Mentoring

Mentoring at Tougaloo College, 1970-2002

In antiquity, liberal arts (artes liberals) were essential for citizenship. A Greek citizen was obligated to master rhetoric, the art of persuasion and public speaking; to have skill in forensic science or the art of defense in court and in making juridical decisions; to render service military and otherwise. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the trivium) were valued. These were amplified in medieval Europe to include the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy/astrology). In later iterations, logic was subordinated to accommodate history and moral philosophy (ethics), and studia humanitatis ascended, becoming the foundation for what in America was deemed a liberal arts education when Tougaloo College was founded in 1869. For one hundred and fifty years, our alma mater has been the site where the future meets history, the unending narrative of social, cultural, and political events.  During that time, good teaching, intense learning, and dedicated mentoring have made Tougaloo College a unique oasis in the wastelands  of the United States of America, a national treasure in the chronicles of American higher education.

These  brief remarks are explanatory footnotes for ideas about the centrality of mentoring in the pedagogy of the oppressed . In the bloodless warfare entanglement requires, teaching and advising are practices watered with morality, concepts of justice, and imagination; they are actions that bespeak citizenship and membership in global societies. For over forty years, the art and joy of teaching and the ethical onus of advising endowed my life with meaning. Serving as a mentor in the UNCF/Mellon Program  (1990-2020 )  was  the apex.  The imperatives of David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World and the wisdom I  obtained from Plato’s Republic, Machiavelli’s The Prince, DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions  influenced my sometimes tense, often rich, and always rewarding engagements with students at Tougaloo College between 1970 and 2002.

 My discipline is English, the study of language and literature with special interest in literary theory and criticism and African American literature. From David Walker I learned how the so-called wretched of the earth were obligated to destroy the material and psychological restraints imposed on their freedom by those who violated their minds and bodies. Plato taught me the difference between a statesman and a politician and the diverse outcomes of morality in social space. From Machiavelli I learned the value of being skeptical.  DuBois instructed me how best to use the strength and resilience of my soul so as not to be crushed by the uncertainties of secular power and the unfolding of histories. From Kuhn I learned the importance of empirical evidence, patience, and exactness in changing from one paradigm of cognition to another. But most of all, I benefited from timeless lessons about mentoring during my undergraduate years (1960-1964) at Tougaloo from Naomi J. Townsend, George A. Owens, A. A. Branch, St. Elmo Brady, and  Ernst Borinski; from Blyden Jackson and Darwin Turner and other noteworthy figures from the College Language Association; from Ralph Cohen and E. D. Hirsch during my graduate school education at the University of Virginia.

 I delighted in teaching and transmitting what I absorbed from my own mentors and, by extension, from my ancestors; life drove me to see my teaching and mentoring as a vocation not a job. My vocation would have been trivial, sordid, and  incomplete had I not helped my mentees (and all of my  students )  to identify their options so they would freely assume responsibility of their choices. Mentoring at Tougaloo was never an algorithmic; it was trial and error, a special  intervention in the lives of students that went far beyond mere teaching as I tried to do the right thing.  In contrast to contemporary ideas about moving students through some pipeline of preparing for graduate and professional schools and the Academy and other sectors of American life, my mentoring of students was human and not mechanical. I associate pipelines with sewers rather than with profoundly necessary and human communion and transmission.

College teachers of my generation were most likely as invested as I was in a pedagogy which maximized the importance of making connections between our chosen disciplines and those we chose not to pursue. I was subversive with a purpose, determined that my students would at once master specific content and be conversant with what was emphasized in other areas of study and acquisition of knowledge. Walls between disciplines in the humanities, pure and applied sciences, and the human or social sciences are maintained for discursive convenience.  Those who live fully, who embrace a liberal arts education, who are genuine critical thinkers boldly walk through walls to go where they have never been.  The telos of a liberal education at Tougaloo College is to prepare students for enlightened citizenship,  for multiple careers and meaningful lives.

In 2019, we are existentially obligated to contemplate what shapes mentoring at Tougaloo College will assume in a future.  We hear the humorous noise of Jonathan Swift’s “A Full and True Account of the Battel Fought Last Friday, between the Antient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library,” echoes of C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, and the dirges in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Animal Farm ; the warnings of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and Tommy J. Curry's The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood.  Shall citizens and students  who ought to be agents of history in a space where critical thinking is valued become drones of a State where the supreme values are those of capital and relentless, amoral information technologies?  The possibility of such accomplished future shock makes the interrelated questions ---Why Teach? Why Advise? Why Mentor? ---crucial for how we choose now to deal with destiny and retain  control of our lives.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr. '64                      December 26, 2018