St. Croix Review - Thomas Martin: On Mentoring, Heroing and Hammering

On Mentoring, Heroing and Hammering

Thomas Martin

Thomas Martin teaches at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Nominations should be arriving in your office for the Faculty Research Mentor Awards, and I just want to remind you that upon receipt of a nomination, the College application form should be sent directly to the nominee. There should be a letter of support accompanying the nomination form, and that can be forwarded to the nominee as well. Applications are due back to your respective offices by Friday, April 6.

Last year there was some confusion regarding a department secretly nominating and applying for a faculty member, and the Mentor Awards Committee wishes to avoid that problem. In each and every circumstance, the nominee should be informed of his/her nomination and it is the nominee's responsibility to submit the application materials.

      I would like to report a verbicide, the murder of a word, which has been committed on my campus. Our minor official in the realm of word usage presented a copy of the above memo from the Dean of the Graduate school to the staff as evidence for this atrocity. The Graduate Dean had sent this memo to the deans of the colleges, who in turn passed it on to their faculties. Along with his memo, the dean included a copy of the Nomination Form: Faculty Mentoring of Student Research Award, to be used by anyone desiring to nominate a member of the faculty for "mentoring" students. It was at this point that the Assistant to the Assistant Director of Word Usage pointed out that the word "mentor" is a noun, and if it were to be used as a verb derivative, as it is in the title of the Nomination Form, "Faculty Mentoring of Student Research Award," its meaning would become inflated and distorted.
      It is common for faculty members to speak about their mentors from undergraduate and graduate school, as a professor whom they admired, though often unknown to the professors in question.
      A mentor is like a hero. No one chooses to become a hero, even those who end up becoming heroes. A hero is someone who is courageous in a situation from which other people flee. Oftentimes, heroes and heroines appear in places as ordinary as a city bus.
      Rosa Parks, for example, one day in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, was too tired to go to the back of the bus where blacks were required to sit and sat in the front of the bus. When ordered to move to the rear of the bus by the driver, she refused. She did not scream, or whine, or threaten the driver; she simply did not move. Thus she forced those who wanted her to move to make the next move. She was arrested, jailed, and brought to trial while the black community refused to ride the public buses.
      To this day, Rosa Parks is a hero in the civil rights movement, and people still look up to her as a lady who freely chose to violate an unjust law. Thousands of other people could have violated this law, but they did not; they sat in the back of the bus and minded their own business.
      Did Rosa Parks intend to become a hero? She was tired and needed to sit down and she did. She might even be looked upon as a mentor by those who were inspired by her actions in their own desire to pursue a course of nonviolent protest against laws which discriminate against people anywhere.
      So what do mentors and heroes have in common? For starters, both are words that may be used in a variety of ways. Being able to use a word, any word, is like being able to use a tool. And just as you can use tools, you can also misuse tools. Using a word is like using a hammer. A carpenter hits the nail on its head every time. In learning to use a hammer (just like in learning to use a word), at first you will miss the head, hit your thumb, bend the nail, and end up pulling more than you pound. However, with practice, using a hammer becomes second nature. The word "hammer" is further defined by its uses: jack, finishing, prospecting, claw, bricklayer's, roofing, framing; moreover, in addition to there being many types of hammers there are different uses for hammers, and some meanings have nothing to do with using a hammer: "I went out and got hammered last night."
      The word "hammer," unlike "mentor" and "hero," may be used as a noun or a verb by definition.

      To say that mentors are involved in the act of mentoring is like say heroes are involved in the act of heroing. Likewise, heroines would be involved in the act of heroining, and their understudies would be heroees and heroinees.
      A mentor at a university is usually a professor a student wishes to emulate. In the case of an undergraduate and graduate student having a mentor the student freely decides whom he admires, whom he wishes to emulate. The professor does not decide to be the student's mentor any more than a hero chooses to be a hero to his people.
      It may well be the case that a professor is totally unaware of being a student's mentor: a student does not necessarily tell a professor that he admires him, that he was inspired by the professor's love of biology, chemistry, English, philosophy, or whatever discipline the professor teaches, and that he now wishes to pursue the same course of study in the hopes of becoming like his professor.
      Furthermore, a mentor need not be living to be admired. Socrates and Mother Teresa could be mentors, such that a person may seek their advice and counsel about what he should do with his own life. The wonder of the written word is that souls of the dead can inspire the souls of the living.
      Which brings us to the Nomination Form for Faculty Mentoring of Student Research Award and some of the criteria for professors who wish to apply and win an award for mentoring:

1. Faculty must show evidence of mentoring at least 3 student projects in the past 3 calendar years.
2. For each project, the faculty member and student must have collaborated in the (A) generation and articulation of the initial idea, (B) implementation of the research, scholarship, or creative activity, and (C) compilation of the final project.
Faculty who are nominated for this award will be contacted and are responsible for providing all necessary materials to document that they meet the above criteria.

      Notice that when the word mentor is used as a verbal, criteria are established to determine the behaviors a professor must exhibit to meet the requirements of mentoring a student. In order to qualify as a mentor there must now be confirmed evidence of "generation and articulation," "implementation" or of research, scholarship, or creative activity, all of which ends in a "compilation," (some pile of data) which can be presented to the Committee on Mentoring Assessment (COMA), who will judge the data to select a recipient of a plaque as one who "excels in mentoring."
      The professor whom students previously decided to admire and emulate now must meet necessary criteria, which have been imposed by a committee in order to determine whether or not the admired professor is a certifiable mentor in the eyes of COMA.
      Imagine that to qualify as a hero a person would have to fulfill the criteria of demonstrating at least three acts of heroing in the past three calendar years. All nominees for heroing must show evidence of heroing in at least three events where they were either under enemy fire or in fear of receiving a beating or losing their job. Then have the person who wants to be recognized as a hero complete an application form in order to receive a medal for his bravery.
      In all of this let us not forget that while a mentor might be a teacher, it is not the case that all teachers are mentors, even though all teachers are in the position to be mentors.
      Furthermore, there are no measurable criteria that a student applies to a professor to determine that he is a mentor. Students might admire a professor for a variety of reasons, some noble and some not so noble. It might well be the case that a slothful student admires a lazy professor for not working his students. Such a student might even think that if he could muster the energy to complete a Ph.D. he might wile the hours away in academia at the expense of the state of Nebraska.
      It is puzzling that anyone would fall into the nonsense realm of "mentoring" students given that there is no such criteria for students who freely decide who they wish to emulate, unless, of course, there are teachers who are offended that students are freely choosing their mentors and these teachers think such freedom of choice should not be permitted. However, such a professor is not truly a professor and has failed in the vocation of being a professor by blowing his own horn.
      Such is the condition of the sophist who commits the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this), which consist in alleging mere sequence as a proof of consequence or causal sequence. Such a sophist appeals to experience, to observed facts: the sequence which he alleges has been observed. But the appeal is fallacious: the observation on which he relies amounts only to this, that the one event has followed upon the other. In other words, the teacher or teachers who are against a student freely choosing his mentor think that the professors students admire have the ability to "generate" ideas in students, which prompts them to do creative research that results in an outstanding research paper, or a scientific or artistic project. So, the professor or professors sit down and think up these criteria in the Nomination Form for Faculty Mentoring Student Research Award:

For each project, the faculty member and student must have collaborated in the (A) generation and articulation of the initial idea, (B) implementation of the research, scholarship, or creative activity, and (C) compilation of the final project.

The sophist then assumes if he repeats the behaviors of a mentor he too will become a mentor. Then if he provides all the "necessary materials to document that [he] has meet the qualification criteria," and successfully completing the application form, he qualifies for a reward, and the chance to win a plaque and add a line to his vitae.
In all of this it must be remembered that there is not a rule that says we cannot use words any way we wish; however, at some point we stop speaking sense and start speaking nonsense. Thus, there is nothing to stop us from saying that as mentors are involved in mentoring, the people whom they mentor are their mentees whom they ment. Conversely, as mentors are involved in menting students, dementors are involved in dementing their dementees whom they have demented.
Professors just used to teach and advise. The good ones did it well. The poor ones did it poorly. So it went, and that is the way it should still go.