This book is for higher education faculty and staff who wish to deepen their approach to mentoring all students, but it is especially concerned with “outsider” students—those who come from groups that were long excluded from higher education, and who have been marginalized and minoritized by society and academia. Mentoring is difficult work for an abundance of reasons, and—given higher education’s troubled history of exclusion, as well as a contemporary context fraught with social and power imbalances—it can be especially challenging when the mentorship takes place across dimensions of difference such as social class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, or ability.
Mutuality, Mystery, and Mentorship in Higher Education examines the seemingly spontaneous and serendipitous connection between mentor and protégé, and points to a new vision of mentorship based on a deep sense of reciprocity between the two. Hinsdale proposes that if more mentors take a responsive, decolonizing approach to their work across difference, then the promise of social and class mobility through education might be realized for more of our students and the tide might begin to turn toward an increasingly inclusive, intellectually open academy.