Lessons from a mentor: Navigating academic life in the contemporary South African university

Abstract

This paper offers a first-person reflective account of one mentorship relationship, between an emerging health sciences scholar and a senior biostatistician, facilitated by South Africa’s Future Professors Programme. Drawing on five lessons from the mentorship – goal-setting, publication planning, the meaning of excellence, research integrity and the ethic of care – we examine how emerging scholars are socialised into the norms of a metric-driven academy, and how a care-oriented, ubuntu-inspired mentor can open space for a more substantive understanding of scholarly work. The account is situated within debates on neoliberal and neocolonial academic culture and on mentorship in South Africa and the Global South. We do not evaluate the Future Professors Programme as a whole, but reflect on a single case within one phase of the programme. We argue that the tensions described are features of the contemporary academy more broadly, and ask what it means to become a good scholar, not merely a productive one.

Significance:

Transformation of the South African professoriate is being pursued through the same metrics that historically excluded the scholars it now seeks to develop. Drawing on one mentorship within the Future Professors Programme, this paper shows how this contradiction is transmitted in practice through goal-setting tools, publication plans and promotion criteria absorbed without being chosen. It argues that genuine transformation requires more than demographic change in the professoriate: it requires changing what scholarship is taken to be for. The paper offers implications for mentors, programme designers and the metrics used to assess transformation.