Ms. Mentor

Am I Really Stuck?

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person Just Visiting Again When his tenure-track search fell short, a Ph.D. faced a fundamental choice about dealing with the disappointment. The Adjunct Track It's All in the Bag Teaching part time sometimes makes a Ph.D. feel like a failure, but it also allows her life as a parent to work. Heads Up Keep Your Emeriti Close How can deans and chairs find appropriate ways to involve retired professors in the life of the college? First Person An End and a Beginning Accepting the possibility of tenure denial and dealing with the reality of it are two different things. Moving Up 'A' Hire vs. 'the' Hire Following the 5 principles of external hiring can keep your search for a dean from getting derailed. 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 (from "Agatha"): Another summer, and I'm in the same spot. I earned my Ph.D. at 25, got a tenure-track job, published two books, made full professor. I teach at Very Respectable U. with excellent research grants and teaching opportunities, and I've won fellowships and awards. But there's not much intellectual stimulation here.

My dream is to teach at a first-rate, liberal-arts college, though I'd settle for decent grad students. I'm also, right now, socially isolated. I have no partner, am older than the interesting new hires, and have a rather pathetic tendency to answer simple questions with, "Let me explain why it works that way ... in the early 1990s ... then at the end of the decade ... and the latest innovation ...." I make people's eyes glaze over.

Most jobs advertised at my level are for administrators, but I'm somewhat disorganized, less socially adept than many, and don't have a mentor. Things aren't awful, but I've been here 15 years and I'm afraid if I stay, I'll feel more and more trapped. Is there any way to improve my job mobility?

Answer: Ms. Mentor hears the usual reader grumblings ("I should have her troubles"). All right, all right. But unhappiness dwells at every level of the human condition, and it is Ms. Mentor's mission to respond to all that she can. And so, to Agatha:

You're asking about job change, but Ms. Mentor, in her infinite wisdom, recognizes the real, classic questions that we all ask at midlife: "Is that all there is?" "What do I do next?" You needn't do anything at all, of course, and many tenured academics do not move from where they've been planted since their 20s.

Academics as a group are not risk takers. They've stayed in school, respected their teachers, handed in papers on time, and gotten A's. As a lifelong academic, you've marched in a neat, laid-out groove -- but now you want more in your future than menopause, retirement, and death.

Administration is the standard way to move. Serve a few years as a dean or department head, and you can fold back smoothly into a department at Better U. Unlike those with public midlife crises, you're not embarrassing anyone by junking a fine old spouse for a young nubile one or buying a red convertible.

But to be hired as an administrator, you'll have to change your current ways and get to know people. At conferences, cultivate schmooze buddies who'll tell you about openings in academic administration, about who's really in power, and about what they're truly looking for (a hatchet woman? A caretaker? A toady?) Good buddies can get you to the top of the shortlist, and sometimes can even get you the job -- but, of course, you'll owe them favors afterward.

To be hired as a full professor at another college, you also need to know people -- for senior hires are most often made by targeting particular people ("We need Agatha to round out our program. What will it take to get her?") Hirers may know your publications, but unless they know you -- especially in the humanities -- you're unlikely to be on their mental recruiting screens.

You need friends in high places -- and you get them by smiling, remembering everyone's names, and working the room at conference receptions, with intense miniconversations full of ambition and gossip.

To move in academe, you have to work on your charm.

You can do that by being a dutiful scholar, reading biographies of famous charmers (Cleopatra, Bill Clinton). You can study canonical texts (How to Win Friends and Influence People) and furtively buy Relationships for Dummies. (Ms. Mentor is not making that title up).

You can watch talk-show guests, promoting their latest movies with well-structured, engaging anecdotes. You can try out seductive personalities ("Lusty Southern Belle," "Randy Rosalind") in Internet chat rooms -- and if you get crude overtures, at least you'll learn new words.

You can also practice people chat in creative-writing groups, wine-tasting classes, bird-watching outings, group therapy, or dinners you host for visiting celebrities (take off the store tags and claim you cooked everything yourself).

And after a few years of this self-inflicted charm school, you should be ready to Take On the World and Grab a New Job.

Or not.

Ms. Mentor, herself a loner, does not enjoy the social jangle of mindless chitchat. Too many faculty-senate meetings and receptions, in fact, drove her to the splendid isolation of her ivory tower, from which she now watches the scene -- and then closes the door. She would rather be the reclusive Emily Dickinson, dwelling in the richness of her own mind, than the strutting Madonna, cheered by millions. Academe is the most congenial profession for motivated and intelligent people who work well by themselves.

Agatha, too, may be a loner by nature, as celebrated in Anneli Rufus's Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto, a tribute to the independence and imagination of solitary souls. Money and power are less important if you do not seek the world's approval -- and Agatha may realize that she most loves the pursuit of knowledge, of any kind.

People who don't need people for entertainment will never wind up like the actor George Sanders, who wrote in his last note in 1972: "Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool -- good luck."

To loners, the world is a carnival and not a cesspool, and Ms. Mentor hopes that Agatha will eschew the rat race and learn to enjoy, fully, her sweet solitude and the pleasure of her own company -- as Ms. Mentor does, every day.

Question: My archenemy, who's tried every mean trick to get me fired, is very allergic to perfume. When I go to his office to crow over getting tenure, do I dare wear Chanel No. 5?

Answer: Oui.

SAGE READERS: Ms. Mentor's summertime mail includes intense criticism ("you're promoting twaddle") as well as thoughtful questioning ("does tenure really promote independent thinking?") Ms. Mentor invites meditations, queries, and rants, and especially seeks material about long-simmering feuds. Anonymity is guaranteed and identifying details are always masked.