mentorship/schemtorship

While I certainly agree that mentoring is of great import, I’m not sure that women or persons of color new to the academy have the most difficult time finding a mentor. These groups have made significant gains in the academy over the last twenty years. Where I think the real problem lies is social class. People from working class backgrounds of any race or gender are going to have a tougher time. A book I’ve heard does a great job of talking about this is Working-class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory by Tukarczyk and Fay.

Not that my own experience is exactly a scientific study, but I’ve seen both the results of formal mentoring programs (at Pennsylvania State University at New Kensington) and informal ones (at Robert Morris University). The PSU program was extremely pro forma. The mentor assigned to me was selected because we were both in the same broad discipline. Although, a tenured full professor, she had never taught creative writing class (which was what I had been hired to teach) and also had a class in another building at the same time as my class. Near the end of the semester, I submitted a video tape for review. I got pro forma feedback and the meeting we were supposed to have never happened.

The experience I had at Robert Morris University was outstanding. There, the chair of the English Department, A Distinguished Professor of English and an associate professor all took me other their wing in one way or another providing guidance and instruction as well as assignment sheets, grading rubric and tips for how to become a better instructor. Their doors were always open to me.

I also received a great deal of support from my fellow adjunct faculty my first year—which I tried to pay back my second year to some degree. I think one thing the Mentor Web article doesn’t acknowledge is the broad array of backgrounds of students in doctoral programs now due the recession and the collapse of the publishing industry. It’s not uncommon to have doctoral candidates being taught by people who have significantly less life and professional experience than they do. So what I think might be helpful is a mentoring program designed to help people with the transition from non-academic careers in addition to ones geared toward traditional graduate students.