David W. Foster,
Professor of Spanish

When the doctoral program in Spanish was established at Arizona State University in the late 1960s, the institution was only just beginning to make an assertive effort toward the solidification of research programs. For whatever historical reasons, many of the new graduate programs were established with limited resources. Moreover, there were few institutional guidelines for charting the course of these emerging programs. This situation strengthened the hand of program officers committed to new standards and enlarged goals for their programs. Since Spanish had only been offering master's degrees and the majority of them to current or potential schoolteachers, it was necessary to institutionalize new standards for the preparation of doctoral students, a long and often frustrating process designed to ensure their successful competition in a job market that soon began to shrink in the mid-1970s.

It has now become fashionable to speak of the "socialization" of graduate students. Although that term was not in use twenty years ago, an awareness of its importance as a reference point for the preparation of graduate students—primarily doctoral students, but also master's students, who were being prepared as research scholars and not only as schoolteachers—came to underlie the program in Spanish. What this primarily meant was the extraordinary need, at an institution that was only beginning to define itself as a graduate research center, to provide students with an entire range of professional skills beyond the customary classroom and library experience that are often the boundaries of graduate programs in the humanities.

Clearly, in this sense, then, mentoring assumes a very broad meaning. It does not refer only to the very essential depth of the interaction between professor and graduate students as the latter move through the various stages of evolution in their graduate studies. Such interaction is, indeed, especially important in the humanities, where formation may involve less the acquisition of formal methodologies of research than the development of a style of critical discourse in which the humanities expounds its analyses of cultural phenomena. Rather, mentoring also involves, both before and after the individual student moves through the evolutionary process of formation, the creation and sustainment of a climate of intellectual inquiry propitious to the development of humanistic inquiry. This climate necessarily involves curricular matters (and humanities programs are notably more fluid and flexible than they are in the sciences, social or natural). It also involves the development of a range of professional opportunities that allow students to move with ease into the company of their peers. To the extent that opportunities for professional involvement are considerably more limited in the humanities than in the "wealthier" areas of academic inquiry, this aspect of program development and the socialization of students is especially vital. Quality graduate education, therefore, involves the imperative to move beyond the concentrated personalized attention professors give their graduate students, to require also that they take a very active role in stimulating overall programmatic conditions that will promote a context in which such personalized attention will be the capstone of graduate education. The sort of smoothly functioning dynamic of curricular aspects, professional opportunities, and administrative controls is what, after all, allows for the intellectual exchange between mentor and student that is crucial in the humanities to take place productively.

It was this need to provide students with extraordinary professional skills that led me to build into my own interaction with students, and then into the program, several features that have now become the standard in such training at ASU and in the nation. Beginning with the premise that students were receiving adequate classroom instruction in the primary texts in Spanish, that is, the basic "content" of Hispanic literature, I insisted that students also receive extensive formation in the broad area of literary criticism and theory, which now extends to the even broader field of cultural theory. By instituting a graduate seminar on contemporary critical theory, which is now a required component of the graduate programs in Spanish, we began the process of exposing students to a host of theoretical ideas that are now an integral part of research in the most innovative arenas of Hispanic scholarship. The commitment to postulating a theoretically based approach to Hispanic literature has been carried over into all of the graduate courses in the program, such that primary texts are constantly being read in terms of theoretical ideas that enable a sophisticated critical discourse about them. While many graduate programs in Spanish have moved in this direction, it is notable that such a theoretical underpinning is not yet by any means a standard component of graduate training. This fact has helped to differentiate the ASU doctoral program from many others and allowed it to assume a special niche for itself.

The general assumption has been that it is enough to describe the content of literary works. The current view that literature (and culture in general) involves highly problematic sociopolitical and ideological processes has led to the need to develop theoretical premises that enable the scholar to understand these processes. A major programmatic transition in the humanities has been away from the description of content—assumed to be there transparently—to the analysis of cultural processes that give rise to literary works and condition our response to and assessment of them. The sort of theoretically oriented program we have sought to put into place in Spanish at ASU reflects this current understanding of research activity in the humanities.

This theoretical training has made a difference for us. As we also moved in the direction of involving students in conference participation and scholarly publishing, they had a considerable edge over their colleagues from other, often more prestigious, programs where the training continued to be characterized by a "pretheoretical" approach to humanistic texts. It has only been in recent years that humanities disciplines have moved in the direction of directly involving students in the research projects of their mentors and in preparing their own independent research on the basis of classroom and seminar participation. The graduate program in Spanish has been energetically involved in this sort of professionalization of its students, as can be established from the extensive list of publications and scholarly presentations of its current and past students. One of the ways in which ASU students have been able to win spots on the programs of scholarly meetings and place their research in scholarly publications has been as a consequence of the theoretical preparation being given them. While we of course have done our best in incorporating our own students in panels and sessions that we have organized, both at national and on-campus meetings (for example, many of my students were involved in two recent Graduate College Research Conferences I organized: "Impact of Latin American Literature in the United States," April 1987, and "The Marxist Interpretation of Cultures," November 1988), we are especially proud of the enormous success our students have had in competing with already established scholars in obtaining places on the programs of the best academic meetings in the country and abroad.

Perhaps the best indicator of a student's successful formation as a research scholar is in having a manuscript accepted by a rigorously refereed scholarly journal. Since I announce to students that they cannot expect to receive an A in a graduate seminar unless their semester project is either publishable or, with minor revisions, potentially publishable, it has become customary for students to place their seminar papers with scholarly journals in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. This norm has become extended to the program as a whole. The best way in which we have been able to socialize our students and to make them exceptionally competitive has been in getting them to see their research published while they are still graduate students.

One of the particular satisfactions of being a research scholar in foreign area studies in the humanities is the opportunity to create a community of colleagues not only within the U.S., but throughout the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking world. These colleagues, many of whom have been guests and visiting faculty members in the graduate program in Spanish at ASU, also include the numerous students who have passed through the program in the twenty years it has existed. There has been, as a consequence, considerable opportunity to continue to interact with students as they have pursued their professional lives, and many of them are now tenured, full professors. The most important way in which this has been possible, in addition to the sort of routine consultation that always continues to exist between colleagues, has been in involving former students in collaborative projects. These projects have included an array of reference works on diverse aspects of Hispanic studies for presses like the University's Center for Latin American Studies, Garland Publishing Co., and the American Library Association. In organizing these projects, I have found it important to be able to turn again and again to former graduate students because of my confidence in their research and theoretical grounding and in the impressive degree to which they have continued to make strides in the profession. This is evident in a current project to provide an ideological history of Mexican literature. Two former ASU graduate students are among the ten scholars who have agreed to contribute to this volume.

While much of the foregoing could be said about the creation of a sustained mentoring climate in most of the graduate programs at ASU (with special emphasis on those programs that emerged from the institutional transition of the late 1960s) and while many of these procedures are routine at peer institutions, there is an added and unique dimension related to Hispanic studies. Although ASU is located in the Hispanic Southwest, the Phoenix area has only in recent years begun to emerge more and more as a Hispanic area. Historically, Hispanic culture has been very thin and definitely suppressed in the Valley of the Sun. Therefore, a crucial component of the creation of a competitive graduate program is the need to make efforts to bring Hispanic culture to the fore in our program. This we have done since the inception of the doctoral program by the usual practice of inviting a wide spectrum of visiting writers and scholars. More significantly, we have attempted to create among the graduate students a commitment to Hispanic culture as an integral part of their daily lives, both as persons and professionals. We have arranged, as they have traveled, opportunities for them to interact with writers and intellectuals, to visit scholarly institutions, and in some cases, to publish in the outlets of these organizations. This practice has given the students a sense of identity and involvement with Spain and Latin America that would not be possible if they were to go only as tourists or neophyte scholars.

The other side of this process has been assiduously to recruit students from Spain and Latin America for the program (at the present moment, approximately half of the students are non-U.S. citizens) in order that they provide our American students with real linguistic and cultural models in the classroom and the teaching assistant offices. Concomitantly, one of the real successes of the mentoring process has been the creation, at the initiative of two Latin American graduate students, of a Spanish-language theater company (known as Belicia, S.A.) with which I am involved as an actor. Aside from the collegiality of such an involvement, the theater company has proved to be a valuable cultural experience for the students, both as spectators (we regularly perform for ASU students) and as participants (over a dozen students have been involved with Belicia, S.A., since its inception five years ago). The group has performed all over the Valley, in a theater festival in New Jersey, in Spring 1989 at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in Spring 1990 at the University of Southern California. This group and its activities constitute a sort of capstone in the overall cultural involvement that has been a principal mentoring goal with Spanish graduate students at ASU.

Strengthening classroom and seminar involvement through the introduction of a theoretically based program, the extensive involvement of students in a wide spectrum of professional activities (including most significantly publication in respected academic journals), the creation of a global Hispanic cultural commitment, and, finally, the sustained involvement of former students in various research and reference projects are all facets of a mentoring process that has won for the Spanish graduate program at ASU its solid and distinguished recognition.