Role Models, Good and Bad

When talk turns to academic hiring, it also often turns to the question of mentorship: how candidates have been guided, well or poorly, by those with more experience and, presumably, more savvy in the ways of academe, and how that guidance has helped or hurt candidates.

Certainly, I have encountered job applicants who have apparently been getting bad advice from their mentors. Years ago, in a couple of consecutive searches at my first institution, we saw a string of really poor job letters from candidates in an extremely prestigious graduate program, candidates whose general qualifications and accomplishments would have made them highly competitive for our positions. These letters were poor in similar ways, suggesting a pattern of bad advice rather than some odd series of quirks in a fairly large number of candidates. They were terse and arrogant, lacked sufficient detail about the candidates’ interests and experience, and gave no indication whatever that the candidates had thought specifically about the jobs for which they were applying. I wonder at times whether any of these candidates overcame their letters and got academic jobs–their self-presentation was so far out of the disciplinary mainstream that I am sure they were handicapped in other searches.

Other candidates have clearly received excellent mentoring. They understand the realities of the academic market, present themselves well, and what you might call the “rhetoric” of their application packets is suited to the institutions to which they are applying. These candidates, who are generally strong but whose excellent self-presentation makes them stand out even further, have the look of success as they progress through the job-search process.

Interestingly, in my own job searches I have been asked more and more about my mentors as I have progressed through the administrative ranks. I suspect that mentoring, per se, may be more important for junior faculty hires at research institutions than it is at teaching institutions, because research is arguably a more “mentored” activity for young faculty than are other faculty functions. But in my career at teaching institutions, since I have started interviewing for administrative jobs I have nearly always been asked about my mentors at some point during the interview.

I have had many great mentors and I hope I have learned their lessons well. For instance, I have always tended to be frank and informal in meetings, but earlier in my career, as department chair, my dean advised me to be more careful about my comments. This advice, kindly but firmly given, has been an enormous help over the years and especially now, when in a real sense I speak for the academic program. A thoughtless comment from me may carry a lot of weight, embarrass me or others, and generally spoil the tone of a meeting. Other mentors have helped me in various ways to understand life and work at a small private college, and I think of these lessons often as I go about my days.

Honestly, though, I think I have learned more from “negative mentors.” I think often of administrative actions that have irritated me, made me angry, or struck me as patently unjust, and use them as a model of what not to do. Instead, when making decisions, I try to keep the faculty perspective in mind. This kind of mentoring, of course, is inadvertent because neither party views it as such.

One incident from early in my career still comes to mind whenever I make job offers, evaluate our salary scale, and discuss institutional finances with prospective and current faculty. At my first college I started as a visiting instructor, A.B.D., and then was hired for the tenure-track position for which the visiting job was a stopgap. A couple of years into my career, a friend of mine who’d been in and out of the same institution in various visiting capacities, and whose credentials were almost exactly equivalent to mine, was hired for a one-year, full-time visiting position. We were both in oversupplied humanities disciplines, so that was not a factor in what happened.

Because we were friends, we talked openly about our compensation and other matters. Over a beer one evening I discovered that he was being paid about $600 a year more than I was, which at that time was about a two-percent difference in our salaries. I’m all for paying faculty members as well as possible, but I was a tenure-track faculty member and he was not, which meant that I had duties — advising, performing institutional service, etc. — that he did not.

This incident was sheer carelessness and inattention on the part of the administrator who set the salary. It was insulting, possibly even demeaning to me, and to several other similarly situated junior faculty who were in the same financial boat. It happened nearly 20 years ago, and I still think of it every time I pick up the phone to make a job offer; I always look hard at our salary spreadsheets to make sure I don’t do the same thing to someone on our faculty. As it turns out, it was a formative moment in my academic career, because it showed me the incredible importance of careful, honorable administration, and how hard on faculty morale inattention (which can look like indifference) to equity can be. It also showed how much bigger a very few institutional dollars are psychologically than they can possibly be in the overall budget. Those are lessons I will not forget.

The combination of positive mentoring by good people who set an example of probity, smart thinking, and honorable action, and negative mentoring by less positive examples, can be a rich source of professional insight. Unfortunately, though, young job candidates who most need positive mentoring are not in the best position to recognize negative mentoring. Which is why formal and informal mentors need to be very careful to give good advice and to set the right kind of example for those who are paying attention to their advice and their actions.