The Pitfalls of Academic Mentorships - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 0 views
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At the height of Plumb's career through the 1960s and early 1970s, the word "mentor" was used only occasionally in academe or the corporate world.
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The era of the mentor began in earnest only in the mid-1970s. The Yale psychologist Daniel J. Levinson, best known for his studies of middle age, had a precise definition quoted in The Christian Science Monitor on February 14, 1977: a person 8 to 15 years older than the "mentee," a "peer or older brother" rather than a "distant father." Levinson continued: "He takes the younger man under his wing, ... imparts his wisdom, cares, sponsors, criticizes, and bestows his blessing."
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Corporate mentoring took center stage in 1978 and 1979 with two articles in the Harvard Business Review. The title of the first, an interview with a group of senior executives from the Jewel Companies, echoes to this day: "Everyone Who Makes It Has a Mentor."
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Harriet Zuckerman's 1977 book on the scientific elite and American Nobel laureates had shown how crucial the system of graduate supervision had been; more than half of America's Nobel laureates by the year 1972 had been students, postdoctoral fellows, or junior collaborators with older laureates, and many others had worked with major nonlaureates.
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For all my gratitude for such support, I remain skeptical about the mentor-protégé bond and see the "Much Ado about Mentors," to quote the title of Roche's late 1970s Harvard Business Review article, as the start of a disturbing trend.
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Yet the search for a mentor, for a safe initiation into academic or corporate mysteries, can overshadow the entrepreneurial spirit. Roche himself pointed out that mentored executives "do not consider having a mentor an important ingredient in their own success." They credited their aptitudes, hard work, and even luck ahead of mentoring.