Ms. Mentor

Who's the Most Clueless of All?

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Question: In my department are half a dozen people who have a clue and give a damn. Half a dozen others have a clue, yet don't give a damn; another half a dozen have no clue but do give a damn, and the many remaining neither have a clue nor give a damn. Any advice?

Answer: Your question leaves Ms. Mentor clueless, and she suspects some of her more impatient readers won't give a damn. But she, infinite in her compassion, wonders if you're prey to a common autumn academic misery, one that turns sunny skies to gray -- so that even when you're in Arizona, you think you're in Seattle.

Ms. Mentor observes that many academics feel victimized in the fall by the clueless and the uncaring: stingy legislators, obtuse regents, pusillanimous presidents, dastardly deans, demonic department chairs, cruel colleagues, sly secretaries, vapid or vicious students. But she does wonder if all of them, willy-nilly, really understand nothing and care about nothing -- except, perhaps, making you miserable in the usual ways: overworking you, underpaying you, and thwarting your efforts to display your brilliant talents to eager young minds. She also wonders if it can be true that you are the only one who notices all this -- while everyone else, pod-like, is asleep at the wheel?

Half a dozen people, you concede, do "have a clue yet don't give a damn." Ms. Mentor wonders how you know. If most of your colleagues seem careless or clueless about whatever it is that irks you -- courses you don't like? a long commute? loneliness? -- it may be that they're clued in enough to know what cannot be changed. They run from quagmires.

Ms. Mentor suggests that you suppress the urge to berate the clueless and the uncaring, especially if you're fairly new on the job. For one can often predict at the first faculty meeting of the year, who will, and will not, have a successful academic career -- as Ms. Mentor revealed in her column on "Your First Month in a New Job".

The wisest listen more than they talk, and learn the rituals. At most first meetings, the department chair welcomes everyone, after which Professor Senior Hothead delivers a demanding, intemperate harangue about low salaries. Then he stops, having given everyone a cathartic experience, and the meeting resumes with introduction of new adjuncts, reminders to sign forms and pick up parking tags, and warnings not to overuse the photocopier.

Then everyone goes to lunch, sharing pleasantries ("How was your summer?") and griping about the usual suspects. A few days later classes start, and good teachers and researchers and department citizens rarely have the time for another major gripe fest until December.

"But what can I do about the ones who don't have a clue, and the ones who don't give a damn?" you wail. Ms. Mentor's first piece of advice is to get a mentor -- a senior professor who'll decode the academic enterprise for you, and tell you that words that seem distant and uncaring ("uncollegial," "inappropriate," "not germane") are in fact strong condemnations, not mealy-mouthed euphemisms. (They are also far clearer as descriptions than "clueless.")

A good mentor will also tell you about past department feuds and minefields -- so that you don't naively rave to Professor E. about the accomplishments of Professor R., her philandering ex-husband, to whom she hasn't spoken in five years.

Your next step is to get tenure -- for until you do, you can't change anything significant in your world. By that time, after five or more years, you'll know who's truly unknowing and who's truly uncaring -- and who just prefers scholarship to skirmishes over lab space, tiny perks, and minuscule raises. By then you may even post on your wall the great truth attributed to George Santayana -- that in academe the fights are so intense because the stakes are so small.

Right now, Ms. Mentor says in all candor, you appear to be a rudderless whiner. But given more knowledge of the seas, and a bigger boat, you may learn to navigate on a course that makes you feel more like Johnny Depp and less like Joe Shlep. Unless, of course -- and who can tell from your letter? -- you are the one who is really clueless. Ms. Mentor stands on the deck of her ivory tower and sighs.

Question: I'm a recent Ph.D. whose major professor is not in good health, and I'm afraid he may pass away before I get a stable position. If I ask him to write a reference for my dossier now, am I being foolish, ghoulish, or wise?

Answer: Wise.

SAGE READERS: In the last month, Ms. Mentor's mailbox has received an inordinate number of missives praising her wit and perspicacity. One loyal reader calls a Ms. Mentor detractor a "churlish lout" and opines that "if everything he/she knew was rolled up and stuck up a gnat's butt, it would rattle around like a BB in a pick-up bed -- so there."

This wave of benevolence worried Ms. Mentor, until a longtime correspondent wrote that he still cites her on his Web site as a major cause for the collapse of Western civilization.

Ms. Mentor is more troubled by responses to her column on "bad fit", for it drew letters from several middle-aged women who were told they did not "fit in." Their colleagues preferred more deferential young ladies, and often said so -- violating the law, and depriving everyone of the unique wisdom of women of a certain age.

And so Ms. Mentor particularly invites correspondence about age discrimination and age chauvinism in academe. Among adjuncts in English, for instance, rumor has it that too many (how many?) years as an adjunct means you'll never get a tenure-track job, because "everyone wants a virgin." Is this true?

As always, Ms. Mentor welcomes gossip, rants, and queries for this column and a second tome (covering all genders) to follow Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia. For her long-in-the-works column about coming out in academe, she invites comments on the Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas decision.

Ms. Mentor reminds readers that she rarely answers letters personally, does not open attachments, and will not be rushed. Her mission is to reveal the inner workings of academe, the swirling political currents that may nonplus the naive. Anonymity is guaranteed, and no one will know that Ms. Mentor is in possession of your most lurid imaginings.