Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis

Acknowledgments

A project of this magnitude depends upon the generosity, dedication, and knowledge of a great many people. We wish to thank David Blakesley at Parlor Press, as well as Patricia Sullivan and Catherine Hobbs for supporting this collection. For editorial help and assistance, we are grateful to Delisa Mulkey at Georgia State University for her early assistance organizing both contributors and contributions and to Megan Roberts at East Carolina University for providing invaluable help with the index and final submission details. Finally, we wish to thank the seventy-six authors who religiously adhered to deadlines (even when we couldn’t), willingly revised and trimmed their pieces, and inevitably challenged our assumptions about mentoring theory and practice.

Michelle F. Eble: I would like to thank my colleagues and mentors in the Department of English at East Carolina University for their consistent support, willingness to collaborate, and inspiring conversations. I could not ask for a more collegial, smart group. In the course of editing this collection, Lynée was a fabulous collaborator and friend especially when a hurricane and my wedding took my attention away from this collection; I will always be grateful for her patience and wisdom. I also want to thank Shane and our web of family and friends for their support in anything and everything I do.

Lynée Lewis Gaillet: I wish to thank the Georgia State University College of Arts and Sciences and Department of English for their constant support over the years. I am also indebted to the scores of students who have mentored me over the last two decades. I have learned far more than I’ve taught, and I am constantly awed by my students’ knowledge, energy, perseverance, and drive. From my students, I have learned humility and the true meaning of what Eodice and Day label (first person)² collaboration. Finally, for their generosity and understanding when I’ve ironically ignored them to mentor others, I am forever grateful to my family—Philippe, Helen, John Rhodes, Charlotte, and Stormy.

1 Introduction

Lynée Lewis Gaillet

This collection seeks to define the current status of mentoring in the field of composition and rhetoric by providing both snapshots and candid descriptions of what that term means to those working in the discipline. Contributors offer a wide array of evidence and illustrations in an effort to define the scope of this ubiquitous and ambiguous term. In the pages of this collection, then, the reader will find program descriptions and critiques, testimonials and personal anecdotes, copies of correspondence and e-mail messages, term projects and assignments, accounts of forged friendships and peer relationships (some good; some bad), both new paradigms and familiar constructs for successful mentoring, tales of pregnancy and mothering, chronicles of both administrative nightmares and dream solutions, and stories giving insight into the character of those rare individuals who embody the term mentor.

Our experiences, both as mentors and mentees, led us to the present investigation. Within two months of issuing our call for papers, we received ninety queries and abstract submissions. Interestingly, over ninety percent of the proposals were multi-authored; obviously, the topic touched an academic nerve. To include as many representations of mentoring within the field as possible, we elected to accept shorter reflective pieces as well as longer chapter-length studies. The result? A chorale of seventy-eight voices whose experiences depict current theories and practices of mentoring. In this study, we do not draw definitive conclusions or posit a theory of mentoring based on the contributors’ work. Rather, we compiled these stories, anecdotes, reflections, analyses, descriptions, and discussions of mentoring to serve as a representative sample of mentoring as it is theorized and practiced in the fields of rhetorical, writing, and literary studies during a moment in time. When viewed collectively, these essays help define and complicate conceptions of mentoring within English Studies.

The term mentoring proliferates the field’s recent scholarship, and is most often associated with teaching assistant training programs, the preparation of graduate students to meet the demands of professional development, gender and tenure issues, and the enculturation of new faculty members and administrators. The concept of mentoring, dating back to Homer’s Odyssey, currently signifies a range of practices and responsibilities within rhet/comp studies, but definitions of the term are hard to come by. Although the term figures prominently both in the pages of our field’s scholarship and as a primary component of graduate education, mentoring did not make Heilker and Vandenberg’s list of important Keywords in Composition back in 1996.

While rhetoric and writing faculty boast a long and rich heritage of mentoring, scholarship specifically addressing the act is a rather recent occurrence. Nearly a decade ago, Theresa Enos challenged the master-apprentice, male model of mentoring, suggesting alternative strategies for incorporating mentoring and role modeling within graduate education (Mentoring). Enos also alludes to the importance of mentoring throughout her book-length study Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition (1996). In Graduate Students as Active Members of the Profession: Some Questions for Mentoring (1997), Janice Lauer applauds faculty who encourage graduate students to develop themselves as professionals within the field, but she claims those mentoring efforts aren’t always adequate. Although we have the responsibility to train our students for the rigorous demands of life in academia, Lauer, a generous mentor, says we must also adopt an ethics of care approach to mentoring, which promotes modeling the effective ways in which professionals relate to each other within the field (234). Recognized as master mentors, both Enos and Lauer further explore the ramifications of mentoring within the pages of this volume.

Perhaps the best source for examining the significance mentoring holds within Composition Studies lies in the work of Writing Program Administrators (WPAs). Given their university-mandated responsibility to train teaching assistants, experienced WPAs have published an important body of work related to mentoring and mentoring programs. With the growing recognition that WPAs are engaged in intellectual inquiry, mentoring has become more programmatic and systematic. This paradigm shift in part replaces the individualized professor/protégé construct of the past and has led many WPAs to disseminate information about the programs they helped form. Recent edited collections targeted to WPAs address the challenges of training TAs, particularly those new writing teachers with little or no training in writing instruction. Preparing College Teachers of Writing (Pytlik and Liggett 2002) outlines histories, theories, programs, and practices of writing teacher preparation, and several chapters focus on the act of mentoring teaching assistants as well as preparing them to teach writing (see chapters by Rickly and Harrington, Ebest, Martin and Paine, Das Bender). Likewise, Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition (Roen, Pantoja, Yena, Miller, and Waggoner 2002) discusses the training and mentoring of new writing instructors. Other important book-length volumes addressing writing program administration include Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers and Troubadours: Writing Program Administrators Tell Their Stories (George 1999); The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher: Inquiry in Action and Reflection (Rose and Weiser 1999); The Writing Program Administrator’s Handbook: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Change and Practice (Brown and Enos 2002); The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist: Making Knowledge Work (Rose and Weiser 2002); The Writing Program Administrator’s Handbook: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Change and Practice (Brown and Enos 2002); Don’t Call it That: The Composition Practicum (Dobrin 2005); and Writing Program Administration (Susan McLeod 2007). Three excellent new collections—Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric and Composition (Anderson and Romano 2006), Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics (Dew and Horning 2007), and the forthcoming Feminisms and Administration in Rhetoric and Composition (Ratcliffe and Rickly 2008)—critically and extensively explore ways in which the profession is reinventing its identity, in large part through (post)doctoral training.

In addition to providing excellent teacher-training advice, WPA-led scholarship also addresses both faculty and peer mentoring of junior WPAs. Collaborative models of writing program administration advance a decentered administrative structure, while providing increased opportunities for mentoring and for the professional development of graduate students as they attempt to make the transition from graduate school to professorships. Often controversial constructs, junior administrative positions are economically beneficial to the university (read cheap labor). Associate and assistant WPA positions—commonly held by graduate students, lecturers, or instructors—are designed to prepare apprentices for full-time administrative positions. However, as James Sosnoski and Beth Burmester contend, the master/apprentice traditional model of education has long outlived its usefulness for the training of graduate students. Burmester explains,

Mentoring as a practice was always connected to education and the welfare of the less experienced person, but apprenticeship was never constructed to apply to education, nor to look out for the apprentice’s rights or growth; instead, apprenticeship helped maintain the distance between masters and apprentices, in the conditions of their labor and wages. (328)

In a thematic issue of Rhetoric Review (2002) devoted to administrative work and the professionalization of graduate students, contributors agreed that their graduate school experience in administration gave them useful, practical experience that prepared them for the intellectual work of being a WPA; however, they didn’t feel adequately prepared for the institutional politics of this very difficult job (Mountford 42). In describing collaborative efforts between teachers with different amounts of institutional power (66), Margaret K. Willard-Traub argues that

formal opportunities [to engage in administration and assessment] would not only help to improve the quality of teaching and of learning; opportunities for graduate students to theorize the politicized nature of their positions within the institution would help serve the aims of scholarship as well, providing emerging scholars with occasions for the kind of epistemic reflexivity that Pierre Bourdieu argues for in support of the pursuit of disciplinary knowledge. (68)

Perhaps the most significant benefit that results from the kind of mentoring that occurs naturally within collaborative administration is the increased opportunity for significant reflection—an important facet of mentoring illustrated by the experiences of Susan Popham, Michael Neal, Ellen Schendel and Brian Huot (working together both as GTAs and program administrators). Having found a way to successfully combine theory, practice, and program policy, Popham, et al. claim that writing programs benefit from collaborative reflection that leads to revision in policy and curriculum and that informs the intellectual work of writing program administration (28). These voices suggest new paths that mentoring might take. In addition to preparing students for the triumvirate of activities most commonly associated with faculty work (research, teaching, and service), mentoring within WPA programs can potentially provide mentees with the tools to negotiate institutional politics while helping them conceive of administration as intellectual inquiry.

Collectively, works in the tradition of the ones cited above provide a foundation for this volume; however, these studies address mentoring tangentially (i.e., in the course of describing a faculty member’s job responsibilities, offering ideas for building programs and training students, or discussing tenure and advancement). Existing scholarship doesn’t attempt to collect and capture specific theories, practices, stories, and reflections of mentoring—the goal of our collection. In a field that likes to define keywords, concepts, and best practices, no extensive treatment of mentoring currently exists. The overwhelming response to our call for papers—which included queries from undergraduate and graduate students, business professionals and technical writers, lecturers and instructors, professors and emeritus faculty—attests to the widespread interest in mentoring practices. Building on the last ten years of research and scholarship addressing mentoring, the essays in this collection provide a wide range of examples for assessing the implications and applications of mentoring, while documenting existing research and practice on the subject. We think both undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, department and college administrators, and those interested in assessment/documentation of faculty work will find Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis of interest.

We divide this work into four sections realizing that these divisions are a bit arbitrary and permeable. Interspersed within the traditional chapters, readers will find shorter reflective pieces highlighting unique perspectives on mentoring. The four sections include (1) definitions of mentoring by and multi-voiced tributes to model mentors, (2) tales of mentoring relationships, (3) descriptions of mentoring pedagogy from both undergraduate and graduate education, and (4) analyses of mentoring that occurs within program administration. Winifred Bryan Horner, my dissertation director and mentor for nearly twenty years, provides an extended definition of the term mentoring in the opening essay and offers a first-hand account of the development of mentoring within the field of rhetoric and composition. Professor Horner is recognized nationally (and internationally) as a master mentor, and scores of women and men claim her as a career-long friend and guiding light. Recipient of the 2003 CCCC Exemplar Award (presented to a professor who represents the highest ideals of teaching, scholarship, and service within the profession), Professor Horner is never content to rest on her laurels, but serves as a model for emulation and an avid mentor well into her retirement. Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where for a decade she held the first Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition, Professor Horner remains interested in her colleagues’ projects, eager to collaborate with former students on new projects, and concerned about both the professional careers and personal lives of so very many of us in the profession.

In Educating Jane, Jenn Fishman and Andrea Lunsford (1994 CCCC Exemplar Award recipient and mentor extraordinaire) both define and complicate traditional connotations of mentor. They forego this nebulous term and instead opt for colleague—a term that implies shared inquiry, collaborative research and writing, and true professionalization between and among partners. The next three essays in this section are multi-voiced tributes to influential mentors and the programs they established. In Their Stories on Mentoring: Multiple Perspectives on Mentoring, Janice Lauer (1998 CCCC Exemplar Award winner) and seven of her former graduate students, who entered the program at Purdue in 1994, describe and discuss the primary components of a successful mentoring program. In this dialogue, the participants discuss composition instruction, academic advising, collaborative dissertation groups, professional development sessions, community building experiences, and job search preparation. In the next chapter, Mentorship, Collegiality, and Friendship: Making Our Mark as Professionals, Steven Bernhardt and nine of his mentees offer a range of individual perspectives on what it means to be mentored within a PhD program. The collaborators discuss the metamorphosis of their relationships from that of professor-to-student into colleagues and friends. In the final essay of Part I, Anna Leahy, Stephanie Vanderslice, Kelli L. Custer, Jennifer Wells, Carol Ellis, Meredith Kate Brown, Dorinda Fox, and Amy Hodges Hamilton document ways in which Wendy Bishop and her work mentored colleagues and students. The authors discuss Bishop’s call to collaboration and the legacy she leaves for the next generation of academics through those whom she mentored in person, via correspondence, and through her scholarship.

The second section includes chapters describing and analyzing diverse mentoring relationships. In these pages, the contributors discuss mentoring in the contexts of friendships, mothering, collaborating, conducting research, and observation. In Mentoring Friendships and the ‘Reweaving of Authority’, Diana Ashe and Elizabeth Ervin argue that multifarious, mutual, and generative relationships—friendships—can offer a potent model for mentoring, especially relationships frequently advocated in the literature on critical pedagogy. Catherine Gabor, Stacia Dunn Neeley, and Carrie Shively Leverenz explore the important role that mentors can play in the careers of young women attempting to combine motherhood with academic labor. In Mentor, May I Mother? the three collaborators, mentored by Andrea Lunsford, weave recent research on motherhood and academia within their own stories of becoming mothers. In the next chapter, The Minutia of Mentorships: Reflections about Professional Development, Katherine S. Miles and Rebecca E. Burnett explore qualitative longitudinal data from worklogs, collected over more than two years, and provide narrative reflections from their own mentorship to chronicle its initiation and growth—and to demonstrate ways in which it has evolved over time and in specific contexts. Next, Wendy Sharer, Jessica Enoch, and Cheryl Glenn highlight the importance of professional and personal respect enacted and taught within a collaborative mentoring relationship in Performing Professionalism: On Mentoring and Being Mentored. The final snapshots in this section capture unique mentoring relationships. Susan Thomas and George Pullman reflect on their international mentoring relationship and advocate mentoring by modeling, while Doug Downs and Dayna Goldstein describe a long-term, ongoing mentoring relationship that privileges everyday practice and mutual benefits over career advancement

Part III, Mentoring in Undergraduate and Graduate Education, includes seven chapters that examine opportunities for mentoring in both undergraduate and graduate education. The first two essays describe writing groups: Lisa Cahill, Susan Miller-Cochran, Veronica Pantoja, and Rochelle L. Rodrigo illustrate how graduate student writing groups serve the function of community building, and Angela Eaton along with seven of her undergraduate students describe a mentoring experience that began as a course in research methodologies and culminated in several publications and professional presentations for the group. The next three essays explore the role of mentoring within graduate studies. Adopting a web metaphor, Jennifer Clary-Lemon and Duane Roen define mentoring as a scholarly practice and graduate school as the locus of that practice. And in Mentor or Magician: Reciprocities, Existing Ideologies, and Reflections of a Discipline, Barbara Cole and Arabella Lyon remind readers of the tensions and obstacles involved in mentoring literature-trained graduate students to teach writing, pointing out ways certain ideologies function within disciplinary practices such as the composition practicum. In the next essay, Amy C. Kimme Hea and Susan N. Smith outline the transition from graduate student to faculty member that many TAs experience. The co-writers report on issues of power and authority that surfaced when they piloted a co-taught, graduate course. The final two reflective pieces in Part III specifically address mentoring pedagogy. C. Renée Love outlines a teaching plan that asks students to explore the benefits of mentoring relationships, and Nancy Myers argues convincingly how a text can function as mentor, providing access to disciplinary habits and institutional responsibilities that are often viewed as the role of a human mentor.

Part IV of the collection explores mentoring practices associated with writing program administration. Alfred E. Guy Jr. and Rita Malenczyk recount their experiences working within New York University’s (NYU) Expository Writing Program. In describing the history, structure, and strengths of the program, the authors speculate on the implications the NYU program may have for mentoring within current writing programs. In Mentoring Toward Interdependency: ‘Keeping It Real’, WPAs Krista Ratcliffe and Donna Schuster argue that writing programs must address five key factors in order to provide a pragmatic vision for mentoring: local institutional situations, writing staff needs, curriculum design, staff personalities, and training opportunities. Joan Mullin and Paula Braun explore the notions of reciprocity and risk-taking in successful mentoring relationships, followed by Cinda Coggins Mosher and Mary Trachsel’s analysis of how mentoring programs, based on attention and response, negotiate the distinction among panopticism, oversight, and surveillance by paying attention to individuals and their needs as instructors. In the final program description, Holly Ryan, David Reamer and Theresa Enos chronicle the three-year revision of their faculty and peer-mentoring program in the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. The co-authors critically discuss the research, evaluation, and continual development of this highly acclaimed mentoring program. Tanya Cochran and Beth Godbee close this section by proposing in Making It Count: Mentoring as Cultural Currency ways to document mentoring as a scholarly activity of value in CVs and tenure and promotion materials.

In the coda, Michelle F. Eble critically reflects upon this volume, discussing the implications Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis might hold for future scholarship. Like Telemachus’s Mentor in the Odyssey, present-day mentors are commonly viewed as teachers, coaches, counselors and protectors, parental figures, role models, advisors and motivators trusted with the care and education of younger and less-experienced mentees. But as the contributors to this collection demonstrate, professional mentoring relationships are much more complicated and often hold high-stake repercussions for individuals, local programs, and the discipline at large.

Collectively, the essays in Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis illustrate diverse ways in which mentoring is defined in everyday practice. However, the multiplicity of views that compose this collection is by no means exhaustive; we attempt only to provide discipline-specific, candid snapshots of mentoring within the field of rhetoric and writing. Areas offering particularly rich opportunities for research include: mentoring and distance learning, undergraduate mentoring, viewing mentoring as intellectual inquiry, and issues of race/gender and mentoring. We hope other researchers, mentors, and mentees will share their tales of mentoring in these areas, adding their voices and experiences to the stories shared in this collection.

Works Cited

Anderson, Virginia, and Susan Romano. Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric and Composition. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2006.

Brown, Stuart C., Theresa Enos, and Catherine Chaput, eds. The Writing Program Administrator’s Handbook: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Change and Practice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. 

Gebhardt, Richard C., and Barbara Genelle Smith Gebhardt, eds. Academic Advancement in Composition Studies: Scholarship, Publication, Promotion. Mahweh: Erlbaum, 1996.

Das Bender, Gita. Orientation and Mentoring: Collaborative Practices in Teacher Preparation. Preparing College Teachers of Writing: Histories, Theories, Practices, and Programs. Ed. Betty Pytlik and Sarah Liggett. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 233-41.

Dew, Deborah Frank, and Alice Horning, eds. Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2007.

Dobrin, Sid. Don’t Call it That: The Composition Practicum. Urbana: NCTE, 2005.

Ebest, Sally Barr. Mentoring:  Past, Present, and Future. Preparing College Teachers of Writing: Histories, Theories, Practices, and Programs. Ed. Betty Pytlik and Sarah Liggett. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 211-21. 

Enos, Theresa. Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996.

—. Mentoring—and (Wo)mentoring—in Composition Studies. Academic Advancement in Composition Studies Scholarship, Publication, Promotion, Tenure. Ed. Richard C. Gebhardt and Barbara Genelle Smith Gebhardt. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997. 137-46.

George, Diana, ed. Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers and Troubadours: Writing Program Administrators Tell Their Stories. Boynton/Cook, Heinemann, 1999.

Heilker, Paul, and Peter Vandenberg. Keywords in Composition Studies. Boynton/Cook, 1996.

Lauer, Janice M. Graduate Students as Active Members of the Profession: Some Questions for Mentoring. Ed. Gary A. Olson and Todd W. Taylor. Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition; Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1997. 229-36

Martin, Wanda, and Charles Paine. Mentors, Models, and Agents of Change: Veteran TAs Preparing Teachers of Writing. Preparing College Teachers of Writing: Histories, Theories, Practices, and Programs. Ed. Betty Pytlik and Sarah Liggett. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 222-32. 

McLeod, Susan. Writing Program Administration. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2007.

Mountford, Roxanne. From Labor to Middle Management: Graduate Students in Writing Program Administration (In Memory of Eric Walborn). Rhetoric Review 21.1 (2002) 41-54.

Popham, Susan, Michael Neal, Ellen Schendel, and Brian Huot. Breaking Hierarchies: Using Reflective Practice to Re-Construct the Role of the Writing Program Administrator. The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist. Ed. Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser. Westport, CT: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 2002. 19-28.

Pytlik, Betty, and Sarah Liggett, eds. Preparing College Teachers of Writing: Histories, Theories, Practices, and Programs. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 

Ratcliffe, Krista, and Rebecca J. Rickly, eds. Feminisms and Administration in Rhetoric and Composition. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, forthcoming.

Rickly, Rebecca J., and Susanmarie Harrington. Feminist Approaches to Mentoring Teaching Assistants:  Conflict, Power, and Collaboration. Preparing College Teachers of Writing: Histories, Theories, Practices, and Programs. Ed. Betty Pytlik and Sarah Liggett. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 108-20. 

Roen, Duane, Veronica Pantoja, Lauren Yena, Susan K. Miller, and Eric Waggoner, eds. Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition. Urbana, IL:  NCTE, 2002.

Rose, Shirley K, and Irwin Weiser, eds. The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher: Inquiry in Action and Reflection Portsmouth: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 1999.

—. The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist: Making Knowledge Work. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2002.

Sosnoski, James, and Beth Burmester. New Scripts for Rhetorical Education: Alternative Learning Environments and the Master/Apprentice Model. Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Virginia Anderson and Susan Romano. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2006: 325-45.

Willard-Traub, Margaret K. Professionalization and the Politics of Subjectivity. Rhetoric Review 21.1 (2002) 61-70.

2 On Mentoring

Winifred Bryan Horner

With my training in linguistics, I always look first to the dictionary when I am writing on a subject and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) never fails to enlighten my understanding of a concept—or more importantly other people’s understanding of the many meanings of a word.

The citation for mentor is relatively brief and its history equally short. I’m sure the mythological derivation of the word will be covered and explored elsewhere in this book. Odysseus turned to the goddess of Wisdom, Athena, (in all mythologies, Wisdom is depicted as female) to advise and guide his son, Telemachus, in his absence. Athena disguised herself as an Ithacan noble, Mentor, to fulfill her role. The OED further notes that "the currency of the word in French and English is derived less from the Odyssey than from Fénelon’s romance of Télémaque, in which the part played by Mentor as a counselor is made more prominent. Its first citation after Fénelon, an eighteenth century author, is in 1750 by Lord Chesterfield in advising his son. Wisdom is embodied in the female, but in my early experience, my first mentors were always men. There are no feminized versions of mentor even though tutor, often given as a synonym and of much older origin, has three—totoress, tutress and tutrix—as well as a form of the person being tutored as tutoree. In my limited research for this article I discovered that mentoring is a hot topic particularly in academe. When I looked up mentor/academe on the Internet, there were 191,000 hits as well as a journal, called Mentor, An Academic Advising Journal. Looking back on my own experience I suppose I have served as a mentoree, and later as a mentor, and also as a mentoress, and possibly a mentrix.

As an early graduate student teaching freshman composition I was told in effect to keep my place. My first experience was with the director of freshman composition, a man cut from the old pattern—blustering, and smart—who periodically lumbered down the hall to the coffee room where he sucked on a large cigar and loudly held forth in a cloud of evil-smelling smoke, giving the word to his favorite male graduate students who circled him like a bunch of hungry young wolves. I never saw him as my mentor although I knew he treasured his relationship with the male graduate students, involving them in weekly poker games and other seemly male bonding activities. He kept tight control over the graduate students, allowing for no deviations from the rules which were of his making. I was first impressed by such power, later intimidated, and finally disgusted.

This was in the 1960s and the department was interviewing for new positions. I had been impressed by a particular black female applicant who was turned down. I assumed it was because she was black, but I later learned it was, in fact, because she was a woman. That came as a great revelation to me until I realized with surprise that the department was entirely made up of males and that a woman of whatever color would be an intrusion in the old boy’s club. The men in the department were definitely not into mentoring women graduate students.

In the Master’s program, I was assigned an advisor who informed me early on that over his dead body would I continue teaching in the program and when I inquired about continuing with a PhD, he told me that advanced degrees caused terrible things to happen to women. His prophecy proved true when he, himself, later married a woman PhD. There were no women mentors at that time simply because there were no senior women in the profession. In those days mentors by default were male. He, like many of my early memorable mentors, is now gone to the academic heaven in the sky where he felt confident that God and his angels would all be male.

When I went to graduate school my first advisor turned out to be immensely helpful in the long run but first I had to prove myself. He tried to guide me to abandon the PhD program but on the advice of a woman mentor I was determined not to settle for anything less than a PhD. When he discovered that I had no trouble with the language requirement and that I was actually a good student he became a dedicated supporter to whom I will always be grateful, guiding me with care and counsel through the minefield of the PhD program. He was my first true mentor. I knew then that there was no way I could immediately repay him, but I determined then to pass on his wise counsel if I ever was in a position to do so.

During my PhD program probably my best mentors were my fellow graduate students. I remember one who tried to give me some help in reading Old English, which my professor told me that I pronounced with a French accent. That night I went to a party celebrating the completion of O in the Middle English Dictionary and I was finally admitted to the cadre of graduate students. My fellow students, both male and female, were the ones who led me through the labyrinth surrounding the idiosyncrasies of the professors. We willingly helped each other. As one of the mature graduate students I was assigned the task of getting one of our better students across the campus and into the room to take his qualifying exam—which he had deftly avoided once before by going to a movie instead.

When I returned to my original university as an assistant professor I was helped through the advancement process by a male colleague who largely provided a shoulder to cry on over cups of coffee and martinis after five. One day when I complained that garbage collectors in New York were better paid than professors at the university, he took a long sip of coffee, looked thoughtful and replied that he thought he would rather teach than collect garbage in New York.

I learned early on that the name of the game was research and writing, two occupations that I thoroughly enjoyed. After attaining the rank of professor with a good publishing record, I was offered an Endowed Chair and suddenly I found myself in the position of mentor instead of mentoree. It was a constant surprise that my opinion was now of great value. I had a friend who had recently retired who bemoaned the fact that although she now had all the answers no one asked the questions anymore. However, when I talked at the lunch table the students listened and when I talked in class they took notes. As the first woman endowed chair on the campus, I discovered that I was a model for all women, a role that humbled and challenged me.

I was assigned a graduate student as a research assistant, but I failed at my first position as a model when my assistant dropped out of the PhD program because, she confessed, she didn’t want to work as hard as I did. I was amazed because I really loved my work and felt as though teaching, writing, and researching were great fun and much superior to other occupations such as collecting garbage in New York City. I found writing pure joy when it came out right.

Finally I embraced the role of mentor. I realized that I had two things going for me. I had no more promotions to work for, and I was exactly where I wanted to be. I knew then that my future was with my students, whom I hoped would carry on the work that I had started. Since I had started at the very bottom, I felt I did have some answers and they were voracious in asking the questions. I was eager to help but I was humbled by my new status.

I found that I was able to open doors for my students that were hard for them to open themselves. I tried to help them get on panels, urged them to attend conferences, and helped shape their papers into publishable articles. I tried to help them develop a nose for an article and shape an idea into publishable form. At conferences I always tried to introduce them to the people whose work they knew. At one conference a colleague of mine from another large university and I organized a party for our students in the history of rhetoric so that they could get to know each other. We also invited the well-known scholars in the field who responded with the expected grace of real scholars who are always interested in what young researchers are doing. The party was lively, and the conversation sparkled. Friendships were forged and ideas were shared. It was networking at its best and mentoring at its finest.

As a dissertation director I worked hard to get my students past that hurdle and often passed on the advice of one of my professors in graduate school that the best dissertation is finally a done dissertation. It is hard to convey the idea to eager graduate students immersed in their research that the dissertation is not their life’s work and the best thing is to get on with it and move to other things like a salaried position.

At one time I was reviewing articles for all the major journals in the field and I loved having the opportunity to read the newest and best work being done. I felt as though I were on the cusp of new knowledge. In return I tried to be encouraging and helpful in specific ways.

I have heard of several universities where mentoring has been set up on a formal basis. I don’t know how that works but I do know that in order for it to work, there must be questions and the mentor must feel that she or he has answers. That is the basis of the relationship. Most important there must be the questions—a knowledge of those things you know you don’t know, and that alone takes a certain amount of wisdom. Finally, the relationship is built on common interests, common goals, and most of all, respect for the other. In the end those mentoring relationships develop into deep and long lasting friendships where knowledge is no longer one-sided and wisdom is shared.

3 Educating Jane

Jenn Fishman and Andrea Lunsford

You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.

—Heraclitus

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

—French Proverb attributed to

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Women who entered the profession some thirty years ago, as Andrea did, took mentors if and where they found them, though they might not have used the term mentor itself.* Almost certainly they would have found no formal arrangements for mentorship, no organized means of becoming initiated into the academy, and precious little if any systematic encouragement. What they did encounter was the old boy’s network through which men found academic positions and moved often seamlessly into the academy. As a result, such entry could be fraught with special difficulty for women. Women entering the field of rhetoric and composition—Jane Rhetors of an earlier generation—found themselves in a double bind: not only were they at a disadvantage in being women but they were also entering a field whose place in the academy was itself contested.

Today—well, that’s another story. While still marginalized in terms of its relationship with literary studies, the field of rhetoric and writing is now firmly established. In fact, if today’s Jane Rhetor wishes to explore possibilities for mentoring, she may be close to overwhelmed by upwards of 50 Modern Language Association (MLA) and CompPile citations for