2: Academic Mentoring as Precarious Practice

Those of us in higher education who call ourselves mentors as distinct from professors rarely question that designation. That what we do with students in a mentoring relationship might be problematic to those who mentor in other contexts is not often recognized. Nor do we wonder how it is that the concept came to be applied in a setting where an ordinary student can successfully graduate from college without any significant contact with an individual professor at all. It is true that many colleges, driven by concerns about retention, have sought out innovative ways of promoting greater faculty—student contact. However, for most colleges, mentoring as a way of teaching is not a model that immediately comes to mind as a likely, or scalable, solution.