training Program]: One-Minute Mentor

Note: Available at http://accelerate.ucsf.edu/training/mdp-seminar1-one-minute-mentor; accessed January 3, 2019.

As administrators demand more formal mentoring of faculty, providing the template in table 1 may seem a logical way to support faculty. Yet, some of this systematization, such as that of table 1, goes overboard in my view—as if human beings were robots that interact in mechanistic ways, therefore needing every step to be laid out in linear fashion. Such advice is characteristic of a corporatized mentality that conceives of mentoring as market transactions that can and should be made more efficient through formalization. Table 4 highlights this administrative imaginary, in which “mentoring pairs” are systematically trained with the “tools and resources,” provided by program designers, to interact based on designated “ground rules” within a specified timeline. It is astounding that program designers assume such training is necessary for functioning adults and that they cannot see that compulsion is at odds with a mentoring ethos. The advice is so mundane that one might ask whether an interaction of this sort is the best use of faculty time. Frankly, table 1 constitutes the dullest of activities for intellectuals.

Table 4

5 Tips for Successful Mentoring Program Implementation

Note: Available at https://mentor.unm.edu/mentoring-tips; accessed January 3, 2019.

Second, it is not difficult to imagine how such formalization may slide into instrumentalizing the mentor–mentee relationship. Although all workplace relationships may always, even necessarily, exhibit some degree of instrumentalization, there is something bizarre about the tip, “Take an interest in your mentee” (see table 2, step 6)—as if the mentor needs to be reminded about that person’s humanity. As revealing, the full text developing step 6 links that personal interest to the ever-present workplace mantra of “productivity,” stating as follows:

• • “Having someone at work that cares about you as a person and encourages your development is positively correlated to productivity.”

• • “Take a genuine interest in your mentee. Be aware of real-life issues that may impinge on productivity.”

This text is emblematic of the corporate university in which—as in the business mentality overall—individuals’ health and well-being are instrumentalized, tied to the interests of the unit rather than the humanity of the employee.

Third, consider the existence of something called a “One-Minute Mentor” (see table 3). What the time designation refers to is not clear. Perhaps it is meant to summarize deeper, substantive learning from a training program but, if so, the title misleads—implying that mentoring is an activity easily squeezed into an existing schedule. That an actual mentoring session could accomplish the listed tasks in that time frame is ludicrous, especially if there were “urgent issues” to attend to (see step 1), much less a conversation about “professional/personal balance” (see step 4). Mentoring takes time, the mentor’s time. Tellingly, I did not find any “tips” in the resources I examined that implied in-depth engagement, such as “Read mentee’s manuscripts carefully.” For an academic of my generation, the rhetoric of the One-Minute Mentor insults our intelligence and experience. For newer faculty without memory of a time before corporatization, the One-Minute Mentor might seem to imply a personal deficit, communicating that if they were “simply” more efficient, they would be able to accomplish all that the speed-up requires of them.

Readers may object that I have chosen easy targets for critique and that examination of more in-depth literature would give a different impression. Alternatively, this evidence might be dismissed as another case of the sort of checklist discourse that fills webpages. Finally, mentors may not read such advice (I had not), much less take it seriously. Yet, someone spends time producing such texts and making them available to faculty. Implicitly, through their appearance on university webpages, administrators endorse such checklist approaches. To the extent that mentoring can be measured and fit into this corporatist framework, it is valued and rewarded. Whether the mentoring so measured is worthy of its name is questionable.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

The sort of advice on mentoring and mentoring programs considered here is only one instantiation of the corporatization of university life. As Piccorelli and Zingale (Reference Piccorelli and Zingale2018) explored, a pervasive backgrounded mood infects/affects our daily lives. It is a mood of fear, in which time discussing politics at the copy machine feels like a waste of time, particularly for untenured faculty who hear the ticking of the tenure clock but also for senior faculty anticipating their yearly “merit” assessment (and sabbatical requests) as well as, for example, the CUNY adjunct faculty member who must travel from a campus in Queens to one in the Bronx to teach his next class. This mood undermines the conditions of possibility for genuine mentoring, in which faculty are willing to take the time to reach out to others as fellow travelers in the life of the mind. But how can we resist what seems like an overwhelming juggernaut?

Resistance begins with recognizing corporatization: it is corporatization that squeezes our scholarly time for human interaction and intellectual community building (and requires detailed counting of every activity). It produces the inconsistent messages of mentoring advice and programs that try to jimmy actual mentoring into something that can be claimed in a merit report. Mentoring that is not so reported is invisible to administrators who decide our fates, making us question time spent on a face-to-face meeting with a graduate student or that extra hour giving feedback on a colleague’s manuscript. Paradoxically, these administrative efforts are indicative of how corporatization has negatively impacted cultural supports for intellectual work, as if formal mentoring—an emphasis on individual-to-individual human contact—can repair that social, interactional “glue” that makes university life appealing and functional. Recognizing corporatization does not mean that we stop mentoring (most of us have been doing it all along) but rather that we analyze its management model. Surfacing its pernicious assumptions enables criticism of the advice examined here in order to confidently respond with creative mentoring ideas that better fit the academic milieu.

Specifically, in this management model, faculty are treated as homo economicus, responding to “incentives” dangled before them by deans and presidents intent on improving the national rankings of their departments and institutions. From journal-impact factors to the merit statements in which faculty provide detail on their mentoring efforts, metrics based on this portrait of faculty are pervasive. Proponents of these management techniques believe that faculty can be “nudged” with incentives to behave in ways that will be beneficial, such as getting more white male professors to do their fair share of mentoring. As mentors, we may even normalize this individualized, incentive approach, helping mentees to comply with this now-dominant system.

The logic of this management approach needs deeper analysis. First, consider why people join academia. Motivations vary, but many conceive of what they do as a vocation and cherish ideals such as the life of the mind. But the management approach of “incentives” and “incentivizing” presumes academics who lack intrinsic motivation (Deci Reference Deci1975). Such academics do what they do for external rewards rather than for the intrinsic rewards to be found in the work itself, such as the excitement of a new idea, the satisfaction of crafting a well-honed argument, or the give-and-take of Q&A. Applied to mentoring, this model produces an instrumental attitude—one more “box ticked” in a merit statement—that is antithetical to genuine mentoring and to the academic values that bring many people into higher education in the first place.

A second effect of this model is that it fosters an atomistic, hierarchical system (i.e., rewards from deans) instead of a relational culture of solidarity among peers. In a relational culture, mentoring need not be “incentivized” because it occurs organically in the discussion of ideas, the exchanges among colleagues and graduate students that bring excitement and intellectual satisfaction. This is the milieu that produces meaningful connections and possible mentoring relationships, grounded in shared interests. Such a culture requires nourishing through collective activities, whether within departments or epistemic communities (e.g., organized sections of APSA) where scholars share substantive research agendas.

Administrators’ metric mania and absurd anti-intellectual systematization combined with the speed-up has changed academic values and culture in ways that are only now becoming clear. Baele and Bettiza (Reference Baele and Bettiza2017) found that metrics undermine intrinsic motivation. Knight (Reference Knight2009) analyzed why metrics cannot actually work as intended. This management model is an ideology of corporatism rather than an evidence-based practice. Yet, instead of questioning the application of the model to higher education (Welsh Reference Welsh2019), many chase the promise of the perfect metric—a chimera because humans have the consciousness to game any system.

What does this critique imply for those who believe that mentoring matters? It means recognizing that intrinsic motivation is essential to academic life and naming mechanistic incentivization for what it is: a management model better suited to the building of cars than the discovery of new knowledge. That model cannot sustain individuals and communities of scholars and may even be undermining them. It means thinking about mentoring outside of the hierarchical-incentives approach (Will I get credit?) and emphasizing instead, whenever possible, collective activities that bring people together—writing workshops, brown-bag sessions, the creation of communities within conferences—to discuss ideas, the very reason we chose academia over more remunerative professions.

One recent example is instructive. In 2016, 10 political scientists (Beaulieu et al. Reference Beaulieu, Boydstun, Brown, Dionne, Gillespie, Klar, Krupnikov, Michelson, Searles and Wolbrecht2017) launched “Women Also Know Stuff” (WAKS), a website that connects media to women experts. They describe WAKS as “meta-level mentoring” that challenges the implicit biases that produce women’s underrepresentation in political discourse. WAKS takes a collective approach—similar to the associational women’s caucuses that I found so important as a new faculty member—and it focuses on a shared substantive purpose. This innovation is to be applauded and imitated; we need more such innovative mentoring practices that move beyond an individualized template. We need creative collective efforts, particularly along race-ethnic-gender lines, to challenge the institutional mood of fear and corporatized management models that are hostile to the best in academic culture—even as we try to improve that culture so that it is inclusive of all.