Ms. Mentor

Do I Have to Play Golf to Get Ahead?

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines An Academic in America Yearning After Books Why are so many artists and writers preoccupied by the so-called demise of bookish culture? First Person What Am I Doing? Shouldn't seven years of graduate school have helped me avoid taking a job just to have a job? Career News Too Much Information Colleges encourage the use of cellphones for emergency-alert purposes, but professors have begun to worry that students can use their phones during exams to cheat off the Web. First Person Moving a Step (or 3) Up the Ladder Why would a newly tenured associate professor in the sciences decide to go on the job market? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

Question: The high-level administrators at several educational institutions in my area seem to do much of their business on the golf course. I think golf is pointless and boring. Is it necessary for a person to take up golf in order to move up high in an academic organization -- say, to the presidency of a college?

Answer: As someone who relishes the beautiful and the unpredictable, Ms. Mentor has never been able to fathom the appeal of golf -- a so-called sport without the grace of diving, the power of football, or the perils of bungee jumping. Golfers seldom seem to spew venomous language, get arrested for bizarre infractions, or whack each other's knees. In the tabloids that brighten grocery checkout lines everywhere, one never sees headlines about "Wild Golfers Run Amok."

It occurs to Ms. Mentor that golfers are rather like most academics, except that they have more time. They dress sedately and speak softly. They do not sashay or skedaddle. They walk a lot and keep themselves clean.

But golf also has a troublesome history as a class marker. Until the egalitarian revolutions of the 1960s, most academic administrators -- and indeed, most faculty members -- came from the class of people who golfed. If you were not a rich white man, or if you were Jewish, or if you lacked the appropriate social connections, you could not join the country clubs where golf was played. (Nor, most likely, could you afford to buy a set of clubs.)

In your country club, you would play with other like-minded professional men -- doctors, bankers, lawyers -- on Wednesday afternoons, when gentlemen had their leisure time. Of course you would exchange business information, and you might genteelly conspire against outsiders as well. Anyone who lacked an Anglo-Saxon name was probably not a golfer, and the ranks of college presidents were filled by those whose names showed their membership in a WASP elite: Woodrow Wilson, Kingman Brewster, Grayson Kirk, Lincoln Gordon, James Bryant Conant. Golf was the symbolic game that kept the riffraff out, and if anyone who looked like Tiger Woods happened to be seen at the country club, he would be a caddy, a waiter, or a janitor.

Even Ms. Mentor, with her perfect wisdom and her perfect swing, would not have been permitted to tee off at the gentlemen's country club.

But thanks to the exuberant and fearless rebels of the 1960s and early 1970s, the world changed. A man who loved baseball and had an Italian name -- A. Bartlett Giammati -- became president of Yale in 1979. Princeton, a university that was male-only until 1969, is now led by a woman, Shirley Tilghman. There are public golf courses, and prize-winning golfers have included Nancy Lopez and Lee Trevino as well as Tiger Woods.

And so golfing is no longer a crude sorting device or a hunting ground for gentlemanly university administrators and those who want to be them. About 21.1 percent of college presidents are women, and nearly 13 percent are members of minority groups. More than half of the universities seeking new presidents now use search firms ("head hunters"), who look for candidates by placing discreet phone calls, checking publications, and making the rounds at major meetings. Head hunters do not lurk and troll for candidates on the golf course.

Nowadays when Ms. Mentor takes a break from her labors on a Wednesday afternoon and peers down at the golf course below her ivory tower, she sees nary a college president on the greens and fairways. Few of them have that kind of leisure time. Most spend 18-hour days with meetings and paperwork and official entertainments, and most have also become de facto fund raisers for their universities. More than a few wish they could be gentlemen, rather than beggars.

Today's high-level administrators have not given up on exercise, of course, but they're more apt to play handball or tennis. Some swim, and many work out on machines. Deans, it's rumored, feel especially at home on treadmills.

As for the administrators who are golfing in your neighborhood, transacting business, Ms. Mentor wonders who they are. Perhaps they are trading tips on how to say no to importunate faculty members (a singularly melancholy form of networking, Ms. Mentor thinks). Perhaps they work at wealthy institutions that can still afford to support something of a leisure class. Or possibly they are just not spending enough time on their jobs, and using the golf course as a cover.

In any case, they are not good role models if you have executive aspirations. A modern university administrator has to be able to reach the general public, and cope with strange and often hostile outsiders. Today's college president needs tact, humor, vitality, and a willingness to take risks. Bungee jumping might be better practice.

Question: I often hear teachers profess love for students, but disgust for colleagues, administrators, and everyone else. Can such a paradox exist?

Answer: Yes.

SAGE READERS:: Ms. Mentor's correspondents continue to be diverse, articulate, argumentative, and sometimes zany. Some readers praise her for being "honest, direct, acerbic," while others hate her for the same traits. Some compete to have the best story: "He thinks he has problems? Let me tell you mine."

One recent correspondent announced that he never reads this column, because of Ms. Mentor's "silly penchant for referring to yourself in third person" in the style of Miss Manners, "whom I also never read." Ms. Mentor wonders if her correspondent also makes a practice of nonreading the newspaper, nonwatching the TV ("it's all garbage"), and -- scariest of all -- nonteaching his students.

Ms. Mentor is happier to hear from "Harriet," once a conscientious and exploited student, now a Ph.D. and happily ensconced in a well-paying tenure-track job far from the demands of her graduate-school campus. Likewise "Ella," bedeviled by a seemingly malevolent faculty spouse, has been rescued. The husband took a job elsewhere, the wife moved with him, and they both "went into therapy," Ella reports. "My life improved by leaps and bounds, and I've been promoted. There is a God, and she's clearly a god of compassion."

As always, Ms. Mentor invites queries, gossip, rants, and speculations of all kinds, for this column and a second tome in progress. She continues to collect material for a column on coming out in academe, and also invites responses to a correspondent's query about "the proportion of people who have been screwed in academe -- meaning discriminated against, harmed, and stolen from."

Anonymity is guaranteed, and identifying details are changed. Ms. Mentor regrets that the huge volume of mail precludes individual answers and consultations. She urges correspondents to check her archive on this site, her tome and its bibliography, this site's other columnists, and especially The Academic Job Search Handbook by the Career Talk columnists Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick. Since most academic lives follow similar plots, Ms. Mentor expects to handle your problem eventually, but she cannot be rushed.