Adages for Ethical Graduate Mentoring in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

Adages for Ethical Graduate Mentoring in the Twenty-first Century Charlotte M. Canning (bio), Esther Kim Lee (bio), and Sara Warner (bio) We were among the fortunate ones, and even then we knew it. After graduating with our doctoral degrees, we got tenure-track jobs in top-ranked programs at Research 1 (R1) universities. We each knew brilliant and talented people in our graduate programs for whom this was not true. Our paths were not without challenges, including deeply gendered obstacles, but we are now in positions that come with many privileges. With these privileges, however, come an equal number of responsibilities to research, teach, and serve on and off our campuses. Of these responsibilities, the one that is the most challenging is our role as advisers and mentors to PhD students. The three of us defended our dissertations in a historical moment when we were taught to be like our advisers, and the goal of almost everyone in our cohorts was to be a professor. Although the job market since the 1970s has been subject to downturns, there was little discussion of the ultimate end-goal of doctoral education. Now, however, there are many questions surrounding the purpose of doctoral education and whether or not the professoriate is indeed the goal for everyone, or whether this can be a goal at all. We did not experience the level of uncertainty our students are now experiencing, but we want to be the best advisers we can to help our students navigate the changing landscape of graduate education. Earlier in our careers, we all believed that we could change anything, and that what we endured our students would not. Esther wanted to make sure her students of color would not be the only minority participants in a seminar or a conference panel, as she often was in graduate school. A first-generation college student, Sara was the only working-class member of her graduate school cohort and the only out lesbian in most of her classes. Charlotte’s program was all white and mostly women. She hoped, like Esther and Sara, for greater diversity and that women would not silently have to endure sexual harassment. To some extent that has proven to be true, and our students have a greater voice and more support than we did. These changes, unfortunately, are not enough that we can look with pride on the current situation in academia, especially when it comes to diversity, inclusion, and ethical actions. We are advising our students to navigate a market that looks nothing like the one we experienced. We struggle daily with the ethics of what we are doing: How do we know we are making the right choices? How do we fulfill our obligations with integrity? What does a respectful partnership with our students look like? In what follows, we share some of our thoughts on what we have identified as the biggest challenges we face as professors and advisers to graduate students. We place particular focus on the job market and the issues of diversity as a way to ground our conversation. By reflecting on our own career trajectories and the current trends in our field, we hope to shed some light on how we approach the critically important responsibility of being doctoral advisors and mentors in the twenty-first century. Ethics and Advising I: Jobs Contingent, Alternative, and Adjacent The ethical quandary that those of us who administer PhD programs must grapple with is not simply the question of employment in higher education, but what kinds of jobs our students [End Page 103] can hope to get and where. Of course, getting a PhD as a theatre academic/scholar has always been something like a leap of faith. Even when Charlotte entered the job market in 1991, she received letters saying that searches had been closed due to losses of funding or hiring freezes at the institutions holding the searches. Perhaps one part of understanding our students’ future is to stop implying a past golden age, which never really existed. This is not to say, however, that there are not significant differences here in the early twenty-first century compared to the late twentieth...