Mentoring Matters: Theological Explorations of Generational Transition and the Academic Vocation

Early in a career in student affairs, one of us stood at a railing overlooking the main floor of the student union. The director of the university’s counseling practice stood just to the right, taking a break between appointments. Eventually the director commented that what he saw once again concerned him to the point that he needed to return to his office.

At one of the tables on the main floor sat a senior member of the faculty with one of the university’s most recently hired faculty members. This senior member of the faculty was known for his interest in serving as a mentor to his junior colleagues. Unfortunately, the long-term result of those efforts rarely turned out well for the junior faculty member. As the head of the university’s counseling practice knew better than anyone, the culturally assumed definition that passed for mentoring disguised “a need to be needed” on the part of the senior faculty member, rather than a commitment to a selfless cultivation of created potential. In time, a number of those junior faculty members would seek support elsewhere, including from the university’s counseling practice.

Time and again, the director of the university’s counseling practice raised the need for a conversation on campus about best practices concerning mentoring, training in the light of those determinations, and even forms of accountability for individuals who knowingly deviated from those practices. Time and again, however, that conversation had failed to gain traction amongst senior faculty members due to the refusal to acknowledge that anything passing for mentoring was less than inherently positive.

Even though a quarter century has passed since that conversation at the railing overlooking the main floor of the student center on that campus took place, little has changed in the wider culture—almost any seemingly reasonable practice passing as mentoring is perceived as inherently positive. Even one young faculty member whose life and/or career is damaged in any way by poorly conceived mentoring practices, however, is one too many. Perhaps Christian higher education has entered a season in which the stakes are at least quantitatively greater than a generation or two ago when it comes to mentoring.

Confusion among members of the various generations (in simple terms, as labeled by some sociologists as Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers) is reaching a point not witnessed in recent memory. At the same time, members of those two younger generations (Generation Z and Millennials) are reporting a desire to benefit from being mentored at rates greater than their predecessors (Generation X and Baby Boomers).

Just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Indiana Wesleyan University’s Lumen Research Institute launched an effort concerning the practice of mentoring as applied to communities populated by individuals called to the academic vocation. That project was to begin with a symposium held in Indianapolis, IN, in September 2021 but was postponed a year as a result of the spread of what came to be known as the Delta variant. One of the few (if any) upsides of the COVID-19 pandemic was that it allowed for the release of Cultivating Vocation: Sharing Wisdom in Christian Higher Education by InterVarsity Press at the symposium in September 2022. That volume included the keynote addresses that were prepared in time for the September 2021 symposium. As a result, an even greater amount of time was able to be allocated to Q&A between the keynote presenters and symposium attendees at the 2022 gathering.

This themed issue of Christian Higher Education includes revised versions of papers that were originally offered as part of a panel during the symposium. As with the keynotes, we were fortunate to have a prominent group of scholars and practitioners participating in this portion of the program, and thus each article is worthy of consideration in its own right. In addition, we encourage you to consider what emerges when considering all four articles in relation to one another.

For example, the first two articles provide overviews of successful mentoring programs—one designed to prepare the next generation of administrators for Catholic colleges and universities and one designed to prepare the next generation of Reformed educators. The first article was authored by Michael J. James (2023), who serves on the faculty at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and as the Director of the Institute for Administrators in Catholic Higher Education. His contribution to this themed issue, titled “A Christian Anthropology for the Mentoring Community: Nurturing Love and a Shared Humanity,” explores the origins of the Institute, its successes to date, and its aspirations for the future as the next generation of administrators are prepared to “see everything by the light of faith.” Individuals concerned with the preparation of administrators for both Catholic as with all other church-related colleges and universities will find great value in James’s commentary.

In a comparable manner, the article by Calvin University’s Matthew D. Lundberg (2023) explores the origins, aspirations, and successes of the De Vries Institute for Global Faculty Development. In this helpful essay, titled “Joining and Renewing the Mission: New Faculty Mentoring and Institutional Vitality,” Lundberg explores the role that faculty formation within a particular theological tradition plays for both individual faculty members as well as the health of the faculty as a whole. The specific Christian tradition addressed by Lundberg is the Reformed theological tradition. In previous years, that tradition arguably proved to be the most vibrant within Protestantism in terms of the shaping of faculty within and beyond the campuses it defined. Names such as Nicholas Wolterstorff, George M. Marsden, and Alvin Plantinga at Calvin, as well as Arthur F. Holmes and Mark A. Noll at Wheaton College, exerted significant influence. Lundberg’s focus is to honor and advance those efforts by preparing the next generation of faculty called to the academic vocation.

In contrast to their predecessors, members of Generation Z and Millennials committed to the academic vocation are more diverse with respect to gender and ethnicity. With that reality in mind, the third article, by California State University’s (Los Angeles) Ji Y. Son (2023), is titled “Following the Mentorship Model of Jesus: The Role of Storytelling.” Son discusses the critical role that storytelling can play within a mentoring relationship and how her research in the learning sciences accords with Jesus’s means of mentoring his disciples. Son examines the role of struggle in learning and maintains that struggle is not to be avoided but to be embraced as an opportunity to grow in character. Such character is needed to persist in today’s academy, but of even greater importance is the fact that such character bears witness to the salvific message only Jesus Christ can offer.

To conclude this themed issue, Excelsia College’s Maureen Miner and Kirsty Beilharz (2023) offer a response to the other three articles in “Mentoring in Christian Higher Education: Cross-Cultural Reflections From Australia.” Although the academic context of Miner and Beilharz (in Sydney, Australia) is similar in many ways to those of the rest of the contributors who serve in the United States, significant differences also exist. Miner and Beilharz focus on those differences and identify benefits of the practice of mentoring from a trans-Pacific perspective. In Australia, evangelical and Catholic institutions of higher education are relatively new additions to the landscape. As a result, institutions such as Excelsia College exist more on the margins of the educational culture in Australia than do Catholic and evangelical institutions in the United States.

In many ways, the cultural spaces populated by Australian institutions are comparable to the spaces that Catholic colleges and universities populated in the United States prior to the mid-to-late 1950s and evangelical colleges and universities populated prior to the early 1970s. While these institutions in Australia are still progressing toward measures such as full accreditation, they also possess a keen sense of preparing disciples to serve in a post-Christian culture. As a result, that point of comparison may be of greater benefit to institutions in the United States than institutions in Australia.

Although we find great value in the lessons the contributors to this themed issue share, in many ways their insights into the value of and strategies for mentoring are just the beginning. More analytical and programmatic work needs to be done in grappling with the value that various practices of mentoring can offer the next generation of colleagues. We are hopeful you will join us in this critical work. Assuming that anything passing for mentoring is inherently positive is a mistake we simply cannot afford to make. Our junior colleagues and the created potential they represent deserve to encounter practices of mentoring with the cultivation of that potential and that potential alone in mind.