USC Mellon Awards for Excellence in Mentoring, 2005

Martin H. Krieger
School of Policy, Planning, and Development

Mentoring is Being a Good-Enough Mother, and Avoiding "Internalization of the Aggressor."

I mentor in three very different ways. I have put out a regular email newsletter, This Week's Finds in Planning, now about 300 items long, since 1997. (Much of its materials can be found at http://www.usc.edu/schools/sppd/krieger/.) The basic idea is that there is no reason "to walk in front of an oncoming truck." More deeply, just because "it was good enough for me" does not mean "it is good enough for my students." If I have suffered as a student or junior faculty member, why should they suffer? As the child psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg describes it, mothers who say "if it was good enough for me, it is good enough for my kid," are "internalizing the aggressor," rather than saying, "I would not want my child to suffer as I did." The latter is the liberating move, and I try to practice it assiduously. My advice takes from my own and others' mistakes, and counsels how to avoid them. By the way, it is quite hard to convince some people not to walk in front of oncoming trucks.

My other way of mentoring is to listen to students, and respond to their real needs. I am not very gentle, but I am direct and helpful. It may involve telling them unpleasant truths, but again they are less likely to walk in front of other oncoming trucks. If they need to see the psychiatrist, stop wearing gang clothes, or consider not going to graduate school, I tell them what I think. If there are strong points I am enthusiastic about them, largely because I am enthusiastic by nature. If students tell me about their papers or dissertations or other research projects I am good at seeing how it all might hold together, what to do next, and how to make what they are doing really interesting. It does not seem to matter what the topic is, at least in the humanities and the social sciences. (I am trained as a physicist, so go figure.)

My third way of mentoring is to have projects for which students can take the ball and run with it. I curate a gallery in our School, and over the years I have put on shows of students' photographic documentation projects. I give advice, I sketch out how to go about doing the work, but in the end it is the student who does the work. As curator I may select and organize, but what seems to work is that it is their project, their interest. My contribution is to recruit them or to respond to their ideas, and to be a coach. Some of my former students call me "Coach." I have read a bit about coaching, and from I can see the good coach knows what to say at the right moment to improve performance, and also is demanding without being a perfectionist. If I am that sort of coach, I am grateful.