1) Men behaving poorly in relation to women, in the context of power imbalances (but also without the power imbalance) is widespread to the extent that many women (meaning, guys, many of the women you personally know) are subjected to some kind of bad behavior or another on a regular basis, ranging from random out of the blue unwanted sexual attention to being placed in a position of needing to appease some man’s interests in order to be taken seriously or given the same access to opportunities as a man might get without socio-sexual extortion, and of course, worse. I am constantly astonished at the degree to which men who claim to be well informed about sexism and who claim, even, to be feminists are incredulous when confronted with personal stories such as “I get hit on by strangers every single day on the bus” or “I’ve gotten harassed in a professional context way more times than I can count … this month” etc. Such statements are too often assumed to be exaggerations. Also, harassment and unwanted sexual attention of this sort is often assumed by those who don’t experience it to be not that big of a deal. The truth is, how big of a deal it is for a person is a matter of that person’s experience, and I would guess, plus some two-digit number of percent to account for the fact that we humans are good at putting away a certain amount of bad experience for our psyches to use later against us. Indeed, many men view “unwanted sexual attention” as a good thing, something they themselves would like more of. That is called being clueless.

OK, this set of closely related facts did not emerge from the Bora thing, it was already there, but we are reminded to remind ourselves and each other of this. And, also not discovered over the last weekend but in need of restating and emphasis:

2) Women who are subject to sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior (of a wide range) … i.e., women … probably usually feel uncomfortable talking about these things, or for that matter, doing something about their own experiences. We should assume that a contributing factor in this discomfort is the widespread and incorrect writing off of the experience as either rare or not so bad (see number one above). So, when a woman does come forward with a well described very credible (and especially, verified by the other person in the deal, the harasser) the automatic reaction should be to support that woman in whatever way we can, minimally by accepting the person’s account of their own reaction, pain, or trouble. What it means to that person is what the thing was (plus the above cited mark-up, I assume), not what you or I or anyone else thinks it means.

But what was Laura’s special insight that I wanted to mention? It has to do with mentoring. Mentoring is considered very important in most professions, and in academia. The idea is that a young student, upper division college or graduate school, or a post doc who is on a particular career track, gets a mentor, an established professional who can help guide that person through the process of professional development, around the land mines, towards key objectives, etc. etc. This sounds like a good thing, and in fact, it is a good thing when it works. More notably, I think, in our current system it is demonstrably a bad thing when mentoring does not occur at all or is done poorly. Students and early stage professionals who, in our current system, either don’t really end up with a mentor, or who are mentored by a bad mentor, can suffer and do poorly.

The fact that the absence of mentoring or poor mentoring has negative consequences naturally and perhaps reasonably leads us to conclude that mentoring is good and there should be more of it, and mentors should be trained better to do a better job. And that is not entirely wrong.

But, maybe we should be looking at this very differently. Laura Helmuth says:

We glibly advise people starting out in business to find a mentor, to identify a successful, established, generous person in your field and somehow get her to help you become her.

This is terrible advice. It perpetuates old-boy networks, wastes time that early career people could spend actually doing their work, and tells them they are only as good as their contacts and charm. Young people, don’t look for a mentor. Listen to and learn from people who have more experience, but don’t hitch your wagon to their star. Just do your job well.

Now, you established people, listen up. You will occasionally meet younger people who go out of their way to speak with you at professional events, ask you interesting and sometimes personal questions, and hang on your every word. Those are not puppy-dog, crushed-out eyes staring up at you. These are eyes hungry for a professional break. These people are not trying to sleep with you. They are trying to get hired by you.

Interesting.

I’ve always taken mentoring very seriously, but Laura indirectly points out that mentoring and its value is received knowledge not sufficiently examined with a critical eye. I’ve paid attention to and analyzed the mentoring I received (or didn’t) and I think my own experience actually follows Larua’s model pretty well. Irv DeVore was my longest-term mentor, and he was a great colleague, a close friend, and helped me a lot, and he was a good mentor, but when it came to my research, mostly hands off. Rather, he helped me get grants. Informally, Nancy DeVore (Irv’s wife) was my writing mentor, and she is the second toughest and best editor I’ve ever worked with. I’m not sure if she ever actually slapped me but I sure felt like it a few times. DeVore followed the Helmuth Model in that he handed me off to others who were more expert in the areas of research and methods that I needed, and actually, he didn’t hand me off, I went and found them. As a result of this, my PhD thesis was signed by Ofer Bar-Yosef, Israeli archaeologist, Irv DeVore, primatologist, Mark Pagel, statistician and evolutionary theorist, and John Yellen, ethnoarchaeologist and head of Anthropolgoy at NSF. Pretty nice range of dudes (and yes, all dudes, all good ol’ boys but mostly the good kind, I’m sure). Of these people I regard DeVore, Bar-Yosef and Pagel as having been mentors. John was a colleague and outside reader (we did not live in the same city or even state). After graduate school, no other individuals who could ever be called a mentor for me ever did anything along these lines that was of any use, especially at the junior faculty level, aside from continued support from Irv, of course.

I think and hope (or convince myself it is true!) that I’ve been been a pretty good mentor for some of my students. But what follows Larua’s model is the degree to which my mentoring relationship with each student has been completely different from every other student. There have been students with whom I’ve worked intensively on both writing and research, spending hours going over stuff and working on things together. With other students, my role has been almost entirely to represent the student at faculty meetings and write recommendations, but otherwise just get an update now and then from the student (so I could do those two things well). In the latter case, the mentee was typically being advised on research by one or more other individuals more closely involved in the particular work being done, generally at research facilities elsewhere (on campus or beyond) as needed. I’ve taken the job of mentoring seriously, and been fairly thoughtful about it, and consciously tried to find the best solution for each student. But, and this proves Laura’s point, there has been absolutely no relationship as far as I can tell between the amount of direct involvement I’ve had with a particular student, vs the student assembling a longer list of colleagues to help in research and career development, and those student’s success or happiness. In other words, a solid and intense one-on-one mentoring relationship did not produce the best results. There was no clear difference between one-on-one mentoring and students finding a collection of colleagues to work with (my advice being sometimes but often not useful in doing that).

The best advice I’ve probably given students, and I’ve given this to all my students since I started any kind of advisory role as a freshly minted PhD, is this: Advice (including this advice I’m giving you now) is not necessarily worth anything. Advice is a reaction someone else in the world has to something you did, something you showed them, or something they observed. Understand their advice in that context, and use it, modify it, or ignore it as you see fit. I think this advice might correspond to what Laura is saying. Develop relationships with a range of colleagues (many of whom will be your senior when you are starting out) and do what makes sense. For the potential mentor, take your role in doing the same thing; help your students develop multiple contacts and relationships with both individuals and other entities (labs, institutions, etc.) as needed.

Obviously Laura’s advice is meant to help mainly young women to avoid finding themselves in power differential fueled bad mentee positions. But this approach works more broadly than that. The smaller number of students with whom I worked closest are those with whom I’m still in most regular contact and in some cases whom I consider friends, or for whom I’m still playing a similar role. Indeed, I’m writing five letters of recommendation for jobs or grants over the next two weeks and they are all for students with whom I worked closest. Meanwhile I know some of my other students are moving from post-doc to junior faculty, or beyond, or getting grants, mainly using recommendations from those specific experts they worked with while working on their degrees, because those are the people in the subfields and the most appropriate recommenders.

And bringing it back to the first two points made above, before we started talking about mentoring, as Laura says, “recognize that you have a tremendous responsibility to take your mentees seriously. … you have a lot of power in comparison, even if you have just a few years more experience or feel like a cog yourself. Be respectful, be appropriate, be professional. Above all else, do not be a creep.”

In case you missed it here’s the link to that post.

I normally ignore much of this blogospheric discussion because I find it disturbing and of little relevance to me or anyone I know. Presumably because NIH funded research is so vast, most of the discussion seems to be about how to deal with that environment. Over the last year or so I’ve actually worked a bit with mainly NIH and Medical Industry funded labs in a couple of different capacities, and my wife works in a highly specialized medical research lab now, so I know enough to understand that when we talk about “young investigators” or the demographics of science training and professionalization (and retirement and so on) that the majority of this drama is being carried out in a world that is different from the one I’m interested in or know much about. Also, I find certain aspects of that world rather disturbing. For instance, the insistence that it is ethical to have one’s name on a paper using data collected with an expensive machine that you got the funding for, where you had nothing else to do with that paper, is disturbing, offensive, and … well, if it were not so demented it would make me laugh. That kind of thinking certainly kicks the moral stilts out from anyone who practices this form of intellectual theft. But I digress.

My first graduate adviser, Glynn Isaac, was quite experienced and began his relationship with a brand new crop of graduate students at Harvard with the idea of a very fresh start. He was coming to Harvard from Berkeley, and most of us were starting out as new grad students, so it was fresh for all of us, and one had the sense that Glynn wanted to do things in a way improved over his prior experience. (Two student came with Glynn from Berkeley, so their relationship was a bit different.) Glynn knew that it would be difficult to maintain regular and systematic contact with his students, so he set up a system. Every Wednesday, without fail, each of us was to meet with him no matter what. There was a sign-up sheet on the door. In the event of a scheduling issue for that Wednesday, there were some other times we could use to do a makeup meeting.

So we started out this process at the beginning of the semester. I remember my first meeting with him on week 2 of graduate school. I also remember my last meeting with him. On week 2 of graduate school. Every other time there was a note on the door: “Sorry, meetings canceled” or words to that effect. Every. Other. Time.

This does not mean that I did not have a lot of interactions with Glynn. I actually did have a fair amount of interaction. I was his “special assistant” (like a teaching assistant sort of) for his Intro Archaeology class. John Shea and I had set up a nice flint knapping arena in my old archaeology lab, and Glynn worked there quite a bit with his flint knapping class and with various visiting scholars. Glynn and his wife Barbara Isaac had regular parties at their house, and that always involved sitting around with Glynn smoking something (he would smoke a cigar, some of us cigarettes) by the fireplace and chatting. I took a class from him. Some of our longest interactions were out on the North or South Shore making hand axes for hours at a time.

There was one such time I remember very well. There were about eight of us down below high tide line at Marblehead, Mass. Marblehead is a head of land (that’s a coastal/nautical term) made of rhyolite, which is a workable stone for making stone tools. We were harvesting the rhyolite to use in the lab, but also, we were making a lot of stone tools on the spot. If you are at a source, you might as well spend several hours working the rock. This gives you a much better idea of what to bother taking home, and you can waste a lot of material playing around with it but not pay the usual transport costs.

I remember two things especially well that day. First, as we were pounding and pounding and making stuff, the ocean was glass calm, which is very rare for the Atlantic. And the air was a bit cool for that time of year, and there was almost no breeze. Suddenly, I noticed little tiny wisps of fog out over the water, distributed sort of randomly (but actually rather more uniformly than randomly), each about three feet above the water, almost invisible. I said to Glynn and one of the students, “Watch the water. Something you don’t see every day is about to happen.” They watched.

Suddenly, the wisps, all of them at the same time, grew. They became visibly continuous with the surface of the sea, and grew in height, and breath, and then there were no more wisps … just continuous fog, five feet think, covering the ocean from view. In a few moments a modest breeze came up and the fog lifted off the sea, then was disrupted and dispersed. A clear crisp day by the ocean was thus converted to a misty foggy day by the ocean. (What we experienced usually happens at night and is much less visible.)

After the fog found its place, the second thing happened. There we were at the base of this low cliff over the sea, down in the low tide zone making dozens and dozens of stone tools. More experienced flint knappers were instructing the novices, and everyone was exchanging ideas and showing each other their products.

Glynn was at the center of all of it, reveling in the experience of actualistic archaeology, as it was called … doing the paleolithic in the present. Glynn was a small man, bald on top with his pattern baldness ring of hair diving into a full beard. His facial features were rugged yet slight, and he was slim yet tough in his smallness. In other words, for Glynn to dress up for Halloween as an elf, well, he could probably just put on an elf hat OR curly shoes and that would be all he would need. (Indeed, he and his twin brother were once arrested in Austria on suspicion of being elves.)

Glynn also had the habit of putting his hand on top of his head as he spoke. So did Louis Leakey. So there are all these photographs of Louis Leakey and Glynn Isaac talking to each other, four or five photos in a row from one bull session, with the two of them alternating who’s got the hand on the head, elbow raised to the side, chattering away about some archaeological issue.

And Glynn was very quick witted, had a thick colono-British accent, and a bit of a gravelly voice.

So it was funny when the couple … the man and woman of 32 years of age or so, yuppies in the days when yuppies ran the world (or thought they did) out for their mid day stroll along the shore, stopped at the top of the cliff and watched us for a while. Tap tap tap tap clunk, scrape tap tap tap ouch tap clunk, and so on, as we detached flakes, shaped blobs of stone into spear heads, and hurt ourselves now and then.

And the young man ventured to say, “Excuse me, but I need to ask … What are you people doing down there?”

Glyn half turned to the man. The hand went to the head. And in his elfin gravelly voice,

“We’re survivalists!!!”

Half turn back to the rocks, pick up a new hammer stone, and we continued…

…. Tap tap tap tap clunk, scrape tap tap tap ouch tap clunk, and so on…

The yuppies wandered off. Amazed, I’m sure.

That is how it was for half a summer, a Fall semester, and a Spring semester. Then, at the end of the Spring semester, I went to the field, and near the year’s end received the telegram, three months after it had been sent. Glynn had died on an air strip in China. By the time I got the telegram, the autopsy was done, the ceremonies were over, the gathering of arcahaeologists and africanists from around the world to honor him posthumously had happened, and the decision had already been more or less made to bring Ofer Bar Yosef in as resident paleolithic archaeologist in the Peabody Museum. When I got home another couple of months later the crying was done except on the occasional quiet lonely night in the Stone Age Lab.

I still have one of those notes, scrawled in his big script on a half sheet of lined yellow paper.

“Greg – Can’t make this week’s meeting. Please reschedule! … GLlI”