All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

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students can access valuable information
about classes, academic policies and learning
resources of all kinds.
While I continue to work with new and
existing students, I know I will continue to
learn more, as each student brings a new
opportunity and a new perspective. With
that in mind, I wonder … where will my
mentoring career grow from here
Note
Thanks to Diana Hawkins for her help in
editing this document.
Suspending our Suspicions
A quote from European historian Tony Judt that was included in All About
Mentoring #38 (inside front cover) contained a quite awful error. Judt’s words
(from his 2010, Ill Fares the Land) should have been:
“All collective undertakings require trust. From the games that children
play to complex social institutions, humans cannot work together unless they
suspend their suspicion of one another. One person holds the rope, another
jumps. One person steadies the ladder, another climbs. Why In part because
we hope for reciprocity, but in part from what is clearly a natural propensity
to work in cooperation to collective advantage” (63).
Judt, the Remarque Professor in European Studies at NYU, died of A.L.S.
(Lou Gehrig’s disease) in August 2010 at the age of 62. His final volume,
The Memory Chalet (2010) contains the following:
“Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I
remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself,
I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just
the means by which we live together but part of what living together means.
The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own
right – and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words
fall into disrepair, what will substitute They are all we have” (154).
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011