[The Montana Professor 14.1, Fall 2003 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]

The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School Through Tenure

John A. Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schine Gold
Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2001
310 pp., $14.00 pb


Philip Gaines
English
MSU-Bozeman

The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career is not the first effort at introducing the novice to the academic life: Blaxter, Hughes, and Tights's The Academic Career Handbook (1998), Margaret Newhouse's Cracking the Academic Nut: A Guide to Preparing for Your Academic Career (1997), and Gerhard Falk's The Life of the Academic Professional in America: An Inventory of Tasks, Tensions, and Achievements (1990) take it upon themselves to inform and advise those who are considering or embarking on a career in the academy.

In addition, there are a number of books that address the academic interests of specific groups--e.g., women, minorities, teachers, publishing hopefuls, or members of specific disciplines. What distinguishes The Chicago Guide is its ambitious scope, beginning with the issue of deciding about a career in academia and continuing through the rigors of achieving tenure.

The book is overtly mentoring, as the subtitle makes clear. Advice is gathered into two main sections. In "Part One: Becoming a Scholar," the focus is on pre-professional matters--such as getting into graduate school, choosing a mentor, writing a dissertation, and finding an academic position. "Part Two: The Academic Profession" addresses the life of the junior faculty member, the responsibilities of teaching and research, achievement of tenure, and professional advancement and mobility, as well as personal issues in academic life. Everything imaginable is treated--from "what graduate school is...all about" (18) and "what it is like to be a brand new assistant professor" (135) to the finicky details of what a c.v. should look like (82) and the specific things to keep in mind in order to get along with faculty colleagues (151ff).

While the bulk of the material is informational--and quite thoroughly and competently so--the authors are not hesitant to include more subjective perceptions, dealing with (as they say) both the "unpleasant aspects" (xvi) of the academic enterprise and the "exhilaration" of the intellectual life. The stated goal here is to offer a "candid introduction to the academic career" (xi) as well as clear up "a host of misconceptions about academia as a way of life" (x).

A willingness to go beyond the mere reporting of facts about academia is perhaps the most compelling aspect of The Chicago Guide--addressing, as it does, matters about which initiates to the profession are so often heard to complain: "They never told me this in graduate school!" Examples of such discussions include discouragement with the dissertation topic (63-4), understanding the qualities and quirks of search committees (87ff), managing the tensions between family and academic life (157-8), getting perspective on student evaluations of one's teaching (179), and even what to do if tenure is denied (221-2). Even with this interpretive and subjective tone, the authors largely avoid "a politicized view" (xvi) of academia and steer clear of "open or hidden agendas." (A notable exception, however, is taken up below.)

Rather than reading like an informational handbook, the text is decidedly--and intentionally--conversational: First- and second-person pronouns are regularly used and discussions are frequently personalized by the authors. To create "the format of an extended conversation" (ix), the book employs a structure in which an imaginary, interested interviewer asks a question (e.g., "How should I prepare for presenting a paper at a professional conference?") to which each of the three authors responds. While some of the contributions are several pages long and quite technical, thus making the supposedly conversational format seem a bit pretentious at times, this informal approach does make the book lively and reader-friendly.

Another surface attraction of The Chicago Guide is the inclusion of "a lot of personal opinion" (xiv) as well as occasional disagreement among the authors: "Our voices are distinct from each other, and not always in agreement.... [S]ometimes they are discordant" (xvii). While such disagreements are few and usually mild, it's kind of fun to savor the possibility that the scholars might get into a tiff on the next page.

The conversational format of the book and its openness to intra-author controversy, while creating a rich and interesting read, also sets up The Chicago Guide for what I see as its one mentionable flaw, i.e., occasions of apparent insensitivity in its representation of women and their concerns in academia.

The first example has to do with the authorship role of Penny Schine Gold. Standard practice in academic publication calls for the order of names in a multi-authored work to reflect the level of contribution of the individuals. This is the case for The Chicago Guide, too. John Goldsmith's offerings make up by far the largest share of the text--not surprisingly, since his prefatory remarks make it clear that the original idea for the book was his. The preface also says that Goldsmith collaborated early on with Komlos in producing the bulk of the manuscript. Gold was added later (xvii): when Goldsmith was introduced to her through an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (in which "[s]he had terrific things to say about the academic career"), he thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to add a third perspective to our conversation?"

This history of how the authorship came together certainly explains the respective quantities of the individual contributions. It also accounts for the fact that John Goldsmith is clearly the authoritative voice in the conversation, setting the agenda and laying the foundation for the many issues under consideration. This arrangement, however, might also give the impression that Gold's voice is being marginalized.

Of the 94 "interview" questions, Gold's comments are almost always placed second or last (So, is she being given the "last word" or relegated to the afterthought?). In addition, Gold's contributions are more frequently--with respect to Goldsmith's and Komlos's--oriented to issues traditionally associated with women, e.g., family matters, personal and emotional issues, and teaching. Perhaps she was included in order to bring a woman's perspective to the conversation, or the point of view of a faculty member in a small private college (Knox; Goldsmith and Komlos are at the University of Chicago and the University of Munich, respectively), or even the insights of a specialist in teaching; the preface should have told us. By not clearly contextualizing Gold's role from the beginning, the book risks giving the appearance that women have a more constrained sphere of influence in academic mentoring.

On two occasions, Komlos seems to exhibit a naïveté about gender issues in higher education that could strike some as insensitive. At one point in the chapter dealing with family, gender, and personal issues, Gold reflects on what she sees as a "debilitating attitude [that] holds that there is no [gender] discrimination in academia and that anyone who perceives such is just whining or looking for excuses to cover up her own failings." She adds that "[t]he entry of women and minorities into the profession has...threatened the dominant position of white males," resulting in "an invisible, yet felt, layer of hostility that makes life that much more challenging for some of us in the academy" (245). Komlos responds, "I have not heard of hostility directed at women in the academy." Is Komlos merely reporting his own personal experience as a German academic or insinuating that Gold's claim is somehow weakened by his retort? In any case, Komlos' facile recourse to personal experience could strike some as a denial of the significance of the problem Gold addresses.

Perhaps a certain defensiveness can also be seen when Komlos responds to Gold's observation that, in her experience, it is more common for "male [versus female] professors [to] use the power of their position" to "undermine the self-confidence of women" (250-1) through engaging in inappropriate, sexually-oriented behavior. Komlos says, "I do not think it is particularly useful to argue about which gender, or race, or ethnic minority has been more prone to commit improprieties" (251). Of course, Komlos may sincerely want to defuse any divisiveness that might result from Gold's strong allegations. At the same time, his extrapolation to the additional categories of race and gender subtly distracts attention from Gold's focus on gender in academia--something that, contra Komlos, is clearly "useful to argue about." It might have been wiser to simply let Gold's comments stand.

Because of its wide range of topics, covering matters that come up sequentially and over a span of more than a dozen years, The Chicago Guide is less a heads up for would-be graduate students than a reference work to be pulled off the shelf at key moments in one's career development to profit from the authors' information and insights. For this purpose, of course, the book is neither exhaustive nor sufficient: what single text could be in view of the enormous complexities of the academic life? However, it does touch all the important bases and provides ways of thinking about issues that will serve as informed starting points for gathering more data and getting into relevant conversations with real-life mentors.

While certain discussions in The Chicago Guide may become less à propos as academia changes, the bulk of the text has enduring value and is a quintessential example of the kind of book that reviewers like to call "required reading."

[The Montana Professor 14.1, Fall 2003 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]


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