|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ONE often reads or hears accounts told from the perspective of a mentor. I would like to share the other side of the coin: the view of protégé, or mentee. It is essential to begin with something about me and my background.
A description of my early life reads like a stereotype of black childhood in America. I was born of working-class parents, neither of whom had been educated beyond high school. My parents divorced when I was a toddler, and I was raised in a female-headed household on my mother's very modest income. We lived in the inner city of Detroit and moved frequently, and I attended inner-city schools through junior high school. Despite having what many people may consider an unfortunate childhood, I was a happy, welladjusted child, blessed with loving parents. Contrary to societal expectations, I have successfully earned undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from reputable institutions, studied in Europe, served as a university administrator, and achieved a place in the professoriat.
What are the reasons for this Horatio Alger-like success story? American culture is replete with myths and well-known adages that might be used to explain my rise. After all, everyone knows that in this “land of golden opportunities,” “anything is possible.” We are constantly told “if at first you don't succeed, try, and try again,” and reminded that we need only “knock and the door shall be opened.” My favorite is the admonition to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” All these cultural insights are predicated on the broadly accepted but, in my view, erroneous assumption that the individual is absolutely responsible for her or his own fate and success. If you have the intelligence and the tenacity, all things will be given unto you. It is unfortunately not that simple. Let's take a closer look at the advice to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” I have always associated this expression with our Wild West tradition, although the phrase seems to be of unknown origin. Virtually every American has heard it and perhaps even used it to refer to “rais[ing] oneself through one's unaided efforts above one's former cultural, social, or economic level” (Funk 51). There are many successful individuals who confidently assert, “I did it alone, why can't they?” I want to debunk the belief that anyone can do it alone. It is my conviction that persons like me, minority women, cannot achieve professional excellence completely on their own. Why? Because, to follow this sage advice, one must have boots as well as the proverbial bootstraps-and also strength. To anyone who has ever attempted to pull on a pair of new and fairly stiff leather boots quickly, the difficulty of the task will be obvious. Even if we minority women have boots with bootstraps, we still need help pulling them on, and providing that help is, in my view, the task of the mentor.
Let me return briefly to my own career path. Why was I successful professionally? There are several possible explanations. As you probably are aware, I reject categorically the notion that my professional attainments are an example of the inevitable fulfillment of the American dream. The notion that my accomplishments are due to a miracle is engaging, although unlikely. Perhaps those who believe in Fortuna might prefer to hold Lady Luck responsible. Although I can certainly attribute some occurrences to good fortune, that alone is not a sufficient explanation. Finally, the particularly charitable might assume that my intellectual brilliance is the answer. This conclusion, however, is most assuredly not justified. Many of my classmates who are much more intelligent than I were unfortunately unable to negotiate the educational maze successfully. In fact, I consider a combination of several factors to have been crucial to my success. I list them here not necessarily in order of importance: average intelligence, hard work, luck (or, if you are a believer, interventions of divine providence), and, finally and most important, a series of mentors. Although it would be interesting to consider each of these factors in turn, it is the topic of mentors that I would like to discuss in detail.
First, a definition is in order. The term mentor originates in Homer's epic The Odyssey, where Mentor is the tutor and guide for Odysseus's son Telemachus. Metaphorically, a mentor is a guide who leads a traveler on a pilgrimage of discovery. Today a mentor is generally defined as “someone, not a blood relative, who takes a special interest and responsibility for the growth and development of another person” (Daloz 35). For my purposes, this definition is a bit too narrow, because my first mentor was very much a blood relative-my mother.
Without my mother, my pilgrimage of discovery would never have begun. She was the person who encouraged me to take risks, who gave wise counsel, who provided honest and sometimes painful criticism of my strengths and weaknesses, who challenged me to exceed her expectations and achievements, who was willing to listen, who provided a shoulder to cry on but rearmed me for the next battle. Perhaps most important, she was the first person who generously devoted time to me. It was only much later that I learned that these traits characterize a good mentor. During the various stages of my personal and professional development, I have been lucky enough to have had many mentors, all of whom made vital contributions. With few exceptions, they are white and male: they were my teachers, professors, and supervisors. Their homogeneity should be no surprise, considering the scarcity of women and minorities holding higher-level positions in the schools I attended and in the universities and colleges where I have been employed.
My mentors include the fourth-grade teacher who selected me, a black child in a predominantly white school, to play the part of Scrooge in a Dickens play; the black geometry teacher in high school who challenged me to earn not just A's but 100s on his exams; the university professor who wisely advised me against a premature year of study abroad and helped me receive a scholarship to attend an American total-immersion program to strengthen my language skills; the German student in Freiburg who became my unofficial language teacher and patiently explained and corrected innumerable linguistic errors; the German family who “adopted” me as their American daughter, introduced me to the intricacies of their culture, and offered me a safe haven in a foreign country; the curator of the German collection of the Stanford library, who helped me develop the bibliographic skills that were essential to my dissertation research; the visiting professor who encouraged me to explore an interesting but atypical dissertation on blacks in eighteenth-century German literature; the department chair who recognized my ability as a teacher and teacher trainer and advised me to develop a pedagogical, rather than a literary, professional specialty; the dean who appointed me his assistant and thereby enabled me to acquire five years of invaluable administrative experience; the numerous colleagues who over the years have taken an interest in my career development and have provided me countless opportunities to sharpen my skills and broaden my areas of expertise.
All these people and many others were instrumental in helping me in ways that I could not have helped myself. They taught me the ropes of a new and different environment; they introduced me to the language and expectations of this environment; they encouraged and challenged me; they gave me honest feedback on my performance-not always positive but always constructive. Because they knew the system, they could help me to learn about it and ultimately to function independent of their help and advice. Each guided me in a different way toward a path of intellectual and personal independence. They did not try to produce clones of themselves; they challenged me to be the best that I could be. For this I will always be indebted to them.
Not all my mentors have been helpful. Two examples should suffice to indicate the potential problems associated with the wrong mentor. First, a wellmeaning professor, my undergraduate adviser from whom I had earned an A in an advanced German grammar course, discouraged my applications to Stanford and Harvard. He thought that these schools were long shots for a person like me, that it was clearly a waste of time and money for me to apply, and that I would be better off at Ohio State or Michigan. Had I followed his “kind” advice, I would certainly have received a fine education, but I would not have realized my personal dream. I am now convinced that this professor, though he was very likely unaware of it, could not believe that a black student could gain admission to the Ivy League institutions. I've always wanted to write him to describe my subsequent experiences, but I never have done so.
My other unhelpful mentor was one of my own-a black woman. When I was a faculty member, I was often advised to solicit the “help” of a female minority administrator at my institution who others thought would be only too glad to help me achieve my desired career in university administration. Little did they know! When I finally managed to get an appointment with her, I was very much disappointed by our conversation. On hearing about my four years on the faculty, she labeled me a “closet faculty member,” someone who had concentrated her efforts on internal departmental activities and who was now seeking admission to the “hallowed halls” of administration. Furthermore, she made it quite clear that she was reluctant, and even unwilling, to help every Tom, Dick, and Jane who was suddenly interested in altering his or her status at the institution. After all, most of these people were only after her job! (How sad it is that even competent minorities at white institutions are often encouraged to believe that there is only room for one minority member in the executive suite and are therefore convinced that helping younger minority colleagues is tantamount to putting themselves out of a job.) Although at the time I was confused and angered by her response, I now recognize that she was threatened by my interest and fearful of the potential competition of a younger black woman.
These two interactions, though painful at the time and disturbing even in retrospect, taught me a valuable lesson: although mentors are important, one dare not become overdependent on them. One must remain objective and able to evaluate, as unemotionally as possible, the advice and the person giving it. Only after thoughtful consideration should one decide to follow the advice of others. I think that it is much easier to accept the negative consequences of one's own mistakes than the consequences of mistakes engineered by others.
If it is our sincere goal to increase the numbers of minority and female PhDs and faculty members in the foreign languages, we must recognize some basic facts:
The strangeness that minorities and women often feel in the halls of the academy is not unique to this environment. In A Tale of O: On Being Different in an Organization, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Barry Stein describe the situation and feelings of the outsider as
a familiar drama performed every day in every place where there are many more of some kinds of people than of others-where some people have an easy time fitting in because they're just like everyone else, while other people have problems because … they are different. There are two kinds of characters in this story: the X's-the people who are found in large numbers-and the O's-the people who are scarce. (2, 10)
In this popularized version of their sociological research on men and women in the corporate world, Kanter and Stein conclude that
X-O situations will never completely disappear, even with respect to some obvious O's (by sex or race). It will be a long time before numbers are balanced in enough places that the O's in X-groups no longer seem unusual. (215)
Moreover, they identify some behavioral changes of the X's that would be beneficial for the professional life and career advancement of the O's. They recommend that the X's
In short, they recommend that X's become the mentors of O's.
If we in the academy wish to recruit and keep more minority and female faculty members in the foreign language teaching profession, we must be aware that their success lies not only in their hands but in ours. We must help them to adjust to our “foreign country” and to feel at home here. We must take it on ourselves to ensure that the best minority and female students in our lower-level language courses persevere to advanced language study. We must dislodge the stereotypes that exist among many of our colleagues and major advisers about the ability of these students to succeed in language study. We must investigate financial opportunities that would help our students to finance study abroad. In essence, we must take it on ourselves to provide them with the help that they cannot provide themselves. We owe it to our profession and to ourselves to release the massive untapped resources and the vastly underestimated potential that these future colleagues represent. Finally, we must remember that we are all potential mentors, and it is our task to help with the bootstraps.
As a Germanist, I can appropriately close my remarks with words that have been ascribed to Goethe: “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”
The author is Associate Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 15–17 June 1989, in Northridge, California.
Daloz, Laurent A. “Martha Meets Her Mentor.” Change July- Aug. 1989: 35–37.
Funk, Charles Earle. Heavens to Betsy. New York: Harper, 1955.
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, and Barry Stein. A Tale of O: On Being Different in an Organization. New York: Harper, 1980.
© 1990 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
