The Wabash Center's Dialogue On Teaching
The Wabash Center's Dialogue On Teaching
Mentoring: Tat-siong Benny Liew
Tat-siong Benny Liew, Ph.D. is Professor, Class of 1956 Chair in New Testament Studies at Holy Cross College.
In this rich and reflective conversation, Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield and Dr. Tat-siong Benny Liew explore the complexities of mentoring within academic and theological contexts. They discuss mentoring as a relational, communal, and intergenerational practice rather than a top-down, ego-driven model. Emphasizing listening over advice-giving, they critique hierarchical approaches and advocate for mutual, organic relationships built on trust and care. Both speakers highlight the importance of multiple mentors across one’s career, including peer and reverse mentoring, and the vital role mentoring plays in sustaining intellectual and theological traditions. The episode concludes with reflections on mentoring as a form of invisible labor and collective responsibility to nurture future scholars.
Welcome to Dialogue on Teaching, Wabash Center's podcast series. I am Nancy Lynn Westfield, director of the Wabash Center. Paul Myhre is our sound engineer. It is my great pleasure to welcome to the conversation Dr. Tatseon Benny Liu, class of 1956 professor in New Testament, College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Welcome, Benny, to the conversation.
SPEAKER_00:Great to be with you.
SPEAKER_01:So we wanna talk about, particularly in this time of high anxiety, right? The notion of mentoring, right? So we mentor early career scholars, we mentor students, we need to be mentored ourselves, right? I'm gonna say as a late career person, I still have mentors. So we're not just talking about the issues and the networking needs and the relational needs of early career people, we're talking about at all the stages of our careers. I completely agree. The need for mentors. So tell me about your approach to mentoring.
SPEAKER_00:My approach to mentoring, I think it is mainly about relationship. It's mainly about understanding. It's mainly about expectations. I think for me, it's important that I don't assume that I know everything. That as a mentor, it's not just to give advice. and to tell people what to do or to be, quote unquote, a role model so they can follow your footsteps. I think mentoring really is about having that relationship that you can have trust, that you can build space to help people think about what they want to be, who they want to be, what they want to be. That's mainly how I understand it. And when I am mentored by others myself, at least that's also what I would desire. What about you? What do you think?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think one of the deadliest things we do to ourselves and to other people is to think that the scholarship of teaching is about isolation and individualism. So mentoring and the assumption of the need for a mentor is you know, flies in the face of all this individualism. And I did it myself. I, you know, I make my contribution too. It moves closer to a we and an ours and a more communal understanding about what effective scholarship is. How do you teach effectively? You stay in conversation. You stay in dialogue. You... approach people who look like they might be in need, because I've had that experience. You also seek out help from people who might have more insight, more perspective, more understanding about what's going on. When I took this job at Wabash, I actually called a senior scholar and asked for mentoring, and I received it. I also received a call from a senior scholar that said, In effect, though she didn't say these words, I know you're going to need some help. So I am here if you need me. Both of those approaches were life-saving to me.
SPEAKER_00:Excellent. So it's more like a communal network of support. I would add to that, in addition to the problem of individualism, I am very worried about an understanding of mentoring that is egoistic.
SPEAKER_01:That
SPEAKER_00:is to say that a mentor or I as a mentor or my mentor thinks that I know everything or she knows everything. And the idea is simply, you know, I'm telling you what to do or you are telling me what to do. I think that is also a very bad understanding. Well, maybe I should not say that. At least that's not my understanding of mentoring.
SPEAKER_01:I think when I'm looking for a mentor, the primary thing I'm looking for is not advice, but somebody to listen to me.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly, exactly.
SPEAKER_01:So the egoistic thing is not helpful because I actually know what my choices are, right? Because I've been in the business long enough. I know my choices. I need you to listen to me while I work some stuff through.
SPEAKER_00:But that is great because I have met some younger people uh scholars when they started out they had that understanding of mentoring right you have been there you know what is the right way you tell me what to do what should i do what should i do and you always i always have to end up turning it around and kind of like what would you want right i can ask questions but i really love what you said about it is more about answer listening than answering
SPEAKER_01:So it's not, let's continue to talk about what it's not. It's not therapy. It's not counseling. It's not even pastoring people, right? I'm not there as your mentor. I'm not there as your pastor, right? And in fields of religion, sometimes we can fall into or blur those boundaries where we begin to pastor that person under the guise of mentoring. That's not our role either, that mentoring is a discrete thing, right? It is its own thing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It is interesting. I don't know if you know this, Lynn, that there's a really well-known feminist scholar who has mentored many, many young women scholars. She does not like this term mentor at all.
SPEAKER_01:What does she use instead?
SPEAKER_00:I do not know what she used instead, but because she's a New Testament, she went back to Odyssey where this term appeared. It appeared because it's called mentoring because Odysseus, when he left to fight a Trojan war, he left his family, had a young son, and he asked his friend to take care of his young son. And his friend's name is Mentor. And that's- So for her, this is where that term came from. But it came from a situation of a father abandoning the family to fight a war. That's why she does not like it.
SPEAKER_01:So that makes sense to me. I don't want it to be about people who have been abandoned or bereft or left off somewhere. So that's understandable. I do think... when we do challenge ourselves to move past advice giving
SPEAKER_00:that
SPEAKER_01:it becomes more difficult.
SPEAKER_00:It does because again that's why I said when you first asked me how I understood mentoring I said it's about relationship understanding and expectation. I think between the mentor and the mentee that expectation has to be clear, right? If you're expecting me to give you advice, tell you what to do, I would not be able to deliver. Now that is not to say there are not some time when I need to give advice. When sometimes I see someone going the wrong way, I may have to say, but that's not what mentoring is mainly about. Giving advice and telling people what to do, giving warnings, that will only be a small part of mentoring. At times you need that, but it should not be what mentoring is about.
SPEAKER_01:So do you mentor the way you were mentored or do you mentor because you weren't mentored well?
SPEAKER_00:I think I have both. I think I have both. So maybe in my vocabulary, I would say I have both. both excellent mentors who mentor the way I desire to mentor, but I also have mentors who tend to be more imperative. You do this, you do that, right? So, and most of the time, as I think about it, I did not follow the instructions. And I realized that that's not what mentoring should be. And then you begin to feel funny, right? Should I still keep that relationship? Did I offend that person? It just would not work. And
SPEAKER_01:from the ego-driven model, yes, you did offend the person when you didn't do what they told you to do.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:And it's likely that they will terminate the relationship so you don't have to, right? Because their contract is you will do what I tell you to do.
SPEAKER_00:If you don't listen to me, why am I mentoring you?
SPEAKER_01:If there's a pattern, and there might not be, Benny, if there's a pattern for early career people or in your mentoring, what kinds of things do people get stymied by and need you to listen to them about?
SPEAKER_00:I think a lot of things have to do some of it is quite mundane and routine. That would be less fun, at least for me, right? Searching for jobs. What should I do for an interview? How do I negotiate salary? Those things are actually more like advice and telling you do this, don't do that, that kind of stuff. The other big thing would be relational. A lot of politics of the academy. People struggle with that. How should I deal with this? How should I deal with that person, that student? And some of that, which is the most difficult one for me, would be career orientation. Should I stay in the field? Should I do this kind of scholarship? should I pursue this kind of career, like going to be administrator or whatnot? Those are the most difficult mentoring that I have experienced because those are really, you're just helping the person to discern what do they want.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So the life decisions part, right? I've taken the job now. I don't know how to negotiate the salary. I still think that that is life decisions. And I also wanna, I always wanna tell people, go look at our, blogs and our podcasts where we tell people how to negotiate these things in a custom conversation. But I have similar experiences with you that the more interesting conversations and the more challenging conversations are about the politics of the institution they're finding themselves in. And sometimes that's relational and it's always relational, but sometimes it's so sharply political. Right. And when people So I help people learn to read their context, not answer the question because I don't know the context
SPEAKER_00:most of the time. So I
SPEAKER_01:can't answer specifically, but I can tell them what to look for, how to discern, what kinds of questions to ask. But then also pushing past that too, people find themselves making ethical decisions. When the politics gets short and sharp, they move into ethical decision-making, like what are their own values? What's their own character? Can their conscious let them do whatever it is they're being pressed upon to do? Now, those are the most difficult conversations.
SPEAKER_00:That's exactly why the kind of mentoring we talked about as an unhealthy kind would not work, right? Because you have to remember that person is not you. Your mentee is not you. And there are so many factors in that mentee's life that you may not be aware of, and hence the need to ask questions.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So people are often surprised when, and I've heard you say this, I've certainly said it, you need more than one mentor,
SPEAKER_00:right?
SPEAKER_01:Even out of the model that we're espousing, you should have more than one person who's helping you navigate, say more about why that's so important.
SPEAKER_00:I think several reasons. I think first of all, mentoring is really an organic relationship, right? People change, people change, you change, I change, we grow in different ways. So one mentor that works for you at one stage would not necessarily work at another stage of your life and your career. That's one reason. Another reason is every single mentor is limited by their perspectives, by their experiences, by their way of knowing how to ask questions. So there may be questions I cannot think of that a person who have different experiences may ask. I do not even know how to ask. So all of that is just helpful to have more than one perspective, have more than one mentor. And again, it also goes back to what you talked about, that mentoring is this communal network thing. It's not me as the sage, as the one who knows everything, guiding you throughout your life. It really is a group process. And actually, in some ways, the best kind of mentoring, I should say one of the best kind of mentoring actually is kind of peer mentoring, right? You mentor me, I mentor you, because we're just bouncing ideas out of one another to help each other discern, to make the right decision as we see it. So that kind of mentoring actually is also very important. And so you cannot just depend on one person. Well, after all, don't forget, one day, every one of us will be gone. If you just have one mentor, it just would not work.
SPEAKER_01:And even into retirement, right? Are we going to ask mentors to come out of retirement if you've got that one mentor? I have also begun to, because I am getting closer and closer to retirement, moving into mentoring relationships with people, not who are my peers as in the stage of career, but younger, early career people asking them for their discernment for my work, right? So that's still, that's a kind of mentoring as well.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you really need a village of mentors because again, no mentor knows everything. That's right.
SPEAKER_01:And there's also a way that you cannot hear what is always being said. So I oftentimes look for patterns about what is being said. That
SPEAKER_00:is a very good point. If I'm
SPEAKER_01:making big decisions, right? It's not just the one lightning bolt moment. But let me kind of ask several wise people, regardless of where they are in their careers, to hear how I might maneuver.
SPEAKER_00:That is a very good point because sometimes I may resist hearing certain things. But if Lin tells me this, another person tells me this, another person tells me this, or they keep on asking the same kind of question, then I really know, wow, I really have to think about that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And maybe even do it, but at least when I would resist thinking about it before I heard it from several locations.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So
SPEAKER_01:the person seeking mentoring has to be not right-seeking, right? So people will come for advice to be mentored or to be listened to, but already knowing what they think they're going to do rather than being open to hearing what's possible right it's hard to mentor a person who is closed
SPEAKER_00:exactly i have i have experience with one person in particular who basically is not really open to what anybody has to ask anybody has to say and this is a situation actually it's quite sad because there are And I was not the only person who was working with this person, but everybody came to the same conclusion. This particular person really was not able to hear questions or entertain different possibilities. This person has the mind made up, right? So this clearly would not work in terms of mentoring relationship.
SPEAKER_01:I've had more than one time since directing the center, getting what I would call formal emails from people asking to move into a mentoring relationship. And I've always turned those down because as you said, these relationships are organic, right? You don't kind of hire a mentor. or a person that you don't bump up against in some kind of way. It's much more intimate than that. There is an intimacy in mentoring, being mentored and mentoring someone.
SPEAKER_00:I don't think there's a designated mentor. I mean, it all depends on the moment, depends on the question. The sad thing about this, now that we talked about it, the sad thing about this particular person I was thinking about, the person is no longer in the field. no longer in the academy. And it's not because I want that person to do what I think this person should do. It's that the person basically in some way, for lack of a better term, self-destruct because the inability to consider other options, other possibilities.
SPEAKER_01:So I always trust people to get where they need to go even if it's out of the academy even if they bump their way out you know what i mean like in that scenario i would say one of the reasons why the person is trying not to take the advice because they're trying to get out you know what i mean so if that person ended up out i think they were trying to figure out a way to get out
SPEAKER_00:It could be, it could be, yeah. And again, it goes back to what that person really wants, at least in rhetoric, that person came across as really want to be in the academy. So maybe you were right, maybe deep down that person wanted out and then they... work it out in a way that they are no longer there. I have not been in touch with the person now, but I hope the person is happy.
SPEAKER_01:That's right, that's right. So one of the questions I often ask in mentoring is, in different kind of ways, kind of like, what do you want? Invariably, the
SPEAKER_00:person doesn't know. Right, right. But that is okay, that is okay. I think then you just keep on raising different questions, right? but now that we talked about i want to ask you a question yes when would you know how would you know that somebody should not be your mentor have you had experience that somebody came across as really wanting to mentor you and you kind of like check no not you
SPEAKER_01:So they wanted me to be the mentee or the mentor?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. They wanted me to be the mentee.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. I've had that experience. How would you know? Because I didn't have a resonance with the person. Because I didn't feel cared for by the person. And it was somebody who I was in proximity with. I was a colleague that I knew, but it was not a colleague that I had a resonance with. But we know when we feel cared about, we know when we feel seen, we know when we feel appreciated. I didn't feel any of those things from the person who then volunteered to mentor me. To which case I said as politely as my mother has taught me to say, no, thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Have you experienced people who come across as really want to mentor you? I think that would be my signal. If someone came across too strongly, like, you know, I can mentor you. I want to mentor you. I often feel funny about that.
SPEAKER_01:I don't think I've ever said that to anybody. I've had that experience twice in my career. And both times it was said, what I heard was, I want something from you.
SPEAKER_00:And
SPEAKER_01:both times I said, no, thank you. You know what I mean? Seriously, no. Like I didn't, it wasn't, I wasn't wondering, oh, what should I do? Oh, maybe I should consider this. Oh, this is a person of stature. I trust my gut, right? I trust my own intuition. I trusted my experience of both these people. And they were not people who I trusted. So I don't need to like second guess myself or wonder or even check them out by other people, right? You know, sometimes you do that. You're not sure. Let me ask other people what they, in both of these instances, no, not for
SPEAKER_00:me. I asked that question because it went back to what we talked about earlier, right? I think when people came across like that, their understanding of mentoring often was I was the sage. I was the role model. You do what I want you to do. I kind of like take you under well i would say his wings i had experienced that once and i realized wow that from now on i watch out for people they're coming across too eagerly to mentor me i was like no i'm gonna keep some distance
SPEAKER_01:yeah yeah no it's never and i'm trying to think i don't know that i've ever said to anybody even though i thought it I don't think I've said, let me tell this person I want to mentor them. You know what I mean? I don't.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think that would be right. It's all organic. That's right. That's right. Actually, most of the time you never even use that term. mentoring right so we go back to that term you just have that relationship that's it people may come to you you talk you both enjoy it and then you know the person may go to someone else i may go to someone else it's never like would you be my mentor i mean i don't think i ever asked that question
SPEAKER_01:it's not something you put on your cv right mentor entered by vinnie lou like nobody nobody does that
SPEAKER_00:i do think it's important it does go back to what you say about the communal part, right? I think you and I are both invested in changing the academy and our discipline in some ways. And if we're really going to do that, it has to be a community. Again, one of these days I will be gone, but I want this kind of minoritized theological tradition to continue. And the only way it can continue is that we put different generations together.
SPEAKER_01:we put them together and we have them listen to one another right and like you said not the ego thing put them together so the elders can tell them how to continue the traditions but we put them together so they can talk about what's needed to build a better future
SPEAKER_00:yeah and that will be another term i think it's important to keep in the mix the communal part should be generational
SPEAKER_01:yeah i absolutely agree with that So we've started, you know, we do peer mentoring grants, have done those for years. We also have started and will continue to do intergenerational grants for the very reasons that we're talking about, that the generations can't stay siloed away from each other. They have to be in conversation with each other, in relationship with each other. And
SPEAKER_00:good mentors do a lot of things that mentees don't know about. Yeah. I have, I know people who have helped me. They, Help me in different ways I simply do not know about. That's right.
SPEAKER_01:And you're not supposed to know because we're in rooms that you don't know about.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And we can mention your names in places that you can't go.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:But that's one of the payoffs of being mentored. But that's also one of the invisible labors of being a mentor, right? That you're taking your mentees into rooms where without those relationships, they wouldn't be on the tip of your brain.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. And that is another reason why mentoring really is about a network, right? I know I have networks and you have network. You might have helped me in some way that I never even knew about. And that's the precious thing. I mean, because when you do this kind of work, you really are not looking for award, looking for recognition. You're really trying to build the other person up.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And you're trying to build the person up, but you're also trying to get the work done, right? You need certain people in certain places because the work is important, right? The work of scholarship and the scholarship of religion is important to the larger society. So we need good people in the right places to do that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it has to go to do with what I said earlier, that kind of intellectual tradition, the theological tradition that we want to build. And that has to be generational. That has to be a communal tradition. than all of them.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Dr. Bu. Come back anytime.
SPEAKER_00:It has been fun. I enjoy speaking with you always. So thank you for your time.
SPEAKER_01:To our listeners, the Wabash Center website is the place. Look on our website for information about our workshops, for information about our regranting program, as well as information about our educational resources. A special thanks to our podcast producer, Rachel Mills, and the music which frames our podcast is the original composition of Paul Myrie. Wabash Center for more than 30 years is exclusively funded by Lilly Endowment Incorporated. And we are out. How was that, Paul?
UNKNOWN:Bye.