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When Is a Mentor Like a Monk?
You, too, can take tips on mentoring from the successful socialization and succession strategies of the medieval church.
By Cristina González
I just finished reading a paper by a student in my graduate seminar on the philosophy of higher education.1 All of his classmates wrote about contemporary issues, but this student, Christopher Flesoras, focused instead on mentoring in the medieval church. He reported that both the eastern and western branches of the church (Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox) saw formal mentoring as an important means to acculturate new members and provide continuity from generation to generation. Protestantism, however, broke from this mentoring model. My student wrote that American universities, many of which were originally Protestant, showed little interest in formal mentoring until recently. Interestingly, he noted that many mentoring programs now under development appear to parallel those seen in the medieval church.
This intriguing observation made me think about why American institutions of higher learning see the need for mentoring programs at this moment. What does the medieval church have in common with contemporary U.S. universities? One thing, it seems, is diversity. The medieval church drew its membership from many different ethnicities and cultures worldwide and thus needed explicit and formal mentoring processes to create a sense of community and to carry out succession planning. Protestant churches, however, have tended to be monocultural and regional, because dissenting members can simply split off and form new denominations. In relatively uniform groups, mentoring seems to take place naturally, with no need either to require it or to name it. In diverse settings, however, informal relationships do not arise as easily, and so we see a trend toward explicit and formal mentoring, conceptualized as a professional obligation. American colleges and universities today seem to be moving from reliance on the implicit, informal guidance common in monocultural groups to the explicit, formal mentoring typical of multicultural ones.
The literature about mentoring in academia reports significant benefits for both mentors and those they mentor.2 Formal mentoring relationships, however, vary more in their helpfulness than do informal ones, which have more consistently positive outcomes.3 Especially when mentoring women and minority faculty members, it is important to remember that the definition of mentor includes the concepts of “sponsor” and “advocate” in addition to “guide,” “tutor,” “coach,” and “confidante.” Many women and minorities will need mentors who will share power, not just knowledge and wisdom, with them.
Students
Today, students at all levels clamor for mentoring. The presence of more women and minorities in higher education contributes to the need for mentors, as do demands on students to evaluate ever more information and new career paths created by the global economy. This increased desire among students for intellectual and professional guidance occurs at a time when expectations for faculty research are rising, teaching loads are shrinking, and student advising is being delegated to staff.
Although this situation would seem to reduce the possibility for mentoring relationships between faculty and students, universities have nonetheless expanded mentoring opportunities for undergraduates by, for example, introducing upper-division research programs and first-year seminars, publicizing best mentoring practices, and giving awards to outstanding mentors.
Faculty members are increasingly expected to mentor students at all levels in addition to carrying out their regular duties. Untenured faculty members question whether mentoring students counts as teaching and how much is expected. They also wonder about the relative importance of teaching, research, and service and about who will mentor them.
Faculty
Universities are trying to answer this last question by expanding mentoring opportunities for untenured faculty members. Some people, however, object to explicit and formal mentoring programs as artificial. Indeed, when life was simpler, this sort of thing usually happened by itself. Faculty members—overwhelmingly male and white—used to meet for lunch at now largely defunct faculty clubs and similar locales. In addition, when most professors had stay-at-home spouses, they saw one another at dinner parties and other social events more often than they do today. New faculty members were assimilated with relative ease, and they knew what was expected of them. Not so anymore.
My own campus, the University of California, Davis, is among the institutions that have taken steps to strengthen the mentoring of untenured faculty members. In 2004, as chair of the committee appointed to recommend improvements in campus mentoring, I had the opportunity to learn first hand about the challenges we faced. Although the central administration offered workshops and other informational activities for untenured faculty, the quality of mentoring was uneven at the level of departments, schools, and divisions; some units provided strong support, while others offered only minimal help. The committee soon concluded that it had to ascertain which mentoring activities should be made mandatory and which should be optional, after which it would need to determine where each activity should be located: department; college, school, or division; or central administration.
We solicited advice from college deans, department chairs, recently tenured professors, and untenured faculty members and found, not surprisingly, that many untenured faculty members wanted more mentoring. At the same time, some recently tenured professors expressed their willingness to mentor untenured faculty members, revealing an important untapped resource. Both the untenured and recently tenured faculty members actively helped the committee articulate its recommendations, which follow.
1. Mentoring must happen at all levels: that of the department; the college, school, or division; and the central administration.
Although new faculty members may look first to their departments for mentors, departments cannot provide faculty members with all the help they need to survive and prosper. It is particularly difficult for small departments to do so, but even in large departments, new faculty members can benefit from the advice of colleagues outside their units. They must get guidance at the level of the college, school, or division and the central administration on questions of tenure and promotion. But information about policies on balancing work and family and on teaching, research, and service can come from outside the department as well.
2. Departments must articulate and implement mentoring strategies.
Whether or not departments have formal mentoring programs, they should have well-thought-out mentoring strategies, including plans for fostering informal contacts among faculty, to ensure that all new faculty members receive necessary information and advice. We suggested that departments establish mentoring committees to help chairs reflect on the needs of untenured faculty and articulate and implement mentoring plans.
3. Colleges, schools, and divisions must take responsibility for the mentoring strategies of departments.
The committee concluded that colleges, schools, and divisions must monitor and support their departments’ mentoring strategies and keep track of the progress made by new faculty members. Deans should regularly discuss the progress of untenured faculty members with department chairs and meet periodically with all the untenured faculty members in their units to encourage them to discuss issues of common interest and get to know one another.
4. The central administration should expand mentoring resources and establish an optional mentors-at-large program.
At UC Davis, the central administration has traditionally offered detailed information advising untenured faculty members about the tenure and promotion process; teaching, research, and service activities; and even work-life balance. Our committee praised the administration’s workshops and other programs but suggested that these allow enough time for free-ranging conversations and networking among untenured faculty. In addition, we recommended that the Office of Academic Personnel establish a formal, optional, mentors-at-large program to complement the activities offered by departments, colleges, schools, and divisions. Under such a program, the office would compile a university-wide list of potential mentors-at-large, including recently tenured professors, so that faculty members who want advice from colleagues outside their departments can find an appropriate match.
The committee made a point of recommending that faculty mentors receive appropriate service credit for their contributions, including an adjustment of their service load. Over the past few decades, the service load of faculty members has expanded dramatically to include service to the campus, the community, and the profession. Professional service now often includes membership on national and international committees, grant panels, and editorial boards—and sometimes even means mentoring faculty members at other institutions. When faculty agree to serve as mentors, these kinds of demands need to be adjusted.
Unlike the initiatives undertaken by other universities, ours does not advocate a single mandatory and formal mentoring program. We recommended that the informal programs we described should be mandatory (the mentoring strategies at the level of departments and colleges, schools, or divisions) and that the formal one should be optional (the mentors-at-large program at the central administration level). Our goal was to provide flexibility at each level, while keeping all three levels involved.
Mentoring the new generation of faculty will require a concerted effort involving central administrations, departments, and colleges, schools, or divisions. Put another way, it will take a village. This village should include not only senior professors, but also recently tenured and untenured faculty members, all of whom can contribute to the professional development of assistant professors. We received two kinds of answers in response to the question, To whom do you go when you need advice? Some assistant professors said they went to senior faculty members for help, but others were more eclectic in their sources of support, often turning to peers for assistance as well. In informal conversations with untenured and recently tenured faculty, we got the impression that men tend to rely more on senior colleagues than do women, who showed much appreciation for help received from peers. The men we interviewed seemed more focused on vertical and intergenerational relations, while the women appeared to have stronger horizontal and intra-generational networks of support. Both kinds of relationships are important.
The committee strongly advised tapping recently tenured faculty members, who are just a few years ahead of untenured faculty and fundamentally belong to the same generation, for the mentors-at-large program. For untenured faculty members, interacting with recently tenured professors only a few years senior to them is as important to their professional development as their relationships with senior colleagues.
Diversity
As the baby-boom generation of faculty approaches retirement, institutions of higher learning need to plan for its replacement. The future of the university depends as much on the ability of the new generation to reach for the torch without fear as it does on our willingness to pass it with grace. Mentoring must therefore be an important part of any succession planning.
The faculty is increasingly diverse, and the spectrum of activities in which faculty engage is more varied than ever before. Providing this more complex generation of faculty with effective mentoring is a major systemic challenge. To do so, universities must establish both heterogeneous and homogeneous mentoring networks. In their encouragement of heterogeneous mentoring—men mentoring women, whites mentoring minorities, and so on—universities must help faculty members understand the importance of reaching out to people from different backgrounds. At the same time, because homogeneous mentoring—women mentoring women, minorities mentoring minorities—has been shown to produce significant benefits, universities must also tap recently promoted faculty members as mentors for junior colleagues of the same backgrounds. This kind of intra-generational or horizontal mentoring can be extremely helpful, even across gender and racial lines. Peer mentoring helps to enhance the position of a cohort, which can use the knowledge and wisdom acquired in its interactions to articulate and advance its own vision.
In the final analysis, mentoring is really about power: vertical mentoring is about giving power, and horizontal mentoring is about taking it. If the university is to renew itself, each generation needs to differ from the previous one. There should therefore be a healthy tension between acculturation and culture-changing. That is why, if we want to have a really diverse faculty and a truly inclusive university, we must encourage power taking as much as power giving.
By expanding opportunities for untenured and recently tenured faculty members to interact with one another, as well as with senior faculty, we can help them develop a collective identity and a sense of belonging, so that, working together, they are prepared to succeed us and to take the university to new heights. ¨
Notes
1. I thank my student Christopher Flesoras and my colleague Patricia Gándara for inspiring me to write this article and fo r offering valuable comments on the first draft. I also thank Steffen Abel, Andrea Bjorklund, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Liz Constable, Jason Eisenrich, Michael Gertz, William Jackson, Winston Ko, Dan Potter, and Tamara Swaab, members of the University of California, Davis, Advisory Committee on Faculty Mentoring, for their efforts to improve the professional lives of their colleagues through their thoughtful recommendations. Back to text.
2. The literature about mentoring in academia is extensive and continues to grow. For an introduction to the topic and basic bibliography, see Carol A. Mullen, Mentorship Primer (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Carol A. Mullen and Dale W. Lick, New Directions in Mentoring: Creating a Culture of Synergy (London: Falmer Press, 1999). I found the following works particularly relevant: Daniel J. Levinson, et al., The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Ballantine 1978); Rosabeth M. Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Robert T. Blackburn, David W. Chapman, and Susan W. Cameron, “‘Cloning’ in Academe: Mentorship and Academic Careers,” Research in Higher Education, 15 (1981): 315–27; Roberta G. Sands, L. Alayne Parson, and Josann Duane, “Faculty Mentoring Faculty in a Public University,” Journal of Higher Education, 62, no. 2 (1991): 174–193. Recent books about faculty diversity that discuss the importance of mentoring are Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner and Samuel L. Myers, Jr., Faculty of Color in Academe: Bittersweet Success (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000) and JoAnn Moody, Faculty Diversity: Problems and Solutions (New York: Routledge, 2004). Back to text.
3. See Patricia Gándara and María Mejorado, “Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Mentoring as a Strategyto Increase Access to Higher Education,” in Preparing for College: Nine Elements of Successful Outreach, eds. William G. Tierney, Zoë B. Corwin, and Julia E. Colyar (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2005), 89–110. Back to text.
Cristina González is professor of Spanish and education and a former senior adviser to the chancellor at the University of California, Davis.
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