Question: I'm a young assistant professor on the tenure track who belongs to an unpopular religious minority, hardly represented at all in the city where I work. There's no real community I can worship with. Dinner parties, etc., tend to be an embarrassment, with colleagues tacitly (or not so tacitly) assuming we all share the same values and world view. My social life consists of gripe sessions with a handful of like-minded graduate students from various departments (which I know is probably unhealthy).
I'm considering leaving my job—a dream job in most other ways—and moving someplace where I can find a like-minded community and feel like a whole person again. Anyone else out there with a similar problem?
Answer: Ms. Mentor yearns to know which religious minority you're referring to. Muslims, Mormons, Mennonites? Jehovah's Witnesses? Christian Scientists? Bahai? Wicca? Scientology?
Your letter is full of mysteries.
Ms. Mentor wonders how you were hired at a college where you're so unlike anyone else. Many institutions with a particular vision hire only "their own"—but yours evidently doesn't discriminate. Maybe you were hired for your research potential? Being an outsider will give you gobs of time to do the research for a job elsewhere, if you wish.
And, yes, academics are chronically critical of the places, the people, and the folkways where they land. During the first years on a job, fledglings are also too exhausted to embrace what's different about a new home. The natives seem perplexing and peculiar. "I've been exiled to the provinces" and "The locals don't understand me" could be perennial hits, if someone would write the tunes.
YouTube awaits.
But you don't seem to be a town crank, and you do have a small community of supporters. If no one harangues you to follow their path to salvation, and if your religion doesn't involve proselytizing, Ms. Mentor is unclear about the sources of your distress. Religion is usually a private matter; the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, advises pious folk not to pray loudly and ostentatiously, but to go into a private room, shut the door, and worship their gods in secret (Matthew 6:6).
If you're troubled by the presence of nonbelievers, Ms. Mentor can report that atheists and agnostics are not the majority in academe. Nor are "born-again" Christians, whose ranks are swelling. Atheists and agnostics are most common at elite institutions, and in psychology, biology, and mechanical engineering. The most god-believing professors are in accounting, elementary education, and finance (see the study by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, "How Religious are America's College and University Professors?").
What "values and world view" are your colleagues assuming you share? Are you the lone conservative surrounded by left-leaning academics? Are they vegetarians or vegans? Do they recycle? How many are pacifists? How many have ever smoked anything? Ms. Mentor hereby invites her readers to tell her what's "normal" in the lifestyles of professors they know. Are these common topics at social gatherings?
She suspects everyone is bored to death by people who declaim, as if it's a transcendent new discovery: "I support sustainability" or "I think moderation and balance are very important for the health and stability of our nation."
Ms. Mentor has trouble containing herself through such blather.
If it's professorial behavior that irks you, Ms. Mentor suggests you keep notes for an academic novel. Everyone's got at least one rumbling and fermenting.
If you're a teetotaler, boozer misbehavior always leads to good satire. Just sip your ginger ale, and if someone nags you ("C'mon, have a drink already!"), Ms. Mentor gives you permission to use a little white lie ("I have an allergy"). She supposes you could say, "Let me tell you about my drunken Uncle Henry and his hilariously sad demise," but that may be more information than an ordinary tenured partygoer wants to hear.
You can always go into your private room and read Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with its alcoholic academic party games: "Get the Guests" and "Humiliate the Host" and "Hump the Hostess."
Ms. Mentor sometimes wonders if there is an Academic Haven Where All Souls Fit In. Harvard, for instance, is far more welcoming to minorities than in the days when it was a Unitarian hotbed for elite white males. But it's still for a cultural and economic elite. If you're rich but a Scientologist, Harvard is probably not the place for you.
Is there a place for you?
One clue: You like to hang out with graduate students, but feel awkward at faculty dinner parties. Are you just a lot younger than most of your colleagues? If you're in the humanities, your fellow faculty members are probably old enough to be your parents, maybe even your grandparents (the average tenured professor nowadays is close to 60 years old). Your contemporaries are, most likely, graduate students and an occasional adjunct. They're more apt to share what excites you: arcane intellectual subjects, Wall Street protests.
At "dinner parties, etc.," Ms. Mentor wonders if you just don't like the food (pork?) or the conversational topics (the Red Sox? lawn care?). If you're the one who rudely mentions dieting or calories, stop. If your colleagues are reminiscing about the 1960s, or even the 1980s, they're excluding you—which is indeed rude. If they think you have, or should have, a position on political events that happened before you were born, you can, of course, assure them that you're glad slavery is over and that women have the right to vote.
If they're doing the dreaded organ recital that people of a certain age sometimes fall into ("let me tell you about my kidney stones"), smile politely and listen. You may need that information later.
Be pleasant unless deeply provoked. If you wear distinctive dress that identifies you as a religious minority, you no doubt have pithy and polite answers ("I cover my head because ..."). It's not up to you to educate the ignorant or the clueless, as members of minority groups too often are forced to do ("Why do your people insist on wearing sagging pants?"). That's when you sidle away.
You do deserve a respite, with people who are like you. But Ms. Mentor wonders if it's more a matter of age, career stage, or place—and not really religion. Like most academics, you are probably an oddball in some way. You're much smarter than the average bear.
You can try to find a job elsewhere, or just start considering yourself a lifelong learner. Whenever you teach, you're always learning. Right now, your students are closer to your age, though more distant intellectually (if you can even get them to look up from their texting). But if you stay at the same job, you'll eventually be hiring new faculty members—and you can bring in the colleagues you want.
And at least some of them will think you're old, out of touch, and totally weird.
Question: Does every generation of academics think that the younger generation is going to hell in a handbasket, or is it just mine?
Answer: Yes.
Sage readers: Ms. Mentor invites queries, theories, stories, and facts about "normal" or "typical" faculty members. She knows they're older, more female, and more ethnically diverse than they were a generation ago—but what else is different? So what else is new?
Ms. Mentor regrets that she can rarely answer letters personally, and never speedily. All letters are confidential, and identifying details are always masked. No one will know whether you're a fogey, a newbie, or some kind of intermediate species not yet named.
(c) Emily Toth. All rights reserved
