Ms. Mentor

Isn't It Romantic?

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Question: Can Ms. Mentor share some of her perfect wisdom for lovelorn and love-seeking academicians?

Answer: A few years ago, Ms. Mentor invited comments about romance in academe -- and got just one reply. "Jackie" a librarian, wrote that she married the first academic man who actually listened to her without pawing the ground impatiently and snapping, "Uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh," until he got to speak.

Ms. Mentor's other readers may have been too busy pontificating or weeping. She would still like to hear from them, perhaps for next Valentine's Day, although she doubts that many will find the time.

And that, of course, is a great obstacle to academic romance: the incessant deadlines. While civilians think scholars "work" just nine or 12 hours a week, with summers "off," in-the-trenches academics know that there is little rest for the ambitious. Besides grading, planning, office hours, research, and committees, successful scholars also fit in rumor mongering, character assassination, placating, and such survival activities as cooking, cleaning, and reproducing the next generation -- which may not be as easy as it sounds.

According to one well-published scholar, there is only one possible attitude for graduate students to take if they imagine their professors in carnal congress: "Revulsion," writes James R. Kincaid in an essay in The Erotics of Instruction, (University Press of New England, 1997). "It's a wonder the highly-educated propagate," he writes. Nor does promotion add glamour, he adds, for deans and presidents "enter another species altogether, a reptilian order."

But Ms. Mentor digresses. Interested parties should read The Family Track (University of Illinois Press, 1998) and The Two-Body Problem (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), as well as studies by Mary Ann Mason and Robert Drago -- all showing how tough it is to have two bodies and two careers in academe. Indeed, eager scholars could spend years reading up on how hard it is to have a romance, without ever emerging to see if it's true.

How to meet people? Academics can have daily free time to go to bookstores, laundromats, and blood banks. They can attend out-of-town conferences, volunteer for committees, and take part (often with approval) in community activism. Couples Ms. Mentor knows have met at Amnesty International meetings, whale watchings, wine tastings, and receptions for obscure dignitaries from tiny nations. "Barbara" and "Susan" bonded when they found themselves side by side, snickering and snoozing, at a meeting of the commission on the status of something.

Once academics do find their quarry, their public-speaking ability helps: They can always start a conversation with a rip-roaring discourse on an esoteric subject, and see who does not flee. Professorial types have common experiences and common norms (ugly cars, uncertain fashion sense). Lunch is easy to arrange and coffee together is less fraught, Ms. Mentor used to think -- until she read a recent thread on The Chronicle's own forums in which a married faculty woman wondered (Ms. Mentor paraphrases), What does it mean to have coffee with an attractive, married male colleague?

Academics live to interpret. For five days, nearly 80 posters gleefully theorized. Should she tell her husband? Is a coffee date "racy"? Is any tête á tête suspect?

Meanwhile, the much-talked-about man in that scenario had sent a jovial e-mail ("Have a great day"), which scholars pounced on: Was there a sexual subtext? Oh, no, nothing's "more neutral" than a meeting of research colleagues, claimed one faction: "You women worry everything to death." Another poster recommended that they all read He's Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo -- which Ms. Mentor also recommends, for a dose of reality. Still another wanted to know if "Have a great day" now means "I want to suck your toes."

When, eventually, the poster did have coffee with her colleague, he brushed off research talk and launched into a lugubrious whine about how "My wife doesn't understand me." How gross, some posters thought. And how very trite, sighed Ms. Mentor.

And so, ever the scholar herself, she Googled together "professors" and "romance" -- mostly turning up Romance-language departments, although there was also a list of romance novels featuring professors in love. Googling "professors" with "sex" turned up a list of "Hottest Harvard Professors," many articles on sexual harassment, and a Nigerian exhortation to faculty members and students to eschew "intergenerational sex."

But many academics meet their mates later in life -- after a "starter marriage," after divorce or widowhood, or after coming out or going into the closet. Ms. Mentor wonders how mature scholars handle sentiment, for much of academic research is devoted to debunking romance. Literary scholars talk about "performativity" rather than feelings; anthropologists record eccentric courtship rituals; and psychologists wonder how much of what we call "love" is merely physiology.

Academics in love are apt to be self-critical and ironic, and the best-known academic novels have little love talk and few happy sex scenes. More often there are flamboyant flirtations followed by shrieking escapes, as in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, which starts with a psychoanalysts' convention. There are multiple partners, as in David Lodge's Small World: An Academic Romance, but revenge, greed, and schadenfreude evoke more passion. The late May Sarton wrote academic novels about women, but (probably constrained by the homophobia of her day) did not include sexual expression. In older academic novels by the likes of Mary McCarthy and Bernard Malamud, there are predatory faculty wives; in Jane Smiley's Moo, everyone -- including professors of Spanish and agriculture -- has an agenda.

But no one seems to have sex in those books just for the fun of it. Ms. Mentor suspects that academics distrust the idea of fun. They tend to be introverts, and academe allows people to be nerds for their entire lives. Scholars are supposed to be strong and individualistic, without emotional needs.

Some grow so used to lecturing that they utterly forget how to listen -- and so they lose out on one of the wickedest and most delightful activities ever invented. Ms. Mentor urges all frustrated romantics to do what she does so well: close mouth, open eyes, hunker down, and begin eavesdropping.

Question: If I yearn for someone I cannot have (my nubile student worker, my hot provost), should I confess my love and throw myself on his/her mercies, or is it better to suffer in soulful silence and sublimate my feelings into research and writing and getting tenure and moving on with my life?

Answer: Yes.

Sage Readers: Ms. Mentor, ever attuned to the woes of job seekers who need speedier answers than she can provide, urges them to read Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick's The Academic Job Search Handbook, and the Career Talk column on this site.

As always, Ms. Mentor invites queries, commentary and rants, especially for forthcoming columns on disabilities, homophobia, and religion in academe. Anonymity is guaranteed, pseudonyms are welcome, and identifying details are always obscured.

Ms. Mentor rarely answers letters personally, but many readers have found answers on her Chronicle archive and in her tome, Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia.

Ms. Mentor, who never leaves her ivory tower, channels her mail via Emily Toth in the English department of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. Her Chronicle address is ms.mentor@chronicle.com

Her views do not necessarily represent those of The Chronicle.

Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia, by Emily Toth, can be ordered from the University of Pennsylvania Press by calling (800) 445-9880 or from either of the on-line booksellers below.