Mentors, advisers, and others

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines mentor as an experienced and trusted adviser or guide. In Homer's Odyssey, Mentor was tutor to the youthful Telemachus, son of Odysseus. Having been very effectively mentored as described in my previous post, I became mentor to occasional medical students in a series of relationships. The longest-lasting of these dates back 40 years and it has evolved into a collegial friendship. I'll consider the mentor's perspective later, but first there is more to say about my perspective as a receptor.

The relationship to a mentor is usually long-lasting and can evolve into a two-way mutually beneficial friendship with emotional bonding and social, cultural interactions. In addition to a handful of mentors, I've had wagon-loads of advisers, some ephemeral, some for long periods, occasionally years. I like to think that I am always receptive when I ask for advice, and often even when the advice is unsolicited. Whence comes this advice? Just about anywhere: colleagues, peers, those higher up the food chain than  I, and those who are lower. Looking back over a long lifetime I can't recall many occasions when the advice or suggestions were inappropriate, wrong, or unwise; and only one or two that were malicious or ill-intentioned. That came from a pair of militant feminists when I was a newly appointed department head. It never occurred to me that colleagues in whom I had placed my trust would deliberately set out to betray my trust, but in retrospect I saw that it had been a useful experience because it made me aware that even in the ivory tower of academia there are people motivated by malice rather than good will towards their colleagues. Over the course of half a century in academia I've observed malicious motives at work no more than a small handful of times, and my own career has been almost entirely free of such unsavoury influences. On the other, the good side of the ledger, there must have been hundreds of times when good and wise advice has helped to steer me towards right decisions and desirable outcomes. A good example appears in the Acknowledgements in the Front Matter of the second edition of my book, Public Health and Human Ecology. The names listed there are those of people whom I was able to identify, whose advice, suggestions, or responses to specific requests, helped made that a better book than it would otherwise have been. Similar lists of names appear in the Front Matter of other books that carry my name on the title page.  I assembled a list of names of people and organizations to thank when I prepared annual reports of departmental activities for the Dean of the medical school, during the years that I was head of the department, but someone deleted this paragraph when the reports were printed - I suppose in the interests of uniformity because other department heads hadn't provided comparable data.  What these data show is the fact that the quest for excellence is a collegial, collaborative activity, in which team work of a very high order is a sine qua non.