Geoffrey A. Clark,
Professor of Anthropology

Mentoring Archaeology Graduate Students

I must admit that the notion of a "mentoring philosophy" never occurred to me until I was asked to make my own explicit. On some reflection, I will acknowledge to having one—the evolutionary product of more than two decades of interacting with graduate students. My ideas about the nature of this interaction are conditioned to a large extent by my general attitudes toward graduate students, the considerable demands placed upon me by the research enterprise, and the preconception that archaeology is, or should be, a science (as opposed to a historical, or humanistic, discipline).

I like graduate students and have always been sympathetic to the conditions of their existence, probably because I remember with some fondness my own grad school days and find that graduate students tend to keep me on my intellectual toes. The best of them scarcely need mentoring. They are possessed of a seemingly inexhaustible store of energy, enthusiasm, and good humor, qualities that are all the more remarkable in this era of reduced support for and confidence in higher education. It takes real dedication and a commitment to the intellectual aspects of the discipline to persevere through nearly a decade of postgraduate studies while working, often outside the profession, during students' tenure in graduate school. When they finally finish, there is no guarantee of employment in the profession, nor of employment outside of it commensurate with their expertise and abilities.

Mindful of these competing demands on graduate students' time, energies, and resources, and, in most cases, powerless to help them financially in any substantial way, I try to treat them as adults and as individuals—people with multiple responsibilities completely unrelated to their graduate student status. To do otherwise is to take a completely unrealistic view of the situations most graduate students face today.

I also thank my lucky stars that I had it relatively "easy" myself. I did my postgraduate work between 1966 and 1971, when federal funding for graduate education was far better than it is today. These were the waning years of the post-World War II "Golden Age," when science experienced unprecedented growth and widespread popular support. Were it not for the National Science Foundation, I could never have contemplated, let alone completed graduate school, nor embarked on a career as a research scientist. I honestly do not know whether I would have persisted in archaeology had I thought I would emerge from graduate school tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and with no semblance of a "normal" family life (whatever that is). Unhappily, both circumstances are all too common among recent cohorts of graduate students, a condition I chalk up almost entirely to federal funding priorities, which not only have decreased per capita spending (in constant 1970 dollars) per graduate student, but also have forced students to rely heavily on loan programs for support. The effects of these policies are devastating, not only for graduate students but for the university community in general and, in my estimation, for the larger society. Graduate education in many fields is difficult to attain for persons of average means.

An ironic historical footnote is that graduate students in my generation were not permitted to take teaching assistantships, nor supposedly to work at all, when supported by NSF. The reasoning behind this policy was that one could actually live on an NSF fellowship, which was true enough, and teaching and other responsibilities were thought to detract from time spent on research endeavors.

Research and Teaching
I do not separate research and teaching conceptually or operationally and am extremely suspicious of all attempts to do so. A high-quality, productive research program cannot fail to keep faculty current in the discipline, and the absence of such a program can do as much harm at the undergraduate level as at the graduate. Moreover, teaching is a beneficial experience for most anthropology graduate students because there are limited opportunities in the applied sector, and the best graduates, at least, will eventually find jobs in the academy. Teaching assistantships are a major source of support for graduate students and typically come with tuition waivers.

Matching Talents with Interests
If I have a special talent as a mentor, it is because I have a "good sense of problem," can spot promising students (or see promise in those previously overlooked), and can match problems with students' rather diverse interests. The objective, of course, is to guide them from a relatively dependent status to as independent a status as their competence will allow. I accomplish this by extending coauthorship to them (whenever there is a good match between an individual's interests and talents and some aspect of a research project with which I am involved), by encouraging them to attend and present papers at the appropriate professional meetings (and trying to find the money that will allow them to go), by seeking funding to help underwrite their research endeavors and, most generally, by treating them as junior colleagues in as many aspects of the discipline as I can. A kind of symbiotic relationship sometimes evolves wherein I get the help I need in my various research enterprises, and they gain entrée into the profession through the avenues I have opened for them.

Like most nonexperimental fields, archaeology is characterized by partly discrete, partly overlapping, yet complementary and antagonistic research traditions. Most of us work in one or several of these: no more the solitary researcher working in lonely isolation. The research traditions provide a relatively congenial social and intellectual milieu in which a young scholar becomes acquainted with the leading figures in the field and with the paradigms that govern its research protocols. Although I dislike the term, it is accurate to say that a mentor's "network" plays a significant role in making professional opportunities available to his or her students. It would appear that I have a substantial network, since most of my former students are gainfully employed in the profession, both here and abroad.

Operationalizing Success
In common with most of my colleagues, I consider that my involvement with a student does not end upon receipt of the Ph.D. Placing a talented, qualified individual in a position suited to his or her abilities is, after all, the raison d'être for a graduate program. In my opinion, graduate students must have a reasonable expectation of employment after completing the Ph.D. To insure that they are as competitive as they can be, I encourage and assist them to participate as fully as possible in the professional activities of the field during their graduate years. Ideally, I aim to produce Ph.D.'s with vitae like those of established assistant professors. I argue that they must do more than their counterparts at better-established schools, since they cannot count on the institutional cachet to help them get jobs. This is not intended as a criticism of Arizona State University, which has come very far, very fast. But ASU is only thirty-five years old and cannot count upon its reputation to assist its graduate degree holders in the job quest. The only way I can think of to minimize the impact of this lack of institutional prestige is to turn out Ph.D.'s who are so strong that they will outshine the graduates of better-known institutions. I tell them this—there is no point in ignoring it.

There is also an element of trust and mutual respect in the mentoring process. Graduate students need to know that, in addition to the intellectual and operational aspects of the interaction, their advisors will go to bat for them in internal struggles over the allocation of resources (assistantships and the like), that mentors will take care of the various procedural details that mark successful progression through a graduate program and, in general, keep an eye out for their interests.

Epilogue
Once a source of international pride, American science has entered a period of uncertainty and doubt marked by decreased federal spending in many fields and increased disillusionment on the part of its practitioners. Academia has also experienced a sharp drop in public confidence in the ability of science to answer significant questions and to resolve significant problems. These disheartening trends are linked, in my view, to widespread public misperceptions about the role of science in society, and what science "is" or "does." The causes of this unfortunate situation are many and complex, among them a scale of social values that emphasizes the material consequences of success at the expense of education and knowledge. In addition, the short-term perspective, typical of much industry-driven research and development, has because increasingly maladaptive in the face of foreign competition. With no easy solutions in sight, one can only hope that some reassessment of national priorities might eventually take place, resulting in a rebuilding of the scientific infrastructure. Such an eventuality will probably be forced upon us some day by our declining share of the international marketplace.

In light of these and other gloomy considerations, it is hard to encourage students to embark upon a career in science—the time investment and risks seem too great, the potential return too small. But I do it anyway. It has been my experience that archaeology (and, more generally, anthropology) touches something deep in the human psyche: a need to know our roots, to know how we came to be the way we are. It is this admittedly romantic notion that draws people to the field, that something sustains them through years of graduate study and even occasionally throughout entire careers. I believe I have a responsibility to prospective graduate students to make clear to them the conditions of life in the profession (by the time they enter graduate school, most have a pretty good idea anyway). Once I have done that, however, if they still wish to continue, and if they have the requisite background and abilities, I will do everything in my power to encourage and assist them.

Mentoring, for me, has been accretional. In no sense an integrated philosophy, my approach is instead a cumulative, somewhat haphazard product of a twenty-year evolutionary process. It is what seems to work for me, and what has, evidently, worked for some graduate students as well. This essay is an effort to identify the commonalities in the success stories. I have also had my share of failures. Mentor was a friend of Odysseus who entrusted him with the education of his son, Telemachus. History doesn't tell us how Telemachus turned out. I wonder if he would have received tenure.