We humanists these days are afflicted by so many calamities (downsizing, disrespect, directionlessness) that it is easy to lapse into a state of complete demoralysis (= demoralization + moral paralysis).
Understandable as such a lapse might be, it is less depressing more productive to envision how we might assure the future of our guild. One possible solution to the crisis–and this is a long-term solution, I confess–centers around getting faculty to commit to mentoring students. It’s an unusually difficult concept to grasp for my academic generation. As such, I provide you with some helpful FAQ’s.
As per my syllabus, I hold office hours 90 minutes a week (!), and I’m pretty much always in there. Is that mentoring? No. Conducting OH is decidedly not mentoring. Far from it (and would it kill you to put in an extra half hour a week?). It’s necessary, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not mentoring.
So what do you mean, then, by mentoring? I refer to the process of getting to know a student both in the classroom and outside of the classroom so as to be able to positively impact the trajectory of their lives. It consists of engaging them beyond their assignments, grades, etc. It means thinking of them as people you care about and wish to help–the way you might think of a niece or a nephew (or if you’re an emeritus, a grandchild). It means understanding your mentoring as a professional obligation.
You don’t seem like a mentoring sort of guy. There’s a distinct–just being honest here JB–self-absorbed-^$$hole vibe emanating from you. From whom did you, of all people, catch the mentoring bug? From the Jesuits at Georgetown University. When I first got here the thing that impressed me was the way students would speak about dinner discussions with Father Joe about Nietzsche or conversations they had had across years and years with Father Jack about family issues. Alums would always ask me to say hello to a priest that had talked them through intellectual dilemmas or even through personal crises. I am not a priest or a even a Catholic. I am not even a believer. But I very much admire the concept, the form of the mission of Jesuit pedagogy. I sought to secularize it in accordance with my proclivities and character.
Were you ever mentored? No. Not as an undergrad. In graduate school one senior scholar took me under her wing, especially when I and my career were going nowhere. I have written elsewhere about an older colleague who befriended sad-sap me as an adjunct when I and my career were still going nowhere.
So what does mentoring, secular or otherwise, entail? It means spending lots of time with students outside of the classroom. Office hours plus walks through campus, coffee, lunch, whatever. Before I started my last book, my wife and I used to have students over for dinner every other week. Now that my manuscript beard is shaven we look forward to starting the tradition anew. With a student’s permission, it may also mean getting to know their parents if and when they swing through town.
So aside from Jesuits and JB, nobody else mentors in Higher Education? False. My guess is that 10 to 20 percent of the American professoriate is passionately committed to the “whole person.” My hunch is women do it more than men, adjuncts more than fulls. The faculties of small colleges more than the Level One Research Universities. Just a hunch. I could be wrong.
So why do the other 80 percent refrain from mentoring? There are so many reasons. Some understandable, some odious. Understandably, cultivating relationships with students takes time and if there is one thing professors engaged in research and publication do not have, it is time. Administrations, at least in nonreligiously chartered institutions place little or no emphasis (i.e., paths to promotion) on mentoring. Hence it advances a scholar’s “life chances” not one whit to lounge around campus chugging espressos with a sophomore no matter how elucidating that experience might be for aforesaid sophomore.
What are the odious reasons? We are the odious reasons. We have forgotten that the scholar’s product is not only a journal article or a seminal monograph, but, equally, generations of human beings whom we educate and cultivate. It is, regrettably, hard enough to incentivize professors to take teaching seriously. Mentoring is obviously going to be a much harder sell.
It’s also going to be a hard sell because of the quasi-hysteria regarding any sort of extra-classroom interaction between professors and students which set in during the 1980s and has decimated the organic bonds that traditionally obtained between them. I am not defending lecherous professors, yet in the name of wiping them off the face of the earth, the longstanding tradition of mentoring fast became roadkill. A conspiracy of sanctimony and convenience that radically transformed the American campus.
Why would a return to mentoring be good for the humanities? Because it deals with the intellectual cultivation of the soul and this is a “deliverable” that few other institutions are as well equipped to provide.
