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MENTORING, previously an informal and spontaneous relationship, has recently begun to receive considerable conscious, analytical attention. The 1980s saw the development of corporate mentoring programs and the emergence of books and essays, national seminars, and surveys on mentoring. Several recent contributors to the ADFL Bulletin have focused directly or obliquely on the subject. 1 Although the phenomenon transcends academia, interest is mounting in the academic ranks. In 1988, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 50% of all new PhDs accepted nonacademic employment. Depending on whose projections one chooses to believe, faculty retirements during the next decade may range from 70% to approximately 35%. Faculty members in many disciplines (including Hispanism) are already producing too few new doctorates to replace themselves. Even if one rejects the worst-case scenarios for retirements, the aging of the professoriat is a reality. The job market reflects many other factors—including economic, political, and demographic considerations—but there is cause for concern when statistics indicate a present enrollment of some 6,000 graduate students in all foreign languages combined. Given the more than 3,000 institutions of higher learning in this country, the potential shortfall is evident. Precise calculations are difficult because of the dearth of comprehensive information on attrition and completion rates, as well as on the differential completion times across disciplines, 2 but when ABDs do not finish dissertations, the cost to individuals and to society is incalculable. Available data suggest that only about one-third of the graduate students in the humanities complete the PhD, taking an average of ten to twelve years. Even more regrettably, most of the dropouts occur after five or six years, an investment of time that is sufficient for their counterparts in the natural sciences to complete the doctorate. 3
That is the downside, but there is good news for the current crop of PhDs. Not only are they entering a seller's market—job prospects in languages are better than they have been in a generation—but mentoring is now being stressed as never before. A number of writers have affirmed the decisive significance of mentoring (e.g., Harris-Schenz; Kronik), even though some had no mentors themselves. Nor did I. Qualified through experience (having learned by trial and error) and endowed with twenty-twenty hindsight, we who lacked mentors perceive with perfect clarity the junctures where mentoring could have made a crucial difference. Readers will find in the following remarks a deliberate absence of emphasis on gender, ethnicity, and minority status, although most of the suggestions have developed from my experience as a woman (unmentored) mentoring women. Some groups or individuals may need mentoring more than others do, but I doubt that the experience changes radically according to gender and ethnicity. Minorities and women, faced with an uphill struggle, which renders the mentor even more important, have generally lacked role models and encountered additional barriers to the mentor-mentee relationship (e.g., gender and subcultural differences) not present in the traditional male-to-male, majority-to-majority mentoring situation. Such complications make it crucial to develop guidelines that any would-be mentor can use. Deliberately generalized and depersonalized, the following suggestions apply equally to all mentors and mentees, whatever their gender or ethnic classification.
For academics there are three major groups of potential mentees: undergraduate students; current and former graduate students, particularly current thesis and dissertation advisees; and junior colleagues, whether at one's own institution or in the discipline at large. While certain positions—graduate adviser, thesis director, department chair—lend themselves especially well to mentoring functions, numerous opportunities exist for most professors to mentor and nurture new faculty members and advanced students, the groups on which I concentrate. My remarks focus on areas other than the mentee's performance in the classroom, which I leave to the experts in methodology and applied linguistics and to specialized seminars and workshops.
Mentoring can be relatively passive if, say, one merely serves as a role model, but in the paradigm I label “the proactive mentor,” the mode is more active and nurturing. Within these parameters, I distinguish three stages of mentoring that are especially crucial. The first, launching the graduate student, comprises the steps of choosing an area of specialization and entering into the company of publishing scholars. The second, providing guidance on initial job-market and career decisions, can be as important for the junior faculty member contemplating reentry into the job market as for the ABD, or new PhD. The final stage, helping neophytes become established (whether by earning tenure or acquiring a scholarly reputation), requires less focused and more extended mentoring.
To counsel graduate students on selecting an area of emphasis, the mentor should be well informed on the present and potential job market and capable of providing up-to-date insights. For example, students thinking of specializing in Spanish literature of the golden age or of the twentieth century should be made aware of the relative overcrowding in these fields, while students attracted by medieval studies should know that there are perhaps only two dozen universities nationwide with sufficiently large graduate programs to support a full-time Spanish medievalist. Modified according to the language in question, the principle of avoiding concentration on an overcrowded area (or of doing so exclusively) can be widely generalized. Because so many jobs in the next decade—an estimated 62% of the openings—will be in junior and community colleges and small four-year schools, students should be advised to have a well-developed second language, a double major, or a strong secondary area. Such flexibility will make job seekers more readily marketable—an especially important consideration for those restricted to a given region for family or other reasons. For example, students tempted to enter an overpopulated area of specialization, such as the twentieth century, might profit by learning of the comparative dearth of specialists in Romanticism and other nineteenth-century studies, areas that they might offer in combination with the more popular and crowded contemporary fields. Specific choices within these broad categories will depend on such variables as the expertise within the department and the strength of available library collections. If the department does not offer courses in critical methodologies, the mentor should ensure the student's familiarization with appropriate critical tools, either through an individual studies course or through offerings in the department of linguistics, comparative literature, or English (one should put the student's best interest before any competitiveness over departmental enrollment totals).
Mentors and mentees alike may underestimate the importance of the application process per se. The mentor should make sure that the mentee is skilled in the writing of résumés and should encourage frequent applications for scholarships and grants on the institutional, regional, and national levels. Local or institutional scholarships, fellowships, and other grants may be small, but each award helps to flesh out the neophyte's credentials, and such awards sometimes go unclaimed. In many institutions, a small grant or scholarship often determines whether a student takes summer courses or drops out to go to work; even if the funding is only symbolic, the recognition may persuade the student to continue. Some institutions also offer joint faculty-student summer grants, which pay the student a small stipend to carry out a research project under faculty supervision—an ideal mentoring situation. Such grants may stipulate not only that a professional paper or other publication be produced before the mentor or student applies again, a requirement that helps to guarantee project completion, but also that the subject differ from the dissertation topic, a condition that helps protect the originality and integrity of the dissertation process. If the announcements for university grants are sent by intra-institutional mail, students may not receive them, so it could be up to the mentor to suggest that the student apply for a scholarship, fellowship, or joint grant.
On entering the job market, students are tempted to accept the first job offer or to choose primarily on the basis of salary or location, yet such criteria applied in isolation could lead to dead-end positions. In today's market, the better graduates (especially from minority groups) may expect to have more than one offer—perhaps several viable alternatives. New PhDs should be made aware of the important of considerations other than immediate economic benefit. The duties of initial jobs can either foment productivity or effectively block it, consequently influencing development and relocation opportunities. First jobs can be dead ends if research facilities are lacking, teaching expectations are excessive, or other duties (committee work, extracurricular obligations) are too numerous. It is obviously more difficult to move from some institutions than from others, so applicants should choose the smaller and more obscure institutions only if they plan an extended stay.
The characteristics of an institution and the opportunities it provides for growth are comparable in importance to location and salary, for few subsequent recruiters will be favorably impressed with candidates whose curricula vitae have remained unchanged since graduate school, except for the addition of a place or two of employment. Likewise important are the relative weight the institution gives teaching versus research and the specific criteria underlying tenure and promotion decisions. Candidates with a true and abiding interest in teaching and no desire to be literary critics or scholarly researchers might well be unhappy at a major research university or graduate institution. Such mentees should be informed that there are institutions where nonpublishing career objectives are quite acceptable, though the trade-offs are likely to be lower salaries and higher class loads. Mentees need to understand the necessity of clarifying job expectations at interview time.
The new PhD, particularly, must realize that one of academia's more lamentable traditions involves hanging the departmental albatross on the new faculty member. Such onerous obligations as sponsoring foreign language clubs or honor societies, eating with the weekly foreign language tables, and taking the minutes for departmental meetings tend to be shunted onto the latest recruit as a sort of latent honorific recognition, if not as a required service (part of the tripartite expectation of teaching, research, and service from which senior faculty members expect relief on the grounds that they've paid their dues). In medium-size departments, with graduate teaching assistants but no specialist in applied linguistics, the new faculty member may also be expected to supervise teaching assistants or coordinate first- or second-year courses or both. Not only is the neophyte unprepared and generally unqualified for such responsibilities, but their combined total can constitute a crushing weight unless it is offset by corresponding course reductions. Mentees should be told to “just say no” to such dubious honors or even to demand relief from responsibilities that require spending too much time and effort on undesirable but necessary tasks that are unlikely to score points when hard decisions are made at promotion time. The mentor must caution new PhDs that they risk unplanned and expensive relocation unless they concentrate on activities that will carry weight with the tenure committee.
Humanists generally are disadvantaged in the grants and contracts competition; potential extramural funding is rarely available and then only in small amounts. Institutional seed funds and start-up monies for new researchers usually go to the “hard” sciences and engineering, with little help likely for the fledgling humanist unless it is negotiated at the outset. Mentees should be primed to inquire during interviews not only about research and publication expectations but especially about the possible availability of institutional assistance for recently hired faculty members. If newcomers must compete with established scholars for the same limited resources or must spend a certain number of years at the institution before becoming eligible, both the time and the funding for their research projects will probably have to come from their private resources. These situations are not unusual, and while they may not be entirely avoidable, mentees who are informed about them in advance are better able to guard against such pitfalls. Newly recruited instructors may be able to negotiate reduced teaching loads for a year or two while they begin to establish themselves as publishing scholars. Mentees must also determine in advance whether the department under consideration allows only a limited percentage of its faculty to be tenured and how many other pretenure members are already employed or are being appointed at the same time. In other words, will tenure depend on considerations other than individual performance? Few departments, even in the largest institutions, will recommend three or four persons for tenure in the same year.
Since joint appointments (e.g., French or German and comparative literature, or Spanish and ESL) are becoming increasingly common, job seekers should understand the tenure process and publications expectations in all relevant areas, as well as know which department or tenure committee will be making the decision. Such questions should be clarified when the appointment is offered, not when tenure or promotion decisions are made.
Probably the most diffuse stage of the mentor-mentee relationship (and the most prolonged) is the establishment of the neophyte in the ranks of the profession, whether as a publishing scholar or an academic researcher, a master teacher or a grant recipient. Participation in the research experience at the graduate and postdoctoral levels is essential in preparing the future professoriat and in transforming graduate students into teachers and scholars. Whether the neophyte aspires to become a literary critic or plans to concentrate on pedagogy, most institutions will have at least minimal expectations of ongoing professional and scholarly involvement as evinced by publication; attendance at and participation in professional meetings, workshops, and clinics; preparation of proposals; competition for grants; and the like. Therefore, dissertation directors should encourage students to structure their work in formats that facilitate extracting portions for articles or presentations. Drafting the dissertation as a series of autonomous units (whether subtitled sections or chapters), for example, facilitates reusing the material with minimal rewriting. The sooner the graduate student or junior faculty member begins to attain visibility in professional meetings and to acquire a list of publications, the more secure she or he will be.
The chair can play a significant role at various junctures, ensuring early and ongoing intervention in the junior faculty member's development through peer consultation and advisement, reviews on a semester or annual basis (to be discussed with the neophyte by a committee or by the chair), and several interim evaluations before the tenure or promotion decision. John W. Creswell identifies “six key practices of faculty-oriented chairpersons,” stressing the chair's function as faculty role model and mentor and highlighting such activities as sharing good teaching techniques, coauthoring articles with colleagues, and helping new staff members to identify research areas of inquiry. Matching manuscripts to appropriate journals, creating project teams, observing classroom teaching, reviewing videotapes of individual teaching performances, and providing constructive feedback are also cited as examples of productive mentoring. Chairs may give junior faculty members valuable assistance in prioritizing goals, relating these to departmental and institutional missions, and understanding career opportunities and setbacks. The proactive mentoring chair will also be a diplomatic buffer, both internally (with strategic faculty committees, deans, and senior administrators) and externally (networking with professional associations and establishing contacts with national leaders in the discipline). In the absence of such a chair, dissertation directors may be able to use networking to establish contacts for their mentees. Chairs should not overlook the deadwood in their departments; judicious mentoring of ineffective faculty members may revitalize them. For example, a chair can facilitate professional growth by reassigning poor performers to work outside their specialization and then—if further action is warranted—petitioning deans for sabbaticals or development leaves. Visiting faculty members on their turf (in their offices) to offer timely praise for work well done is another pragmatic and fruitful mentoring technique that should not be overlooked.
From the perspective of mentoring both graduate students and junior colleagues, it is useful to hold regular, informal departmental or humanities colloquia that allow the two groups to come together to present and discuss their research. Faculty members might explore possible collaborative research with students as junior authors—a procedure that is standard in the sciences, although relatively uncommon in humanities disciplines (in many science disciplines, a doctoral student will publish at least six papers—usually as coauthor—before completing the degree). The novice learns from experienced faculty members about conducting research and preparing material for publication, and the same principle applies with students and junior colleagues. Both will find it useful to experience a research orientation other than that of the dissertation director, and some disciplines require the doctoral student to take a research course or do a project with each member of the dissertation committee.
We learn by precept and example, but examples are especially important for fledgling humanities researchers, whose early efforts tend to be imitative, derivative, or unconsciously parodic. Since research by the novice in language and literature studies incorporates a good deal of imitation, it is crucial that good models be chosen; students do not always possess the expertise to discriminate among choices. Mentors should guide mentees to the best scholars in the field or to a selection of works representing different critical approaches to a given question or text. If the mentor and mentee subsequently discuss the pros and cons of each methodology, positive and negative examples are potentially of equal usefulness. For instance, the mentor might have students or junior faculty members evaluate articles that illustrate negative characteristics, ranging from glaring deficiencies to more subtle shortcomings. Learning what to avoid may be simpler than mastering the skills to produce polished essays from scratch.
Another significant mentoring function is gathering and disseminating information on opportunities. The established faculty member or publishing scholar who is plugged in to a variety of outlets receives announcements of competitions, awards and grants, calls for papers, and scheduled meetings that are unlikely to come to the recent PhD or ABD. These should be clipped and duplicated for mentees. Dissertation directors and graduate advisers might also require students to submit abstracts or papers to regional MLAs and other local or area meetings that accept graduate student participation; if so, mentors should review the abstracts or papers that are to be submitted. The same procedure can be used with new faculty members. The mentor should follow up on the results the mentees obtain. Rejections can be useful if accompanied by comments and explanations and if the unsuccessful document becomes a guinea pig in the search for improvement.
The good mentor should prod mentees (whether advanced graduate students or junior faculty members) to become active in professional organizations. Established professors can contribute to mentoring junior colleagues by organizing special sessions at conferences and including these colleagues on the program or by calling their attention to the appearance of new journals in the field. (These usually have no backlog and can be good outlets for the novice, whose promotion or tenure may depend on having something in print.) The mentor should also encourage mentees to apply regularly for awards by local, regional, and national organizations, both professional and honorary. Not only does a successful application augment a slender income, but any award helps to flesh out the beginning résumé. In the past, such mentoring could be onerous because of the number of letters of recommendation involved, but with word-processing capabilities, a generic letter, easily revised to fit a multitude of such applications, requires minimal effort.
The mentoring relationship can be mutually beneficial; it need not be a one-way street where the mentor gives and the mentee receives. For example, the mentee may proofread some of the mentor's manuscripts since two pairs of eyes are better than one, or read to detect areas of obscurity or confusion that seem to need clarification. The mentee benefits from this additional interaction with the mentor and quite possibly from the feeling that the relationship is not exploitative or abusive of the mentor's time and goodwill. If the relationship is truly collaborative or mutually supportive, the junior member is more likely to be open about areas of doubt and less fearful of becoming a burden.
As noted above in the discussion of dissertations, both student and junior faculty mentees should be advised to conceive their early professional papers as articles that can be published with minimal modification, such as the addition of endnotes and documentation, or—more ambitiously—to plan a series of papers as eventual chapters in a book. Conversely, they might compose their essays as articles but plan to omit certain portions during an oral presentation, which must conform to time limits. The advantages of this approach include the possibilities of receiving feedback from members of the audience and of exchanging ideas with colleagues working on related topics. The built-in deadline of the conference date is another advantage, for periodic deadlines help the budding scholar to reach and maintain a steady rhythm of production.
The limited grant opportunities in the humanities may be better used by the neophyte than by the established faculty member who has acquired a family, a mortgage, and one too many credit cards. Mentees should be made aware that some agencies restrict their grants to new faculty members or new doctoral recipients and earmark funds for fostering innovative instruction in small colleges, at beginning instructional levels, and so on. Novices should be encouraged to submit proposals to national organizations like the ACLS and the NEH and to appropriate foundations and to ask for critiques in the event of negative results; many national panels furnish a digest of reviewers' comments on request. Like typescripts for papers or articles, the drafts of grant proposals will benefit from a reading by a peer group or a committee. Feedback helps the mentee anticipate questions, clarify obscure passages, and identify weaknesses. Many universities also sponsor programs on proposal writing or offer assistance through an office of research services. Even if this help is aimed at garnering engineering contracts or awards in the sciences, the instruction covers aspects of the mechanics of proposal writing that are relevant to all disciplines. Chairs might require all new faculty members to attend such a workshop or, if the emphasis is on undergraduate instruction, to participate in a seminar or roundtable on teaching excellence.
Established faculty members who decline invitations to give papers or write book reviews may function as mentors by suggesting the names of junior colleagues who could do the job. They can also encourage former students and new faculty members to submit their own names and credentials to book review editors, conference organizers, and program chairs. In addition, mentors should nominate students and junior faculty members for relevant teaching awards, research awards, and service awards, since someone must initiate such accolades. For those entering the job market or not yet established, professional memberships can also be important: many universities use these as an index of professional involvement. The new faculty member who belongs to no organizations may be just as good as the “joiner” who belongs to three or four, but, other things being equal, the joiner will hold the edge.
Not all professional involvement, however, is equally useful for the novice. For example, new faculty members should not undertake to organize conventions or symposia or to edit proceedings, since these are time-intensive activities that receive little solid consideration by tenure and promotion committees or by recruiters. Like the dubious honor of sponsoring student extracurricular activities or being an unpaid course coordinator, organizing meetings and editing proceedings may offer a short, one-way power trip; yet such tasks are usually thankless, consuming hours and energy that could be more profitably spent in activities that will carry decisive weight in advancing one's career.
Mentoring as I have described it is not a normative activity but a pragmatic and altruistic one. While it requires some dedication, it offers the mentor the opportunity to provide real benefits to mentees and at the same time to perform a meaningful service to the profession in a period of growing need.
Janet Pérez is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Spanish and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Texas Tech University.
1 Harris-Schenz's and Kronik's titles allude to the centrality of mentoring, while both Hanson and Waldinger address the topic more obliquely. Invoking the mythic archetype, El Saffar equates nurturing, self-abnegating female academics (devoted to teaching and professional service) with Demeter and implies that the primary task of the female mentor is to ensure that such women are promoted. From widely varying perspectives, all these writers treat the need for mentoring, usually concentrating on demographic subgroups. Common denominators in their articles are personal experience (autobiographical input) and a narrow or partial focus (men mentoring women, women mentoring women, chairs mentoring new faculty members).
2 Completion rates are highest in the laboratory sciences, where students are better supported, closely monitored, and usually assigned dissertation topics (aspects of the mentor's research) almost from the outset. The rates are lowest in the humanities. Brendan Maher, dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, cites data showing that 83% of students in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, received their PhDs, while only 39% in sociology and 18% in classics did so (74). The National Research Council survey Summary Report 1988: Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities reports median years to degree in broad fields: 7.4 years for the physical sciences, 10.5 for the social sciences, 12.2 for the humanities, and 16.9 for education (23). Findings by the NRC survey in 1987 include the observation that students who completed their doctorates in the least time generally had fellowships, traineeships, or research assistantships, while students holding teaching assistantships took longer to finish. Those whose primary sources of support were their own earnings or loans almost always had the longest degree completion times. Because research assistantships and traineeships are rare in the humanities, the difficulties are compounded, making mentoring more crucial. The national Council of Graduate Schools in its policy statement The Role and Nature of the Doctoral Dissertation identifies additional obstacles to completing the dissertation, including difficulty in determining a suitable topic; problems in conducting the research, such as the necessity of working abroad; and poor direction (18). More recently, NRC's study On Time to the Doctorate found that times for completing the doctorate in science and engineering also increased in the period 1968–86 (although in 1986 the median time to the doctorate in chemistry was 6.1 years).
3 The average completion time for the doctorate in the “hard” sciences and engineering is approximately half the average for the social sciences and humanities. Peter Syverson notes that recent data (from 1987, 1988, and 1989) reveal that completion time for a doctorate in science and engineering is no longer increasing, with the median for engineering at 6.5 years (some earlier increases are believed to reflect changes in the job market). These findings help explain data reported by Bowen and Rudenstine showing that, while the total number of doctorates conferred from 1973 to 1988 remained relatively constant, there were important shifts in fields: “The humanities were the principal losers (a decrease of 1,861 doctorates, or 34 percent). This ‘loss’ in the humanities almost exactly offset the ‘gain’ in the sciences and engineering” (25). In fields like the languages, therefore, mentoring is both more problematic and more essential than it is in disciplines in which the PhD is acquired much sooner.
Bowen, William G., and Neil L. Rudenstine. In Pursuit of the PhD. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
Council of Graduate Schools. The Role and Nature of the Doctoral Dissertation. Washington: CGS, 1991.
Creswell, John W. “Six Key Practices of Faculty-Oriented Chairpersons.” Department Chair 1.2 (1990): 1+.
El Saffar, Ruth. “Promoting Demeter.” ADFL Bulletin 20.3 (1989): 46–48. [Show Article]
Hanson, Klaus. “Inquire, Hire, Inspire, Fire: The Chair and the New Faculty Member.” ADFL Bulletin 20.3 (1989): 35–40. [Show Article]
Harris-Schenz, Beverly. “Helping with the Bootstraps: The Mentor's Task.” ADFL Bulletin 21.3 (1990): 18–21. [Show Article]
Kronik, John. “On Men Mentoring Women: Then and Now.” ADFL Bulletin 21.3 (1990): 22–27. [Show Article]
Maher, Brendan. “The Long March to the Ph.D.” John Harvard's Journal May-June 1990: 73–74.
National Research Council. On Time to the Doctorate. Washington: NRC, 1990.
———. Summary Report 1987: Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities. Washington: NRC, 1987.
———. Summary Report 1988: Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities. Washington: NRC, 1988.
Syverson, Peter. “NRC Releases New Study on Increased Time to the Doctorate.” CGS Communicator 23.7 (1990): 3+.
Waldinger, Renée. “New Faculty Members: Expectations and Responsibilities.” ADFL Bulletin 19.3 (1988): 38–41. [Show Article]
© 1993 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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