In a recent survey completed by 84 graduates of rhetoric and composition PhD programs at various phases of their career, a majority of respondents reported that their graduate programs provided excellent guidance when it came to teaching but insufficient guidance toward scholarly publication. An analysis of survey responses suggests that scholarly publication is troublesome because it marks the transition from student to scholar and because prior knowledge of “school genres” can impede learning of scholarly genres. Furthermore, the liminality novice scholars experience in transitioning from student to scholar evokes anxiety and feelings of impostor syndrome for many. This suggests that mentorship should help emerging scholars develop strategies for recontextualizing genre knowledge in response to diverse rhetorical situations in order to navigate the emotional strain that accompanies the recontextualization process in high-stakes situations.

In 1964, the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a predominantly Black civil rights organization, recruited hundreds of volunteers, mostly white college students, to work with them in Mississippi for the summer with two goals in mind. First, they aimed to use the volunteers’ social connections in order to garner federal support for their work in Mississippi. Second, they aimed to collaborate across racial lines while maintaining Black leadership. While they worked toward both goals, they only achieved the first, which resulted in short-term gains and long-term damage.