Reaching Up, Reaching Out
Mentoring Women in Journalism
and Mass Communication Education
Judith Cramer
Kandice Salomone
Emily Walshe
When Odysseus went off to fight the Trojan War, he entrusted his son Telemachus to the tutor Mentor. The teacher later revealed herself as the Goddess Athena, patroness of the arts and industry, and accompanied the youth when he went in search of his missing father.
—Van Collie (1988, p. 36)
The academy has traditionally been the locus of intellectual thought, a fertile ground for new ideas, and a place for experimentation, and yet, curiously we lag far behind private-sector organizations in nurturing personal and professional growth. Although the academy, as an institution, professes to be a nesting place for collegiality, collaboration, shared knowledge, and academic integrity, there is little evidence to suggest that it actually engages in this activity on a broad scale. Mentoring can be a productive way of affecting and effecting these cultural ideals.
The research literature on mentoring in business and management is plentiful and strongly suggests that mentoring is integral to the success of any individual manager and to the organization in which he or she works. The majority of business organizations are hierarchical in structure and the mentoring model seems to mirror that very structure. Whereas the business mentoring research has focused almost exclusively on mentoring models,
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