Secret Life of a New Faculty Member.

A graduate student at a large research university (later a teacher at a small state college in Arkansas) succumbed to, rebelled against, jumped into, and refrained from many varieties of mentoring and being mentored. Mentoring is like institutionalized parenting, containing exchanges analogous to the range of exchanges that happen between parent and child. The way the institution of mentoring is protected parallels the ways parenting is protected. With that protection, the possibilities of changing mentoring are limited, and that protection also makes it impossible to consciously disengage the practice of mentoring from the ramifications of the parenting metaphor. The oral transmission of secret knowledge--information about how a particular institution really works--lies at the heart of mentoring. In terms of mentoring in the academy, these knowledges collectively reveal a shadow institution. What the academy needs is mentoring as alchemy, mentoring as standing witness to personal and institutional transformation. Members of the academy need to investigate the dynamics and the codification of the discourse of mentoring, to recreate and revise its purposes. (RS)