Every year, as I fill out my institution’s Professional Activities Inventory, I’m vaguely aware that one of the categories soliciting a response—Mentoring of Colleagues—uses language far more ubiquitous now than when I fir
st became anyone’s colleague. But it was not until I began a writing project this year that has brought me deep into the fields of business and finance that I started hearing mentor and mentee at every turn. I confess publicly here, and with no small amount of shame, that these terms irritate me, as if someone’s placing a guiding hand on the back of my neck every time either of them comes up.
Mentor, like so many casual verbs and nouns, was once a person, or a character anyway. Possibly the son of Heracles, he became Odysseus’s friend in his old age, and he took charge of Odysseus’s son Telemachus while the wily hero was off at the Trojan war. Athena also dropped in on Telemachus from time to time, and when she did, she took the form of Mentor in order to give him solid advice, like fighting off his mother’s unwelcome suitors.
French romance picked up the Mentor character in the 17th century, and from that point forward, the name became generic. But a Google Ngram shows a sixfold rise in the use of mentor between 1960 and 2008, with books like Mentoring: The Tao of Giving and Receiving Wisdom (1995) leading the charge. I suspect it’s grown far more popular since then; Amazon displays thousands of books with the word mentor somewhere in the title, subtitle, or quick description, with books on business and money leading the way at 2,739 books available on mentoring.
Business profiles, too, emphasize mentoring. Gina Luna, head of JPMorgan Chase’s Houston office, writes,
I think mentor is a verb and not a noun. We all develop relationships, and mentoring—advice, coaching, perspective, and help—is a component of almost every relationship . … I mentor someone when I see in that person the potential to do more, make a change and become a high performer. When I see someone I know has what it takes, I want to maximize the potential. My job is to make the organization better for the future. It’s also really rewarding to help people succeed.
You’d have to be a curmudgeon not to warm to such feelings. And when a note from a student or colleague thanks me for having been his mentor, I feel gratification. Yet I continue to wonder about the particular selectivity of some of these relationships; I wonder about the crumbling of other supportive networks whose place is not quite supplanted by mentoring. Odysseus had only one son; what if he had had 10 sons and 10 daughters? Do the other 19 fend for themselves?
Another mentoring junkie, Walter C. Wright, leans toward using mentor exclusively as a noun:
Because the verb “to mentor” places the initiative, and perhaps the responsibility, in the hands of the mentor, and from my perspective that undercuts the power of the mentoring process. I do not “mentor” anyone, nor do I want to “be mentored.” … Mentors are important resources for our learning, they are guides for our development, they are models for our choices. But they are not responsible for our growth. The power of mentoring rests in the decision to select mentors, the choice to learn from them, and the responsibility to act on our learning. Mentoring as a verb encourages someone to think they are doing something to someone else, rather than being someone for something else.
But then, I think, why aren’t we content with the very synonyms—resources, guides, models—that Wright leans on? To me, there remains something self-congratulatory about mentoring, and a dangerous whiff of the sycophantic in being so-and-so’s mentee.
Still, there it sits, on the Professional Activities Inventory. One grits one’s teeth. One tries to do one’s part. One types in the response.