Question: I'm untenured, my department chair is doing wrong things, the dean is supporting the wrong things, my colleagues have low intellectual standards, the students are undisciplined and unworthy, the town is a dump, I'm being nagged to publish, my spouse will not be moved, my children are screaming for more time with me, my aging and foul-tempered parents are about to move into our minuscule apartment, and I'd really rather be in New York. Am I being uniquely screwed?
Answer: Well, no — and Ms. Mentor feels sure that her readers are having wildly varied reactions to your epistle, among them:
-
How did s/he know all that about me? (Or did I perhaps write that letter myself, and forgot? I haven't been sleeping well lately, and I'm really stressed ...)
-
Hmm. I match 50 percent of the description. What does my score mean? Do I pass?
-
What a whiner.
At this point Ms. Mentor might perhaps say something about The Human Condition, about how modern anomie dulls the senses and destroys our natural empathetic responses to our fellow suffering creatures in this vale of tears.
Or she might observe that whining — epistolary therapy — is good. She likes this missive as a summary of letters she has received in her first three years as a Chronicle columnist (yes, dear ones, she began in August 1998). In her column and in her tome (noted below), she has tried to persuade an unbelieving world that academics do suffer just as regular human beings do. But higher educators also have the ability to verbalize their suffering in colorful and sometimes overwrought ways.
Ms. Mentor gets some doozies.
She also gets repeats -- questions that she, in her perfect wisdom, has already answered (sigh). See, for instance, her columns on "Are Academics Real People?" and "The Caregiver and the Critic" along with "Whose Career Should Be No. 2?" and "What to Do When You've Been Exiled to the Provinces." Ms. Mentor believes that academics, of all people, really should check indexes and do their homework.
As for your letter, Ms. Mentor prefers not to address such knotty personal problems as demanding children, stonewalling spouses, and grumpy parents. But she notes that most great creative people have had unhappy families, and so you may be raising a genius. Franz Kafka was both neglected and browbeaten as a child; Edith Wharton had a neurotic husband; Socrates had a nagging wife. Karl Marx had a ne'er-do-well son-in-law, and Groucho Marx had some mighty peculiar brothers.
As for your academic woes: Deans, chairs, colleagues, and students all have the capacity to be wicked, stupid, unworthy, and undisciplined. So do you. So, even, does Ms. Mentor. Some seem to embrace every opportunity to belittle, betray, or bedevil — but often what appears to be malice or malingering is simply ignorance or incompetence, or fear of looking like a fool.
Indeed, the fear of public humiliation may be the biggest spur in academia, for successful academicians are those who have somehow endured and even triumphed over some 20 years of potential public embarrassment. They've risked the scorn of their peers in physical-education classes, and they've survived one of the most terrifying of all public ordeals: being a teacher.
Which brings Ms. Mentor to one more point in your screed: "I'm being nagged to publish." In other words, you're once again being assigned to risk public humiliation, and you are resisting. Probably you are saying that you don't have time. Privately you're thinking that you can't handle any more rejection. This time, you think, they really will discover you're a fraud.
Yet the search for original bits of knowledge is, or should be, the reason you went into academia in the first place. It is one of the few professions where you are truly paid to think, and where your theoretical speculations will actually be heard (and not just by students worried about passing a test). In short, Ms. Mentor believes you will be more contented if you have an independent intellectual life, a pursuit of knowledge that does not depend on the favor of those you don't respect. Research gives you back the excitement of the mind, and you owe it to the world to share what you've learned.
What if Ms. Mentor had declined to publish her unique wisdom? Think how your life would be impoverished.
Question: Will you help me write my paper on underachieving students, by giving me a list of all the sources I need?
Answer: No.
SAGE READERS: Ms. Mentor's mailbox for July was full of distinctive morsels, including an advertisement offering her a penis enlargement. That is not needed.
Ms. Mentor received especially interesting answers to the question: "How do deans think?" Current and recovering deans described themselves as paragons of fairness, looking at "big pictures" and carving up "budget pies." Some deans were supremely self-congratulatory, while others saw themselves as middle-management martyrs. No one commented on the old unwritten rule -- is it still true? -- that deans must be tall.
Ms. Mentor invites further comment, but exhorts her correspondents not to emulate the reader who wrote on "how do dean's think." Ms. Mentor does not know whether to froth or faint. Never, never, never use an apostrophe for a plural.
Other correspondents rose to the mighty question about whether "diaconal" is an appropriate and gussied-up version of "deanly." All, including ministers and classical scholars, agree that the correct form is "decanal," and that "diaconal" refers to deacons. Perhaps the confusion comes about, wrote one wistful current dean, because a few people, in their heart of hearts, do know that the deanship is "somehow sacred."
Ms. Mentor appreciates all informative speculations, and as always, welcomes gristly problems to gnaw on, but rarely answers individual letters. In future columns, she may want to look at academic confidentiality and who benefits and suffers from it, and she invites correspondence on that subject. No names or identifying details appear in her column, for she is the soul of confidentiality.
