Question (from "Mona Lingua"): I'm new to the humanities faculty at Small Rural College, where we're all expected to pitch in on every task, including interviewing job candidates at national conventions. So I'm one of three young assistant profs trekking off to meet applicants in German, Russian, and Portuguese -- languages I don't even know, nor do my two colleagues. How can we handle this without making ourselves look like complete fools?

Question (from "Hermes"): At my convention interview with Exciting U., two of the interviewers were gracious and interesting, but the third one fell asleep. He even snored a little. Shocked but also amused, I said nothing, and Professor Sleepy did wake up by the end and shake my hand enthusiastically. What should I have done?

Question (from "Perle"): A guest speaker I invited to my class told an offensive story using a Charlie Chan type of accent. I was too startled to say anything. What could I have done?

Answer: Every newish academic, Ms. Mentor knows, lives with an overactive conscience and an intense, overriding fear: Sometime soon "they" will finally discover that you are a fraud. They'll decide you don't know enough (Why DON'T you Americans know half a dozen languages, anyhow?). They'll decide you're hopelessly boring (Professor Sleepy has NEVER nodded off except with you). They'll believe that you harbor and abet the frothings of bigots. They'll yank your Ph.D., and you'll wind up trying to trade your poems for food. Junkyard dogs won't even use your leg for a hydrant.

Indeed, a terror of public humiliation dwells in the souls of all untenured academics. Mona, Hermes, and Perle have no doubt grown up with the classic student anxiety dream: It's the end of the semester, and you discover you're registered for a course you've never attended. The nightmare gets worse once you become a professor yourself -- for now it's the end of the semester and you find out you're supposed to have taught that course you've never attended. It's also in a subject you know nothing about, such as agronomy or fencing.

One ambitious, hard-driving young woman, now the chairwoman of a powerful English department, used to dream she was naked in front of a lecture class of 150 students, all of whom rated her a 3 on a scale of 10. But Ms. Mentor hears her audience twitching impatiently while she philosophizes. What, they want to know, should Mona, Hermes, and Perle DO?

Well, Mona and her team members could take cram courses in German, Russian, and Portuguese, and try to fake it. Or they could blubber and abase themselves for being monolingual Americans -- thereby passing along the embarrassment to their interviewees. Or they could decide to chat in English about the one topic they all have in common: teaching.

How, indeed, does one start a class in Portuguese? What's easiest for students taking German? Do students in Russian delight in learning a new alphabet? How does a language teacher handle students' embarrassing mistakes? Mona's team can stage a charming and intelligent interview, a reciprocal interaction with potential colleagues. (As for the absurdity of sending non-speakers to interview: Mona and her team should simply say that their college values teamwork highly. Nary a word of criticism should pass their lips.)

Hermes has also shown singular tact. Professor Sleepy may be narcoleptic; he may be exceedingly powerful; or he may be a refugee from a psych experiment. But Hermes saved him from embarrassment by overlooking his faux pas. If Hermes is hired, Prof. Sleepy will be one of his strongest supporters. And after all, good teachers often have to ignore students' (or their own) belchings, yawnings, gassings, lunch stains on ties, and unexpected glimpses of body parts.

As for Perle, she might have asked her guest speaker why he used the faux-Chan accent. "I don't understand the point you were making," she might say with sweet naïvete. "I was just trying to be funny," the speaker might claim, whereupon Perle can ask why some people (never "you," never accusatory) think broken English is funny. The speaker may not catch on, but Perle's students will. For Ms. Mentor knows that in academia, as in the real world, we often teach by indirection. Embarrassment in itself is not bad, but failure to learn from it is deadly.

Question: Other women seem to think it's OK to breast-feed during a job interview, but I think it's distracting (to say the least) to be showing my nipple while discussing my research. Am I right?

Answer: Yes.

SAGE READERS: Ms. Mentor's mailbox bulges with letters about teaching evaluations, most of them negative. "We're being held to a corporate model," her correspondents say, "but teaching can't be reduced to numerical scales." Moreover, there are students who use evaluation forms for revenge ("I hate 8 o'clocks") and vendettas ("Everyone else thought I deserved an A"). Students rarely get to discuss what evaluations mean, or should mean, and Ms. Mentor admits to being skeptical about the claim that "Good teachers always get good evaluations."

If that is true, why do so many teachers use the last day of class for wine-and-cheese parties, exchanges of gifts, movies and guitar concerts, dinners and field trips? Far be it from Ms. Mentor to use the word "bribe" ...

Ms. Mentor invites further correspondence on teaching, learning, and everything else that academics do. She would particularly like to hear readers' thoughts on hidden inequities and academic hierarchies. Is it true, for instance, that someone with a degree from Midwest State can never hope to get a job at Harvard?

As always, anonymity is guaranteed. She reminds readers that she rarely answers letters personally, she does not open attachments, and she will not be rushed. Ms. Mentor will not resolve your sexual or romantic dilemmas for you. She is perfectly capable of doing so, but she has chosen to use her perfect wisdom to save the academic world first.