Ms. Mentor

How Dysfunctional Is Your Department?

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"If your workplace refers to itself as a family, you know it's dysfunctional," claims one loyal reader.

Ms. Mentor, like most of her flock, grew up with the usual happy family images: Scrabble tournaments by the hearth, Dad with pipe, Mom with apron. But literary study introduced her to the Snopeses, Oedipus, Medea, and Tolstoy, who deserted his family to poke about as a prophet in the snow a few years after writing his famous line about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way.

And so it is with academic departments -- where, with unbounded creativity, some scholars choose to make the lives of others a living hell.

A department is a faculty member's home, and some are havens in a heartless world, ruled by benevolent patriarchs or Mama Bears, with dedicated staffs. Maybe your department has harmonious brown-bag lunches, productive meetings, and lively end-of-year parties with delectable treats.

Or your department may be a nest of vipers in which, every time you move, someone bares fangs. You listen for hissing. You writhe in venom.

"Dysfunctional," Ms. Mentor notes, does not mean malodorous or corrupt, but "impaired in its functioning." Many dastardly departments actually work very smoothly -- for those who are power-mad, socially challenged, and tenured. The malcontents and the victims are the ones who write to Ms. Mentor, who knows that all happy academics are alike: they love gossip. And so, to Ms. Mentor's mail:

• From "Alice": Our bellowing pontificator ("Rex") butts in on lunch conversations and tyrannizes us at department meetings. When I apologized once after a small misunderstanding, he responded with loud, filthy language and a threat to turn my husband into "raw hamburger."

• From "Brenda": At department parties, Professor Satyr drinks like a walrus, strips, and flings himself on fully clothed graduate student women.

• From "Caligula": Our hated chair hosted a party for a new job candidate, and only three people (untenured wimps) showed up. They need to be punished for their disloyalty.

• From "Desmond": The top three administrators in my department ("The Unholy Trinity") all live together, sexual arrangements unknown, but we're sure their pillow talk is about ways to yank our chains, cancel our raises, and sentence us to vacuous committees.

• From "Emma": In our latest faculty job search, as in all previous ones, the men again voted to hire the OK man over the much-more accomplished and energetic woman.

• From "Fabian": At my small private religious college, one colleague was jailed for child molestation, faculty members attacked each other in hallways and classes, alumni phoned in death threats, and people were mysteriously fired over weekends. I quit and moved to New York City, where they'll never find me.

Ms. Mentor sighs, for some of those scenarios are achingly familiar. Rex, the boom-voiced pontificator, is the drunken uncle whose perfect wisdom about football and politics will ruin everyone's Thanksgiving dinner -- after which Satyr, a different drunken uncle, will harass anyone remaining. The peacemaker siblings who tune out the yelling and praise the turkey will be savaged by someone like Caligula, who sees them as traitors. Desmond is the cousin who knows that everyone's picking on him, Emma protests when the boys gang up on the girls, and Fabian, fed up, runs away from home.

And all of them, or their ilk, inspired the British literary magazine Granta some years ago to do a special issue called "The Family: They Fuck You Up," in which writers declared that family dynamics had given them a lifetime's worth of material.

Which does not, of course, solve the problems of Ms. Mentor's correspondents. Fabian is right to flee. Alice, Brenda, and Emma should seek out allies and report bad conduct if anyone is receptive, but should also quietly look for other jobs where women are more valued and protected. (Yes, they could sue, but that would consume their lives for years and steal time from their own families, research, and teaching.) Desmond might put together a well-rehearsed cabal of his own allies to combat the Unholy Trinity at department meetings -- though Ms. Mentor does wonder who put the Trinity in charge, anyway? What goes up can be brought down.

There are other avenues for beleaguered academics. Threats should be reported in writing to administrators and campus security; sex discrimination can be reported in writing to human-resource and equal-opportunity offices; faculty unions may help; and victims should seek friends outside their departments and outside academe. Sometimes mediators have to be brought in. You cannot force people to be warm, wise, or witty -- but most can be taught to be civil, and sometimes by unconventional means.

Ms. Mentor's columns, for instance, have often been forwarded, anonymously, to malefactors who get the idea that the world's talking about them. Student grapevines can pass along knowledge that administrators want to overlook. Slyly dropped tips to campus or town newspapers or alumni may inspire investigations. Sometimes villains genuinely do not know that their behavior is illegal as well as immoral and frightening to the horses. Ms. Mentor feels it her duty, and that of all right-thinking individuals, to inform and cure or expel sinners.

But just as in families, not all problems can be solved with a cudgel, a tabloid exposé, or a generous spirit of sharing our differences. Ms. Mentor isn't apt to name names, but she welcomes more specific communications, as well as answers to the reader who wrote, "In our department we've got shouting matches, profanity, bullying, torture, sadism, paranoia. Doesn't everyone?"

Question: I got lucky and was canned in my first year at Snakepit U., and am now teaching at Delightful College. Should I (a) write a super-nice thank-you to Snakepit for releasing me, or (b) write a scathingly honest thank-you to Snakepit for my liberation, and not mail it?

Answer: (b).

SAGE READERS: Ms. Mentor's life's work is to aid the righteous and expose the malevolent, and she urges her readers to write down their stories: how you were civil, how they were hateful, how you comforted yourself through blogging and lampooning, if sterner measures did not work. She has only just begun to write about dysfunction in academe.

Ms. Mentor always welcomes gossip, rants, and queries, for which anonymity is guaranteed and identifying details are masked. Please use subject headings. Ms. Mentor rarely answers questions personally, but directs readers to her archive and her tome (below), as well as to the other learned worthies and lively correspondents on this site.