Mentoring members of minorities: Sponsorship and “the gift”

This article examines academic mentoring and the need to establish a viable sponsorship program for minority graduate students. Accordingly we consider the nature of mentoring as represented in the literature and examine several of the problems facing minority academics who already have entered the field but have not been accepted as full members of the “academic guild.” Finally, in an effort to contrast mentorship with sponsorship, we propose a four-stage model for true mentoring by applying Marcel Mauss's concept of “the gift.”