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Good mentors recognize that fostering research integrity and modeling the responsible conduct of research in all their mentoring activities is essential to guiding protégés in what is expected for the ethical practice of research. This chapter describes various roles of the mentor and mentee, and drawing on the literature about research mentoring, presents strategies and practices that appear to enhance the mentoring relationship. Information about cross-race and cross-gender mentoring is presented. Guidelines for selecting a mentor, as well as a tool for mentors and protégés to assess how effectively they are carrying out their roles are also included.

This chapter contextualizes the 1943 paper by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts on the logic of neural activity through McCulloch’s emerging institutional roles at the University of Illinois at Chicago—both in psychiatry research and as an egalitarian mentor. His performance of this identity at a crucial stage in his career facilitated his turn to the more clinical aspects of brain organization as well as his model-building practices, which converged in his rhetoric of providing a foundational basis for the ever-expanding discipline of psychiatry. The chapter discusses the role of the Rockefeller Foundation and of Nicolas Rashevsky’s group in mathematical biophysics at the University of Chicago as key institutional contexts for McCulloch’s work with Pitts. Rather than simply a precursor to later work in artificial intelligence, their work signified a burgeoning practice of applying mathematics and logic to problems in the biomedical sciences, as well as continued fluidity between science, medicine, and philosophy.

Chapter four explores how educators might help cultivate the capacity for authentic patient care among doctors-in-training, including a comportment of humility, openness, and gratitude for patients. The argument is made that the curative ethos of medicine and its preoccupation with calculative thinking will persist until educators can cultivate within clinicians and clinicians-in-training the capacity to face their vulnerability and the reality of existential anxiety. It is through a pedagogy that values and fosters vulnerability and reflexivity that this capacity can be cultivated. Although recent trends in the professionalism movement, including that of “professional identity formation,” have made progress toward these ends, these movements actually may serve to reinforce calculative thinking, due to their focus on outcomes and assessment. This chapter looks critically at such trends in medical education and contends that ideas concerning professionalism can be enriched and expanded through an understanding of virtue ethics and the Aristotelian concept of phronesis, which emphasize personal development, experiential and habitual learning, and quality mentorship.

While certainly a mystery, as Palmer suggests, a teachers mission, as well as reward, is educating, drawing out from students what lies dormant while proposing the new, the exhilarating, the as-yet undiscovered. Professors, especially those new to academe, frequently find themselves in the classroom with little preparation, guidance, or direction about how to convey the knowledge and skill set of the profession. The prevailing assumption is that advanced knowledge of subject matter itself is sufficient preparation to teach the subject. The unofficial credential for teaching is completion of a research doctorate in a particular discipline. This narrow position is reinforced by the belief that students will learn from a one-way transmission of information. Many of us have learned to teach the hard way, by the seat of our pants, by circumstance, or by necessity. We often teach unaware of how we teach, both at the surface level of recognizing and identifying what we do in the classroom, and at the philosophical level of considering why we do what we do. Theoretical frameworks and findings from research studies provide only limited assistance in mastering the art and craft of teaching. Between the ideas that research provides and the kinds of direction and decisions you, the teacher, must make, there is a gulf. Teachers, both new and experienced, seek practical yet innovative suggestions for creatively working with students. They need help with difficult questions. How do I divide my focus between establishing a relationship, developing a learning contract, and plunging into content? How can I enhance the learning process without actually getting in the way? How do I best connect with students? How can I make learning active? In what ways can I personalize the teaching/learning environment? How do I adapt the method of teaching to students differing learning styles? How do I keep content fresh for them and for me? How do I create a climate that is calming while challenging? How do I build a secure place to invite learning and change? Themes in this book resemble those in my other books that concentrate on clinical practice. They are heartfelt and basic.

The critical role of the teacher is laying the paradigmatic groundwork for students learning to be professional. Teachers manifest in their comportment the intellectual, affective, and ethical bases of professional expertise. Their very conduct, enhanced by knowledge, embodies the essential message about how to be a helper. Three interwoven processes modeling, mentoring, and mirroring form the basis for professional education. They are converging and commingling processes, not independent elements in learning, as described here for intelligibilitys sake; they are multidirectional in influence and spiral back on each other, comprising a wholesome and fulfilling professional educational venture. Each individual mode is important in and of itself, but their interrelationship is the compelling element. Modeling is a complex process involving observation, imitation, and identification by students of the teacher. It occurs whether or not you intend it or not. Many of the same skills and conditions that promote client growth promote student growth. Strive to create an ambiance that engages students. Seek to engross them at a level that allows them to take the concepts they learn, as well as the examples you provide, whether tacitly or explicitly, from seeing you practice with them in class, and transfer them to their contact with clients. The words you utter, the actions you take, the manner in which you conduct the class are carefully observed and considered by students. They attend to your preparation, enthusiasm, and relatedness as lived lessons about how to deliver these same attributes and functions with clients. They observe your unspoken feedback how your tone and facial expression reveal whether you are attuned and on the right track. In your interaction with students, whether consciously or not, you continually display your own competence in your discipline. Students observe how you practice what you preach in your dealings with them, with colleagues, with syllabus material, nascent ideas, and theories. They inevitably appraise your ability to facilitate communication, manage dilemmas, encourage mutuality, and foster cooperation in working associations with others. They assess your patience, availability, and skill.

While I thought about this conference, my mind drifted back to fall 1956, when I became academic dean at one of the world's smallest higher learning institutions, a tiny college of arts and sciences in southern California. During my first month on the job, the faculty curriculum committee met to review the college's requirements for graduation. In an act of unrestrained innocence, I asked why we had a "distribution requirement" for all students. A senior professor replied, "We borrowed it from Pomona College" (our prestigious neighbor down the road). I then asked where Pomona got it and was told, "From Harvard"—which gave me a basic lesson about higher education policymaking that's stood me in good stead for almost forty years. Liberal education is one of the most enduring and widely shared visions in American higher learning. Almost everyone agrees that beyond acquiring competence in a special field, undergraduates must be broadly informed, discover relationships across the disciplines, form values, and advance the common good. It's also true, however, that this inspired vision of liberal learning, which is powerfully reaffirmed in almost all college mission statements, is under siege on many fronts. The decline in the quality of the nation's schools surely has weakened liberal education, as has the growing emphasis on careerism and credentials. Also, the cultural fragmentation in America today makes it especially difficult for academics to bring to undergraduate education a sense of coherence and shared purpose. In 1920 Archibald MacLeish diagnosed the problem this way: 'There can be no educational postulates so long as there are no generally accepted postulates of life itself." Beyond all of these impediments, it is my own impression that the most serious challenge to liberal education on most campuses is the system of faculty rewards. And I remain convinced that liberal learning will be renewed only as faculty members who teach undergraduates and spend time with incoming students are rewarded for such efforts. But before considering how this ambitious goal might be accomplished, I would like to take a backward glance and reflect on how priorities of the professoriate have changed through the years.