Centre for Teaching Excellence

"She wasn't really familiar with my discipline, but she was able to give me perspectives about the institution from a different vantage point. I really grew to appreciate that."

an increasing number of colleges now rely on formal mentor programs, many of them campuswide, to give new faculty members guaranteed access to senior professors who can help them.

These days, actively seeking career guidance within the ivory tower doesn't hold the stigma for new professors that it once did

A good place to start searching for a mentor is within your existing network -- that same pool of friends, alumni, and other contacts who helped you during your job search

Since most work environments are very different from academe, you will probably look to a mentor for an explanation of the mores of your new office

Mentors have much to gain from these relationships as well. A senior staff member often learns valuable insights into the organization through the eyes of a talented newcomer like yourself.

"Mentoring" is in vogue, thanks in part to the Bush administration's emphasis on volunteerism.

The effects of mentoring are smaller than people think

But if you begin to control for the quality of the relationship, how long it lasts, the level of supervision, the kinds of kids who are recruited into the program, there are much larger effects.

Take, for example, the concept of apprenticeship, to which the Carnegie researchers devote an entire chapter. The faculty-master and student-apprentice relationship as the signature pedagogical structure of doctoral education dates back to the university's medieval roots. But, the Carnegie authors say, it's time that model was updated.

The study recommends that doctoral programs adopt new structures that allow students to have several intellectual mentors and come to think of mentorship as less an accident of interpersonal chemistry and as more a set of techniques that can be learned, assessed, and rewarded.

Arizona State University that awards an annual $5,000 cash prize to an "outstanding doctoral mentor" or another at the mathematics department of the University of Southern California that places new graduate students in "mentoring triplets" with both a faculty mentor and a more experienced graduate student.

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.

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."

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."

Ask for multiple mentors so you can get the benefit of experts in more than one topic. Many professors are overworked and overassigned, so getting a single, good mentor can be a pretty tall order. Instead, work with your chairman to determine four or five topics on which you would like to receive guidance from several mentors.

Some suggestions: Find out who the whizzes are at teaching the various kinds of courses in your department and ask to meet with them. Believe me, most good teachers will find time to talk about their own approaches to teaching; it's quite flattering. Ask to be linked with someone who can help you to understand how to balance scholarship and good teaching, or how to make the service expectations of the institution jibe with the teaching expectations. After you meet with your colleagues, talk about these things with your chairman.