In memory of my mentors, who were without peer: Howard T. Young, Andrew P. Debicki, and E. Inman Fox

When athena wished to advise telemachus on his quest for his long-absent father, odysseus, she slipped into the guise of mentor, the tutor in whose care Odysseus had left his son and household. Respected, wise, war-savvy Athena preferred to counsel her mentee or protégé in the form of a human male rather than as a female goddess. The Greek story suggests the matters of hierarchy, selection, approach, relationships, and gender addressed in the proliferating literature on workplace mentoring. Athena's maneuvers behind the scenes also remind us that, compared with teaching, doing research, writing, advising, serving on local and national committees, editing, applying for grants, and evaluating colleagues and manuscripts, mentoring is perhaps the least recognized and least rewarded aspect of our academic work. The related but substantially different work of advising has achieved a more formal place in academic reviews. Although journals, books, and articles devoted to mentoring attempt to codify the practice and assign it a formal place in the constellation of our working lives, mentoring continues to be elusive, difficult to define, and unevenly carried out. I argue here that this ragged, catch-as-catch-can situation is not necessarily a bad thing. Overinstitutionalization could stifle the vitality of mentoring relationships, which flourish optimally when they are spontaneous, mutual, and open-ended.

Early in my probationary period at the university of wisconsin, madison, long before my department (spanish and portuguese) began assigning mentors to junior faculty members, I found myself in a work situation that would shape my career profoundly.

Discussions about academic work often tangle with the seemingly bifurcating demands of teaching and research. occasionally, they celebrate how the two endeavors nurture each other. These professional divisions, which George Levine a decade ago called a “combat” scenario between “two nations” (9), have not been reconciled since then. Despite that persistent tension, when I shifted my professional energies to the academy after several years of community-based social work with not-for-profit organizations serving Hispanic populations, the challenges of balancing teaching and research were not my only concerns. I also wondered how I could incorporate community service into the multiple demands of academic life. Would there be time to devote to the community? Would I find academic work in an area where I might have something to contribute beyond the campus? Aside from location and time constraints, would I find a way to integrate into my faculty identity an engagement with the wider society, or would those endeavors be relegated to a separate self, dissociated from my academic world? I anticipated that extensions of my teaching and scholarship might connect with realms outside the academy. Accepting the challenge, I patiently observed my campus and surrounding community, searching for opportunities for interaction.

In 1982, a year after i was appointed director of the center for twentieth century studies at the university of wisconsin, milwaukee (I had just received tenure), I met with a program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC. “Aren't you a little young to be the director of a humanities center?” he asked. Notwithstanding the inappropriateness of the question, my point is that thirty years later I'm still in the same position, albeit at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, Seattle. In a sense I haven't moved. I have consistently chosen to remain at this level in university administration, refusing the hierarchical ladder (chair, associate dean, dean, provost, president) in order to stay close to faculty and graduate student research, including my own, and relying on building networks across the campus and the country in order to have influence at my university and beyond. Two anecdotes—I think of them as short stories—illustrate why.

This listing contains names received by the membership office since the March 2012 issue. A cumulative list for the academic year 2011–12 appears at the MLA Web site (www.mla.org/in_memoriam).

I remember the devastating irony of a new york times frontpage photograph on thanksgiving day 2011 depicting a row of people who had pitched tents outside a Best Buy department store in Mesquite, Texas. Alas, the campers were not staging an Occupy Best Buy but positioning themselves at the head of Black Friday's mad rush. At any other time, the photograph would have been unremarkable, perhaps not even newsworthy. This itself shows how extensively consumerist desire is internalized in the American psyche. Black Friday (what a cynical name!) is so ingrained in American life that it occupies its own slot in society's calendar. Some years ago a person died on Black Friday, trampled in the mad storming of a Walmart palace in New Jersey. I argued then that charges should be brought against President George W. Bush for instigating a homicide, since on the day after 9/11 he had commanded the American people to respond to the catastrophe by going shopping.

The question of what occupy wall street wants has been a hard one to answer—despite or because of Adbuster's founding call for “one” “simple” and “uncomplicated” “demand.” This is partly because the Adbuster candidate, “Democracy without Corporatocracy,” was a little vague and partly because the many specific demands that followed it—from reinstating Glass-Steagall to reforming campaign finance to establishing an “Office of the Citizen”—didn't really capture the radical spirit of the movement. What emerged as most characteristic of OWS was something like a critique of the very idea of demands: we refuse to make any because we refuse to acknowledge that anyone has the authority to accede to them, or we will make only demands that cannot be met. But this strategy, not unlike the mechanism of occupation itself, has obvious limitations: going someplace just because you're not supposed to be there and asking for something only as long as you can't possibly get it doesn't look like a recipe for changing the world.