Mentoring gone wrong: What is happening to mentorship in academia?

Academia: the name traces back to Plato’s school of philosophy, founded in 385 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and skill, north of Athens, Greece. The academia was located outside Athens’ walls because of its sacred value, and because it was independent from politics. In this idealized place mentors and mentees used to meet and discuss important philosophical issues. Plato, and later Aristotle, are considered the founding fathers of mentorship and academia. A famous painting by Raphael “The School of Athens” perhaps is the most powerful and beautiful representation of academia and mentorship (Figure 1). The School of Athens represents all the greatest mathematicians, philosophers and scientists from classical antiquity gathered together sharing their ideas and learning from each other. These figures all lived at different times, but here they were all under one roof.

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Figure 1.

School of Athens painted by Raphael between 1509 and 1511. (Raphael Rooms – Vatican City)

Mentoring is about sharing experiences, hardships, and knowledge to help others to grow, advance and carry on a legacy. Great artists and scientific personalities of the past had great mentors in their lives. Michelangelo Buonarroti, for example, was apprenticed at the age of 13 to Domenico Ghirlandaio, the most fashionable painter in Florence. At the age of 15, Leonardo da Vinci became the apprentice of the painter Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence, where his skills as an artist developed, flourished and even intimidated his mentor. Hayden was a mentor to Mozart, who credited him with the teaching of string quartets. Giuseppe Levi, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Turin, a pioneer of in vitro studies on cultured cells, was an influential and magnetic mentor; he still has the peculiar distinction of counting three Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine among his students: Salvador Luria, Renato Dulbecco and Rita-Levi Montalcini. For all of them, the internship in Levi's laboratory provided an excellent initial stimulus (Bentivoglio et al., 2006).

Mentors are exceptional leaders and often are the one who stand up for their mentees and support them when they are experiencing the most challenging moments. They also encourage and push their mentees to take on bigger challenges. True mentors show a genuine interest in and concern for others. Mentoring future researchers is an essential value in biomedical research, and it is something that should always be present in training programs. However, academic institutions do not enforce or control an active mentorship program and, very often, receiving good mentorship is something left to chance: some students and trainees are lucky enough to have tremendous mentors, while others never experience the true value of mentorship. Academia often glorifies and rewards overwork, long hours, publications, and success in getting grants; the power balance between early-career researchers and their supervisors is problematic with a constant increase in dissatisfaction for the type of mentorship received, and a toxic environment that harms too many PhD students and postdocs (Timbs, 2019). Too many supervisors focus their time and attention on helping their mentees become more like them rather than shaping the mentees’ potential. Additionally, many mentors see their mentees as a tool to achieve a specific goal; no attention is given to the mentoring process. As a result, the mentees become dependent upon their mentor––this creates an imbalanced mentorship process and the damage inflicted could last a lifetime.

So where is the problem? What is happening to mentorship? Why are an increasing number of academics good scientists but not good mentors? Is the concept of mentorship gradually disappearing from academia? Why is mentoring students often so low on the faculty agenda?

Seniority and success as a scientist do not necessarily mean being a good mentor. In fact, many excellent scientists are not mentors at all. Being a mentor requires strenuous work, patience and a lot of dedication. Mentors have a tremendous responsibility on their shoulders, because they are shaping the leaders of tomorrow’s research and academia. Mentorship is a powerful tool: as a mentor it is never about you––it is always about your mentee. Mentoring is not only teaching technical skills or providing instruction on how to write a manuscript––mentoring is helping those that entrust you with their concerns, problems, insecurities and future scientific career. This is why a more active academic monitoring program on mentorship should be established for students and early-career researchers. Unfortunately, many mentees have to learn the hard way and failure in good mentoring programs may result in negative effects that can affect the mentee’s ability to advance together with a general status of career dissatisfaction, discontent, frustration and distress.

Mentorship is not an esoteric issue; many scientists want to become a mentor for the wrong reasons, and very often the mentor’s intentions before the relationship with the mentee starts are misleading and never properly discussed. Graduate committees and early-career committees (when present) are often a superficial assembly of senior academics placed together based on administrative departmental mechanisms aimed to ensure the completion of the training program and to fulfill a mere administrative duty. In the majority of cases the mentee’s personality, vision and career plans are hardly discussed and/or taken into consideration and students and early-career researchers do not feel they are receiving enough support. Supervisors are never evaluated based on their performance as mentors, but more likely based on their managerial abilities. Overall, postgraduate committees are hardly engaging in a mentorship relationship that, if properly established, could lead to positive outcomes. Many studies have demonstrated that mentorship is associated with increased academic performance, professional development, positive self-image, psychological well-being and emotional adjustment (Crisp & Cruz, 2009; Eby et al., 2008).

Professors spend very little of their time working one-on-one with students––much less than the time they spend on meetings, preparing for class or on research. For many faculty members, time for mentoring falls through the cracks, as other tasks are considered more urgent. Many faculty members recognize that without mentors they would not be where they are today. Yet the same faculty members often forget to ‘pay-it-forward’ and return the favor to the next generation of scientists they are currently training. A mentor who had a profound impact on my academic and personal growth used to say: “Mentorship is a pay-it-forward, if you receive it, and you don't give it back, you are doing something terribly wrong. When you mentor someone you are creating a legacy, you will live in the mentee forever, your teachings, your science and a part of you will become immortal” (Dr. Elspeth Gold, 1963–2015).

Being a good mentor is perhaps an innate quality and it comes naturally to many scientists for a series of reasons. For example, being trained as a mentor during the early-career phase can translate to excellent mentorship provided in the later career steps. Many good mentors learned from poor or absent mentoring they received in the past and they decided to improve their mentorship style to avoid other researchers from experiencing the same bad experience they once received. The main issue is that scientists, and faculty are not generally trained to be mentors. A change in this direction is of paramount importance. Limiting the supervision activity to the minimum required can be dangerous for academia and research in general. Many excellent students or trainees are victims of bad mentorship. Those researchers often leave academia immediately after graduation or after a postdoctoral training period. The phenomenon is on the rise, and lack of mentorship is not the only factor to blame but it certainly plays a very central role in the process. Senior faculty should always be available to improve their mentorship style and adjust this style to produce positive outcomes. Mentorship skills can be taught and can be learned. Faculty with a proven history of being good mentors should oversee and evaluate young academics, and perhaps faculties should incorporate the “mentoring factor” in hiring decisions together with scientific performance, publications and other factors currently used in the decision process. Professors and mentors are not the same thing. There is an implicit assumption among university leaders that people with PhDs or other advanced degrees intuitively know how to mentor. This misconception is passed on to students who often misinterpret the role of a mentor with that of an adviser––someone who helps undergraduate students choose the right courses to graduate or oversees doctoral projects to completion. True mentors do much more, from serving as role models to helping incubate research projects to bringing mentees into a network of colleagues. A large study showed that only a quarter of college graduates report having had any professor who cared about them, and fewer report having had a mentor (Ray & Kafka, 2014). Mentorship was born in academia and this is where it belongs. It is time to restore, enforce and actively monitor mentoring programs in academic institutions. Very often the advice to students is “Pick the mentor and then the project.” This is perhaps very wise advice as a good mentor can have a deep impact on someone’s else career and not only that. At the same time a bad mentor can easily cause a good student to flee and/or lose all motivation. Not everyone can be a good mentor, but improvements in this area are needed and not enough is currently done to support students and early-career researchers. The current lack of mentorship is dangerous and can create a deleterious effect on those scientists who are supposed to become tomorrow’s mentors. It is under the eyes of every professor or faculty member that the quality of mentorship has declined dramatically over the past three decades in academia. Successful mentorship is vital to career success and satisfaction for both mentors and mentees. Yet challenges continue to inhibit early-career researchers from receiving effective mentorship (Straus et al., 2013). Given the importance of mentorship on faculty members’ careers, academic institutions must address the association between a failed mentoring relationship and a faculty member’s career success, assess different approaches to mediating failed mentoring relationships, and evaluate strategies for effective mentorship throughout a faculty member’s career. Ignoring these issues represents a serious risk to scientific research and academic teaching.

In memory of Dr. Elspeth Gold, lecturer, scientist, mentor and friend.