The Science of Mentorship

Narrator (00:10):
Welcome to the Science of Mentorship. People who hold power in academic institutions often choose not to acknowledge the power they hold over their students, believing that students appreciate that approach. This however can cause more harm than good. Biological anthropologist. Dr. Kate Clancy observed this in her time as a faculty member at the University of Illinois, because he found that acknowledging the power she holds over students and setting expectations on mentorship can create more effective mentoring relationships.
Narrator (00:44):
As an associate professor of anthropology, Dr. Clancy has created programs that strive to equip faculty with necessary mentoring skills. With each step, she works to create a more inclusive space for both students and faculty in higher education. Dr. Kate Clancy's research focuses on intersectional feminist biology. She focuses on topics ranging from gender and racial harassment in science, to the effects of environmental stressors on endometrial and ovarian dynamics. Dr. Clancy has given congressional testimony on sexual misconduct in the sciences, has consulted on two congressional bills on sexual harassment in science, and has co-authored a national academy's report on sexual harassment of women in STEM. Dr. Clancy encountered an obstacle early in her career as a faculty member, an obstacle that made clear to her she would need support to move forward.
Dr. Kate Clancy (01:43):
Basically my third year review did not go great. I mean, third year reviews don't always go great. The way it was pitched to me is this is an opportunity for us to be as harsh with you as possible so that we can best articulate an upward trajectory between the third year review and tenure. And I think I've pointed out perhaps to my department head at the time while I didn't have a mentor and it would be really nice to have one and we didn't have a structured mentoring program of any kind in our department.
Dr. Kate Clancy (02:14):
And so he effectively assigned me one who was the one who basically mentored everybody. And I'm going to say her name because she's a very special person, Dr. Nancy Ableman and Nancy took on everybody. Se's an amazing cultural anthropologist who studies Korea. I'm a biological anthropologist who studies menstrual cycles. We did not have anything scholarly in common, and yet she not only provided emotional support to me at many moments that I needed it, she provided line by line readings of memos of understanding that I wrote after my third year review of the project summary for my NSF that finally got funded on its fifth try.
Dr. Kate Clancy (03:05):
When I was having a problem, I remember at one point with a human subjects issue, she didn't live too far away from me. So she walked over to my house one morning and just sat with me at my kitchen table and just helped me think through some of the problems I was having. And I can't remember a time that anyone had ever taken that kind of time with me even a fraction of it. So not only was it really important to have someone who clearly believed in me, but she was willing at various moments. Not that she liked dropped everything to always help me all the time, but there were a couple of key moments where she put aside whatever was going on with her and was focused on me for the 30 minutes or 45 minutes I needed it. In a way that made me feel really seen, but also gave me incredibly practical support. That was exactly what I needed in that moment.
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Narrator (04:05):
These key moments with Dr. Ableman caused Dr. Clancy to evaluate her own mentoring skills.
Dr. Kate Clancy (04:11):
How much she helped me, how much I admired her as a person, and how much I just loved Nancy and still love nancy, I think is a lot of what directed me towards wanting to continue to think about this and provide this for others and get better at it myself.
Narrator (04:29):
She found a program that shifted how she viewed her identity within science, and also taught her foundational principles to better support others in the STEM ecosystem.
Dr. Kate Clancy (04:39):
Something that was transformative for me as a junior faculty member was that I participated in the Faculty Success Program. That's an external organization and CFDD that does this faculty bootcamp, and they do ones for grads and postdocs now as well. And in the summer of 2014 is when I participated and it changed my life in some really fundamental ways in terms of getting me to take myself more seriously.
Dr. Kate Clancy (05:13):
Stop hamstringing myself, because I didn't believe that I was going to be successful. So I didn't do things that I needed to do to be successful because then if I failed, "Well, it's okay if I didn't put in the effort." That's where the idea of that mentoring map was first introduced to me and where I first started to create one and recognize that there are people I could send unfinished work to. There are people I could get emotional support from, all of that recognition of the constellation of support you need.
Narrator (05:44):
Dr. Clancy felt more assured in her competence as an anthropologist. These newly learned skills and tools became critical in how she supported students. As she progressed through her career however, Dr. Clancy observed some alarming patterns in higher education.
Dr. Kate Clancy (06:08):
One of the things that I've noticed as I've talked to a lot of my colleagues over the years, who are themselves women or non-binary who have non-cis male identities and or non-white identities and or are part of the LGBTQIA Plus community. Something that has been frustrating has been how often I've noticed that folks with those identities are undervalued by the people who hold power in their department. And so, therefore their work is considered less rigorous or there's constant questions about the quality of their work, whether they're ready for promotion, those types of things. On the other hand, while the people in power are saying these people are not valuable, all of the students want to work with them because what they're usually doing is actually the most exciting and cutting edge research in the department. And so they end up with this incredibly giant invisible mentoring burden.
Dr. Kate Clancy (07:14):
I've seen people with like eight independent studies in a semester. I've seen people who have not gotten to admit a student into their program yet because they're so busy advising and co-advising all the other students in the program who want to switch into their research group or their lab. And I think that that's
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something that the folks who are in power in a department, don't always notice and recognize and try to make visible. And so they don't realize that all of these folks are, again, not only doing some of the most cutting edge and interesting research in the department, but two, on top of that are doing the majority of the mentoring, not just for, for instance, students of color, but basically all the students who are looking ahead and seeing where the field is going and are trying to do the most exciting work. And so they're mentoring everybody.
Narrator (08:10):
The invisible mentoring burden on faculty wasn't the only problematic pattern Dr. Clancy found in the mentoring ecosystem.
Dr. Kate Clancy (08:17):
How is it that the racial and gender and sexual identities of our students plays a role in how we mentor them? And that sometimes there are actually failures in how we've mentored them, because we don't take those things into account. I know that there is a recognition certainly on the part of our students,
that there are a lot of times that they feel they are mentored in a way that isn't as useful for them. So for instance, when say a white cisgender woman, such as myself has a particular lived experience and a particular confirmation bias that is related to the success that I've had, then if I try to impart that wisdom on a student with a different lived experience, I could really lead them astray in terms of what they need from me in that moment.
Narrator (09:12):
She was aware that when it came to effective mentoring, the lack of clear expectations from faculty could cause harm to students. So Dr. Clancy began to collaborate with others to address the gaps.
Dr. Kate Clancy (09:24):
So several years ago now I and some grad students, they're not grad students anymore, but Jessica Heckman and Dan Urban, we had this idea to put together a small proposal where we were to get funded by the graduate college, to put together something that we call the 21st Century Scientists
Group. And the idea behind this group was to make science bigger and more inclusive, and to try to do this across several axes. So one of the last things that we started getting together was this Inclusive Lab Leaders Program.
Narrator (09:57):
She remembered a specific tool from her time in the Faculty Success Program and decided to implement it into the Inclusive Lab Leaders Program.
Dr. Kate Clancy (10:05):
We have introduced this mentoring map concept to our grad students and postdocs in our program a couple of times now, because it is so important for them to recognize that you're not going to get everything you need from one person. And we do have to teach them in many ways, how to be mentored just as much as we in our faculty program try to teach the faculty how to be better mentors. And most of that comes from just teaching people that conflict can be a good thing.
Dr. Kate Clancy (10:37):
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The way one of my colleagues puts it is that conflict is a gift. And it's about how you receive it and that we can find ways to have healthy conflicts with each other and have that lead to better science, then either being really avoidant with conflict or using it as an opportunity to get really hostile and nasty to one another.
Narrator (10:58):
Dr. Clancy knew that it was crucial for faculty and students to align their values with their work, but she realized this was a skill that had to be learned.
Dr. Kate Clancy (11:08):
So teaching them about conflict, teaching them about how to have difficult conversations, teaching them what it looks like to take the time to understand your values, and then have your research group operate in alignment with those values. If you have a certain set of values and then you're faced with a hard decision. And one of the decisions feels like the easy one, but the other one is the one that's actually in line with your values. Then you make that harder decision. And I think a lot of times that actually leads to us having sometimes the scarier conversations with our mentors. Sometimes it means going to bat for them more. Sometimes it means working harder with them to make a project go well. But again, often choosing in that direction is a hard choice if we don't have the appropriate skills.
Narrator (12:02):
The training taught others how to use healthy conflict and values to create inclusive spaces and more effective mentoring relationships, but Dr. Clancy identified another population who also wanted mentorship education.
Dr. Kate Clancy (12:15):
Grad students and post-docs kept contacting us saying, "But we want this training." So then we created a version for them, which was kind of like the inverse, basically teaching them the same stuff, but with the recognition that they need to navigate power in a much more sensitive way. So the faculty were taught how to protect graduate students and postdocs from their coercive power and grad students were taught how to navigate. The moments when they actually had power over others, which sometimes happens like with undergrads, grads, post-docs, but then also how to handle moments when you are dealing with somebody who has more power than you and doesn't always want to acknowledge it.
Narrator (12:56):
The idea of coercive power couldn't go unchecked, even if it was a difficult topic to bring up to faculty.
Dr. Kate Clancy (13:02):
When I talk about faculty protecting others from their coercive power, most faculty are very uncomfortable with that. With being told, "No, you actually have coercive power over grad students." They don't want to think through what it means to have someone's career entirely in their hands. We don't want that responsibility, but if we don't acknowledge it, then we actually cause an awful lot of harm. Because we act pretending that we're friends with our students or pretending that the power that we hold over them, isn't as great as it is. So we first really have to acknowledge that power, then do everything we can to protect them from the course of elements of it. That doesn't mean that all power is bad, but the course of elements are really damaging to the scientific enterprise. And so until we
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acknowledge that, any soft skills we teach about how to have difficult conversations kind of get lost, if they won't start by acknowledging that power.
Narrator (14:12):
Faculty can and should acknowledge the power they hold. When they do this, they can recognize that their methods of mentoring and interacting deeply affect their students. And when a faculty set aside their own lived experiences to focus on their mentees' unique identities or background, they can provide a more positive approach to mentoring that can unleash all students' potential in STEM. Thanks for listening. In the coming weeks we'll be announcing live virtual discussion groups and question answer sessions to help you learn how to implement best practices and mentorship for STEM. To learn more, visit nas.edu/mentoring.
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