Much has been written about the demands from mentoring students. Mentoring is regarded as service work placed on top of faculty demands of teaching, scholarship, and more service. The unbalanced workloads, especially as to the demands on faculty from underrepresented groups, cannot be overstated.
Often the work of mentoring seems to go unnoticed and unrewarded. In one of my faculty evaluations, a former supervisor told me that all of my work mentoring was intangible work for which no allowance could be made in my annual raise.
With the insubstantial value many place on underrepresented faculty mentoring underrepresented students and White students (who may want mentoring because they are first generation students, etc.), it is not surprising that faculty may feel burdened by mentoring. This can especially be the case for faculty who believe they must publish twice as much or perish.
It is not surprising then that much less has been written about the benefits to underrepresented faculty from mentoring students. Here I do not seek to justify overworking already overworked faculty. Rather, I hope to shed light on how faculty from underrepresented groups can envision and capitalize on the benefits of mentoring students.
While the benefits to underrepresented faculty are numerous, here I focus on three: mentoring students can help save our career when we are tempted to leave the building running fast; mentoring students can provide student allies to help verify the truth about our greatness; and, mentoring students helps to pass on the legacy.
Mentoring students can help save our careers, both pre-tenure and post-tenure. In my early years of teaching, I felt overwhelmed, often, and did not believe I had time to mentor students. Still student mentees came, especially White female students and students of color, sometimes just to see a friendly face (our school was quite non-diverse). I was as helpful and patient as my younger self could be. One day, though, I got all the help back and more.
I was working on my promotion dossier. Some student class evaluations were good and some reeked with the language (and low numbers to go with the language) that said I did not “look like” what a law school professor should. Two students I mentored, and who were beginning to understand more the institutional culture, stopped by my office and, seeing my working dossier spread out on my desk and a look of frustration spread out on my face, asked if they could read my dossier. Then they took a red pen to my work; and, then they just took over at the computer. Their excellent suggestions made my dossier more powerful and far less angry sounding. Their suggestions saved my promotion.
