Mentoring in Academia: Why the Future Depends on Getting This Right

At a time when higher education faces political pressure, resource limitations, changing student expectations, and significant shifts in the academic labor market, one of the most influential tools for institutional success is surprisingly one of the least formalized: mentoring. Strong mentoring relationships—between faculty and students, senior and junior colleagues, advisors and early-career researchers—have tremendous potential to stabilize academic communities and foster growth across the institution. Yet most universities still treat mentoring as an informal, almost accidental skill rather than a critical competency deserving of focused attention.

Maria LaMonaca Wisdom’s recent book, How to Mentor Anyone in Academia, along with emerging commentary in sources like Inside Higher Ed, is helping to increase visibility for mentoring at exactly the moment when higher education needs it most. Her message is straightforward but powerful: mentoring is not an innate talent; rather, it is a learnable, teachable, and improvable practice. Institutions that dedicate themselves to developing mentoring capacity will be much better equipped to handle today’s (and tomorrow’s) academic challenges than those that assume good mentors simply emerge on their own.

The Mentoring Expectation Gap

Students and early-career faculty increasingly expect substantive mentorship—about career development, navigating the culture of academia, building resilience, and finding meaning in their work. Surveys show that more than half of college students believe their professors should mentor them in preparing for future careers. Yet paradoxically, most faculty receive little or no training in how to mentor effectively. Many rely on their own graduate school experiences, which range from helpful to harmful, or they provide well-intended guidance that may not match the changing needs of today’s scholars.

This expectation gap is made worse by larger structural pressures: shrinking tenure lines, tighter budgets, heavier teaching loads, and fewer traditional academic jobs for students. When faculty are stretched thin and unsure how to mentor well, the result is uneven support and increased frustration for mentees who seek clarity during an uncertain era.

Recognizing mentoring as a learned skill—not an incidental byproduct of seniority—creates an opening for institutions to close this gap.

From Myth to Method: Mentoring as a Framework

Wisdom identifies three complementary dimensions of academic mentoring—heart, backbone, and coaching—that together create a robust model for supporting growth:

• Mentoring with heart: Empathy, listening, understanding lived experiences, and recognizing the human complexities behind academic work.

• Mentoring with backbone: Setting clear expectations, offering honest feedback, and addressing issues directly rather than allowing unspoken misunderstandings to fester.

• Mentoring like a coach: Guiding rather than dictating; asking generative questions instead of dispensing quick answers; empowering mentees to articulate their own goals and navigate challenges independently.

This triad offers faculty a concrete way to think about the mentoring relationship without defaulting to old paradigms of hierarchy or simply reenacting how they themselves were advised years ago.

What Effective Mentors Do Differently

According to Wisdom—and consistent with emerging research—good mentoring depends less on disciplinary expertise and more on habits of mind and communication. Among the highest-value practices:

• Setting expectations early and revisiting them periodically;

• Listening actively and asking thoughtful, open-ended questions;

• Creating reflective space that helps mentees clarify their goals;

• Modeling sustainable work habits, including healthy boundaries and self-care;

• Encouraging mentees to pursue varied experiences, including nontraditional career paths; and

• Demonstrating humility about one’s own limitations and making referrals when appropriate.

Equally important are the practices mentors should avoid:

• Assuming that mentoring ability is fixed or inherent;

• Approaching mentoring with disciplinary tunnel vision;

• Reinforcing academic hierarchies by acting as the sole knowledge source

• Rushing meetings or multitasking during them; or

• Trying to mentor in isolation rather than sharing strategies with colleagues.

These practices may seem simple, but when adopted, or from the second list, avoided, across a department or school, they can dramatically improve academic culture.

Challenging the Hierarchy

One of the most transformative ideas in Wisdom’s work is the shift from hierarchical to collaborative mentoring. Traditional models cast mentors as experts dispensing wisdom to passive recipients. But today’s students and early-career faculty operate in a very different environment—one in which career paths are nonlinear, interdisciplinarity is growing, and institutional structures are in flux.

Effective mentoring involves seeing mentees as emerging colleagues whose insights, aspirations, and lived experiences should shape the relationship. By asking powerful questions—“What is your long-term vision?”, “What energizes you?”, “What obstacles do you foresee?”—mentors cultivate independence and critical thinking. They guide mentees through ambiguity rather than offering a rigid roadmap.

Toward a Culture of Mentorship

Perhaps the book’s most important message for academic leaders is this: mentoring cannot be left entirely to individual goodwill. It must become part of a department’s culture. Chairs and deans can catalyze this shift by:

• including mentoring on meeting agendas and in faculty retreats;

• creating peer mentoring circles;

• providing training or workshops;

• recognizing mentoring excellence in evaluations; and

• reducing the invisible labor burden by acknowledging the time mentoring takes.

Without institutional reinforcement, mentoring becomes fragmented, inequitable, and overly dependent on personal disposition.

The Road Ahead

For universities facing uncertain futures, mentoring acts as a powerful stabilizing force. It boosts faculty retention, improves student success, and strengthens bonds with the institutional mission. By treating mentoring as a teachable skill and investing in supportive structures, academic leaders can help faculty and students thrive—even during difficult times.

Wisdom’s work offers a timely reminder: mentoring is not extra. It is essential. And when done well, it is transformative.