The More Things Change. . .

I read with interest the article by Linda Marsa entitled "Mentoring: A Time-Honored Tradition Changes Over Time" (The Scientist, Oct. 28, 1991, page 19). As a faculty member over the past 20 years with a modest number of prot‚g‚s, I recently became interested in a more thorough investigation of this important and elusive process. I enlisted the services of a colleague, Don Petersen, and in our search through the literature we read many of the same key phrases found in the article, s

Written byJohn Lewis

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This is a corollary to what we believe is the fundamental proposition underlying mentorship. It is found in Plato's Theaetetus, in which Socrates, whose mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife, uses this profession to expound on his role as a mentor:

"My art of midwifery is in general like theirs, except my patients are men and not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth. And the highest point of my art is the power to prove whether the offspring of a young man's thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth . . . and the many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within. But the delivery is heaven's work and mine."

Aside from the gender bias, we believe this to be the fundamental tenet underlying mentorship. And even though ...

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