This post is available to download as a PDF here and as an audiofile below:
‘A timely call for genuine companionship on the intellectual journey’.
Kwesi Amoak, Mellon PhD Student, Institute of African Studies (IAS) University of Ghana; Visiting Postgraduate Student, Moray House School of Education and Sport.
I need to start by scratching where it itches. I have never liked the word ‘mentee’. So much so that I struggle to utter it, even in contexts where its use is accepted and expected. Mentees sound like something you would find hanging near a supermarket checkout. Bite-sized chewy dragees offering a ‘hit of delicious freshness which excites the mouth and awakens the mind.’ So far, so good perhaps — until you consider that mentees are sucked down to the point of non-existence. Even that hard outer shell won’t protect the mentee. A mentee is someone who is ‘done to’, with the result that the initial hit of delicious freshness may be short-lived. The dice are loaded. The odds are stacked against the mentee who languishes at the checkout counter. As we shall see, the gods are on side of the mentor.
Let’s take a closer look at that word, especially as it was probably chosen for its etymological significance.[1] Mentor (with a capital M) was the name of the person celebrated in Greek mythology and in Homer’s Odyssey as the person who offered guidance and counsel to Odysseus’s son Telemachus. Odysseus had left for Troy when Telemachus was still in his infancy. Some 20 years later, the young Telemachus set out in search of his wandering father. Nowadays, the original Mentor might be described as a ‘life coach’. That form of mentoring requires a serious investment of time. In the case of the beleaguered Telemachus who set sail from Ithaca it was almost certainly a matter of life or death. For the goddess Athena, it was quite literally a transformative experience, as it was she who assumed the guise of Mentor and accompanied Telemachus to Pylos. For the young and inexperienced Telemachus, the roiling seas and a dark night of the soul, alleviated only by a soothing opiate provided by Helen of Troy, were what the philosopher Agnes Callard fittingly describes as an ‘orientation towards something of intrinsic value’. His heart was set on defending the honour of his mother and being reunited with his father.
In the context of the contemporary university, mentoring can all too easily become a Trojan horse for instruction, that is to say ‘how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to some (unspecified) goal’. Examples of the former might be publishing a journal article or being accredited for competence in teaching. Examples of the latter might include getting tenure or being promoted. This kind of advice is commonly dispensed by those judged to be experts at something or other. Mentors are those who are considered to have ‘made it’ in some way. They are located on the other side of the invisible line that separates them from the mentees hanging around at the checkout. Although they rarely achieve the status of mythological figures, mentors with a small ‘m’ inhabit the larger, more fertile islands on the edge of the archipelago. The mentee may become more successful in writing for publication, say. But they are unlikely to say ‘I miss you’ to that distant expert. Why is that so? Because advice in that carefully-curated, restricted sense is instrumental rather than personal. The ship in mentorship has set sail, and the mentee is not on board. Advice dispensed in this way does not bring about what my mighty companions and I refer to as ‘a relation founded on receptive joy’, across lines of difference. As Callard points out, you might get better at doing something that you already value, but you won’t get any better at valuing. It is only by entering into a genuinely companionable relationship that you can be cued in ‘to what’s important, at an intellectual or physical or emotional level’.
Can we conceive of the mentoring relationship as a form of ‘flourishing that unfolds in the moment and is nourished by community, conversation and the richness of differences?’ The notion of bothy culture offers a truly pedestrian solution that invokes a coming together of strangers in a place of refuge. Everyone is just passing through, the young and the old, the callow and the wise. They make their way to this rudimentary place of shelter, often over rough and uneven ground and against a strong headwind. In a bothy you won’t meet anyone who says ‘this is my field’ — or, worse still — who asks you what your field is. Here it is the land that prevails. This is a terrain where the right to roam is taken for granted. No one can claim the high ground. You will meet those intent on conquering a distant summit, and those who are content simply to be with the mountain. As Nan Shepherd has it, their talk is lit up by contact with the hill as it is salted in discussion with one another. Leave the bothy as you find it, with the bare necessities for collective life (candles and a box of matches perhaps, or some logs for a fire). The wet and the wildness will do the rest. ‘Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.’
[1] The Shorter Oxford Dictionary records the first use of the word ‘mentor’ in 1750. The word is now used allusively as a common noun to someone who provides advice and acts as an experienced and trusted counsellor.
References
Callard, A. (2019) Against advice, The Point, May 9. https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/against-advice-agnes-callard/
Homer. (2018) The Odyssey, translated by A. Verity. Oxford. Oxford World’s Classics.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1994) ‘Inversnaid’, Selected Poems. Oxford University Press, p. 31.
Pirrie, A. Fang, N. and O’Brien, E. (2021) ‘Bothy Culture’. Towards a new ethics for the university, in A. Mahon (ed.) The Promise of the University. Reclaiming Humanity, Humility, and Hope. Springer.
Shepherd, N. (2011) The Living Mountain. Edinburgh: Canongate.
This is a thought-provoking piece, which, it seems to me, touches upon some important questions. Chief among which is whether the university, and relationships with it, should be an exception to what prevails in other areas of society? Weber makes the point about Marxist aspirations to remake society that, in the end, all types of social organisation end up functioning in a bureaucratic way. Universities, then, are no different. But should they at least ‘aspire’ to resist the temptation, however strong it may be? There is a romanticism, an idealism, in the view the author gives about relationships that are intellectual in nature. Perhaps this is how all good relationships of that kind begin, but once they form part of something greater, more structured – an education sector, then things go in a different direction. People still have some choice, they still exist as individuals, the system and people are not the one and the same thing.
Thank you, Edward, for your thoughtful and eloquent reply. It made me want to put another log on the fire and offer you a wee dram. You are right to point out that universities are governed by larger structural forces that crystallise over time. And that, as Jonathan Hearn points out in his essay The Problem of Imaginary Agents, https://uneasyessays.com/2020/09/28/the-problem-of-imaginary-agents/, there is a common tendency to blur ‘the necessary distinction between agency and process.’ It doesn’t take an romantic or an idealist to point out that it is people who do stuff, like focusing on things that can me measured rather than on what counts. I’m recalling a phrase used by a good friend. She knows who she is. As we’re engaging in a conversation (or at least that’s what I’d like to think) then the normal citation requirements don’t apply. You completely nail it when you say that people have a choice. We do exist as individuals, but we also exist in relation to others and to the world around us. We all need to take responsibility for the face of the world. Thanks for dropping by. It was good to see you.
Stop press. I shared the above post with a colleague and asked him the following question. ‘If this were a song, what would it sound like, and who would sing it? (It’s not such a daft question, as he is a songwriter as well as an academic.) This was his response.
‘I loved reading your piece. Anything in an academic context that speaks about people as something other than machines or vessels is manna.
If it were a song…
Well, I found myself thinking about Brian Wilson’s journey. Like Telemachus, but with only music – of which he is both master and servant – for companionship. Brian Wilson has found a way in his pilgrimage to create music that acts as a safe haven for him but also becomes a gift for others. When I think about the guidance I’ve needed most in my life it has often come from his music. The complexity of the harmony, arrangement, performative gesture and lyric, have taught me how to live and how to understand the world.
Here he is, a ‘cork on the ocean’, a ‘rock in a landslide’, yet deeply connected and harnessed through music.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46IQu0yuJzU
David Scott (and Davie Scott of The Pearlfishers)
Head of Arts & Media, School of Business & Creative Industries, University of the West of Scotland
I am grateful to have been able to wander outside of the confining role of ‘mentee’, and instead to enjoy walking abreast – This is Maria Puig de la Bellacasa on ‘thinking-with’ and ‘writing-with’ as acts of care:
“Instead of reinforcing the self of a lone thinker’s figure, the voice in such a text seems to keep saying: I am not alone. There are many, many others. Thinking-with makes the work of thought stronger: it both supports singularity by the situated contingencies it draws upon and fosters contagious potential with its reaching out, its acknowledgement of always more-than-one interdependencies. Writing-with is a practical technology that reveals itself as both descriptive (it inscribes) and speculative (it connects). It builds relation and community, that is: possibility.”
De La Bellacasa, M P. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press: London. Page 77.
(cut to: a time-lapse shot of the interior of a bothy. It is periodically dark, and lit with temporary flashes of fire, candles and torchlight. The figures come and go, their movements through the frame are traces that overlap. The space is thick with teeming presences.)
Gray, thank you for this thoughtful and evocative response. Thinking with (and by extension writing with) seem to me to be key dimensions of ‘bothy culture’. Incidentally, it is a superb coincidence that the the surname of the author you cite means ‘of the beautiful house’. It strikes me, though, that there is too much furniture in this beautiful house: ‘situated contingencies’ (aren’t contingencies always situated?); ‘contagious potential with its reaching out’. Give me the bare bones of contingency and potential any day. These are minor cavils. I’m glad that you’ve drawn attention to the aesthetic dimension and that see the connection between ‘bothy culture’ (more on that another time, perhaps) and forms of expression. I’m also mighty glad that you enjoy walking abreast, even if at times I can’t keep up!
As I see it, (academic) writing is neither a form of self-expression, nor a channeling of the thoughts of others, but act of communication, both as a form of address and as the exercise of a particular form of attention.
I love your image of the bothy at the end. Thanks again.
This is late postscript on the origins of the term ‘Bothy Culture’. (Out of time, but not out of tune.) The term is borrowed from the late Martyn Bennet, a ‘musical alchemist’ par excellence. (I’m sure he wouldn’t have objected to my borrowing it, as he was as a self-confessed borrower himself.) Bothy culture was the name of his second studio album http://www.martynbennett.com/Album_BothyCulture.html
In the following short extract from a programme about the Grit Orchestra, which was set up after Martyn’s untimely demise to celebrate his legacy, his former bandmate, the cellist Rory Pierces, describes how the name Bothy Culture came about.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05wgyh9