Before departing Ithaca for the Trojan Wars, Odysseus wisely entrusted his household to his old friend, Mentor. Mentor honorably served his long-absent king, confronting usurpers who occupied Odysseus’s home, spent his wealth, and pursued his wife. Though Mentor angered many, his integrity and courage did not go unappreciated: The goddess Athena presented herself in his likeness whenever she sought to advise or inspire mortals.
Study of the classics has declined, but the practice to which Mentor gave his name apparently thrives. Do-gooders, public officials, entertainers, and entrepreneurs celebrate and promote mentoring for everything from combating drugs to advancing corporate interests. Would-be mentors establish organizations and write (mostly silly) books such as Spiritual Mentoring; The Marriage Mentor Manual; and The Mentor: 15 Keys to Success in Sales, Business, and Life. Other books, such as Marian Wright Edelman’s Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, register indebtedness and proffer testimonials intended to encourage mentoring.
Young academics can turn to Clay Schoenfeld’s Mentor in a Manual: Climbing the Academic Ladder to Tenure or to Emily Toth’s Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia. The Chronicle now offers Ms. Mentor on its online Career Network, and even Radical History Review devoted a recent issue to the subject of mentoring.
It may simply be the fact that mentoring has emerged as the latest buzzword. Or it may be that my oldest child, Rhiannon, is a sophomore at the University of Virginia, and I anxiously hope that one of her professors will recognize her potential and take her under his or her wing. Or it may even be that, having recently turned 50, I have become more sensitive to matters generational. Whatever the reason, I find myself more reflective about my own role as a mentor.
Increasingly, I appreciate the dialectical character of the relationship. Indeed -- though I would hate to give my students swelled heads -- I have come to recognize just how much my own development has depended on those whom I have mentored.
Of course, the academic calling has always been about mentoring. In The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and Geniuses, the historian Noel Annan recounts the powerful influence Oxbridge teachers had in shaping generations of British elites. Although the English term “don” does not derive from the Mafia, it does hint at the patronage system we now exalt as mentoring. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that the old-boy system ruled American higher education. Today, such old-boy networks have survived feminism and affirmative action by admitting girls to their ranks.
Moreover, for better or worse, universities now regularly institutionalize the mentoring of new students and faculty members in formal programs. I say “for better or worse,” because my one official effort -- mentoring a junior faculty member -- ended rather disappointingly. I was paired with someone whose personality contrasted sharply with my own. Rather reserved, my “mentee” must have found my more exuberant style terribly overbearing. I strongly encouraged him in his scholarship and even tried, unsuccessfully, to convince him to be chair of our department. He did go on to win tenure, but soon after, to my regret, requested transfer to another department.
My own experience as a history undergraduate in the late 1960’s did little to prepare me for mentoring students. The closest anyone at Rutgers University came to playing that role in my career was a professor of Spanish; and he did so by sending me away, as the guinea pig for a program that Rutgers was setting up with the National Autonomous University of Mexico. I readily acknowledge what my graduate professors at the University of London and Louisiana State University did for me. But I would better describe them as offensive linemen than as mentors, for they mostly served to guard me against conservative tacklers as I headed intellectually leftward.
Like many of my generation, I entered academe hoping to advance America’s democratic impulse through my scholarship and teaching. I definitely included in that aspiration the mentoring of young intellects. But, as a 28-year-old New York Jewish boy, coming from an all-male, “public Ivy” college, and possessed of radical ideas, I had a lot to learn when I became a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin’s Green Bay campus.
I naively figured my students would be pretty much like my friends and I had been. However, most of my students were women, the first generation in their families to attend college. Half were well into their 20’s (making them my peers). Quite a few had family responsibilities. And -- imbued with a strong work ethic by their working- and lower-middle-class families -- many labored long hours at jobs rather than borrow to pay for college.
Moreover, the majority of those Midwesterners, men and women, found my aggressive, argumentative (call it Talmudic?) pedagogical style rather intimidating. Not to mention the fact that, by the late 1970’s, radicalism had waned. I admired the soundly democratic bearing of my students (remember, the Green Bay Packers are a community-owned football team), but I was uncomfortable with their reticence, variously interpreting it as fear of me, respect, or plain lack of interest.
Institutional developments also inhibited my mentoring relationships. The Wisconsin legislature had created the Green Bay campus in 1965, and designed it to be the innovative, interdisciplinary component of the state system. Originally well financed, it had suffered serious budget cuts by the time I arrived in 1978 -- and it has continued to do so. Twenty-two years later, we have the same number of faculty members and twice the number of students as we did when I started. With seven classes per year, up to 200 students each semester in my introductory course alone, and no graduate assistants (plus scholarly, community, and familial obligations), I have had only so much time to devote to individual students.
Nevertheless, irrepressible and irresistible students tend to come a professor’s way. Fortunately, since my colleagues and I have varied interests and characters, we tend to find different students intriguing. Personally, I respond to the more vocal, enthusiastic, and passionate types. Some students walk right up and demand my attention. In my first year at the university, a young man waylaid me in the hall to insist that we read Marx’s work together. This student was brilliant (far smarter than I) and, in spite of his attraction to the arcane and ahistorical side of philosophy, we became good friends, working closely together until he and his wife went off to Boston for graduate school. I had read Marx before, but probably never so carefully as I did with this student.
Other students, whether they have intended it or not, have recruited me to their cause by persistently challenging me in class, and remaining undaunted in ensuing exchanges. One working-class “kid,” whose questions revealed remarkable critical powers, but whose writing needed disciplining (and got it), kept his student comrades and me forever on our toes, occasionally exasperatingly so. He had incessant questions about logic and theory, while I pressed him to think historically. I made it a point of meeting with him after class, not sending him away -- that is, until graduation, when I proudly packed him off to follow in my footsteps in pursuit of a master’s degree at the London School of Economics.
Last fall, a freshman biology student reminded me that Midwesterners can tangle with ideas and professors as well as any East Coaster. He also made me think about how terribly foolish I must sound each year when, before the start of autumn classes, I whine to my family that all the best students have graduated. Knowing this student had a medical career in mind, I refrained from trying to get him to shift to history or social science. But one day, after class, contesting my view of what history had to say about the prospects for greater equality, he so got under my skin that I shot back: “How’d you like to really develop that intellect of yours?” (More honestly, I probably should have asked him how he’d like to spend the next few years cultivating my intellect.) Still premed (I’d have it no other way), this student is working independently with me this semester, and every Thursday over dinner in the commons, we grapple with the “Age of Revolution,” past and present.
I would love working with graduate students; but I know that, being an undergraduate teacher, I don’t have to feel guilty about pursuing the pleasures of intellectual nomadism but can range over a variety of topics and areas (and I don’t have to agonize over the academic job market). My best students have inspired me and helped prepare me for the classroom by making me explain myself more clearly, before I face their more reserved comrades. They also have pushed me in new directions.
Back in the 1980’s, before we hired a women’s-history professor, feminist students motivated me to read the growing corpus of scholarship with them. Other students picked up my interest in the British Marxist historians and cajoled me into reading English cultural studies (though I abjured postmodernism). And just last semester, three young women persuaded me to tutor them on Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Doing so, they not only gave me another chance to reconsider Durkheim, and scorn Weber, but also to more deeply appreciate Marx’s dictum that “even the educators need to be educated.”
Harvey J. Kaye is a professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay and the author of, among other books, “Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History?” and Other Questions (1996, St. Martin’s Press).
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