New Essay Argues Mentoring Can Help Academics Manage Higher Ed’s Crises
Long, Z. (2026). Mentoring in academia for transformative resilience. Journal of Applied Communication Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2026.2730259
Main takeaways
Research funding is being cut, academic freedom is under pressure, and faculty are exhausted. Ziyu Long, an organizational communication scholar at Colorado State University, argues that in this climate mentoring must do more than move people toward degrees and tenure (Long, 2026). In a discussion essay in the Journal of Applied Communication Research, she contends that the dominant model, in which a senior person guides a junior one, oversimplifies a relational process, strips it of politics, and hides its capacity for change.
Long finds four faults with the traditional frame of academic mentoring. It reduces mentoring to a career function. It locks mentoring into formal, long-term pairs. It assumes any mentoring beats none, which ignores a “dark side” of gatekeeping and silencing. And it obscures inequities in who receives mentoring and who performs the often unrewarded labor of providing it.
In its place, she offers a communicative definition. Mentoring is built through everyday choices, interactions, and institutional structures, all shaped by intersectional power relations. She frames mentoring as a site for “transformative resilience,” meaning collective, forward-looking action aimed at structural change rather than a return to normal.
Commentary
In a crisis, mentoring should be treated as shared infrastructure, not a private arrangement between two people. The essay is a conversation starter, and it draws heavily on Long’s prior research and her own peer collective. Long (2026) argues that resilience that depends on individuals enduring alone is fragile.
Implications for mentoring
Long proposes three practices:
(1) Care and justice: mentoring should rest on ethics of care and justice, including advocacy for mentees facing precarity.
(2) Episodic and networked forms: examples include hallway exchanges, a sensemaking paragraph in a weekly email after a budget cut, and constellations of diverse mentors. She recommends a simple mapping exercise to find mentoring potential in routine communication.
(3) Co-mentoring circles: these can form locally and across institutions, with peers setting shared agendas and turning mutual support into collaborative action.
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