Great Mentors: Featuring Joseph Cropsey, David Easton, and Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph

Extract

The Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession wants to encourage more members of the APSA to participate in the mentoring program. Mentoring is not just for junior scholars; mentoring goes on one's entire professional career. Senior scholars can help in immeasurable ways as a mentee moves through different stages in the profession, becoming a senior scholar, moving through the administrative ranks—department chair, dean, even president of the university of college—or pursues a career outside academia. Mentoring can be part of a formal program and narrowly focused on how to get published, do research, and improve teaching, but it also can be ad hoc, informal, and can include how one assumes a greater role in professional societies or politics in general. It also addresses integration of life choices, touching on the issues that are important to us as people as well as scholars, and how our roles as human beings relate to our identities as scholars and teachers. So the concept of mentoring is broad.