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The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal On Mentors and Janitors: Toward a Classical Definition of Advising in Higher Education John D. C. Buck, Penn State University
Thirty-two years ago, Coach Paterno gave a talk to assembled liberal arts faculty at a comparative literature luncheon. Bruce Rosenberg, who had persuaded the coach to talk to us, assumed that he would discuss football . . . spring recruiting probably. Paterno, however, proposed as the title of his talk “Heroism in the Modern World.” Professor Rosenberg sighed and dutifully sent out flyers for the talk. Paterno dealt with Virgil's Aeneid as the ethical model to which all people should aspire. Virgil, he reminded us, declares pietas the supreme good. Pietas involves defining one's self as the node at which various powerful obligations intersect. Aeneas spends much—perhaps most—of the poem trying to conceive himself as the hero of an epic other than the one in which he is involved. He must constantly overcome those misguided and selfish conceptions. The drama of the end of Book II embodies the pietas to which he must constantly aspire. Most of all, Aeneas had wanted to fight heroically with Hector and the other doomed Trojans. Unwillingly converted, he turns from dying Troy to the mysterious task of leading the Trojan survivors to found a civilization in an unknown place. He leads his son by the hand and carries his father, who is carrying the household gods. Aeneas has value to the extent to which he subordinates himself to his obligations. He is his father's son, his son's father, his people's leader, and devout preserver of Troy's gods. Coach Paterno has sought always, I think, to live a Virgilian life and to promote Virgilian values in his football players. He has not always been successful, of course. Nor have we been always successful in living and promoting the values we hold dearest. Venus aids Aeneas in fulfilling his destiny to found Rome. Although Coach Paterno might well ask us to practice Virgilian values, he would probably not ask us to behave as Aeneas's tutelary, Venus. In fact, behaving venereally is far from his idea of what we ought to do. Penn State's Division of Undergraduate Studies, too, eschewed the venereal model . . . and that's a good thing. DUS chose another model from antiquity, a model that comes to us with as much complexity as, but with less moral ambiguity than, Venus. The classical figure on the cover of this conference's program is almost certainly the second century B.C. bust of Homer, but I think that he is supposed to be Mentor. If he is Homer, we should not be disappointed: though he goes through various developments, Mentor originates in Homer's Odyssey. I propose, though, that we correct the cover of the program: with a pencil or pen give him eyes—irises and pupils, that is. Now I need to offer an apologetic aside before I pursue the rest of this celebratory definition of advising in higher education. I teach English. I have taught English at Penn State for thirty-three years. English teachers of my generation relish etymologies and discover in the origins and evolution of language fascinating accidents and, sometimes, essential truth. You may find my etymological play mere self-indulgence, or you may agree that it schools us in what we can and should be. Mentor, I reminded you, originates in Homer's Odyssey. Mentor is the wise counselor, a persona assumed by Athena to instruct Odysseus's son, Telemachus. Telemachus has grown up without his father, much loved by his mother, but mocked and threatened by the suitors who want to usurp the throne of Odysseus at Ithaca. (No, we have not suddenly changed our location from Penn State to Cornell; it's simply a sad fact that Odysseus's kingdom was Ithaca, not University Park or State College.) Athena as Mentor intervenes in the complexities of Telemachus's life and begins to instruct him in the arts of wiliness, combat, culture, and government. As I said, we all probably agree that DUS wisely named its Web journal The Mentor, rather than The Venus or The Aphrodite. Google searchers would probably have checked “Venus” or “Aphrodite” more often than they check “Mentor,” but many of them would almost certainly have been disappointed to find that the journal was Paterno-pure Virgilian pietas. We avoided that misunderstanding, but we should recognize and embrace the complexities of Mentor and the journal we named after him . . . or her. He is Athena, who, we may say, is the product of a phallocentric culture: she has no mother, and she chooses excellence in what seems a purely masculine world. Were we to say that, however, we would miss Homer's and, more generally, antiquity's sensitivity to her. She and Ares (the Roman Minerva and Mars) are the Olympian divinities of war, but Athena is the smarter of the two. Ares—pure, Arnold-Schwarzeneggerian phallocentrism—can't compete with Athena who can always outwit and outfight him. In the climactic violence of The Odyssey, Athena helps Odysseus and Telemachus to annihilate the would-be usurping suitors. Beyond her military prowess, she is also the goddess of wisdom (the Roman Minerva), justice (as in Aeschylus's Eumenides), and civilization. It is she, after all, for whom Athens is named. So what. So what? So quite a lot. The Mentor who is a cross-dressed Athena reminds us that we need to escape our limits so that we can serve our students and the institution that employs us. Athena can sometimes serve Telemachus, Odysseus, and Ithaca best as a wise, grizzled counselor of many years and many human experiences. The aged counselor, however, is always Athena. Let me move from superficial classicism to what many of you will find self-evident commonplaces—the fruits of my experience and of the tutelage some of you have given me. At sixty, I find the role of graybeard authority a fairly natural fit. (Where is that stripling who came to Penn State thirty-three years ago?) As an adviser of English majors, I deal with students who are working on B.A.'s, students who—among their other requirements—have to reach twelfth-credit-level proficiency in a foreign language. That requirement makes perfect sense to me: I found languages easy, delightful, and profitable to learn, and I am always a little surprised by people who find languages difficult. I know, however, that many students do find language difficult, and I spend a fair amount of time helping students to identify the best ways to fulfill the university's B.A. language requirement. The difficulty arises when students' difficulty becomes obstinate willfulness: “I don't see the point of this damned language requirement. I'm never going to use it, and I think that it's just a crock, a stupid hurdle.” Ah, perfect. They've offered me the occasion for explaining further why a B.A. graduate—perhaps especially a graduate in English—needs to have studied a foreign language. “That's great, Mr. Buck, but you know that it's just bull.” “Actually, as I've said, I know that it's not bull. But beyond my certainty and the certainty of the people who agreed on the requirement, there is one additional fact: you cannot graduate in English from Penn State if you do not fulfill the requirement. You may, of course, confer your own degree and name it after yourself: the Robert Jones B.A. in English. It will not be widely recognized, but you can give it a whirl.” At times academic advisers must become stern and represent their institution and its values. The student, who has probably had cheerful talks with me in the past, is a bit taken aback by the changed tone. Mentor did not always acquiesce in Telemachus's youthful notions of what constituted maturity and the education appropriate to maturity. Merely representing the university's requirements, however, misleads us. A former colleague kept in his desk drawer a roll of toilet paper. When a student broke down in tears in his office, he whipped the toilet paper out of his desk and spun off a foot or two. He was almost always unsympathetic with distressed students and had discovered in the toilet paper a means for shaping them up. He and the student could then proceed to the practical business at hand without having that business obscured by emotion. A callous youth of twenty-six, I found my colleague's toilet-paper trick almost appealing. Mentor would not have behaved so insensitively, nor should we. Now another aside. Using “mentor” to mean a guide—not merely Athena disguised as the aged counselor of Telemachus—comes into English and other European languages in the eighteenth century. Lord Chesterfield in 1750 first used the word in this way. “Mentor” as “guide” does not come directly from Homer, but from the French Archbishop Fénelon, the tutor of Louis XIV's grandson, another Louis, this one the Duc de Bourgogne. In the 1690s Fénelon wrote for his young student Les Aventures de Telemaque (The Adventures of Telemachus), which was published in France in 1699 and translated and published in English in the same year. Fénelon brings to Mentor an emotional responsiveness and sensitivity that had been subordinate in Homer's figure. “Mentor” can become the sort of mentor we think of when we use the word to define what we think of our activities: Fénelon has transformed and, in some ways, enriched Homer's character. Teachers and advisers are usually older and almost always more experienced and knowledgeable than their students and advisees. Age, experience, and knowledge must lead us to sympathy—something like the sympathy that had caused Fénelon to write an enlightened treatise on the education of girls (Traite de l'education des filles, 1687). Students come to us with academic and personal problems—problems that often result from their being young, inexperienced, and ignorant. We must listen carefully to them, sympathize with their visions of the worlds that are darkening (or brightening) their lives, and remember always that we were not always so wise as we are or feel ourselves to be. Athena was born fully mature from Zeus's head; she did not have to go through the experience of growing up. She knows, however, that Odysseus has had to grow up, and she knows that Telemachus needs all the sensitive nurturing she can give him. A demeaning spin of Ithacan toilet paper would not advance his progress toward maturity. I know that I am not a psychologist, and I know that the university has professionals who can take care of students' serious psychological difficulties. Advisers and teachers, though, often see troubled students first. What appears to be academic difficulty becomes more profound. The student needed to see someone, needed to talk to someone, and was not yet ready to “talk with someone,” that common euphemism for seeing a shrink. Advisers who deal with first-year students have to cope frequently—at times almost constantly—with students in a state of near shock. Because I advise majors, almost none of my students are freshmen. I do, however, see many transfer students or students who have moved from one of Penn State's other locations to University Park. In their first weeks, they walk alone down the Mall surrounded by people who know and like one another. Classes may be a respite from the anonymity of the Mall, of a dorm room with a still barely known roommate, or an apartment with three apartment-mates who have their own friends, lives, and happinesses. Classes cannot always, however, overcome our students' anomie. We cannot always help these students to deal with and work completely through their distress. Sometimes the university's psychological counselors are no more successful than we are. When students come to us in darkness, though, we need to help them. Sometimes we can't help them to see that the darkness is illusory or temporary. If they need not to be here, we need to talk sympathetically about alternatives to being here. If their parents are adamant about their children's sticking it out, we may need to call the parents and explain how inappropriate Penn State can sometimes be, how deeply unhappy a daughter or son has become here, how badly he or she is doing. As a result of students' requests and with their written permission, I have talked with mothers and fathers. My wife has listened to my long explanations of why children are not doing exactly what their parents had anticipated they would. As a rule, parents are more easily persuaded by a sympathetic representative of the university than they are by their own children. Sometimes it's better for a young person to return to Ithaca for a semester or a year than it would have been to stay here. Mentor can sometimes explain that an interlude of herding animals with Eumaios is better than the probability of emotional collapse and/or failing classes. Mentor—by way of Homer and Fénelon—is a powerful model for advisers and other teachers. Passing through Latin, “Mentor” became associated with mens, “mind.” We must never forget that our primary obligations are to our students' intellectual lives and to the institution for which we work and at which they are studying. Two years ago, I was asked to define university advising. I might have chosen Mentor as the spirit of advising, and perhaps I should have done so . . . but I didn't. Another allusion intruded itself: the figure of Janus, the spirit of archways (jani) and doorways (januae), the spirit of entrance and beginning. The first month of the year is January in honor of Janus. Janus is a head with two faces, one facing in and the other out, one facing the past and the other the future. Sometimes the faces are youthfully unbearded, sometimes bearded and grizzled. I've agreed that each of us is Mentor and must balance the stern, lovely Athena and the manifestly experienced, sympathetic persona she assumes. So too does each of us need to be Janus. Janus's two faces do not suggest two-facedness, duplicity. They remind us to look to the student at our desk and to the institution we represent. We must help the student to become what she wants to be, and we must help her to see the ways in which the institution's directions can bring about the intellectual growth she seeks here. Our offices are always the portals through which students are passing, and each of us should be the presiding Janus of the institution's gateway to the future. If we do not know our students well, we cannot see their pasts or understand their visions of their futures. Both faces of Janus become much more profoundly blind than the Homer/Mentor figure on our program. Why would a student go to an adviser who paid no attention to the student's individuality? We have heard altogether too many tales of advisers who tell their advisees, “Just check off the requirements.” Checking off the requirements is not becoming educated, and the adviser has failed his advisee. That is not to say, of course, that the requirements are irrelevant. You'll remember my difficulties with some English majors and the language requirement. Janus presides over doorways and archways that should open; he should not keep the doorway closed. We have to understand our institution's requirements and the rationale for those requirements so that our students can—usually, at least—come through the doorway with relish for what awaits them. No adviser ignores requirements. That's not the problem. The problem arises as a result of the adviser's attitude toward requirements. I had no problem with my university's language requirement, and Penn State's B.A. language requirement always seemed to me prima facie reasonable. When I went to school, students at the University of California chose mathematics or a language, depending on their degree programs. I confess that I was grateful to discover that I had left math behind me. Penn State students have not wholly left math behind them: all undergraduates must fulfill a six-credit general-education requirement in quantification. Regardless of my own blighted history in mathematics, I cannot suggest to my advisees that I find the quantification requirement other than reasonable. In fact, I am not even tempted to do so. My students should study mathematics or one of the variations Penn State offers to fulfill the requirement. The university does not demand that everyone take calculus—appealing though that might be to some people. The Departments of Mathematics and Statistics have designed courses for semi-dysmathic students, and those courses generally prove to be thoroughly engaging and profitable. The university's definition of general education resulted from discussions wiser than my knee-jerk definition would have been. The successful Janus-adviser understands both the student and the institution and then assures that the student studies what will be most appropriate and profitable for her. Several years ago I had an unpleasant discussion with an adviser who did not see the university's requirements as reasonable. She had told one of her advisees that she could not see why English majors needed to study mathematics and natural sciences, why an English major interested in writing had to take more than two or three literature courses, why that English major should study any literature before 1800. After her student left, I explained the requirements—their rationale and history. She remained complacently convinced that her judgment was best. Finally, as I had said to the student who found the language requirement impertinent, I told her that she had an obligation to the institution that paid her salary. She could, if she wished, sit in Webster's Bookstore as a freelance adviser, but I doubted that she would find the occupation profitable. We parted amicably, but she was happy to leave advising. She had resolved not to be Janus—not to represent both interests. We can and should conceive ourselves as Janus in the ways I've suggested. It's harder, though, to dramatize the part. We can all put on gray hair and gray beards and be Mentor. The two faces of Janus may pose a somewhat greater problem, but that's all right: we have an option. I reminded you that “Janus” continues to live in the name of the first month. It lives even more delightfully in the functionary whose job is to tend gates and doorways: the “janitor.” Sometimes—perhaps during some days in the academic year frequently—we feel that we fill the bill of the janitor quite nicely. “Janitor” and “custodian” have both evolved considerably from their Latin origins, but restoring “janitor” may be helpful to us. We do keep the doorways and arches of the university; we do help our students to enter and, at another beginning—commencement—to leave our hallowed halls. If we want to feel religious dignity in what we do, we can see that among the illustrations given for “janitor” in The Oxford English Dictionary is this one from the late seventeenth century: “The keys of St. Peter, reputed the janitor of heaven.” If St. Peter can do it, we can too. And if being the janitors of the university sometimes involves hauling out emotional or intellectual buckets and mops, we can do those tasks too. Mentors and janitors have been around for almost 3,000 years in the west. They communicate to us the worth of what we try to do and the dignity of our successes. Let's go now to become better mentors, better janitors. About the Author Winner of the 2001 Penn State advising award, Dr. John D. C. Buck is assistant professor of English and coordinator of academic advising for the Department of English at Penn State. He can be reached at jdb9@psu.edu or 814-865-5311. Published in The Mentor on November 14, 2003, by Penn State's Division of Undergraduate Studies Available online at www.psu.edu/dus/mentor/ Privacy and Legal Statements | Copyright | © The Pennsylvania State University | All rights reserved | |
Editor's Note: This article is based on a keynote address presented by Dr. Buck at the Mentor Academic Advising Conference held at Penn State's University Park campus on May 4 and 5, 2003.