Progress on Both Sides: Wayne C. Booth as Mentor and the Pedagogy of Transformative Engagement
Rent from DeepDyveWayne C. Booth was my adviser and mentor for more than thirty years, from my first days in graduate school to the first year of my deanship. That mentoring never failed to be thoughtful, exact, caring, and candid. For this essay I focus on personal remembrances of three such moments to illustrate how aspects of his advising and mentoring were informed by principles of his "rhetorology" and participated in his larger pedagogy. Obviously such an approach can portray only a reductively small sample of his generosity. But these moments illustrate how concepts distinctive of his thinking were in fact lived out in the practice of his mentoring. Moreover, they also begin to show how concepts of Booth's rhetorology provide a foundation for advising and mentoring relations. For Booth, advising and mentoring amounted to a mode of teaching, with great capacities for transformation. By illustrating a few moments of his work with me, I mean to suggest ways in which Booth's rhetorological theory and pedagogy hold promise for engagements in advising that are truly transformative.
Graduate School "For the Love of It"
I remember the first words Booth said to me: "So tell me, what do you really enjoy reading?"1 It was my first trip to his impressive Gothic tower office. [End Page 99] Booth rose from his desk, the picture of a professor: his silver mane in a distinctive crest, stark black glasses contrasting, a salt-and-pepper beard creased with a toothy smile, saying hello in a reverberant bass voice. In turtleneck and tweed jacket, he seemed the consummate professor, exactly what I had matriculated to graduate school in order to become. But what would follow this first impression left me more than a little annoyed.
As an entering student in the Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and the Study of Methods (I&M) in the fall term of 1974, this was my first advising meeting, which to me surely meant a discussion of the requirements of that interdisciplinary program and some attempt to schedule courses for at least my first term in graduate school, if not the whole year. Booth was the relatively new director of the graduate program in I&M, which was known even in the days before Robert Pirsig published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) for chewing graduate students up without ever spitting them out degree in hand.2 But I was going to be different, and this man was going to help me, whether he liked it or not.
When I was deciding among graduate programs the spring before, I had met with another professor in the program—its director for that quarter, philosopher Charles Wegener. I had asked him for a few names of recent graduates so that I could investigate what their work was like. Wegener, who went on to be a wry and generous supporter throughout my graduate studies, had given a curious reply: he "phumphered"—his own term for when writers, caught in an intellectual corner, were less than forthcoming in response. In fact, I learned, very few people had actually graduated with any kind of a degree from I&M, and many of those had taken a decade or more. Possibly this was because its interdisciplinary reach asked so much of graduate students, even those who came with an MA in hand, as I had not. Allegedly it stemmed largely from the intransigence of the previous program director, Richard McKeon, now, perhaps mercifully for me, retired. I was a little shaken by Wegener's response, though in the end not enough to turn Chicago down. But by the time fall rolled around and I finally would have my meeting with the famous Booth, I was paying attention to the numbers, and I knew they were grim. I was prepared to tell my new adviser that my aim...
