Beyond the mentor: university staff as the invisible infrastructure of undergraduate research

Undergraduate research is widely promoted as a mark of educational quality, and it is usually pictured as a partnership between a student and a faculty mentor. This Point of Departure argues that student research rests on more than that relationship, and that accounts of how it is produced and sustained can widen to reflect this. Drawing on scholarship about invisible work and third space professionals, and on the author’s experience in research administration at a public research university in the Midwestern United States, the article treats professional staff as infrastructure for student research. Because this infrastructure goes uncounted, institutions may underestimate where research teaching happens and what it costs to sustain. The consequences for continuity, equity, and capacity building tend to surface only when staff positions are cut or reorganized. The article asks institutional leaders and academic developers to plan and fund undergraduate research as work distributed across the institution.