Читать книгу Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia - Emily Toth - Страница 8

Graduate School: The Rite of Passage

Anne, a straight-A student through high school and a summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr, has fallen in love with art history. She's trekked to every odd little church in every corner of Italy and says her soul is more Italian than American. Friends have found her lying down by the hour, staring at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. A boyfriend even broke off with her because, he said, “You love Michelangelo—even though he's dead and gay—more than you love me.” Anne can't deny it. And now, after five years of waitressing in Europe and discovering that tempestuous romances don't satisfy her soul, Anne wants to go to graduate school. She wants to get a Ph.D. in art history.

Beth has worked for several years in a biology lab, doing routine testings and samplings. But she loves to read novels. She continually regrets that her college major was General Studies, with just “Intro to Lit” and a few low-level science courses to certify herself as a medical technologist. She'd wanted a job that she could fall back on and pick up anywhere, since her husband's job requires a family move every few years. They also have two young children. But now Beth is thinking she'd like to do “something for myself.” She'd like to go to graduate school and really study literature in depth, not just as a fan.

Cassie comes from a family of intensely practical doctors and lawyers who've always considered her an oddball: she's obsessed with human motivations and peculiarities. At family events, when everyone else is talking money, Cassie is gathering gossip. When the doctors discuss hearts and the lawyers discuss writs, Cassie wants to know all about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Cassie majored in mass communications, but found her courses too technical, not satisfying her curiosity. She's figured out that what really grabs her is anthropology—comparative cultures—a field in which academic jobs scarcely exist. So she's considering graduate school in history.

Anne, Beth, and Cassie all need impeccable advice from Ms. Mentor, who will allow her sage readers to eavesdrop.

A Ph.D., Ms. Mentor declares, should be pursued only by those who love what they are doing. They should burn with curiosity and wonder; they should delight in discovering new things. Otherwise the graduate school apprenticeship is too long, and the required studies often dreary. Graduate students have little power and much stress: as fellowships and assistantships dry up, poverty becomes a way of life. And at the end, given the dismal job market in virtually all fields, most Ph.D.s will not follow in their professors' footsteps, even if they want to.

Still, Anne has the burning drive; Cassie has family money to fall back on. But Beth must be able to stay at one university for years of study. Then she'll need to move, possibly several times, to remote and distant places where jobs happen to open. Even with good child care and a husband willing to share a commuter marriage, her options are limited. It's not uncommon, now, for a new English Ph.D. to take five years to find a tenure-track job.

This is not to say that Beth cannot be an academic. But Ms. Mentor would place her bet first on Anne, with her passion for her subject, her real-world experience, and her willingness to sacrifice. Cassie, though, may find history to her liking—if she discovers mentors who share her passion for gossip and narrative. But Beth, so far, knows only about reading literature for pleasure, and Ms. Mentor fears for her.

Will Beth be able to embrace the jargon of literary theory—or will it make her mewl and twitch?

For Anne, Beth, Cassie, and all their fellow students, graduate school will be a series of rituals, some dating back to German education a century and a half ago. (There are those who think Ms. Mentor was present at the creation, but she denies it.)

All graduate students today, in lockstep or death grip, enroll in required seminars and classes—some exciting, some deadly. If they're in science, they'll do labs and fieldwork. If they're in applied practical fields, they may do internships or clerkships or residencies. They may need to be proficient with certain languages or computer programs or machines. They may be sent to ask strangers eccentric or peculiar questions, which their sociology or statistics bosses will then manipulate, via numerical hocus-pocus, into conclusions about human behavior.

Graduate students may also be coaxed into doing other very odd things for their major professors. A group of food science graduate students at a Big Ten university were once seduced into swallowing huge quantities of hot sauce so that their professor could photograph, with fiber optic equipment, the effects on their stomach linings. (The students who suffered the most were those who took aspirin.)

Similarly, some science graduate students at Johns Hopkins University were once enlisted to help protect their major professor's prized gardens from rabbit incursions. Following his directions, the students hied themselves to the Baltimore Zoo, where they beseeched the zoo keepers to give them tiger dung. Then they hauled it out to their professor's estate, where they spent the rest of the day slathering it about his carrots and marigolds.

They did get Big Macs for lunch.

More mundanely, though, students are required to take oral and written exams, sometimes several in different subject areas. Then, finally, they're turned loose to write theses or dissertations—the stage at which the uncommitted are most likely to drop out, and disappear.

If, as sometimes happens, graduate students

• cannot bring themselves to do one more reading assignment—or

• cannot get out of bed to go to the library—or

• get nauseous at the smell of a lab or the thought of a rat—or

• spend hours, days, or weeks in useless housekeeping chores, such as folding sheets or curtains, while avoiding all academic work—or

• fuss and dither for months, never finding a dissertation topic that really grabs them…

Those are all danger signals. Academia may not be for them, and dropping out can be the smartest thing to do. It is never a sign of failure.

For at every stage, Ms. Mentor proclaims, graduate students should be asking themselves: “Am I leading up to what I want to do?” and “What are my goals for this week, this month, this year?” and “Do I want to do this for the rest of my life?”

If Anne finds something new about Michelangelo; and Beth discovers a forgotten novelist whose work anticipates Edith Wharton's; and Cassie forges ahead with an historical study of several kinky anthropologists' lives—then they will have the intellectual excitement that will keep them learning and growing, getting their doctorates and making genuinely new contributions to the world of knowledge.

Then it will all be worthwhile, and Ms. Mentor hopes their parents will live to see the great day. She herself will cheer and sing and perhaps even flick her tambourine.

But not all of Ms. Mentor's correspondents reach that pleasant pinnacle, as sage readers will now discover.

Up Against the Balls

Q: One of my most outspoken professors (I'm in political science) told me that “most of the guys who go to grad school these days don't have the balls to go into the real world.” Assuming that “guys” means all of us (he usually includes women), is he right?

A: Ms. Mentor has always been intrigued by the idea that one needs “balls” in order to do anything other than the work for which they were intended—i.e., the propagation of our species and the recreational pleasures of the bearer thereof.

She recalls Mary Ellmann's clever dissection, in Thinking About Women, and Kate Millett's, in Sexual Politics, of Norman Mailer's claim that a writer can do without anything “except the remnant of his balls.” Besides wondering, as feminist critics have a habit of doing, where one would place a pen—or, these days, a computer—in a testicular vicinity, Ms. Mentor…well, she thinks it all quite silly.

Still, your query, like all those Ms. Mentor selects, deserves a thoughtful reply. If your professor's claim is to be taken literally—that most of the people in grad school lack balls—that is certainly true in the humanities, where well over half of incoming graduate students are women. In political science, however, nearly 75 percent of graduate students receiving Ph.D.s are men. Ms. Mentor thinks it unlikely that they are all eunuchs.

Ms. Mentor therefore understands your professor to be saying, in a crudely symbolic way, that guys “with balls,” those who enroll in the “real world” rather than in graduate school, have the qualities attributed to true masculinity—such as courage, intelligence, and resourcefulness.

Ms. Mentor thinks it fortunate and delightful that all women, whether they are in graduate school or not, have those qualities.

Plotting One's Courses

Q: My department's director of graduate studies, when he advises students about classes to take, has an unfortunate habit of placing course lists in his lap—so that the advisee has to look at his crotch. I am interested in getting a Ph.D. in rhetoric. I am not interested in his crotch.

Last time I went to ask about my program of study, his crotch was—well—bulging.

I am grossed out.

A: Do you have a sympathetic woman professor who can subtly tell Dr. Crotch to knock it off?

If not, there is no easy way—given his power over your career—to confront him honestly and openly. What he is doing is a kind of sexual harassment, a “micro-inequity” that is difficult to combat. If you try, by filing a complaint, you might be accused of “making a mountain out of a…” Well, you get the point.

As there is no clean way to confront Dr. Crotch, Ms. Mentor sighs and offers a sneaky way. One might, for instance, leave an anonymous note in his mailbox: “We, the graduate students, suggest that you not put course lists in your lap when you're advising us. We do not like to look at your crotch. Thank you!”

This should do the trick, especially since Dr. Crotch will have no idea who sent the note. He will suspect everyone. But if the note does not change his behavior, and if—as is often the case with Dr. Crotches—he is hyper-heterosexual or even homophobic, you can torment him with a second anonymous note: “We, the grad student guys, love it when you hold the course lists in your crotch. Keep up the good work!”

After such a truly dirty trick, the superstraight male who won't change his behavior, pronto, is beyond hope.

Don't Know Much

Q: I have returned to graduate school to get a Ph.D. in women's literature. When I was originally an undergraduate back in the 1950s, I chafed under what I have learned to call the requirements of the patriarchy—to read and appreciate literature by men that demeans or makes invisible women and girls. Back then, I just called it being bored by the bullshit.

However, I was what was then referred to as “well educated” : I was well read in the literature, history, and philosophy of the white boys. I'd had my three years of Latin and two years of French, I'd done a research paper in high school every year since ninth grade, I'd taken English classes where we'd been required to read one novel, one play, and some poems every month that school was in session, etc. I'm sure you're familiar with the Old Curriculum. After all, Ms. Mentor Knows All.

Now, forty years later, I return to a completely different world. And I don't like everything about it, you can bet. One of the main things I don't like is the loss of the concept of the educated person. Most of my professors, who are at least one generation younger than I am, seem so unbelievably limited in what they know, in what they have read. I don't understand why that is. I hope I am not being ageist, but I do believe that my range of knowledge when I was their age was broader and deeper.

I love all the new things I am learning in Women's Studies and women and literature courses, but one of the things I love most of all is comparing those things with what I already know, adjusting my understanding of the true nature of reality, history, etc. But it is really weird to see that my co-students and most of my teachers don't have any basic other knowledge to add to this new material.

These are a bunch of observations, and I know they can easily be written off as manifestations of one or another sort of -ism, some social disease of the politically incorrect, but inherent in this set of observations are some questions. I know that in your wisdom you will discern the questions I am too chicken to ask outright.

What do you think, O Wise Ms. Mentor?

A: In other words, does Ms. Mentor think the current generation is dumber than yours? Well, probably. Certainly every older generation thinks so, and Ms. Mentor is as old as the hills.

Usually, though, each generation's knowledge is different. Your fellow students almost certainly know television and popular music (“media texts”) better than you do. They, and your teachers, may also be more skilled at speaking and writing the jargon of postmodernism (“indeterminacy,” “discourse,” “slippage”). You, like Ms. Mentor, may think much of that jargon is silly, pretentious, and senseless—but it is part of today's concept of what makes an educated person. (Ms. Mentor has more faith in Karl Marx's claim that any great idea can be expressed simply.)

Your underlying questions may be varieties of the bright young person's typical observation when starting a first full-time job: “I'm Surrounded By Idiots.” It is true, unfortunately, that many of the things you value, or at least know well, are no longer valued very much by anyone, including the self-satisfied white males who sanctified them in the first place. You can deplore that, but you can't do much to change it.

What you can do is steel yourself and embrace the “discourse.” Or you can regard it as an anthropologist might, as a quaint set of bizarre native customs. Simply from living longer, you know a great deal of history and psychology, both of which should encourage you to view everything with an analytical, if not jaundiced, eye. You may decide to learn what you like, and in the privacy of your own room, write satires about the rest.

Ms. Mentor has been doing that all her life.

Ungraded, Degraded, Misgraded?

Q: With the exception of one professor, all the professors I've had so far in graduate school return my papers with an A grade, but no comments. And they don't discuss the papers with students in office hours, either. Is this the kind of feedback that will prepare me to publish rather than perish? I'm worried.

A: Ms. Mentor will begin by commending you for your superb perceptions. You have psyched out what pays in academia.

At research universities, where graduate students are trained for whatever paltry positions might someday emerge, teaching is the daily work that is often unmentionable. Meeting classes is talked about, wryly, as the dues that faculty pay in order to pursue the really prestigious fun: publishing books and articles; poking holes in others' obscure or obtuse arguments; posturing at conferences or flaming opponents over the Internet; or pursuing administrative posts through which to protect or punish.

In research universities, teaching provides many psychic rewards (which few faculty will admit), but prestige and money come from writing. If your professors are particularly candid, or rude, they may claim to be modeling correct professional priorities for you: students are little swarmy things to be swatted away in the interests of Pursuing Knowledge and Power, which come through publishing.

Ms. Mentor hopes that once you are a professor yourself, you will not subscribe to the publishing-is-all-that-ever-matters creed. But to aid you in achieving that blessed state, Ms. Mentor suggests these ways to wring some feedback out of invisible or recalcitrant pedagogues:

• Use the graduate student grapevine to finger the most responsive professors. Often they are newer and younger and filled with zeal and grand ideas. (As Jill Ker Conway notes in True North, she was advised to take her Harvard classes from junior faculty. They hadn't already put all they'd ever know in their books; they weren't burned out.)

• If there is no grad student grapevine, create one: a graduate student organization, or brown bag lunches, or coffees. These are not just for gossip or mutual moaning (though those are valuable). Grapevines can spawn writing groups, support groups, and pals who'll help one another get jobs and opportunities.

• Create or join a writing group, with ground rules: How often should the group meet? What should each member be expected to bring or distribute beforehand? How precise should comments be? (Global? A paragraph at a time? Grammatical nitpicking?) If face-to-face writing groups aren't possible, try e-mail (writers' magazines have some suggestions).

• Read up on a subject, at least two journal articles, before tracking down a professor and asking polite, specific questions before writing each paper: “Can you suggest other useful sources on this subject?” or “Have I neglected something important?” or “Why does Koppelman say this?” Vague or whimpering queries—“How should I write this paper?” or “I don't know what you WANT!”—are hard to answer and wearisome, and drive less responsible faculty to evade office hours. (Sometimes such professors can be tracked down in bars near campus. Those are not the best venues for academic feedback.)

As for post-paper feedback, Ms. Mentor adds these tips:

• You may ask the professor: “Would you be willing to read an article I want to submit to a journal?” (It's even better to name a specific journal.) The article may be substantially the same as your class paper, but your strategy will free the professor from feeling hounded to justify a grade. (That, too, often drives professors out of the office and into the bars.) Asked to read a journal article, your professor will have been seduced into feeling that s/he is doing real professional work—and you'll get your comments.

• You may send your papers to journals that provide feedback—such as PMLA, Legacy, and Signs. You will, of course, have studied the journals beforehand: How detailed are the articles? What writing styles are favored? What documentation is used? Do the journals prefer wide syntheses or close readings? How intricate and how tactful (or tactless) are the arguments refuting previous researchers? What seem to be the political stances of journal writers and editors? Given the odds, your work is likely to be rejected, but you may get back detailed, informative critiques.

The critiques may also, sometimes, be scathing, but Ms. Mentor urges you to preserve your ego strength despite the slings and arrows of graduate school. Find people who love you for yourself and won't snipe at you about your GRE scores. Treasure nonacademic friends who ask real-life pointed questions that deserve good answers, such as

• “Why are you clubbing some old dead guy for his racism? He can't mend his ways now”—or

• “Why study a wife beater like Melville? Even Hawthorne wouldn't get it on with him”—or

• “So you're a sanitary engineer. Is our local water safe to drink?”—or

• “Why did that creepy Bettelheim hate mothers so much?”—or

• “So when will you find a cure for AIDS?”—or

• “Why do these smart professors write such long and windy sentences?”

Ms. Mentor exhorts you to flee from those who demand, “What are you going to do with your degree?” They're too depressing.

Finally, Ms. Mentor reminds you that professors' grades and comments are not the main education one acquires in school. Grad students, like all apprentices and underlings, learn best by doing. Through writing papers and reports, you teach yourself to put together ideas, come up with theses, and discuss and demonstrate them with quotations and conclusions, numbers and notations, theories and speculations. Professorial comments, whether ego-satisfying or soul-shattering, won't teach you to be an independent professional generating your own momentum.

Ms. Mentor, who is often the recipient of clumsy though well-deserved flattery, acknowledges that graduate students do need to please their elders. But the motivation to think, research, and write must come from within—not from the hope for more good grades or strokes. An academic needs a strong, independent drive; intellectual curiosity; and an unconquerable urge to write and publish.

Professorial feedback, Ms. Mentor concludes, is but a garnish. The meal—preferably lush and sweet and spicy, not chewy or stringy—is what you concoct yourself.

Ms. Mentor, of course, always brings the sage.

Class Conscious

Q: I'm in a history graduate program, and many of my classmates strike me as pompous, moneyed bores. (OK, I'm in an Ivy League school, and I do come from a preppie background.) Do academics ever escape their ancestry?

A: Rarely. In fact, few Americans stray far from their original class position. First-generation college students rarely get Ph.D.s and become academics, and few, if any, of those will be hired as faculty in the Ivy League, where the nasal “preppie honk” is still a favored accent. Someone who attended Cleveland State (for instance) will be considered quite exotic among people who all matriculated at Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and the like. Ms. Mentor knows one academic in Oklahoma who grew up in foster homes and one in Illinois who is the child of migrant workers, but the typical academic is the offspring of a college-educated, suburban nuclear family.

Ms. Mentor recommends that you read Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory, edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay, and take to heart their descriptions of how the poor feel among the elite.

And should you tire of the pompous, moneyed bores about you (Ms. Mentor yawns and twitches when she thinks of them), you can always urge them to join you in a few hours a week of volunteer work for a battered women's program, or Planned Parenthood, or Habitat for Humanity, or a soup kitchen, abortion clinic, literacy program, or progressive political candidate.

In short, you can do your bit to revive the historical tradition of noblesse oblige. Ms. Mentor believes fervently that it behooves the rich, wise, and powerful to aid the less fortunate. That is why she shares her perfect wisdom with the masses. You, in your own way, can follow her lead.

Fat Chance

Q: I'm a grad student in education, and I'm very fat. I know women of size have problems with job discrimination and hostility, and my classmates all seem to be thin, white, suburban, and athletic, and obsessed with their weight, to the point of anorexia.

I'm used to anti-fat comments from people who don't know anything about metabolism or set points or the fact that more than 95 percent of diets fail. Even Oprah Winfrey's weight yo-yos, and that's far more unhealthy than being “overweight.” But I didn't expect educated people to still believe foolish myths about fat (it's a matter of poor willpower) or disease (fat will kill you—tomorrow), or to monitor every mouthful they eat with self-hating comments (“I hate myself for eating all this chocolate”). I get angry sometimes; mostly I get bored.

But I'm also worried about what this means for my academic future, as a fat woman who won't—and can't, anyway—get skinny. I've tried all my life, with starvation diets, self-punishment, killer exercise, and even some secret surgery. Nothing works, and I know that fat activists are right: if we're fat, it's because it's in our genes.

My adviser is a skinny woman who punishes herself to get that way. Yesterday she told me that if I don't lose weight, I might as well quit grad school, as it'll be wasted on me. Is she right?

A: While Ms. Mentor was fuming over your letter, she was hearing about olestra, a recently approved substance with the mouth feel of fat but not the calories. Apparently it just slides through the intestines, pirating away needed nutrients, and causing “unfortunate” side effects (say the popular media): explosive diarrhea and “anal leakage,” visible on the underwear of tasting volunteers.

Ms. Mentor hopes that by the time you read this, olestra will have been banned. But she thinks it more likely that several I-must-be-skinny-at-all-costs women will be permanently injured, malnourished, or dead. And the promoters of olestra will have fattened their profits at the expense of women.

“I Must Be Thin” strikes Ms. Mentor as a deadly mantra, one women should resist. It siphons away mental energy; it leads to ridicule and abuse and prejudice, for beauty standards have always depended on scarcity and difficulty. In poor societies, fat is in; among rich people, thin is in—so that U.S. women who can afford to dine grandly brag instead that they've learned to starve themselves. Ms. Mentor has heard that some women actually interrupt delicious dinner parties to denounce their own thighs.

And now universities, seemingly in cahoots with the sadistic designers of airline seats, have added a new torture. The latest brand of classroom furniture installed at, among other places, the University of Oklahoma and Louisiana State University, features seats that are only fourteen inches wide. The distance between the seats and their attached writing surfaces is so small that pregnant women and male athletes literally cannot fit inside the desks they're supposed to sit in.

(For further information about the madness of thin people, Ms. Mentor directs her readers to a marvelously funny ‘zine called Fat? So! available for $12/year from Fat! So?, P.O. Box 423464, San Francisco, CA 94142. NAAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, can be reached at 1-800-442-1214, and they can share some surprising facts—not myths. Ms. Mentor also recommends the classic book Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser, and a new encourager: Cheri K. Erdman's Nothing to Lose: a Guide to Sane Living in a Larger Body.)

But all this does not answer your real question: Can a woman of substance be an academic?

To which Ms. Mentor responds: Yes, but you must be sly and choose your battles. Usually it is not worthwhile to try to educate the scrawny self-punishers about the uselessness of dieting: that will just frustrate you. You can leave around Fat? So! and NAAFA leaflets; you can give them to your adviser, if you think she's open to seeing fatophobia as a form of bigotry. If not, shrug and try to be amiable: you still need her approval.

You can also make yourself feel better by bedeviling and misleading the fatophobes around you:

• If you have a boyfriend—most fat women do, since men like a lot of woman to hug—flaunt him.

• Now and then, wear darker clothes: the skinnies will be bamboozled into thinking you've lost weight. Loose-fitting dresses rather than pants will also confound them: they can't easily see and judge your body. (A tip: under skirts, you can wear divided slips for comfort.)

• Silence patronizers (“You'd be so pretty if you'd just lose weight”) by claiming you're on a slow, medically approved diet. They don't have to know that your basic four food groups are whatever you like best—such as chili corn dogs, sour cream and onion-flavored potato chips, Godiva Chocolates, and Budweiser.

• Tell the skinnies that you're “part bulimic.” (You know which part: you like to binge, but you never purge.)

• Use the sterotypical role of Fat Woman as Everyone's Jolly Pal to get inside information. People will tell you secret stuff you need to know—not only gossip, but who really runs the show in your academic department. That's enormously useful.

Ms. Mentor also recommends finding a self-loving Women of Size support and exercise group: they'll be women to eat and laugh with. Call whichever local hospitals are touting the so-called ills of menopause: they'll be looking for ways to hook women. And use the Net for support and discussion groups.

Meanwhile, in grad school, Ms. Mentor recommends that you work most on your writing. If you write well, with lively and interesting prose, you can get to the point where no one knows or cares what you look like. The great women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton was fat, and deliberately so; Gertrude Stein was monumental; Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds and other books, strides around and collects her millions in a muumuu.

Ms. Mentor cannot guarantee that all this will cure fatophobia and get you academic success, but she does know that activity is always better than brooding—just as eating is always better than starving. Toffee beats tofu.

And eventually, as Americans grow older and simply can't have tiny bodies, women of substance may be seen as a wise avant-garde. Ms. Mentor likes to imagine an alternative world in which anytime a woman starts to worry about calories or eating, she tells herself, “Eating well is a contribution to women's well-being and therefore to worldwide feminist revolution and the betterment of all.” Then she chows down, with relish, on those chocolate chip cookies and gooey fried cheese nachos and mile-high ice cream pies.

Imagine a world of happy, well-fed, self-loving, intellectually alert women instead of the bulimic, the cranky, the anorexic, or the walking-dead-from-dieting.

That would truly be revolutionary.

Dissertation Dilemma

Q: I'm choosing a dissertation topic, in literature. What should I keep in mind to be marketable?

A: Ms. Mentor is reluctant to contribute to her own growing reputation for fogeyism, for possessing antiquated ideas. Yet she cannot divest herself of the belief that pursuing one's own intellectual interests is the only valid reason to be in graduate school. And so, in her well-mannered way, Ms. Mentor periodically rails and sputters at the idea that dissertation writers must put “marketability” first.

Ms. Mentor hereby declares: Academia does not pay well enough for people to sell their souls in that way.

She further advises that before choosing any topic, you should undertake a serious self-study. Now, Ms. Mentor is not recommending therapy (or gynecology). Rather, she means for you to start a diary, write letters to yourself, and initiate thoughtful chats with nonacademic friends and family, in order to ask yourself truly:

WHAT DO I WANT FROM ACADEMIA?

Some possible answers:

• To follow my intellectual interests.

• To do new research about women, or people of color, or lesbian writers.

• To get a job with a clear structure of deadlines, rewards, and punishments.

• To continue the life that gives me ego boosts, since I've always been good at schoolwork.

• To make a good living as a professor.

The last is the worst reason, as the job crunch deepens and salaries fall even further behind those of other professionals. Many university faculties are now more than half part-timers, underpaid and without benefits. Some community colleges in the Northeast now consider a typical teaching load for a “part-time adjunct instructor” to be three courses per semester, $1500 per course, no benefits, no chance for tenure or promotion. (This information is available in the Chronicle of Higher Education.) Older professors are not dying or retiring at the expected rate, and when they are, they are often not being replaced at all.

You need better reasons to stay in school. For some students, familiar routines are powerful pulls: they need deadlines and grades, carrots and sticks. Overwhelmingly busy with reading, students too rarely ask, “What for?” (beyond the fact that it's assigned). Few grad students will dare say, “This is boring.” As Leslie Fiedler pointed out a generation ago, academic types generally have a huge tolerance for boredom and an equally enormous fear of risk. The real world is scary. Stay in school and do your homework.

(In reality, there are many highly structured 9-to-5 jobs, such as technical writing, that pay better than academia does. They don't require homework, and technical writers also don't risk being publicly heckled by teenagers.)

Further, Ms. Mentor probably does not need to tell you that graduate school rarely provides ego boosts: one of its unspoken functions is to make students squirm. Even in his youth, at Johns Hopkins University, Professor Stanley Fish was famous for telling classes that “Studying literature should be painful. If it isn't, you're not doing it right.” His then-colleague, Professor Eugenio Donato, used to accuse the rare smiling student: “You think literature is pretty.”

But Ms. Mentor assumes that you have signed up for the rigors of graduate school, accepting years of poverty, for the best and most valid reason: driving intellectual curiosity. There are things you want to read and know and learn, and as you approach your dissertation, you get to ask yourself:

• What am I really interested in?

• What do I want to do with my life?

The topic you choose will determine which jobs you can aim for, and what you can teach, and what you will be expected to write about for publication. If you select Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for instance, you will be “marketable” in Women's Studies; American literature, nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and possibly nonfiction, autobiography, and cultural studies. You may love Renaissance poetry, but you will have to bid it adieu as a subject for scholarly inquiry.

What not to do. Ms. Mentor shudders at the current proliferation of cross-century dissertations, such as “The Rhetoric of Ignatia Quicksilver as Applied to the Works of Shakespeare, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, and Beavis and Butt-head.” Supposedly the student—should she live to complete such a sweeping, impossible dissertation—will then be deemed qualified for jobs in Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature, the novel, modernism, rhetoric, African American literature, cultural studies, postmodernism, gender studies, and Ignatia Quicksilver.

(Ms. Mentor finds it particularly offensive that many a white graduate student who's written one chapter on Toni Morrison—and who hasn't?—purports to be an expert on African American literature. That insults African Americans, who have a distinct, rich culture and literature very different from white folks'.)

In reality, the student with the conglomerate dissertation will come across to hiring committees as a jill-of-all-trades who may be hired for “generalist” positions, but those are usually non-tenure-track instructorships. If she wants a Real Job, she needs a Real Subject for her dissertation: an author, a period, a genre, a critical approach, a community of authors more closely meshed. She needs to demonstrate, through her dissertation, that she knows something well, something that she's passionately interested in pursuing.

Time matters, too. Ms. Mentor advises you to choose a topic that you can complete quickly. No vast syntheses; no biographies (they take too long and require too much money and travel). No need to write the definitive word. Just the completed one.

With well-focused subjects, some highly motivated students can write their dissertations in a year. Ms. Mentor did hers in just under two, she thinks—although they used different calendars then, in the Pleistocene era. It is not uncommon for dissertations to take four years, some of them part-time while the student is teaching, working at another career, or involved with family.

But some students take up to eight years or more—an ominous sign. Often they were never really inspired in the first place, and now they are dithering and procrastinating. Frequently they are people who genuinely do not enjoy writing—or who would rather write lampoons and letters than literary criticism. They prefer real life to lit crit, and that is a perfectly rational choice.

They should stop punishing themselves, Ms. Mentor decrees. There is no shame in not completing a dissertation, for the average person changes careers five to ten times in a lifetime. The shame is to continue in something one does not love, just because one has begun it. Smart folks stop.

Meanwhile other smart folks, the incorrigible literature lovers, try to find subjects that enthrall them. If you're one, what should you write on?

Ms. Mentor suggests that you think about which authors, genres, readings, have kept running around in your mind long after the courses and teachers were forgotten. Which ones did you talk about incessantly with your friends? Which ones are you still quoting? These are the ones you'll enjoy rereading and rereading. What do you not know about these authors and texts? What would you like to know?

Further, are there writers whose papers are in your university library, barely touched by human hands? Does your local historical society have materials you could work on? Is there something genuinely original (and therefore more exciting) that you could do?

You should continue your search until you find something that tickles your fancy, for you will be working with it a long time. This will be your only chance to write a book on a subject dear to your heart and have it critiqued by experts.

Ms. Mentor also recommends that you read some completed dissertations in your field (the university library will have those written locally). Besides seeing how a dissertation is shaped by a thesis (point of view), you will be pleasantly surprised by how awful some of them are. “I can easily write something that mediocre,” many a grad student has told herself, chuckling with pleasure. This is extremely gratifying.

Finally, you should think of choosing to do your dissertation as a gift to yourself and the world, not as a punishment meted out by some horrific schoolteacher martinet in your head. And if the obvious person to direct your dissertation is horrific, you should not work with that person. Life is short. Choose a director who's congenial and helpful, and who's well published in your field: your director's connections may help you get a job.

Ms. Mentor believes that her wise readers should choose pleasure over pain. If living an interesting life inspires them more than the prospect of committing literary criticism, then they should choose life.

Early Publishing = Premature Perishing?

Q: Do I need to publish to get a first job? Should I be sending my seminar papers to academic journals for feedback, or will their manuscript readers get annoyed with me?

A: Ms. Mentor already knows what numerous learned worthies are thinking: there's too much bad stuff published already. You may be right in thinking you're not ready, and that you shouldn't clutter the mails, the Net, the journals with your naive maunderings. You should give your ideas, and your prose style, time to mellow and grow. What you send out should be substantial, long-mulled-over, and gravely wise. That is the only way to make an important mark, rather than selling out to the trendy, or prostituting yourself to the marketplace.

Ms. Mentor characterizes the above sentiments as Senior Scholar Claptrap and Entrenched Pseudo-Wisdom. For you it's also unrealistic, suicidal advice.

Yes, indeed, in an ideal world one would not publish a semicolon before it was ripe. But in the real world, a half-baked, or even raw, book is not uncommon. And a publish-no-thought-before-its-time academic, is an unemployed academic.

You cannot wait to be brilliant. You need to make yourself known as soon as possible.

Luckily for you, the human memory often blurs distinctions: people will remember your name, but not whether your work was splendid or shameful. You should be delivering conference papers, and writing book reviews; you should be volunteering to edit manuscripts, judge contests, arrange conferences, chauffeur visiting scholars and writers. You should be sending stuff around, whether it's published or not; you should list on your vita all the pieces that are “in circulation.” When an article is turned down, you should study the readers' reports, revise, and send it out again within a week.

You must be ambitious; you must aim to publish early and often. That is the only way you'll distinguish yourself from the hordes of people who apply for every tenure-track job—sometimes as many as two thousand for every one job in the humanities.

Without publication, Ms. Mentor guarantees that your career will truly perish.

The Professor Passes the Last Course

Q: My dissertation director dropped dead in the back seat of a taxi, and I have two chapters still to go. Now what?

A: Ms. Mentor, who reads Miss Manners faithfully about proper behavior, sends condolences on your loss. The passing of a professor is always tragic.

Ms. Mentor recalls the terrible case of a young man named Cameron, who was actually present, hailing the Number Ten bus, when his dissertation director—as Cameron put it—“started spitting out black stuff and then croaked.” Cameron persisted in telling this crudely entertaining tale for weeks afterward, until he became known (behind his back, of course) as “the Asshole with the Albatross.” He took a leave of absence to collect his thoughts, and Ms. Mentor does not know what became of him.

You, though, presumably do not want to quit. You want to salvage your dissertation and your academic prospects. And so Ms. Mentor suggests that you meet as soon as possible with your department's chair of graduate studies for advice about possible other directors. You may already have someone in mind, someone else on your committee, but the graduate chair can give you practical advice—what forms will you have to file?—and other information about professors' interests.

Further, if your original director left a lukewarm reference in your file (that sometimes happens), the graduate chair can have it removed, lest it taint your future possibilities.

(Do not make the mistake made by “Jim,” a highly promising graduate student in New York, who had almost completed his dissertation when his director died suddenly, leaving behind a tepid reference letter for Jim. Out of sentiment—or perhaps a strangely rigid loyalty—Jim did not attempt to have the letter removed. As a result, he was never able to get an academic job. Later Jim married a troubled young woman who was receiving interplanetary radio bulletins through the fillings in her teeth—and when last heard from, Jim was supporting them both by selling mortuary slabs in Ohio.)

Ms. Mentor wants you to be wiser, about past and future. For your new director, you will be tempted to seek out someone you like. You've sustained a loss; you'd like comfort. But you most need someone who'll give your career the biggest boosts.

Avoid your original director's enemies (you may not know who they are, but the graduate chair will). Avoid those who've opposed your original director's methodology: if you're a socialist feminist, you don't want someone who scoffs at “that pseudo-Commie crap.” Avoid outright sexists and the very territorial: they may want you to rewrite your entire dissertation so it's theirs, with no trace of your original director's hand.

Meanwhile, Ms. Mentor urges you to continue writing. Keeping busy will be consoling and also reassuring to whoever steps in as your next director. You'll be able to show that you're not someone who needs hand-holding but someone who's a colleague in training. You need a mentor, not a master or a mother.

It is perfectly all right, however, to continue to need Ms. Mentor's impeccable advice.

Every wise academic does.