Question: The sink in the common kitchen of my department always has dirty dishes, usually mugs, despite the polite sign encouraging people to wash their dishes. My biggest beef about this is that faculty members clearly assume that someone else will clean up, and the office-staff members are left looking at the mess every day.
Dish washing isn't part of the custodians' job. I'm convinced that it's an arrogance of gender and/or social class to assume that someone else will clean up after you.
So the other day, when the mess was particularly disgusting, I threw four mugs, two spoons, and a knife in the trash, and left a note signed, "The Dish Avenger."
I told two people. One, eco-minded, was bothered by the waste, while the other wondered about throwing out other people's property. (I doubt that anyone has a sense of ownership about these communal dishes.)
Did I do wrong? Should I continue?
Answer: Ms. Mentor's first thought was, Yes, you should continue, and you should be the Academic Avenger for many other petty annoyances. You could, for instance, lurk outside classrooms and ambush professors who fail to erase their own blackboards. You could slink along behind littering students with your bullhorn and blast them with, "Hey, you in the Fighting Ferret hat! Pick up that cigarette butt! Move it!"
While Ms. Mentor was contemplating further uses of your righteous fury, a poster in The Chronicle's forums complained about a colleague who whistles the same tune endlessly: "Que Sera, Sera." Other posters snickered, recommended singing the "Rubber Duckie" song, or (as academics do) strove to top that. Someone has a colleague who wears headphones to keep out other people's noise and then roars into his own phone, announcing his disputes and poisonous opinions to all within hearing.
Sometimes passive-aggressive academics will kick such offenders upstairs. "Ingmar," whose melancholy whistling of "This Is the End" made sunny souls suicidal, was repeatedly nominated for Faculty Senate committees and offices. He finally won, became famous as an academic politician, and is now a dean, with his own private, soundproofed office.
It is also possible to be crassly direct in the face of gross aggravation. Ms. Mentor's files include a Dilbert episode in which a gutless cubicle worker is driven mad by a neighbor's whistling — until he manages to summon the avenging character Alice. She pulls a "workaround," shouting over the wall, "Stop that whistling, you freaking moron!"
But all of that doesn't take care of the much more fraught topic of dirty dishes. Few scholars, after all, will admit to being selfish creatures of entitlement. Most will claim they were too busy curing cancer, correcting grammar, or listening to the music of the spheres to take note of a few humble messy mugs. How terribly trivial.
Yet Googling "dirty dishes" along with "professor" and "department" yields thousands of hits. Ms. Mentor was gratified to learn that many academics have taken the matter of who does the dishes and what it means as their special area of study.
There have been Great Men of Academe who have dished badly. When Thorstein Veblen ("theory of the leisure class," "conspicuous consumption") was hired to teach at Stanford, in 1906, students instantly loathed him. He graded arbitrarily, switching A's and C's at random; he posted whimsical office hours ("Monday 10 a.m. to 10:05 a.m."); and he urged "girl students" to spend weekends with him in a converted chicken coop in the woods. Mrs. Veblen evidently either got revenge with a domestic strike or had already abandoned him, for when things got really scruffy at home, the great economist himself was seen carrying out piles of dirty dishes, which he washed with a garden hose.
Dishes are known to dampen romance in academe. A few years ago, on a Web site called "Ageless Love: Your Community for Age Gap Relationship Support," a student with a crush on her professor was sympathetically advised to think of him as only human, and to quell her ardor by "imagin[ing] him with dirty dishes in his sink."
Even among students in dorms, dirty dishes mean a power struggle. At Bryn Mawr College, for instance, possible violations of the Social Honor Code include "taking laundry detergent or leaving dirty dishes in the tea pantry." Malefactors get away with it, student-government representatives say, because of everyone's "fear of confrontation."
So why, oh why, don't people just do their own dishes?, Ms. Mentor moans. As Robert Fulghum writes in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, "Put things back where you found them" and "Clean up your own mess" are prime directives. Most people do flush. But not washing the dishes — ah, that is a mighty rebellion against bourgeois conformity.
Sometimes certain acts trigger "displaced aggression," according to William Pedersen, an associate professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach. Your professor savages your class presentation, so you "aggress" (scream) at your roommate for the dirty dishes in the sink. Pedersen does research on ways to "moderate and mediate displaced aggression" and, Ms. Mentor hopes, protect the innocent dishes from kitchen rage.
Or the aggrieved party could follow the advice of Marshall B. Rosenberg, who prescribes his process of "Nonviolent Communication" to get at the heart of people's reluctance to do the dishes. If you yell at your roommate — or lab mate — to do the dishes, the non-dish-doer could cry or stomp, but Rosenberg recommends this response instead: "I can't do the dishes right now, because I have a need for safety, and with you standing there raging at me, I don't feel safe. So I'm going to walk away and take 10 minutes, and then I'll come back and we can talk about this."
Somehow Ms. Mentor can't see that exchange happening in a laboratory. She also notices that advice givers tell women to work on their behavior and their nurturing skills instead of simply telling the offender(s) to clean the dishes. A few bloggers admit to the temptation to put roommates' dirty dishes in the roommates' rooms, or even in their beds — but no one confesses to actually doing so. No one hides the dishes for ransom ("Help! I'm, being held prisoner! Leave $15 and save me. I live to serve!") Nor does anyone in communal spaces simply put up a sign: "Starting Monday, because of medical issues, there will no longer be communal dishes, and any remaining ones will be destroyed. Please bring your own cups and cutlery henceforth."
But the Dish Avenger is way ahead of all that. She doesn't dither or theorize, nor does she create further toxins by, say, putting the dirty dishes outside the offices of the presumed offenders. She simply destroys the evidence.
Ms. Mentor thinks that is the best workaround of all. Don't take it. Dish it out.
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Question: I dread "How was your summer?" and all the phony cheer that accompanies the reopening of school. I'd like to tell the truth about my rash and my philandering ex and my deadbeat plagiarizing collaborator, but am I better off saying "Fine" and claiming that I went to the seashore and loved it because nature is such a beautiful and healing balm?
Answer: Yes.
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Sage Readers: As another academic year commences, Ms. Mentor invites suggestions for "the most annoying, ear-worm-forming songs you could think of" to combat lab and hall whistlers. Other readers seek advice about "unwritten social expectations in academia" and "pleasant answers to 'You look too young to be a professor.'" Ms. Mentor welcomes ripostes, rants, and queries, and she regrets that she can rarely answer letters personally.
Although all correspondence is confidential and identifying details are masked, everyone suspects you are the one who failed to wash those dishes. You know what to do.
