AS A RECENT ALUMNA, I look up to our many leaders on campus, awed by their accomplishments and their impact on the University. Anyone would be curious about how these leaders moved from being students themselves to careers helping current students create their own paths.

I spent my first year after graduation working as a Wake Forest Fellow in the Office of Personal & Career Development, which included the opportunity to co-author a book, “Year One: How Young Professionals (And Their Managers) Can Thrive in Their First Job After College,” with Allison McWilliams (’95), who was assigned as my mentor during the fellowship and remains one today.

I listened to campus and community leaders share their wisdom with our fellows group during a series of “lunch and learns.” My experiences that year gave me a love for mentoring stories. I could not help but feel energized to pursue my own mentoring relationships after hearing how mentors, formal and informal, work their magic.

For this issue’s focus on mentoring, I sought out more of those stories from our deans and the provost. What were their special memories of how mentors guided them? Their experiences seemed more numerous than they could recount.

“It almost takes a village of mentors,” said Dean of the School of Business Annette Ranft.

Here, in excerpts from my conversations with campus leaders, the mentoring stories illuminate a moment or a lesson — a stepping stone on a path. As I learned as a Fellow, careers are built, after all, one stepping stone at a time.

Excerpts have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Michele Gillespie

Provost and Presidential Endowed Professor of Southern History

Gillespie met Professor of History Jim Barefield when she interviewed at Wake Forest in 1999, and he became a “dear mentor” and close friend as he shared the wisdom he had collected since arriving in Winston-Salem in 1963. They talked in their Tribble Hall offices or, most often, over iced tea on the back porch of Barefield’s home near campus, discussing “ways to ignite students’ imaginations around the past in all its complexity,” Gillespie says. Barefield, who is now professor emeritus of history and a recipient of the Medallion of Merit, the University’s highest honor, was famous for teaching about the comic view and irony. “I love irony,” Gillespie says, “and I also think humor is really, really important in what you do.” Always “a teacher-scholar at heart,” Gillespie says Barefield’s lessons continue to guide her in her role as provost.

One of the things he always reminded me is (that) what happens at a university boils down to a relationship between a faculty member and a student. … And really, he will tell you, all you need, at the end of the day, is a log for the two of you to sit (on) and to talk about the ideas, answering questions together and thinking together in sort of exciting, powerful ways in a mentoring relationship. … What separates a university from all other institutions that support people is that relationship at the heart of it.

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The other thing that Jim shared with me as we talked about the challenges of juggling courses, the challenges of juggling the politics of a department or the politics of a college or the politics of a university: At the end of the day, what always carries you through is to do the work. To dig in, to learn, to study, to ask questions. … And in the very act of doing the work and being in relationship with my students and my colleagues, and seeing the good that we can do, I come through whatever these larger challenges are.

…

He has so many students who are alums who look back and know and can tell me what a transformative role he had in their lives, in their formation as full human beings who embrace humanist values and go out and make a difference in the world. … That’s what I hoped to do as a faculty member. … I want to empower all faculty to have that same kind of influence and that same kind of touch.

Jackie Krasas

Dean of the College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

As director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Lehigh University, Krasas helped organize regular gatherings of faculty members from many different fields of study to talk, often over appetizers. The idea was to create an outlet for interdisciplinary mentoring among peers in an informal environment, where Krasas has found “some of the most collectively influential mentoring” for herself. While she has had several mentors at more senior levels, Krasas emphasized the importance of mentoring among those on the same level of an organizational chart.

This informal, cross-disciplinary, multiacademic, generational approach was great because it really felt nonthreatening, an open space where the informal nature of it was really, I think, one of the reasons people just kept coming back. We felt we could raise anything with each other.

…

People would rotate in and rotate out, and it just was a very nice positive thing, even if what we were talking about was very difficult. It was just a place where people felt (like), “I’m outside of my normal setting.” We’ve got this vast repository of experiences.

And nobody has anything to gain from that conversation. … We’re here to sort of help talk you through and let you gain from our experience here or elsewhere.

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(I think about) all of those — they’re so numerous, I can’t count them — but all of those moments of popping into some-one’s office and saying, “Can I sit down and have you walk me through this?” Or having someone text me an “SOS!I need to talk through this with someone and get some advice.” … The formal programs are really important, but sometimes I think we sort of stop there. … Learning happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. So, mentoring happens everywhere.

Charles Iacovou

Dean of the School of Professional Studies and Vice Provost for Charlotte Programs

Iacovou reflected as far back as possible to think of an early moment of mentoring, and he thought of his mother and his grandmother teaching him a formative lesson that became part of his value system — a lesson that informs the way he leads the School of Professional Studies.

I landed on an early lesson that I learned from my grandmother and my mom, actually. I’m Greek; I come from Cyprus. My mom was a teacher. We lived in a part of the world where many cultures come together, and there are always dynamics when many cultures come together. There’s in-group, out-group dynamics and human biases coming into play and all of that.

And I remember early on as a kid, my grandma was sitting there, and she was teaching me that I have to treat everybody with respect. It doesn’t matter what their color is, their experiences, how tall, what their size was, it didn’t matter. And whatever I have been picking up from other kids was not going to be an acceptable set of behaviors going forward.

And that was really reinforced, very honored by my mom, always taking us to homes of people who are different from us to be respectful in sharing what we had with them, but doing it in their home, where they felt comfortable. So early on I learned the value of being inclusive, of treating people always with the same respect, no matter what their journeys may have been.

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(At the School of Professional Studies) a commitment to ensure that human dignity and respect is a core value in what we do. And I feel very privileged to be among a great team of colleagues who share that commitment. …

The School of Professional Studies offers graduate degree and non-degree programs to working professionals across a wide range of studies, from health innovation to analytics and counseling, to name a few. In October, Iacovou shared that, of the approximately 500 students at SPS, the majority are women, and more than half come from marginalized communities.

I think part of all of that is the intentional commitment that … the University has in ensuring that there’s going to be a home to a broader community of learners. They’re all working professionals — adults — so they differ in a number of ways, but this is a way of extending what we do at Wake Forest and doing it so well into a broader part of our community that surrounds us.

Annette L. Ranft

Dean of the School of Business and Professor of Strategic Management

As a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ranft was intimidated by her first seminar professor. He was Carl Zeithaml, then-interim dean of the business school and a specialist in the strategic management field — “really renowned, very thoughtful, purposeful, challenged your thinking,” Ranft says.

“I was terrified of him,” Ranft says, “absolutely terrified.” Yet, he became one of the mentors who set her on a path to deanship and someone she still calls for advice. Ranft shared the surprising moment that became a turning point for her relationship with Zeithaml and for her career.

I was with my cohort. … There were three of us that were sharing an office. We had a bookshelf (where) one of the shelves had collapsed, and everything was tumbling down. One individual in our office was just complaining about it. … The other individual in our office had taken all of her stuff off the shelf and put it in another place to work. And Carl happened to be walking down the hall when I said, “Let’s just fix the shelf.” I pulled it up and stuck the little brace back in and fixed the shelf.

Well, this imposing man that I was terrified of stuck his head in our office and said, “That’s why you’re going to be a dean, and they’re going to be scholars.”

And I was really offended by it because I was there to learn to be a teacher-scholar. And in that moment, I thought, “Oh no, that really hurts my feelings.” Well, guess what? Twenty years later, I’m a dean. …

His observation of behavior and his intentionality about saying something about it made me think about the possibility of doing something different. What were my strengths that I could bring to a scholarly community? Yes, I can do great scholarship, and I love teaching, but maybe there’s a problem-solving bone in me that could be helpful in another capacity. So that was a seed that was planted.

Ranft would ask Zeithaml to be her Ph.D. adviser; Ranft’s dissertation won a national award. “He was so kind in that moment and so touched by just the appreciation of the work that we had done together,” Ranft says.

Dr. Ebony Boulware

Dean of the School of Medicine and Chief Science Officer and Vice Chief Academic Officer of Advocate Health

While working as a professor, division chief and then a vice dean at her alma mater, Duke University School of Medicine, Boulware worked with a dean, Dr. Nancy Andrews, who she says was both a mentor and a sponsor for her. Mentors help you develop your skill set, and sponsors “identify you and say, ‘Hey, here’s an opportunity I think could be good for you.’ And they put your name out there; they get you known; they get you seen,” she says. Andrews also gave Boulware a close view of a dean’s work, which helped Boulware see a path to become a dean herself.

(Andrews) was really wonderful. She was important in helping recruit me there and supporting me. But then she also identified other leadership opportunities beyond those that I was recruited for and saw that I would have potential for these roles. And that really was critically influential to me because she kind of took me under her wing and said, “Hey, I’m going to help you identify some opportunities.” And she’s done that for a number of different people. You can see people’s careers have just really (expanded) under her mentorship and sponsorship, because that’s something that she’s devoted herself to.

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I think once I saw what a dean did, … I developed an understanding and realized I could do it. … I think seeing your mentor in action is very powerful. You can see what they’re doing, and you kind of model yourself after those people, and that’s another way that they help you. It’s not just through the advice. They’re role modeling it for you.

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Without mentorship, I wouldn’t have learned about how to get involved in research or how to study, what kind of skill set I needed, all of that — because not everything that you do in your career is prescribed. A lot of it is experience or apprenticeship. … There gets to be a point where you’ve done all the formal training, but there’s still more you need to learn to get to the path. And that’s where mentoring becomes really important.

Tim Pyatt

Dean of Z. Smith Reynolds Library

In graduate school, Pyatt studied a book called “Modern Manuscripts,” replete with worn pages and dozens of Post-It notes sticking out from the edges. It remains on Pyatt’s bookshelf. The book’s author was Ken Duckett, curator of special collections at the University of Oregon at the time and, as Pyatt says, the “guru” of the field. As luck would have it, Duckett hired Pyatt for his first job as a newly minted librarian and was, Pyatt says, “the most colorful person I ever worked for.” They had coffee together most afternoons at the Kinko’s copy center in Eugene, Oregon, which had a small outdoor cafeéand, surprisingly, “the best coffee in town.”

This was the guy who I felt like I had studied and talked about in class, and now he’s my boss. He’s a World War II veteran … kind of gruff, had a big (Army) tattoo on his arm, but just the nicest person. … (He) saw me as this blank canvas that he needed to really help fill in the gaps of my knowledge to help me progress in the field.

He was just such a generous person. We would have coffee together almost every afternoon. He was a storyteller, and he would tell me a story from something he’d done in his career. … I almost felt like those were my little master classes, having the coffees with him. I used to really look forward to that: “What am I going to learn today from Ken?”

One of the real interesting things about him was, in the ’60s, when he was curator at the Ohio Historical Society, they had part of the papers of former President Warren Harding. (There were) these love letters with (Harding’s) mistress there, and the family wanted them destroyed, and Ken refused to destroy them. … He secretly bought a microfilm camera — this is obviously before photocopiers — and microfilmed all the letters so that if they got destroyed, there would be a copy there. He sent copies to people he knew around the country so that they couldn’t get destroyed. …

The Harding family sued (Ken Duckett) for a million dollars for doing this, and … the governor fired him from his job. So here’s this guy, in his early 40s at that time with a young family. …. But American Heritage magazine took on his cause. … They basically supported him for the legal fees to get the story. …

Duckett’s quest prevailed. A compromise meant that the family agreed not to destroy the letters under the condition that the Library of Congress keep them private until 2014. Duckett died just a week before the letters became public.

I wrote up a case study about this because … Ken always talked about doing the right thing, even when it’s hard, and really taking the strong ethical stance. … So I feel like (this is) my tie back to his book now. Students are using my story about Ken in their classes.

Corey D.B. Walker (P ’25)

Dean of the School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, Director of the Program in African American Studies

In the early part of his career, Walker worked in financial services. A key mentor in steering his switch to academia was his wife, Carthene R. Bazemore-Walker (P ’25), now an associate teaching professor of chemistry at Wake Forest. “That relationship for 30 years now has been central to my intellectual identity,” Walker says. “It’s been a mentoring marriage.” And now, he says, the relationship “goes both ways” as they constantly learn from one another. Early on, though, Bazemore-Walker would give Walker feedback on his writing during graduate school, sometimes sending back his papers marked up in red pen. “She was a model for me for how to become an intellectual and how to become a scholar and a researcher and a professor,” Walker says.

Walker pointed to a pivotal moment for his career shift when his wife worked on her doctorate at the University of Virginia.

She began to introduce me to a group of graduate students and graduate-student life that I’ve just never seen and never experienced. Here are all these African American graduate students, and we go to gatherings with them, and everyone’s talking about their work and ideas. … I’m in this sort of bifurcated world. I’m going to work every day, but yet I have this rich intellectual community. … I see these folks all happy, and their freedom of just engaging the life of the mind. And so, eventually, I wanted to join them. …

And the person who gave me the courage and the support to then embark on a career in the academy was none other than Carthene Rolanda Bazemore-Walker. If I didn’t have that support, and if she didn’t build that courage in me, … I would still have kept with the safety of what I knew. I knew financial services. I knew the business world. I was successful at it. In this (academic) world, I would risk that. I would start over, and I would have to prove myself again.

Mentoring at its best facilitates a risk taking, because mentors can see something in you that you can’t see yourself. … She built that courage for me to take that step. “Yes, you can go to graduate school.” …

It just opened up a whole new world. I mean, I can’t imagine my life otherwise.

Andrew Klein

Dean of the School of Law and Professor of Law

Klein met Jerry Bepko, then chancellor of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), when he first arrived as a faculty member at Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law. Besides being law professors, they both were from Chicago and, according to Klein, “rabid Cubs fans.” Later, when Bepko returned to the law school to teach classes and Klein was dean of the law school, Bepko became Klein’s “oracle of wisdom,” always with an open door for a conversation. Bepko and Klein became especially close while co-teaching a course called “Leadership and Law” in the late 2010s. Bepko died in 2023. In a remembrance about Bepko, Klein wrote of the course: “I was as much Jerry’s student as I was an instructor.”

(Bepko) described himself as a servant leader. … Everyone uses that term today, right? You hear that term thrown around all the time. People don’t think about it.

But he did. So he was influenced by an individual named Robert Greenleaf (who wrote about servant leadership in the 1970s and founded the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership). … But when you read this stuff, and what Jerry taught me — taught the students — is that the real essence of being a servant leader is to measure your success not by what you accomplish but by what the people you lead accomplish. And that’s really what a servant leader does. So it doesn’t matter what I did. What’s cool to me is what someone that I had the opportunity to lead accomplishes. And that’s how a servant leader should view themselves.

And so that sticks with me all the time. So at the law school, you’ll ask people about me, and they’ll say I’m about the students because I’m going to view my success here by what the students do. And my staff, too. One of the things I’m really proud of is that the first two people who were my vice deans (in Indianapolis), they’re now deans in their own schools, too.