Bearing and Sharing the Burdens of Mentoring in the COVID-19 Pandemic (TAPA)

PTF alum Deborah Beck authored this invited paper as part of a group of six articles on "rupture and repair" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was published in Transactions of the American Philological Association, the journal of the professional organization for American Classicists. In the article, she explores the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic's social isolation and "New Normal" on faculty peer mentorship and how the landscape of academic mentorship has changed since the onset of the pandemic. 

Read the complete paper here, or view the first paragraph below. 

Academic mentoring is one of the many forms of inequity that were laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. The plight of junior and contingent faculty is vividly presented in the other paragraphoi in this issue. The difficulties faced by members of the ever-increasing academic "precariat" also affect the shrinking proportion of our field that reaches the kind of professional stability that was once the norm in the academy. As fewer and fewer faculty can reasonably be expected to mentor others, more and more people in the academy need more and more mentoring and support. At the same time, not everyone who reaches a high level of privilege in our field feels that their privilege entails greater responsibility toward others, while some who do feel that responsibility were unable to exercise it during the pandemic for a variety of reasons. The result is that the mentoring responsibilities of any one person can become an overwhelming burden, leading to the same burnout experienced by other helping professions during the pandemic (healthcare, therapists, K–12 teachers, and so forth). In all these professions, the vast needs that were exposed or created by the pandemic are largely continuing during the "New Normal" that has followed the social distancing and lockdowns of 2020–22. Ideally, our pandemic experiences will lead to more effective and equitable approaches to mentoring in higher education. As with mentoring itself, small actions can lead to big improvements for both mentors and mentees.

Beck, Deborah. "Bearing and Sharing the Burdens of Mentoring in the COVID-19 Pandemic." TAPA, vol. 153 no. 2, 2023, p. 345-353. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/apa.2023.a913465.