Marvin Fisher,
Professor of English

"Mentoring," like many new coinages, fills a need that terms like "advising," "guiding," or "directing" do not. "Mentor" was the name of Odysseus' most trusted advisor and teacher to his son, and the usage is analogous to a philosopher "Platoing," a historian "Thucydidizing," or an orator "Demosthening." Yet in an unexpected sense it is an apt term. As a result of my two Fulbright grants to Greece, at least six of my former students are now teaching at Greek universities in Athens, Thessaloniki, and Crete, and two of those six were students of students I taught twenty-five years ago. Without realizing it until Graduate College terminology made me aware, I have already outmentored Mentor, who had only one member of an older generation and one of a younger as his advisees. Much to my surprise and pride, two of these ASU Ph.D.'s have just succeeded in gaining Ministry of Education approval to form the first American Studies Program in Greece, at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki. And this at a time when official Greek-American diplomatic relations are quite strained.

I take my role with graduate students seriously, and I have taken great pride in it and pleasure from it even when it carried no great esteem. In a sense I have taken my cue from Walt Whitman, who wrote "he most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher." What he had in mind was certainly not a death wish but a determination to make his students as independent, individualistic, and self-confident as possible. "To destroy the teacher" is to eliminate the need to lean on or be supported by the teacher. The best teacher is most honored by what is ultimately original in his or her students' work, not by what pays homage to the teacher's work. Unfortunately, too many teachers and graduate advisers want to fashion disciples beholden to them; their egos cannot accept or are threatened by the process which transforms graduate students into independent scholars or researchers. I consider this failing on the part of the teacher a form of academic serfdom and a profanation of our purpose. It even pervades the language we use, and for that reason I consciously avoid reference to "my graduate student" and prefer to say that he or she "is working with me." One of my proudest moments occurred about five or six years ago when I received a sincerely inscribed reprint from a former student whose dissertation I directed. In the course of her article she effectively argued against an interpretation I had published ten years previously.

For these reasons my aim with every student whose thesis or dissertation I direct is to have that person produce the best work that he or she can. It is not an absolute standard, and I know that some dissertations I have directed have been better than others, but I also know that each student has been pushed, pressed, and provoked to do his or her best. I also know that the best dissertation that a student can produce is not the same as the dissertation I would write if I had to write on that topic. Repeatedly I have seen graduate students discouraged by directors who forced their assumptions and preconceptions upon the student or whose editorial comments seemed designed to show how much more the director knew than the student.

Just as abused children often perpetuate the pattern of abuse, abused graduate students may some day recreate the pattern. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had a director who taught me how to avoid pedantry and find the larger significance in a given subject. I know that he kindled the interest of Oxford University Press in my first book and that his example impressed on me the need to avoid writing a book that was just about other books — a phrase that describes all too many scholarly books on literature. Much of what I learned, I have attempted to pass on to others. Central to this attempt is the conviction that the most important challenge in writing about literature is to connect literature to life's more recurrent and compelling questions. It is not an easy task. Students must be taught to respect the aesthetic and semantic strategies of the text; to gauge its relation to the author, to other authors, and to other texts; to relate it to historical context and to readers then and now, to religious and political issues, to questions of psychology and personality, to the past, the present, and insofar as possible the future.

I often hear from the doctoral graduates whose work I directed, and of those fourteen only one does not have a full-time professional employment in a chosen field. One has been on the faculty of a law school, another is a CPA in a highly responsible position, and a third is with the RAND corporation with major responsibilities in RAND's longstanding program of research for the Air Force. The others have more conventional positions in departments of English in the U.S. and abroad. In several instances I was of direct aid in their securing employment; in others they did quite well on their own. I have also been successful in sending B.A. and M.A. graduates to other graduate programs, especially ones where financial aid is more readily available. One such student received a top scholarship to UC, Davis (about $18,000) after the Director of Graduate Studies called me for more personal corroboration. Last April when I attended a conference in Boston, I carried with me the work of one current and one recent graduate student to acquaint some well placed Eastern colleagues with the quality of work being done here. One of these articles is being considered for publications; the other may bring its author a major fellowship for Ph.D. study.