Ms. Mentor

Where are the Sins of Yesteryear?

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Question: Can I live down my past?

Answer: That query, written on a small card in dainty spidery handwriting, was slipped to Ms. Mentor's channeler near an elevator. A young woman in dark sunglasses smiled slightly, breathed heavily, and then slithered away, never to be seen again.

Since that fateful day Ms. Mentor has yearned to know what sensational things transpired in the anonymous young lady's past. There must have been secret rendezvous, perhaps at stodgy academic meetings -- but nevertheless suffused with romance. Were there devil-may-care evenings of wild joie de vivre, where red wine was served, flagrantly, with oysters? Were indiscreet words murmured in an overheated meeting room at the Modern Language Association convention? Were someone's galoshes left behind in the wrong boudoir?

Such attempts at sinful behavior used to be shocking. And until women became much more common on the academic job scene, there were shocking stories. For one, there was the notorious tale of "Millie," who had been flown to Remote Village for her job interview. Feeling claustrophobic in her tiny hotel room, Millie slipped down to the bar and ordered a demure Pink Lady cocktail to sip in solitary comfort -- until she was accosted by a very coarse man who offered money ($25) for her company. She indignantly refused -- only to meet him again, the next day, when he turned out to be the head of the hiring committee.

They pretended not to know each other.

"Millie" repeatedly told that story at conferences, so that it became part of the cautionary lore for young women on the job market in the 1970s. Decades later, academe remains a haven for amateur social commentators, for there are always new occasions for sin, and new morsels to chew on and froth over. But the nature of academic peccadilloes -- the kind of sin that needs concealing -- has changed dramatically.

Romantic secrets and sexual overtures are still the favorite rumors to pass on. "Don't tell anyone" still guarantees that your secret, in garbled form, will reach your department head no later than tomorrow afternoon. It is, of course, considered gauche to e-mail the details of a romantic liaison to an online discussion group, but that, too, is done every day. "Oops! I hit the reply key by mistake." Of course you did.

But Ms. Mentor need not froth on about the consequences of unbridled lust. Pedophiles and rapists should simply be locked up; sexual harassers should be fired; and consenting adults should decide when, or if, to go public. If they choose not to, an array of devices -- cell phones, phone cards, free e-mail providers -- stand ready to keep a romance as clandestine as you want it to be. No one need know what goes on behind closed doors. Only your cheating heart will tell on you.

Yet sometimes Ms. Mentor sighs and wishes she were back in the Victorian era, when a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. She wishes that the misdeeds of the heart were the major missteps to hide. But now, instead, she finds her ivory world turning into a cesspool of crime.

Sports pages, for instance, are no longer escape reading. College athletes are chronically running amok, taking money or drugs -- and engaging in barroom brawls, gambling, sexual offenses, shoplifting, and erratic driving.

And so Ms. Mentor turned to the professors, her more usual constituency, hoping they were still poor but honest, striving but virtuous, glad to learn and glad to teach. But she found that, among administrators and professors, there also seems to be a crime wave, a jamboree of misdemeanors and felonies.

Campus and local newspapers, and virtually every issue of The Chronicle, include news about bad behavior among the most educated people in the land. College presidents are fired for spending too much on travel and interior decoration. A state poet laureate turns out not to have the college degree he has claimed for years. A dean is fired for sexual harassment; a registrar is fired for changing grades; a counselor is fired for downloading child pornography onto his campus computer. Researchers galore are fired for fabricating data. As many as 30 mechanical-engineering theses at Ohio University may have been plagiarized.

Ms. Mentor wonders if warnings should be sent out: "A student athlete or college professor is moving into your neighborhood. Take all necessary precautions. Extremely dangerous."

It is probable that most academics, and most athletes, are righteous, law-abiding, upright citizens. Most college athletes do graduate, especially those in individual sports such as golf and tennis. Among the professors Ms. Mentor knows, there are no known felons, and perhaps the biggest social sin is whining, a very mild and sometimes comical manifestation of anger.

And yet -- if mankind is inherently sinful, Ms. Mentor would wish that academics had not turned to greed, vanity, envy, and sloth (as manifested in plagiarism). If they must sin, why not return to the simple joys of lust, and add the exhilarating pleasures of gluttony? Perhaps a campaign is needed: "Eat, don't cheat."

Yes, you can hide your past, Ms. Mentor would say to the mysterious young lady who asked. Sexual sins are not now -- and never were -- the main playground of the professoriate, as even academic novelists have conceded. Their plots rarely involve sexual joys. Sometimes they include badly managed homicides, but most often their characters are enmeshed in fierce envies and tiny conspiracies. Novelists, as always, write about the lives, and the dreams, that their readers know best.

And so Ms. Mentor has to wonder which stories will guide future academics and quicken their pulses. Nowadays, in our prosaic and cynical times, few are the tales of careers risked, or lives thrown over for passionate trysts. Will anyone be able to write great, heart-stopping stories about plagiarized footnotes or shoplifted shoelaces or forged travel receipts?

How the mighty have fallen.

Question: Should I get a haircut, draft a draconian anti-plagiarism statement for my syllabus, spill the bitter and convoluted truth of my ex-colleague's lawsuit, and have acres of anchovies on my pizza?

Answer: Yes.

Sage Readers: Anticipating a fraught autumn, Ms. Mentor's correspondents are already girding their loins. Grad-school friends, applying for the same jobs, want to know how to backstab each other without being overwhelmed with guilt. Newly hired scientists yearn to commandeer little-used lab space now held by lethargic colleagues. People everywhere want to be paid what they're worth. The last is impossible, but for the first two, Ms. Mentor invites reader comments.

Ms. Mentor also welcomes ripostes, rants, and queries. She rarely answers personally but often contrives to solve multiple problems with a few deft strokes. Anonymity is guaranteed, and identifying details are always disguised.

Ms. Mentor, who cannot be rushed, directs eager readers to her archive, to her tome, Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia, and to The Chronicle's forums and other columns on this site.

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.