Dear friends,

Here in Brooklyn it's finally spring, kind of. The piles of filthy snow aren't completely gone, but the light is changing, the birds are waking up, and I can tell we're close. It's been a long, cold winter—literally and figuratively—and while longer days and warmer weather won't change the political landscape, at least it'll make us all feel a smidge better on the day-to-day.

Meanwhile the work continues. Over the past several months, I've been consulting with ACLS on their Doctoral Futures program (read more about it in this synopsis by project manager Treviene Harris). All through the process of conducting research, convening listening sessions, and facilitating committee meetings, I keep asking myself: Why are these issues still so sticky? In my research for the project, I've found that when it comes to student outcomes, nothing really compares to effective mentorship and adequate funding.

Funding is hard, of course, especially in the current landscape, and I don't have an easy solution to point to on that front. But developing some basic guardrails for mentorship and advising is neither costly nor particularly difficult. Good mentorship doesn't mean hand-holding. What I have heard from countless students is that what they really need is clarity and consistency. They need to know what the expectations are and how to meet them. They need to trust that their advisor will help them move in the direction of completion by responding in a timely way and providing useful feedback.

This is really, really basic. And yet, we know that advising is incredibly uneven and idiosyncratic, left up to the individual advisor. Moreover, academia's orientation toward prestige as the coin of the realm creates major power imbalances that can leave people incredibly vulnerable. While many students have solid support from their advisors, the reality for too many grad students ranges from benign neglect to outright toxicity. The lack of a systematic understanding of the expectations and norms of advising opens the door to the kinds of manipulation, biased gatekeeping, and abuse that are now coming to light in the Epstein files, as scholars tried to curry favor and research funding in wildly unethical ways.

Another issue bound up in this is the hidden curriculum. Academic infrastructure is complex and confusing, and is quite different from many other workplace structures. Students who don't have a handle on how power works in a university context are constantly on a back foot. As Gabriela Garcia argues in Inside Higher Ed, graduate students badly need a primer on institutional literacy. Garcia notes that uneven institutional knowledge “perpetuates inequities, disadvantaging first-generation students and those without institutional connections. What is naturalized knowledge for those whose parents have advanced degrees is part of a steep learning curve for those new to the system.”

So, I don't know. What would it take to have some accountability in graduate student mentorship, and to incorporate an overview of institutional structures into our expectations of doctoral study? Maybe we can't change everything all at once—but we can change this.

Anyway. As my friend reminded me yesterday, the light always comes back. The days are getting longer, spring will in fact come, and we can continue making progress on work that matters, little by little.

With warmth and solidarity,

Katina