mentoring in theory

Mentoring is something that a lot of us hear about as graduate students and junior faculty, but many of us rarely experience.  I've had lots of conversations over the years with friends and colleagues about the dearth of mentorship in academia generally and political theory specifically, especially when it comes to women and minorities (and women minorities) in the field.  Today the numbers of women entering graduate school in political theory are - at least anecdotally - in serious decline, and mentoring younger generations to navigate a depressed job market seems to me more important than ever.

When I received tenure earlier this year, I realized it was time for me to quit whining about the problem and start addressing it.  I signed up to be a mentor through APSA (go here if you want to sign up to mentor or to be a mentee), and soon I was matched up with two mentees.

As I've told other theorists what I am up to, I've heard a lot of comments like:  "Wow - what a great thing to do!"  "I should do that - where do I sign up?"  And:  "What does a mentor do?"

I think there is a lot of untapped generosity in our field, people who want to mentor younger colleagues, but don't know how to get a mentee, and don't know what they would do if they had one.  So I decided to start this blog, in the hopes that it will encourage more conversations about mentorship, and hopefully make good mentoring the norm, rather than the exception, for the upcoming generations of political theorists.

I plan to use this blogspace to do the following:

• encourage colleagues with tenure to give back to the profession through mentoring.  I want to make mentoring accessible, to show how it can be personally - and professionally - rewarding, and to recruit others to join me in shifting the culture of the field!

• create a community of mentors.  I want the blog to be a place for conversations about best practices in mentoring.  Who knows?  Maybe some of us will write articles on mentoring for PS, or join in the blog as co-authors.  We can learn from one another about how to mentor well, what works and what doesn't.  By sharing experiences and ideas, we may also identify field-specific issues that we can address together.

• collect resources about mentoring.  I imagine the blog as a clearinghouse for useful resources about mentoring.  These might be generated by those of us mentoring in political theory, or they might be externally generated.  By collecting them here, I hope to lower any perceived barriers to entry that may keep others from serving as mentors. 

My plan is to post a lot of material in the next few weeks to get a bunch of information and ideas up here on the blog right away.  Over the long term, I anticipate that I will post less frequently:  once every week or two, perhaps. 

As I am getting this blog up and running, please feel free to ask questions about mentoring that you'd like to see the blog address in the future.  If you are already mentoring, and you'd like to offer your own reflections or techniques, please let me know in the comments.  I would love to have collaborators - especially since I am hardly an expert or experienced mentor - just an enthusiastic one.

Michaele