This inquiry uses Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine mentoring policy discourse in Vietnamese higher education. It employs Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis to explore the State’s and university’s documents. The findings point out that the State aspires to uphold its “gaze” by privileging the institution’s policy document as a means of regulating the academics and polarizes the mentors and mentees along the power continuum. A range of linguistic strategies is employed to establish the institution’s power and the State’s control has been discursively consolidated. The mentoring policy seems to have a range of flaws but the participants’ voices are not included in the discourse and they are not given opportunities to construct an alternative discourse around their positionality. This suggests that the mentoring policy seeks to frame and regulate the academics but not necessarily to optimise their abilities. The policy is therefore unlikely to create active subjects and mentoring as governmentality in this case may not deliver its productive function.