According to the largest representative study of college graduates in U.S. history, mentoring is the single most important ingredient of an education. A graduate who strongly agrees they had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams more than doubles their odds of thriving in their wellbeing and being engaged in their work. Yet only 22% of graduates had such a mentoring relationship. Clearly, mentoring is preciously valuable, but it doesn’t need to be preciously rare.
There’s likely no one on the planet who has provided a better example of mentorship than Joel Fleishman. I’m a mentee of Joel’s. I have been for more than 25 years. I’m not alone. There are dozens, hundreds and – I might venture – thousands who say the same. We lost Joel on September 30th – at the age of 90. He is the embodiment of a life well lived. And I’ll continue to refer to him in the present tense because his impact, wisdom and mentoring legacy are so great that he will live on in so many ways and through so many people.
As other tributes to Joel have already noted, he had a career worthy of several lifetime achievement awards: holder of four degrees, book author, founding director of the public policy program at Duke, head of Duke’s first major capital campaign, foundation president, wine connoisseur and professor. He taught for more than 50 years at Duke. And it was in this context that I first met him when I was a junior, majoring in public policy. I took his class on non-profit law and philanthropy – which involved writing a paper every single week.
He was a stickler for teaching proper grammar. And each week he would start his class by reading and critiquing student papers. The ones with the most red-ink on them (in those days he was grading by hand using a red-ink pen) were always at the top of his pile. Mine graced the top of it most weeks. And were it not for Joel’s insistence on turning students into strong writers, you certainly wouldn’t be reading this piece by me today. He was still correcting grammar in my emails to him decades later. That was Joel. Always teaching, always mentoring.
During my senior year of college, I asked him if he would be my mentor. Had I truly understood the full extent of Joel’s mentee network at the time, I surely would have shied away from making such an ask. In the years since I’ve graduated (more than 25 now) I have met countless mentees of Joel’s. He somehow found a way to make each one of us feel special. Just as he did the more than 2,500 friends he sent handwritten holiday cards to each year.
Joel is legendary for how he cultivated relationships. He never let a meal go by without making it an opportunity to connect with people – individually, in small groups and large. He was constantly connecting those he met to others he knew. And he had an uncanny knack for connecting people who then went on to do famous and important work together (in business, philanthropy, etc.) or to cultivate their own precious relationship with one another.
Joel was a staple in my life. He constantly sent me books to read. He invited me to come back to Duke to speak with his classes. We had dinners together in Durham, Chapel Hill, Nags Head, Washington DC, Boston, New York City and Napa Valley. He even conducted my wedding ceremony.
The penultimate moment in our mentor/mentee relationship happened on September 9th, 2014. I awoke to an early morning email from Joel who was the very first person to congratulate me for being quoted in a New York Times op-ed by Thomas Friedman entitled “It Takes A Mentor.” The article covered the findings from a Gallup study I led at the time – the one referenced in my opening sentence. In simple, yet profound terms, the study found the “secret sauce” of college is mentoring. And how remarkably fitting that my mentor was the first one to congratulate me that morning.
I saw Joel last on September 4th – just three days before the fall that led him to be hospitalized. He had invited me to deliver the lecture for the seminar series he was still organizing through Duke’s Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society. Following the seminar, he hosted a dinner at the Washington Duke Inn for special guests, friends, faculty and donors. As we sat down for dinner, he insisted that his home health aid join us at the table. He then asked about his driver – who was on hand in the parking lot waiting for him. And he insisted that she, too, be invited to join us for dinner. That was Joel. Everyone was and is welcome at his table.
The last moment I saw Joel was when I walked him out to his car following the dinner that night. As the bell boy opened the door to the hotel entrance, Joel turned to me and said “Brandon, you have to meet another Brandon.” And he introduced me to the bell boy – who he clearly knew well enough to articulate why we ought to meet. That tiny moment left me in awe. It sums up all that is great about Joel. A man who counts billionaires and heads of state as close friends saw fit to befriend a young staffer at a hotel and to be sure to connect us. No doubt, he was a mentor to that young man.
Friedman and the title of his op-ed is correct. It takes a mentor to get the most out of an education. We lost a mentor in Joel – a super mentor, indeed. We could use a million more. His example is worth emulating and his legacy is one worth building upon. When a mentor is lost its incumbent upon us to fill the void and pay it forward many times over.
I often wonder what schools or colleges full of mentors might look or feel like. Imagine if we shifted the scales on mentoring from a mere 2-out-of-10 students experiencing it to 8-out-of-10. The better question is what would the world look or feel like if that happened? I don’t think it’s a mystery. A mentor-rich world would be full of human thriving.