Ms. Mentor

The Never-Ending Project

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Question: I've been drafted to work on "Project M," a universitywide research program that is an embarrassment (in all senses) of riches. More than 100 faculty members have accomplished nothing meaningful despite five years of substantial foundation support.

The project leaders are forever worrying about securing more money (which supports faculty lines), but not about actual findings. Although the grant has been renewed, the best efforts of the few lucid participants have met only cold rebuke. I want to be a good campus citizen, but do not wish to be stigmatized by association with the project. It's bad enough that I have to invest valuable time and energy in something certain to fail; I would hate for the foundation to think less of me later.

Answer: Indeed, Ms. Mentor knows how soul-searing it is to be a lone voice of truth crying in the wilderness. She feels your pain -- yet thinks you may be fretting inordinately.

First, you have been chosen to work on a richly rewarded project, where your presence will be noticed and appreciated. Other participants may later vote on your tenure, your promotion, or your travel money, or write glowing references if you are seeking another job. Everyone will become aware of your talents and perspicacity, and it could be a fine opportunity -- except that you think it stinks.

Which is the most intriguing part of your communication.

Ms. Mentor does know slow-moving projects. Her work of reforming the academic world -- getting it to rely on merit, openness, and justice -- sometimes seems hopelessly stalled on a grimy railroad track at midnight, while owls hoot mournfully.

But your midnight assignment, should you accept the mission, is more mundane and achievable. You can begin by doing the homework that few vociferous objectors ever do: You can read every word of the grant proposal. Read it aloud, slowly and carefully. (Try out your stentorian James Earl Jones voice.) Notice the typical rhythms of academic prose. If you find a typo, allow yourself a brief chortle of superiority. Note the vague generalities ("to facilitate awareness"), but seek out what sounds innovative or specific ("to increase participation of . . .").

That should be the core, the jewel, the overt purpose for which the foundation is willing to pay. It is usually a magnificent and mildly utopian aim. But academic projects always have more than an overt purpose -- and that is why they are so frustrating to young and eager participants.

And so Ms. Mentor urges you not to believe everything you read. Projects also exist to bring together like-minded people who will create social and scholarly networks. Your friends, "the lucid participants," now have allies, with whom they can achieve smaller goals. They are now a community with some stake in the project, and their interest in one another will keep them coming to meetings. It will make them more loyal to the university. They may even brag about their association with the foundation.

Sometimes more than friendship blossoms from long-term, slow-moving projects. "Althea" and "Hengest," for instance, were first dragooned onto a mini-subcommittee to revise a tiny corner of the curriculum. But their postmeeting gripe sessions segued into coffee, and then drinks, and then intimate dinners . . . and on the day that the huge committee report was finally delivered, and filed with all other huge committee reports, their daughter was born. (They resisted suggestions to name her "Curricula.")

Few project outcomes are so final, dramatic, or welcome, and there is indeed an air of melancholy when a grant ends -- especially since, as has always been the case, most projects do not achieve their long-range goals (transmuting base metals into gold; finding a passage to India). Nowadays, a project just needs to make some kind of headlinable progress ("Mentoring may cure cancer, study shows").

It is not truly in anyone's interest to solve major problems, Ms. Mentor has long noted, for armies of people, in and out of academe, would then lose their jobs. A weight-loss pill that really worked, for instance, would throw millions of people out of work. And who would absorb all the scientists, beauty editors, exercise mongers, diet gurus, and charlatans who are now busily making people hate their own bodies? Ms. Mentor imagines them all on the streets, begging for bread. She snickers and then feels guilty.

But you should not feel guilty or tormented about joining Project M. The foundation will not "stigmatize" you, since it obviously supports the project. It will welcome you, and so will the caucus of lucid malcontents. If the project cannot be redesigned to produce more "findings," at least you will get to do colorful kvetching with friends and allies. (That will even be defined as work time, so you needn't fear the classic academic refrain in your head: "I should be working on . . .") You and the Lucid Caucus will bond. You'll have in-jokes. You can blog together under secret screen names that everyone will secretly know.

But will Project M achieve its overt purpose, whatever that may be? Maybe. Maybe not. Will it continue to create more faculty lines? Ms. Mentor hopes so.

Will it annoy, bore, and amuse you to be part of it? Indeed it will.

Will it also teach you about human eccentricities, jargon, and posturing, while showing you, possibly through bad examples, how a meeting or a class should be organized and run? Will it give you a peek into how academic administration works, should you be inclined in that direction? Or teach you enough so that you will flee, shrieking, blanket over your head, if anyone ever says "committee"?

Being part of Project M can be a "learning experience," even a "baptism by fire," and Ms. Mentor knows you will not be grateful to her for saying so. (No one has ever gotten a grant to write an "Ode to Ms. Mentor.")

But solving problems, or at least explaining what academicians really mean, is Ms. Mentor's life work and her overt purpose. If there were no problems, and everyone were always righteous, well paid, selfless, noble, and thoroughly competent -- she knows what would happen.

She would be out of work.

Question: A colleague called me the department chair's "bitch." Even though I'm male, I should consider this an insult, yes?

Answer: Yes.

Sage Readers: Ms. Mentor's erudite readers have recently supplied the correct plural for CV (curricula vitae), the proper term for postbook letdown (postlibrum depression), and one more suggestion for a must-read novelist about academe: Connie Willis.

Ms. Mentor welcomes further edification, along with rants and queries, and reminds readers that she rarely answers letters personally. All communications are confidential, and in published letters, names and details are always changed. Many recurring situations have been covered in her archive, in The Chronicle's online forums, and in her tome, Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia. She also invites material for her next book, Ms. Mentor's Perfect Wisdom for the Academic Soul.

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.