Question: I'm in my fourth year as a tenure-track assistant professor at Midlevel U., where we're expected to do some research, a bucketload of excellent teaching, and a hellacious amount of committee work. I've done it all, but "Byron," hired the same time I was, is the department's fair-haired boy.

Byron gets big raises; he got early tenure; he gets nominated for teaching awards and grants and prizes. My research record is better, and our teaching and service are about the same -- but Byron wastes a lot of time brown-nosing in full professors' offices, playing squash and tennis with them, flirting with secretaries, and schmoozing with students. I have a wife and a small child and can't waste time that way. What can I do about this unfairness?

Answer: Well, you can sigh and observe that "Life is unfair" (Jimmy Carter) or "Life is suffering" (Buddhism). Or you can hatch plots to humiliate, defenestrate, and eviscerate Byron and all the full profs to whom he toadies. Or you can use the analytical skills you've honed in 20 years of schooling to figure out how Byron does it. How can YOU get to be the department favorite?

Ms. Mentor is sure you have already known too many teachers' pets, ass-kissers, sycophants, bootlickers, fawners, and flatterers. Everyone deplores them -- but they are almost always rewarded. At "P" University, a minimally published young man in English got tenure because he generously gave out free samples of marijuana. At "S" University, a moderately published young psychology professor was tenured because everyone loved her smile and her enthusiastic "How are you?"s each day. It's rumored that law firms hire some associates for their basketball skills -- and everywhere, you get advantages for being white, for being tall, for being good-looking, and for Knowing Someone or being Related to Someone.

Ms. Mentor, in short, is revealing an inconvenient and infuriating fact -- that academia, like the rest of the world, is often not a meritocracy. Ms. Mentor would certainly prefer that it were. She would also prefer to proffer advice that is redolent of compassion ("poor dear"). But your query deserves an honest -- that is to say, a Machiavellian -- set of rules. Suppose you do set out, with the most cynical and manipulative of motives, to become the department favorite and get the goodies?

How do you get to be the golden boy?

To be the golden girl is sometimes easier -- and Ms. Mentor does not mean sleeping one's way up. (As the columnist Ellen Goodman long ago observed: If that's how women get to the top, how come so few of us are there?) Still, women are more able to seem sincere when they look deeply into a man's eyes, fix him with that rapt Nancy Reagan gaze, and ask, "And what did YOU think? And what did YOU do?"

The female flatterer dishes out what everyone craves and never gets enough of: undivided attention. Few academics have that kind of social savoir-faire, and most are too twitchy -- so that a woman who can look directly into others' eyes, as if hanging on their words, will be a golden girl forever. She will be said to have a fine mind; her popularity will soar; her tenure will be assured.

But what about men? How can you, Ms. Mentor's male correspondent, possibly make it as a geisha?

You must (Ms. Mentor says with all the tact at her disposal) -- suck up more subtly. A young man must position himself as a favorite son, and never as an oedipal rival. The key word is INGRATIATE.

When he plays tennis with older colleagues, the would-be favorite must praise their skill (and let them win). He must ask advice. He must be respectful, but not childlike: He will call his 60-year-old mentor "Phil," not "Dr. Jones," because using a title will make Phil Jones feel uncomfortably old. The would-be favorite should mention his own humble accomplishments, praise lavishly the achievements of the senior faculty, and make himself pleasant, diligent, and lively.

Depending on his drive, or his degree of cynicism, the would-be favorite may also enlist his wife to be charming to the senior professors, to gaze at them at department parties, to hang on their words, and to befriend their wives. A child can be an even more effective prop, for everyone dotes on the ostentatious father who trundles the baby around campus, displaying his sensitive, nurturing side. (One of the contributors to Constance Coiner and Diana Hume George's The Family Track reports that women who saw him with his child, doing laundry, found him irresistible.)

Becoming the department favorite, in short, has little or nothing to do with one's ostensible job -- research, teaching, and service. Rather, it's about being known and liked -- being "collegial," ingratiating oneself. It's about knowing that senior professors all harbor insecurities: am I likable? am I still doing cutting-edge research? is my arm still good? or have I become a hopeless old fart? Wanting a worshipful young person drives many middle-aged men to seek out trophy wives. It also makes them reward the respectful young sons who will succeed them and make them proud.

Byron, it seems, has mastered the art of being the department favorite. He may be a genuinely winning young man, not a cynical manipulator: He may not consciously be doing what Ms. Mentor describes. And yet ... Ms. Mentor sympathizes with your anger, for it is painful to see that justice and merit are not always rewarded. It is also one of the coming-of-age lessons in any profession -- or, as the late great Lenny Bruce once put it, "Time to grow up and sell out."

Question: I'm temporarily teaching in a snake-pit department where I try to be a cheerful, upbeat teacher and colleague, and dress professionally, socialize, refrain from side-taking in feuds, and act impeccably -- but a senior professor who wants his wife hired in my place is engineering a whispering campaign against me. Should I redouble my efforts to keep the few friends I have, while applying for jobs elsewhere?

Answer: Yes.

SAGE READERS: Once classes end, many a correspondent turns to Ms. Mentor and pelts her with deserved praise, heartfelt questions, and an occasional impertinent objection. She reads and digests them all, will share the best at appropriate moments, and especially thanks those who share outrageous anecdotes about the strange folkways of academia. From her correspondents she is learning much more about backstabbers, dinner parties from hell, and cases of unexpected generosity and good fortune.

Last month's column, on "Professor Pelvic Practices His Thrusts," attracted more than a few parries from Ms. Mentor's readers. The situation was simple and crude: While Karen, a graduate student, attempted to discuss her thesis with her adviser, Professor Pelvic boorishly lay down on the floor to do back exercises, including pelvic thrusts. Ms. Mentor advised Karen to see him only in public and write down everything that happened, but not to pursue revenge yet. Karen needs his knowledge, and his recommendations.

Some of Ms. Mentor's readers, though, took different tacks. One wrote in enthusiastic support of pelvic thrusts ("they cured my back!"). Another -- perhaps suffering from post-exam surliness -- blamed Karen for wearing skirts instead of pants. Several reported similar incidents in their own careers, while a few insisted that Karen drop Dr. Pelvic as her adviser, immediately!

However -- Dr. Pelvic happens to be the only professor in Karen's intellectual area, the only one qualified to direct her thesis. If Karen dumps him, she will have to change her field, junk her research, and pursue something far less engaging. This is sex discrimination of the rankest kind. (A parallel from the not-so-distant past, according to Ms. Mentor's sources: Female medical students used to be actively discouraged, if not outright prevented, from studying urology, because men feared having women poking about in their genitalia. Who knows how many stellar female urologists have never been trained.)

If Dr. Pelvic's bad behavior means that Karen cannot study his field, who will have won?

There are also winners in Ms. Mentor's mailbag. The correspondent whose story was reported in Ms. Mentor's March column on "The Caregiver and the Critic" now writes that sometimes "your advice seekers' stories have happy endings." The correspondent spent several heart-wrenching years out of the job market, caring for her dying mother, and feared that callous employers would reject her for those "inactive" years.

But they did not, and this fall, she will begin a tenure-track job at a small liberal-arts college. "The only regret I have," the correspondent writes, "is that my mom isn't here to see it, but I like to think that she knows just the same."

Ms. Mentor remains proud to know the daughter.

Ms. Mentor also continues to welcome communications with happy endings, sad ones, or ones that need to be interpreted through her perfect wisdom. In future columns she plans to discuss dissertation drudges, whistle blowers, "great job -- you're fired," changing one's stripes, and other topics that no one else will touch. As always, she promises anonymity to all sources.