Question: I am starting my fifth year as a tenure-track assistant professor at a regional university in the South. My spouse and I do not really like the community we live in. I can't say I much enjoy the people that I work with, and I want to apply for other positions. Any advice?
Question: I've taught for four years at a small liberal-arts school where the students are as dreary and flat as the local landscape. I want to quit. Even teaching part time in New York would get me back to civilization.
Question: My husband and I, new faculty members at Rural U., have seemingly been adopted as best friends by another faculty couple who seem a bit conservative by our New York standards.
Question: Finally I have a tenure-track job — in a snake pit. After three months, I've figured out that maybe eight of the 30 faculty members are truly competent. Meanwhile, everyone lives in dread of the Big Guys, two powerful senior professors who keep up a running feud with our chairman, a nice liar.
My research is stymied, too, since I've been studying flora and fauna in a different geographical region. I could go away during the summer to continue — but it's been hinted to me, by these extremely provincial Southerners (I'm a New Yorker, as if you can't tell) that taking my research elsewhere will cause big disapproval. But if I refocus and work with the Big Guys, I've been told that the department's deadwood will hate me.
I've considered complaining to the dean about the endless whispering campaigns. But when I complained earlier about my teaching load, his advice was to lay low, take the garbage handed out, smile, and stay out of the politics. My inability to repress my tongue may be another problem. How does one lay low, get research done, and cope with being stuck here?
Answer: Ms. Mentor has long been intrigued by the yearning and moaning of certain academic personages. Like latter-day Romantic poets, they look before and after, and pine for what is not. Or they imagine themselves as brilliant flowers, wasting their sweetness on the desert air.
But Ms. Mentor reminds her readers that the Romantic poets had a habit of dying young — which made them poor candidates for tenure. New academics would do better to follow Lenny Bruce's blunt advice: "Time to grow up and sell out."
More gently, Ms. Mentor exhorts fledgling faculty members to ponder which is more important: the place or the profession? Rare is the soul who can get both. Will you move to wherever a tenure-track job surfaces, or would you rather be a clerk in Seattle than a professor in Saskatoon?
Some sunny souls do adapt happily to volcanoes or igloos, palm trees or prairies, as long as they have the libraries and labs they need. Others model themselves on Ovid, Victor Hugo, or Lenin — producers of poems, novels, political broadsides, and endless gossip from exile.
Some urbanites delight in places where (according to Gerald, a new instructor in the heartland) "they're not shooting at you, the dogs are calm, and you're not commuting among cutthroats for two hours a day." Still other exiles enthusiastically hie themselves to potato bowls and farm festivals and tractor pulls. They learn to make lutefisk, grits, and boudin.
But some academics, especially those from the Northeast, refuse to blend in. They're the ones bellowing, "Hurry up already!" in Oklahoma City, or blasting all of Iowa as "cornfed and white bread," or stereotyping the entire South as racist. (Ms. Mentor reminds her readers that there are more African-American elected officials in Mississippi than in New York.)
Some dedicated malcontents do return to New York, but usually as adjuncts — teaching five different courses at three different schools, commuting by subway, and earning maybe $15,000 a year. But many weep with joy anyway. They're back in the Big Apple.
Ms. Mentor thinks theirs is a perfectly rational choice. So is leaving academia, for those who cannot imagine living anywhere except San Francisco or Philadelphia or Boston. What is not rational is to fritter away one's life waiting for a call from the Sorbonne. Or pining to be hired in Ann Arbor or Chapel Hill or Austin or Berkeley or Madison.
Nor is it useful to fume all the time. Ms. Mentor's last correspondent, above, suffers from first year faculty disappointment (see "I'm Surrounded by Idiots!"), magnified by department feuds, regional malaise, and some reluctance to be tactful or strategic. But astute academics are ones who pick their battles. They shrug off rumors, complain only over truly big issues, find non-academic friends to laugh with, and welcome the chance to have Big Guys mentor them.
To all her correspondents, Ms. Mentor recommends scheming rather than gnashing. Think "How can I get my research done where I am, without making deadly enemies?" and "What can I learn here that's valuable and challenging?" Or, if need be: "How can I save enough to live in New York on my sabbatical?"
Sometimes, too, lost souls find other answers. One winter night, two Texans spied each other across the crowded room in the only Mexican restaurant in "Icicle City," a college town in the Upper Midwest. Over burritos and quesadillas and margaritas, the two got to really hear their own endless whining and ranting — which finally made them giggle, then guffaw, then roar.
A year later, a contented and well-fed couple, they are superb teachers who've published more than anyone else in their departments and have been recommended for early tenure.
Sour souls would say they're stuck in Icicle City forever. But Ms. Mentor says they're happy, and Ms. Mentor is always right.
Question: Is it true that deans have to be tall?
Answer: Usually.
Sage Readers: Ms. Mentor's mailbox continues to overflow with fawning, snarly, and righteous epistles, and she regrets that she cannot reply personally to all. Avid readers may want to consult her tome, listed below, as well as the other experts and first-person writers on this site. Also recommended: Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick's The Academic Job Search Handbook and Christina Boufis and Victoria C. Olsen's On the Market.
