The Emerging Scholars Blog

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. Alan Jacobs’ Grad School Thoughts: Should you go to grad school? “Probably not,” writes Alan Jacobs, Wheaton English professor and author of Original Sin, The Narnian, A Theology of Reading, and many other excellent things.  But if you insist, he’s got some good advice. (Also check out Alan’s contribution to our ESN article, “Why Get a PhD in the Humanities?”)

2.  James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom ties for OUR MOST AUDACIOUS CLAIM: THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF THE YEAR with Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft:  An Inquiry Into the Value of Work in Best Books of 2009 Part I by Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds Bookstore.  Take a few minutes to review the list, keep an eye out for two more parts going up next week, and let us know what books you’re interested in discussing this year.

3.  In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton, 2010), Louis “Menand asks four questions: Why is it so hard to create a general-education curriculum? Why have the humanities undergone a crisis of legitimacy? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ been seen—and ultimately failed—as a magic wand? Why do professors share the same politics?” — Oxygenating Academe: The Unpublic Intellectual (By Karen J. Winkler, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2010)

4.  ‘Baby Einstein’ Founder Goes to Court (By Tamar Lewin, NY Times, January 12, 2010):  Raises the question of access to and reproducibility of research in relationship to marketing and consumer concerns.  Do you know anyone who watched or advocated Baby Einstein?

5. Proof (or at least Evidence) That Mentoring Matters (by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed): A study presented the American Economic Association’s annual meeting found that mentoring had a significant impact on the number of grants and publications for female economists.

Rob Jenkins, an associate professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College,* proposes The Five Characteristics of Successful New Faculty Members.  The first one on his list is humility, which includes the importance of seeking out an experienced faculty mentor.

You might be surprised at how many new hires show up believing they’re smarter than their colleagues, or thinking they already know more about how the institution ought to function than do people who have been there 20 years.

You should assume that, as a rookie, you know nothing about the culture of the institution or the way it runs, much less the way it ought to run. Spend the first few months watching and listening to the people around you, observing how they conduct themselves and how others respond to them. From that you will learn much about how to behave—and how not to.

Seek out an experienced faculty mentor, someone who’s been at the college at least three or four years. Avoid members of the “old guard” who appear jaded, disillusioned, and burned out; you don’t want their attitudes to rub off on you. Look for someone who knows the ropes but hasn’t yet considered using them to hang himself/herself.

(Note: Your department chair may assign you a mentor, but if that relationship is unsatisfactory, feel free to seek out another one on your own. You may very well start with a mentor and end up with a friend.)

What do you think?  Is humility the most essential feature of becoming successful as a new faculty member?  How have you seen humility taught/understood, learned, and/or lived out in higher education?  Note:  For the rest of Jenkins’ list visit The Five Characteristics of Successful New Faculty Members.

*Another one of his articles is highlighted in the ESN post Dumbledore as a model admin?

From Tom

Adam Smith: What’s Next for Google Book Search? (Chronicle of Higher Education, 06/12/09):  Do you use Google Books to take a preview and/or search materials?  Is your institution partnering with Google Book Search?  Does Smith address your concerns regarding access, fair use, and privacy?  What are your thoughts on orphan works?  How do you define orphan works?

Google has scanned millions of books and made snippets available online through its ambitious Book Search program. The project has taken heat from authors and publishers, but Adam Smith, Google’s director of product management, says it’s a good thing for academe. (Audio interview, 9:36)

[Mike notes: there are at least two groups not happy with Google's digital books program: the Department of Justice and Amazon.com.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.]

China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession (NY Times, 06/13/09):  Who is familiar with China’s gao kao, i.e., high test?  Would a boost of similar seriousness about education be helpful in the United States or would it increase competitive commercialization of higher education?  How does one encourage the pursuit and wise application of knowledge through vocation in the wider society?

The Chinese test is in some ways like the American SAT, except that it lasts more than twice as long. The nine-hour test is offered just once a year and is the sole determinant for admission to virtually all Chinese colleges and universities. About three in five students make the cut.

Families pull out all the stops to optimize their children’s scores.

From Mike

Mentoring: Call for Papers – The University of New Mexico Mentoring Institute is seeking proposals about effective mentoring for their Second Mentoring Conference. I went last year and was favorably impressed. While the institute and conference are hosted by a public university, there were a number of Christian academics involved last year (from both secular and Christian universities), and issues related to religious faith were openly discussed. For example, several of the mentoring presentations addressed spiritual components of mentoring, two of the plenary speakers (Brad Johnson and Lewis Schlosser) spoke briefly about their different religious views in the context of their mentor-mentee and collegial relationship, and several speakers spoke to questions about how to relate to a mentor or protege with very different religious, political, or personal beliefs from your own. Deadline for submissions is July 31.

Languages on Life Support – From the Chronicle, a survey of the state of dying languages in the world today, and the efforts (or lack thereof) of academic linguists to preserve them.

Of the estimated 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world — about one-half of the number used 10,000 years ago — at least one-half will almost certainly be dead by midcentury, while another 40 percent will most likely become too diminished to survive much beyond 2100. The causes are largely agreed upon: colonization and other demographic shifts, government neglect or outright suppression of regional and indigenous languages, the influence of mass media.

The article explores the question of whether Noam Chomsky’s theory of a “universal grammar” eliminates the urgency to record details of specific languages.  Chomsky himself says no, but others aren’t so sure.  Personally, I was struck by the complete absence of any mention whatsoever of groups like Wycliffe Bible Translators or SIL, which are doing serious work around the world preserving languages.   (For more on linguistics, see my previous post about Dan Everett.)

In this week’s Week in Review, new graduates dealing with the recession, some notable reviews of N.T. Wright’s new book, Justification, a new website for Christian lawyers, some additional coverage of A. N. Wilson’s conversion, and more! If you’d like to contribute to next week’s Review, add your link(s) in the comments, or send them to Tom or Mike directly.

Reminder: We start our ESN Book Club on Your Mind Matters next Tuesday, June 9. We’ll start with the forewords and Chapter 1. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, you can download next week’s selection directly from IVP’s website as a PDF. Read the rest of this entry »

Inside Higher Ed reports on two interesting studies about which students complete a PhD and why. Read the rest of this entry »

I occasionally get asked how much good ESN’s mentoring program can really do, since mentors and mentees are generally on different campuses and rarely, if ever, meet in person. A great example of the potential of long-distance mentoring appeared in my inbox this morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Inside Higher Ed today has a report from this weekend’s Compact for Faculty Diversity’s Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, asking what it means to be a mentor. Here’s a quote:

“I used to think that you didn’t have to have a close relationship with the student to be a mentor,” [Javier] Cuevas, an associate professor of molecular pharmacology and physiology at South Florida’s College of Medicine, said at the session at the Compact for Faculty Diversity’s Institute on Teaching and Mentoring here. “But I’ve come to believe that there’s a huge difference between an adviser, who may only be concerned about the student’s performance on a particular project, and someone who has truly taken on the role of mentor. To me, friendship is an essential component of being a true mentor.”

This was a major question throughout the Mentoring Institute’s conference that I attend last week. A great deal of discussion was given to the question of whether a mentor and an advisor were the same thing, whether being a “mentor” implied some sort of special relationship, and how much of a “cheerleader” a mentor should be for mentees.

Brad Johnson, for example, noted that affirmation was the singlemost important thing that a mentor could do, and that mentors served an important role in opening doors for their proteges. Lewis Schlosser raised the tension between serving as a supporter of one’s protege, while simultaneously serving as a gatekeeper for one’s profession. Izzy Justice, meanwhile, took a completely different stance on mentoring, through his company’s service of anonymous mentoring (which completely removes any possibilities of opening doors or becoming real friends). Several speakers raised the question of whether you could be assigned a mentor, or if being a mentor was something you could only determine in retrospect.

What do you see as the differences between being a mentor and being an adviser? Does mentoring require friendship?

Last week, I had the good fortune attend the inaugural mentoring conference, put on by the University of New Mexico Mentoring Institute. Mark Smith of the Institute had invited me out there, and it was an excellent time of learning for me. I now have many ideas about how to improve ESN’s Mentoring Program (and many leads to follow up on, and not enough time to do it!).

A few highlights:

• Brad Johnson of the U.S. Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins, speaking on the necessary traits of good mentors. (Johnson is also the co-author of The Elements of Mentoring)
• Lewis Schlosser of Seton Hall, speaking on multicultural and cross-cultural mentoring.
• Izzy Justice of EQmentor, Inc., an online mentoring system designed for businesses and middle managers. Justice’s “big ideas” are 1) anonymous mentoring and 2) “network” mentoring, in which a mentee receives one-on-mentoring, peer mentoring from a community, and access to a knowledge base.
• Florence Hamrick of Iowa State, who led a roundtable discussion on mentoring for institutional transformation. (More on this soon, too.)
• Mark Searby of Beeson Divinity School, who led a breakout session on “Leaders Who Last,” about identifying why leaders in academic, business, and the pastorate fail and what can be done to prevent failure.
• MaryJane McReynolds of Central New Mexico Community College, who lead a breakout on best practices for mentoring professional and graduate students, from the perspective of leading mentoring programs in two vastly different contexts: business managers enrolled at DeVry Institute, and MD/PhD students at UNM.
• Though I wasn’t able to make her session, I had an excellent lunch conversation with Lani Gunawardena of UNM about her experience in designing an e-mentoring program that matched faculty in Sri Lanka with graduate students at UNM, using the open source program Moodle.
• A burrito platter from the Frontier Restaurant across the street from UNM. Yum!

I was also pleased to see a couple of my “neighbors” from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, who presented a poster on Children’s mentoring program for African American employees.

There is much more to say and process, and I’ll be writing about some of what I learning in the coming days.