Who monitors the mentors?

In a global sense it is not difficult to agree that anyone wo contributes to the growth and development be it somatic, intellectual, educational or any other form is a mentor. There is no argument that the parents, teachers, coaches, special skill instructors and other similarly engaged individuals can collectively be viewed as mentors They probably instill more important formative traits than any designated mentors, in an individual’s mature life. No intention to praise or criticize the name selection for these early mentors, even though other authors may find this a critical distinction (1). There are several recent articles, elaborating on various levels and/or environments of the formal mentoring processes in science, particularly in biomedical arena (2), similarly (3) offering a novel model of mentoring in biomedical sciences, arriving to concepts of viewing certain metrics, as well as the environmental dynamics of the mentoring process. It is worth mentioning that the current developmental sociologists view the role of family, namely the early life mentoring by the parents and grandparents, as having a critically important value. Thus for the purpose of this editorial I will define mentors as individuals who prepare those selected or assigned to them to grow, get better and ultimately excel above and beyond their mentors’ knowledge, skills and ability in a particular area or field. A failure of existence of such a system may be paramount to no progress, perhaps stagnation and potentially even regression in a particular field. In fact, this writer is on a record for stating that a lack of mentors, specifically in the field of orthodontics, inevitably would lead to a crisis in orthodontic education and leadership (4). In my many years of teaching and acting as an educational administrator, I have never met, or even heard of a person whose job title was “mentor”. Instead, the various mentoring functions are typically taken by, or given to the “chiefs” – Department Heads, Directors, Deans and similar administratively titled individuals. In some, but not many, job descriptions of these chiefs the task of mentoring members of their team is listed, however the specific tasks of doing this routinely and in a given time frame, are not included. If this task was given, it would be logical to also find the specific criteria how successes of performing in this assignProfessor and Director of Orthodontics (retired) New York University College of Dentistry New York, US