Reciprocal Mentoring

Co-creating Knowledges for a New University

Jennifer Richter, Beth Blue Swadener

Introduction: The case for reciprocal mentoring

Indigenous graduate students can end up with a poor mentoring match when paired with a supervisor who has thrived within existing paradigms and pathways to research success…What’s needed to create healthy, welcoming environments for Indigenous graduate students and their scholarship depends on the cultural context and needs of the particular Indigenous students the university is serving…So, universities need to ask those questions in their own communities (Tuck, 2018).

This chapter responds to Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck’s comments in a lecture presented at the first “Summit for Mentoring indigenous Students” at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 2018. Drawing from our extensive experiences mentoring Indigenous students and being mentored by Indigenous colleagues in Arizona and New Mexico in the U.S. to urge the creation of healthy, welcoming, and culturally reflective spaces in higher education. We examine how the experiences of graduate students reflect the structural limitations in the colonial and neoliberal academy, which fails to recognize different kinds of experiences and knowledges that depart from traditional Western histories of technological determinism and colonization. This chapter focuses on ways that we can re-center and co-construct pathways to the making of knowledge that connect students’ values and hopes for transformative change directly to their research that is generative rather than exploitative of their communities.

In A Third University is Possible, la paperson critiques the colonial university while most importantly imagining the creation and growth of anti-colonial and generative spaces within higher education. They write, “To understand the possibilities for a decolonizing university, we must begin with a discussion of colonialism, particularly the colonizing machine's desire to settle, to self-sustain, to seduce, and to school" (la paperson, 2017, p. xxii). They further delineate, “The first world university accumulates through dispossession. The second world university ‘liberates’ through liberalism. The third world university breaks faith from its own machinery by inspiring the academic automaton with a fourth world soul” (p. 37). We take the different formations of university seriously. In our roles as university professors, rather than advising students from an unexamined foundation of academia built on the dispossession of Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) labor and land, we learn and work with students to make oppressive foundations more visible. We use our collective knowledges toward co-creating a third university that displaces and dismantles “technologies of accumulation” while also co-creating new paths to shared knowledge for more equitable and sustainable futures.

We believe that mentoring is a critical aspect of pedagogy that is a core space for decolonizing higher education (HE) and essential for creating a third university. Yet the complexities of this relationship between faculty and students are often unacknowledged, unrecognized and unarticulated, which allows for the continual exploitation of the labor of both students and faculty. This chapter advocates for reciprocal mentoring as a praxis-based model for graduate student mentorship, in order to articulate and challenge the structural barriers that students, especially BIPOC, face in what has traditionally been a colonizing space. Reciprocal mentoring acknowledges the evolution of the needs and ideals of both mentor and mentee, especially in neoliberal higher education settings (Bishop & Webster, 2021; Nagasawa & Swadener, 2017; Dodson, Montgomery, & Brown, 2009). Reciprocal mentoring also allows us as faculty and students to explore and interrogate “the effects of coloniality in lived experience and not only in the mind” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, 243) by delving into the rationales and drivers for student research topics. More broadly, students need different forms of mentorship over the course of their graduate careers, which should be acknowledged early, iteratively, and repeatedly, so students have the language they need to ask for support from faculty and peers.

Many scholars have noted that mentoring is a kind of praxis, or critical reflexive practice (Moss et al, 1999; Mullings & Mukherjee, 2018). The mentor-mentee relationship is complex and laden with unarticulated expectations, but deeply felt by both parties when the relationship is mutually supportive and based in compassion. Furthermore, graduate students are more diverse than ever, yet there is little institutional recognition or action in addressing the intersectional challenges that students face in their journey through graduate school, as well as after graduation, and whether they stay in academia or not. We argue that while faculty do and must take this responsibility seriously, administrators must also recognize the need to create and hold spaces where robust mentorship relationships are clearly supported, defined, and willingly engaged in by all parties. In this chapter we draw from discussions with current and former doctoral students (e.g. Farago et al, 2017; Richter et al, 2020; Swadener, et al, 2015), and from our own experiences as intergenerational activist scholars working largely with BIPOC graduate students. We further explore structural barriers that prevent mentoring from being recognized as academic labor, and discuss the kinds of praxis that are informed by reciprocal mentoring, which is also reflected in our research.

Positionalities

Beth is a professor emerita who has mentored over 150 doctoral students and over 400 Master’s students in her career. She is a white, middle-class woman from the U.S. engaged for decades in anti-oppressive and decolonizing scholarship and activism, and has routinely interrogated her positionality with, and potential impositions on, collaborators from the Global South. She has applied several practices consistently in her four decades of work in African settings—foremost, “nothing about us without us,” an organizing principle from disability justice, which drives her collaborative approach at every stage of research in convivial ways, including locally-sourced research questions and issues, project design, data collection where applicable, analysis, and co-authored publications with minoritized and Indigenous colleagues as first author in most cases. Jen is a first-generation, biracial, middle-class woman from the U.S. who is a pre-tenure faculty member serving on 7 PhD committees at the time of writing this chapter, and has mentored 8 students to the PhD and 16 Master’s Students. Her research focuses on environmental and energy justice, as a means of addressing the systemic inequities that are embedded in energy infrastructure and decision-making that have exacerbated inequitable conditions for historically marginalized communities, and her work uses concepts from environmental justice focused on distributive, recognition, and participatory justice.

Together, our outwardly-focused research is inherently connected to our critiques of HE institutions, and while we speak from the perspective of professors at different stages of our careers, for both of us, graduate student mentoring remains one of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of our work. It is also the most personally rewarding and professionally important, as graduates become the next generation of faculty, scholars, community activists and leaders. Moreover, graduate students are a critical part of maintaining and elevating the relevancy and status of HE to diverse communities and society. They become new faculty bringing their ideas, theories, cultural stores of knowledge, methods, and synthesis to scholarship and research, as well as pedagogy and mentoring. We believe that one of the most central obligations we have to graduate students is to compassionately co-learn to create generative knowledge through a process that will ultimately test their resolve and well-being. In doing so, we view our graduate students as colleagues, and treat them with the respect and care that we expect of our current colleagues.

Reciprocal mentoring in practice

We practice reciprocal mentoring, in which relationships and expectations are co-defined over time, depending on student and mentor needs and logistics. Based on work with Indigenous students, Webster and Bishop (2021) propose that reciprocal mentoring “is not only about the Indigenous student being mentored, but also the academic supervisor. The supervisor brings expertise within the academy, and the Indigenous student brings expertise from their community. Both bring their lived experience and knowledge as whole people to the learning process” (107). While the dichotomies are not always so stark—meaning, there are minoritized and Indigenous faculty who are also members of their communities, we find this assertion important when faculty are unfamiliar with students from different backgrounds. These considerations are also particularly salient as graduate programs become increasingly neoliberal and focused on increasing funding through research grants and tuition increases with state funding sources disappearing (Hartman & Darab, 2012), thereby exacerbating the minoritization of many faculty and students. Additionally, incoming cohorts of students are ever more diverse and are experiencing more intersectional pressures and precarities, including financial and family challenges, which were made especially evident during the global pandemic. Yet neoliberal HE institutions fail to systematically recognize the issues that are reshaping the graduate student experience.

Reciprocal mentoring recognizes intersectionality as a means of interrogating the fundamental systems that undergird HE institutions, openly acknowledging the patriarchal, colonizing, racist, misogynistic, and capitalist-driven foundations of higher education historically, which still permeate graduate education (Collins, 1990; Moradi & Granzka, 2017; Overstreet et al, 2020; Niemann et al, 2020). These barriers are more evident as students come from increasingly diverse backgrounds and choose research topics or methodologies that their advisors may be ill-equipped to recognize as legitimate and transdisciplinary areas of study, such as using abolitionist framings and convivial research methods. For example, in working with several Indigenous PhD cohorts, Beth moved away from assigning readings on historical trauma, which many students were already deeply familiar with and found a painful reminder of their elders’ experiences, and toward issues that students might address through constructive writing, i.e., op-eds or other advocacy work to “advocate in the now.”

We consider a vision of reciprocal mentoring and activist scholarship that opens new spaces of reflection in academia for different and oft-ignored cosmologies and epistemologies, including traditional ecological knowledge. A key component of this vision rests upon the so-called small spaces and reciprocity of mentor-mentee relationships and co-mentoring groups (Dodson, Montgomery, & Brown, 2009), which can be crucibles for graduate student support and critical research. We argue, with Nakagawa and Swadener (2017), that mentoring into scholarship is not about a simple, linear, and primarily one-way delivery of received knowledge and social practices but is instead about co-constitutive relationships: “Relation is reciprocity…. Our students teach us, our works form us” (Buber, 1970, p. 67).

Structural Barriers to Reciprocal Mentoring

Mentoring is an assumed part of faculty responsibilities in higher education, yet it is a systemically overlooked and undervalued role. This lack of recognition stems from several structural barriers that systemically prevent mentoring from being seen as a critical aspect of graduate student success. These barriers include an overly narrow accounting of academic labor that stems from a lack of transparency in terms of expectations for students and faculty. For instance, doctoral success is measured by specific milestones to completion and the speed and efficiency by which they are reached; however, how students get there is less discussed, especially in regards to positionality. Faculty expectations are delineated by the overly simple categories of research, teaching, and service to the institution, but these categories often overlap, and what falls into each category is only vaguely articulated, especially in regards to mentorship. This opaqueness stems from a lack of recognition of the work that mentoring takes, and creates more invisible labor for faculty, especially women and faculty of color who are already suffering from a lack of mentorship themselves (Brooks, 2020), as well as a systemic lack of recognition of students as having rich and complex personal lives and intersectional challenges. These structural issues are especially prevalent in neoliberal university settings and amplified by the recent Covid-19 global pandemic (Carr et al, 2021; Melaku & Beeman, 2022).

An alternative, emphasizing Indigenous teachers and learning working in community contexts for social justice is envisioned by Sumida and Abeita (2018). They discuss Indigenous perspectives in higher education and their connection to social justice, emphasizing community-centered approaches for liberation and self-determination within educational systems and beyond. Their work advocates for rebuilding relationships between Indigenous students, communities, and education as a key social justice goal.

Invisible Labor

Mentoring is a core part of higher education, as faculty are responsible for “training” the next generation of the professoriate. However, mentoring does not fall neatly in the “teaching, service, or research” categories of traditional accounting of academic labor, and is often only vaguely referred to in promotion and tenure guidelines. If mentioned in the teaching category, the category tends to conflate advising (academic advisement) and mentoring (more-than-advising relationship building) and its priorities are more focused on teaching evaluations. The neoliberal framing of students understands them as commodities, or “knowledge products” of the university and consumers. This framing fails to recognize the continuing mentorship of students as they matriculate into graduate and postdoctoral programs, faculty and administrative positions, and positions outside the university. It also fails to recognize the humanity and agency of students in producing knowledge for their communities, rather than “universal” knowledge that is produced under narrow framings of quantifiable data (Charmaz & Belgrave, 2019). This lack of acknowledgement underpins systemic inequities in an essential aspect of academic labor, as both faculty and students then struggle with allotting time for student mentoring, as well as articulating what the expectations are for both students and faculty.

This lack of transparency around mentoring expectations also leads to increased burden and vulnerability for both students and faculty. Even as graduate programs admit diverse cohorts of students, there are limited numbers of faculty who understand from experience the intersectional issues of HE as a space of privilege and oppression, and who can support and help students navigate a graduate program when they encounter both (Turner & Gonzalez, 2015). This is a trajectory issue, as the ranks of early career and non-tenure faculty are diversifying as well, but the senior professorships and leadership positions (who often control institutional policies) remain static. This often adds to structural inequity in advancement for faculty, and leads to replication of non-equitable models for graduate students who want to become faculty.

Jen felt this keenly as an assistant professor jointly appointed in a supportive and collegial atmosphere in a small research-focused department, situated in the largest public university in the U.S. At the time, she was the only tenure-track woman of color in her department, and students were drawn to her research interests and approaches, especially environmental and energy justice studies. She was also asked by colleagues to be on committees for students who were having problems completing their dissertations and committees. Because many students are “non-traditional,” meaning they are not solely focused on the PhD but have other often full-time professional obligations outside of academia and may have taken longer to matriculate through their PhD programs, due to financial difficulties, full-time jobs, and family responsibilities.

We see undefined mentorship labor issues regularly as faculty who serve on many dissertation committees, especially when compared to some colleagues in our programs. We are aware that we offer a combination of attractive mentorship characteristics and values, 1) empathy and sympathy for such students, 2) a sense of obligation on behalf of our institution to the success of students, and 3) a genuine interest and ability in understanding the critical importance of alternative paradigms and epistemologies to assist in student research. Because we believe in these principles, we advocate for recognition of the labor involved in reciprocal mentoring, a model for which can be seen in systems with collective bargaining that provide credit for dissertation supervision or other mentoring roles. Many individual faculty appreciate and take this approach as well, but it is rarely recognized as a model across the academy.

Personal Relationships and Boundaries of Mentoring

The boundaries of mentorship are inherently blurry and transitional, which contributes to the lack of institutional recognition of mentoring. One of the most rewarding moments for both of us as professors is when a student graduates, but the mentor/mentee relationship remains. However, one of the difficulties of reciprocal mentorship is managing personal relationships with students, in terms of being supportive of their struggles, while modeling positive professionalism in an oft-frustrating neoliberal environment. Transition and growth are difficult for both students and faculty to manage, and professors and graduate students are often grappling with similar issues although the scales of the struggles may be different; for instance, limited child care options affect both students and faculty, but students have more limited funds for child care. These issues can include family concerns, elder and child care, mental health and invisible disabilities, and cultural practices. This is especially important for Indigenous and minoritized students who are navigating several layers of bureaucracy in their communities and in HE, and where Indigenous communities, for example, and HE institutions have limited trust and communication with each other, often forcing the student to communicate and negotiate policies between their community and administrators.

At this time, it is also well-known that the global pandemic stemming from the emergence of the COVID-19 virus has laid bare the conditions and circumstances that underlie how vulnerable students are to sudden shocks in educational systems. In our experience, all graduate students were (and still are) affected by COVID-19 in multiple ways, including isolation, loss of the ability to travel, including to collect data for research, income, and tragically, loss of family members and elders. This has particularly affected Indigenous students, as Indigenous communities were hit hard by COVID-19. For Indigenous students, who may be cultural stewards in their communities, there are culturally prescribed ways of grieving for family and community members that must also be respected, even as they are processing their own grief. Indigenous students we mentor have lost multiple family members and were not able to grieve with their clan and community or in traditional ways. They are also trying to manage the effects of COVID-19 on their tribal governance as well, which is especially hard when students work for their Indigenous nations while attending school.

While some universities gave extensions to required degree timelines and additional funding to graduate students, others did not—including ours, resulting in compounding the trauma of loss and isolation, particularly for students with disabilities, visible or invisible; these stresses have challenged all stakeholders of graduate education to better support students, even as we/they struggle. The pandemic has upended the university as a source of stability in their lives, and as the world attempts to adjust to new realities from remote learning and necessary social distancing, as well as economic shocks, there are future ramifications for higher education, especially as fewer tenure track lines are created or supported, and the increasingly neoliberal academy stresses efficiency over care for students, faculty and staff. Other issues will inevitably emerge that we may not even be aware of at this time.

Reciprocal Mentoring as Praxis for a New University

The neoliberal university is a paradox. It embodies an historically and traditionally paternalistic, white and colonizing institutional culture; yet it can also be a liberatory space, filled with information passed on to new generations who will use that knowledge to build new research paradigms that will help society become more equitable and sustainable. The institutional history of HE creates invisible, abstract, and often insurmountable barriers to student success. The increase of inter- and transdisciplinary research has helped academia provide critical information and research on complex social issues, yet the overlaps of different fields, methods, and research questions can also contribute to the difficulty of finding effective and supportive mentors for students, making students and their research less “legible” for other departments and universities. In addition to this complication, recent efforts to increase diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at campuses across the U.S., including ours, have made the rifts between justice-oriented work and the lack of structural support more evident, and students are expected or asked to participate in this work, even as their labor is unrecognized and unpaid.

Reciprocal mentoring centers discussions of these persistent forms of structural racism/sexism/misogyny/classism/ableism, so that students are not silenced and driven out of the academy when they encounter these issues with their mentors, in classrooms (both as students and teachers), and in their research. Furthermore, a reciprocal mentoring relationship supports students in their struggles for institutional change that is informed by justice and equity principles that they are also centering in their research, as they resist, organize, and create new spaces for BIPOC scholars that are informed by intersectional praxis.

We participate in several different kinds of mentorship models that recognize the power differential between professor and student, that challenge colonizing ways of thinking, and that openly acknowledge the full humanity of a student. Feminist mentorship approaches emphasize intersectionality, voice balance and caring approaches (e.g.,Oberhauser & Caretta, 2019; Swadener et al, 2015). Reciprocal mentoring (e.g.,Nagasawa & Swadener, 2015) openly denotes and acknowledges how power and authority shape mentoring relationships and encourages making mentoring relationships as open, non-hierarchical, and transparent as possible. Mentors must acknowledge insecurities, doubt (including internalized oppression), uncertainties, and inherent precarities that can affect graduate education, especially as they relate to new practices and policies that promote neoliberal principles.

Neoliberal approaches blame any failures or struggles on perceived weakness of the individual student, rather than the structural barriers that prevent a student from seeking help when they are floundering. Webster and Bishop (2021) note, “in a program that seeks to support students to transform their self and world views, students can experience different emotional reactions, and this is anticipated” (114). Supporting students as they experience not only the expansion of their knowledge, but also their struggles with how to deal with the emotional and mental concerns that can emerge from systematically studying the traumatic histories of their communities, is a critical aspect of reciprocal mentoring. Approaching mentoring from this perspective, mentors recognize this process as natural, instead of expecting students to conform to ideals of being objective and passionless about their research. Furthermore, what is characterized as failure can be a sign of growing strength in articulating and challenging structural barriers.

Peer Mentorship and Mutual Support Models

Peer mentoring centers different epistemologies and approaches—in our work, feminist, collaborative, community-based and traditional ecological knowledge—that have been generally ignored yet sometimes appropriated when convenient by universities. We ask, “How can faculty co-create knowledge that is relevant and respectful of student needs, values, and goals? How are faculty supported in becoming stronger mentors, when there is little or no formal process of discussion of this?” In order to address issues like these, for the past 12 years, Beth has facilitated a dissertation/writing support group that has met bi-weekly and includes members from several disciplines. All are encouraged to have one or two “accountabilabuddies,” or writing partners who commit to read and provide feedback, meet for writing sessions, and provide mutual support between meetings. A check-in, including an update on writing or research goals as well as any requests for personal support needed comprises much of the meeting time, and two week goals are shared. Graduate students often take a co-facilitator role, and effort is made to have the group reflect feminist and anti-oppressive principles (Swadener, et al, 2015), including voice balance, inclusivity, flattened hierarchies, use of I statements, and respect. These kinds of peer groups are a means of reclaiming knowledge production as the co-creation and sharing of knowledge and experience for community building rather than based on individualism and contributing to the academic pursuit of knowledge to shore up capitalist accumulation.

Beth’s group has always included BIPOC students and created a space for open and reflective discussions of a range of issues in HE and beyond. Members have reflected several forms of intersectionality and gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, class background and other markers of identity played a role in the formation and evolution of the group. The writing group has reflected bell hooks' notions of “homespace” and community as a “place of the positive” (hooks, 1998) to examine how the writing group contributed to both individual members’ self-actualization and to group identity. Additionally, the group uses Gustavo Esteva’s (1987) metaphor of a hammock and a shift away from development to hospitality to reflect the ways the group functions. According to Esteva, a hammock does not represent a standardized or formulaic approach to mentorship; it adapts to those whom it cradles and represents a changing source of support as it takes different shapes as needed, reflecting Indigenous values of hospitality.

The group continues to be responsive to the needs and funds of knowledge of its changing membership and provides a hammock for early career scholars. With over 73 group members graduating and shifting to primarily higher education positions, we would like to think that our small group is having a ripple effect and impacting practice and mentoring strategies, across the U.S. and transnationally. Alongside of this group, several Indigenous student-led writing groups have supported mostly female students in completing degrees. Thus, one of the implications that can be drawn from our collective experience is that, while there is a need to focus on the writing process, there is also great need for holistic, feminist approaches to supporting early career scholars in their socialization to higher education careers if that is what is desired.

Reciprocal Mentoring and Pedagogy

Reciprocal mentoring recognizes the need to decolonize HE to address structural barriers rooted in white supremacy, ableism, and a lack of recognition of the different places and spaces -physically, culturally, and epistemologically- from which students are coming. Decolonizing pedagogy in HE is a key site of challenging neoliberal practices that are seen as not only acceptable but also necessary to protect the “rigor” of academic research while also eliding any accountability to students in terms of understanding how power and privilege are exerted in colonized spaces (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Supiano, 2022). This perception allows the system of mentoring to go undervalued, unseen and unchallenged.

Jen has found that one effective way to contribute to decolonizing HE is to involve students in editing the traditional Eurocentric curriculum by asking them what their expectations are and following through on them, whether a class, mentoring relationship, or their research. It’s also critical to ensure a diversity of authors in the course that reflect the composition of graduate cohorts and their emerging research topics, as well as perspectives that critique and challenge the historical role of universities in shaping society, especially how scientific inquiry and technological innovations have been used to dispossess communities of labor and land (la paperson, 2017; Mbembe, 2016). Students recommend other writers and media that they have found influential, creating a more dynamic co-learning space. By involving students directly in the creation of the course they are enrolled in, the classroom begins to reflect their concerns, and faculty learn directly from students, and can make course materials more relevant. This approach reflects a need to break down barriers related to authorial authority while also allowing for space to discuss how authority and expertise are created in social systems and how power is exerted to shape a student’s experience of the world. As graduate students become co-instructors, and as faculty become co-learners, they together innovate a model of co-constructed pedagogy, participating in a genealogy of reciprocal mentoring from academic generation to generation.

Extending the co-production of pedagogy to writing is another aspect of reciprocal mentoring that we employ and enjoy. Purposefully co-authoring conference papers and publications with current and former graduate students decenters the role of faculty as the primary experts of a research topic and seeks to break persistent hierarchies. Being part of the full review cycle and all the edits that precede publication, the learning curve once on the tenure track (if that is the student’s intent) is not so steep.

Once graduate students are on the tenure track or other positions that encourage publication, making them first author is another recommended practice, particularly as the faculty member is tenured. In such publishing experiences, the notion of reciprocal mentoring can be visible and powerful. Often newer scholars bring unique methodologies, theoretical framings and citations to the collaboration. For example, in two Pueblo Indian PhD cohorts, the dissertation consisted of a book chapter, an article for the Journal of American Indian Education, and a policy brief—all meant to maximize relevance to Indigenous nations and students’ own communities and tribal work organizations (Sumida Huaman & Brayboy, 2017). This assured that all participants gained experience in these genres of publication while making their research accessible to audiences both local and global.

When editing books or special journal issues, recruiting early career colleagues as authors and contributors is also a good approach to mentoring and also ensures cutting-edge content and new perspectives are included. Attention to author-order is an important way to reflect understanding but also dismantling of conventional academic values and practices. Not only does co-authoring recognize the labor and research that students are doing, it also serves as a means of exploring with students if a faculty position that emphasizes publications and grants is the professional track they want to pursue, another important piece of data for future aspirations.

Supporting Scholar Activism: The example of Local to Global Justice

Perhaps most distinctive is that reciprocal mentoring resonates beyond the walls of the university. Students have one identity—as a student of the institution—that is recognized in HE systems, but reciprocal mentoring recognizes the multiple identities that students encompass, including as social and political activists. As mentors, colleagues and friends, we co-direct a local non-profit that is based at our university. Local to Global Justice (LTGJ) is focused on bringing together students and community members in an informal setting, in order to share common local issues linked to larger global struggles and bring to bear the resources of the university to community issues and concerns (Farago, et al, 2017; Richter, et al, 2020).

Students at our institution and others become involved in LTGJ for myriad reasons, but a primary one is a reluctance to limit their scholarly, research, and life engagement to just studying social issues. Rather, they want to be directly involved in social movements, and apply their experiences and research to making society more equitable. In HE settings, this means actively challenging the neoliberal policies and practices that both stem from and create systemic inequities (Rhodes et al, 2018) where the university is complicit, a driver, or a beneficiary of these deeply rooted inequities. LTGJ provides an informal, non-hierarchical academic space where students bring their concerns as community members to the organizing table, but also hear from community members to better understand the structural challenges in their communities.

LTGJ, founded in 2001, has a deep history of foregrounding local BIPOC and youth activism, including events organized around racial and environmental justice, and amplifying the voices and work of BIPOC scholars and activists. Our approach is informed by the organizing table for students and community members. The approach also provides students with the opportunity and experience of planning, organizing, fundraising, and publicizing, as well as running a multi-day community event by taking space on campus and opening it to the public to share their stories, experiences, and to hear and learn from their community. In this sense, LTGJ provides an intentional space for reflection and care, qualities that are antithetical to neoliberal policies.

Recognizing the long lineage between higher education and scholar-activists contributes to students who feel inspired to finish their degrees, while also creating informal spaces of supportive reciprocal mentoring between students, faculty, and community members. Scholar-activism is not only a critical aspect of integrating student needs with their research and teaching; it can also reveal structural barriers within HE institutions that need to be explicated, acknowledged, and addressed through policy and solidarity among students and faculty (Richter et al, 2020). Scholar-activism also provides a space of solidarity, as students and faculty march and organize together, humanizing the process of graduate school as it brings us together.

Conclusion

In the second volume of Presumed Incompetent (see Niemann et al., 2020), Brooks passionately argues,

For those of us on the other side of the PhD, we must stop reusing systems of oppression and reinforcing inequitable systems of power against our own students and in some cases, our colleagues. We need to empathize with our students even as we challenge them to do better. We need to stop dragging and shaming our students. And we should lament when we fail a student after we have measured, fully, honestly, whether it was the students who earned failure or whether the system- or we- failed the students. And if we have done so, we need to use that failure as a signal to change or transform something about our pedagogy, which should always be a work in progress (p. 151).

Brooks’ call denotes the ways that faculty become enmeshed in harmful practices that reproduce the trauma of their own experiences. Answering her call requires understanding how neoliberal policies hurt all. While graduate school is an individualized experience, one way of managing its inherent uncertainties and precarities is to encourage and support students in creating communities, beyond the ones that they come with, that will support them through the experience, but also afterwards, as the barriers are many. We have laid out the larger structural barriers to graduate student success, including the lack of transparency about the roles of mentors and mentees, the logistics of managing mentoring relationships, and managing personal relationships.

Reciprocal mentoring is a praxis-based model that encourages transparency about the practices and policies that shape graduate experiences. It forces recognition and retribution for unrecognized labor often taken on by women faculty and faculty of color. Because our commitment to students and their work will not wane, we propose modeling positive mentoring relationships through community-based research, writing and peer-support groups, publications and presentations co-authored with students and faculty, transformative learning, and support for scholar activism are all means of creating different and flexible relationships between faculty and students. Reciprocal mentoring is a long-term process, demanding mutual investment by all stakeholders in a graduate student’s educational trajectory. The rewards are rich, however, creating overlapping communities of scholars, practitioners, and community activists that will contribute to a more equitable and sustainable world, contributing to the decolonization of HE, which in turn leads to co-creating communal and collective spaces for reflecting on the creation of a Third University—in other words, it is a crucial time to be thinking about what is needed for the freedoms of the next university to be unleashed and shared more equitably among our academic communities. HE is a key area for developing supportive and equitable relationships between different groups, including students, faculty, staff and communities that we are embedded in, which must be supported by HE institutions if they are to become healthier and safer places for students and faculty to grow, learn and share their wisdom.

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