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  • On Mentoring Future Faculty of Color
  • Melissa Phruksachart (bio)

During a dissertation group meeting, my advisor told us frankly, "This institution, the academy, is not meant to support life." Scholars such as Roderick Ferguson, Lauren Berlant, Marc Bousquet, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira have echoed this sentiment in recent years. From the exploitation that drives the adjunct system, to the various forms of debt carried by students and faculty as a result of living and working within the university, to the stress-based illnesses that disproportionately affect minoritized subjects in the academy, the "life of the mind" often vampirizes, rather than vivifies, the spiritual, emotional, and material well-being of its subjects.1 Yet my advisor told us this not to dissuade us from academia, nor even necessarily to bolster us for the work that lay ahead, but rather to give us room to maneuver. She encouraged us to ask: in light of these non–life-sustaining conditions, what would it take, and what would it look like, for minoritized subjects like women and queers of color to flourish in the academy?

This question was in constant play during my time as a student in the PhD program in English at the City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY) from 2009 to 2016. In this article, I write to reflect on my experiences as an Asian/American female graduate student and co-organizer of the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color (MFFC) project, a social and intellectual formation that emerged out of discussions between women and queer of color students, faculty, and their allies. Broadly put, the project was a community of graduate students and faculty committed to diversifying the professoriate through mentorship while remaining attentive to mentoring's limitations. MFFC created a scholarly community by launching a structured lunch and lecture series alongside a number of events, meetings, and workshops. These spaces offered students of color platforms to share, circulate, and strengthen their work and their ability to articulate its importance. For scholars whose work is informed by interdisciplinary fields like black studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and decolonial thought, part of intellectual life is the constant struggle for legitimacy and institutional access. Minoritized graduate students understand all too well that [End Page 117] their topics, modes of analysis, physical appearance, or personal experiences can a priori prevent their work from being taken seriously. Thus, we recognized that a crucial aspect of mentoring should be the creation of opportunities for developing and disseminating student work. The MFFC initiative aimed to create space and time for us to share our work and to form an interdisciplinary intellectual community as well as a support system of inter-generational colleagues. During an early stage in our careers, when many graduate students can get stuck, this helped us to see the breadth of academic life outside of one's own institution.

In this article, I briefly review some different ways of thinking about graduate student mentorship before explaining the context for the genesis of MFFC, its major initiatives, the problems it faced, and how it resolved those problems. I examine the group's institutional legibility against higher educational rubrics of "diversity" and "professionalization," and I distinguish between the particulars of our institution and the broader lessons that can be extrapolated. In closing, I consider the danger and value of proliferating fantasies of the good academic life for minoritized subjects. I hope that sharing our experiment will support thinking and action around the collective strategies that student-scholar-teachers can develop to forge a hospitable place for minoritized subjects in the academy. In particular, I want to stress the importance of creating and insisting upon spaces for vitality—or more specifically, conviviality—in an environment that enervates. By intentionally fostering community, life can be found in the academy outside the curriculum vitae.

Existing and Not-Yet-Existing Mentoring Models

In her essay "On (Not) Mentoring," Kandice Chuh—the advisor to whom I refer at the beginning of this essay, and whose further role I will address momentarily—considers the weakness of what Lauren Berlant termed the "charismatic model" of mentoring. In the profession's longstanding master-apprentice model...

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