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The so‐called Denver connection should be today’s shining example of how to achieve health care quality and safety improvement through lasting evidence‐based collaborations led by health professionals. Instead, this 30 year old experiment is all but forgotten and the story of its demise is a tale of destructive corporate growth. Unfortunately, it bears prescient similarity to problems in health care restructuring today. We should question whether today’s business models, management performance, and accreditation mandates have set the right stage before we venture forth to act again. Unless we ensure a better environment in which to operate, today’s “new” approaches for improving quality and safety may be doomed to the same sad fate.

At my retirement luncheon (July 2004), a colleague described the effect of my photography in a way that has special resonance for a discussion of campus diversity. I had recently installed three photo composites in UCLA's Ashe Student Health Center. These are collections of about 50 photographs each, presented in the form of the I Ching hexagrams for creativity, inner truthfulness, and community. Ronni Sanlo, director of UCLA's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Campus Resource Center, said that at a meeting of the Queer Alliance, students talked about seeing my new work in the Ashe Center. With my photos in place, they now feel welcome there. This response explains why the campus environment needs steady attention, so that the people of a college or university can recognize it as their own. Ronni's next words emphasize this need. Pointing to the bare walls of the residential commons building where we were having lunch, she said, “Look at these walls. Who's welcome here?”

Hugh Africa returned to South Africa in July 1994 after an absence of 30 years. His deep involvement at all levels of education – from basic to university – covers almost four decades. After obtaining the B.A. and B.A. (Hons) degrees from the University of Natal, he completed the M.A. degree at the University of Leeds and received his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. He also holds a Natal Teacher's Diploma.

Hugh Africa, Council on Higher Education (South Africa)

Innovation within a bureaucratic University requires broad collaboration from all agents – those internal as well as external – to promote institutional goals for positive outcomes in novel yet compelling ways. As suggested by the preceding set of chapters, the environment, particularly the cultural values in higher education institutions, can either facilitate change outcomes to support or limit diversity efforts. The same momentum that compels agents within higher education to adopt or adjust their cultural values, also contributes to discourse within the University about intertwined goals related to curriculum, academic programs and other endeavors. Thus, postsecondary institutions with genuine goals to promote diversity will have these goals reflected in their activities and at core layers of the organization to influence institutional plans and actions.

W.E.B. Du Bois proclaimed the colorline as the problem of the 20th century; in similar fashion, the problem of the 21st century could be characterized as the “wealth divide” or more clearly, the challenge of extreme economic disparity alongside broad socio-cultural diversity. Women-of-color scholars have used various concepts such as “the matrix of domination” (King, 1988), “intersectionality” (Collins, 1991), “borderlands” (Anzaldúa, 1987) and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 1995) to demonstrate that the “problems of the 21st century” are related to rapidly expanding diversity alongside stubbornly persistent economic inequities across race, ethnicity, gender, class, language, citizenship and nation. Extensive technological, economic, political and social changes, along with immigration, have coalesced to produce a global community of great diversity and interpenetration. Unfortunately, this global community continues to be fractured by extreme disparities in wealth, divided into “have” and “have-not” societies (Chua, 2003).

The purpose of this paper is to explore mentoring as a dialogic practice in relation to three themes: identity, fear of being judged and respect. It develops Bokenko and Gantt’s (2000) concept of dialogic mentoring to propose a new theorisation of mentoring as a relational, embodied, spatial, affective and ethical practice.

The paper reports on a mentoring project that took place in a UK University which was seeking to enhance its research culture. This project used an innovative methodological approach in which mentor and mentee wrote and shared diary entries as means of building more effective and constructive mentoring experiences, and as a vehicle for reflexively analysing the mentoring process.

The project outcomes were: first, a deepened appreciation and reflexive evaluation of the role played by diaries and writing in the enactment of dialogic mentoring; second, the development of a theoretical framework to enhance understanding of dialogic mentoring and third, the generation of a dialogic mentoring model encompassing multiple dimensions of the process.

The paper provides insights to support methodological innovation in mentoring practice; it links mentoring practice with theory development to enhance mentor and mentee collaboration and reflexivity; it offers an example of good mentoring practice that could be scaled up within educational institutions wishing to enhance their research culture.

The paper offers, first, a reflexive account of a methodologically innovative mentoring practice to enhance mentoring; and second, it proposes a new theorisation and model of dialogic mentoring practices.