Victoria Christie
Communication Studies
Rocky Mountain College
Imagine for a moment that you have lunch with an old friend, someone you knew many years ago when you were both in graduate school preparing for careers in academe. You choose a quiet spot, order a meal, and begin to talk. After catching up on the details of the present, you reflect upon your professional experiences, what makes the academy good, what about it makes you both cringe. Your friend is a very good story teller, peppering her philosophy with stories like the one about the female graduate student who complained about a male professor holding her papers on his lap while he reviewed them with her, or the one about the anxious, untenured female assistant professor who unexpectedly walked in on a colleague to find him necking with his male graduate student. Her sense of humor is exquisite; you laugh out loud, experiencing the relief that comes when one's own insights are shared with a kindred spirit. Your lunch mate is none other than Ms. Mentor, the persona taken by Emily Toth, author of Impeccable Advice for Women in Academe, and reading her book is very much like the experience described. The reader laughs and cries, winces and sighs at the advice offered by Ms. Toth.
Ms. Mentor, who models herself on Miss Manners, the grande dame of advice for achieving gracious interpersonal relations, has the cultivated voice of a woman experienced in academe. Impeccable Advice is based upon questions posed from readers or mentorees. Well informed, Ms. Mentor applies feminist thinking to everyday problems in academe as she answers the questions. Unlike her journalistic sister Miss Manners, whom I never could believe capable of breaking up people on the verge of fisticuffs, Ms. Mentor has moved her mop under the academy's bed to get at the dustballs of such things as tenure refusal, and she has scrubbed the hallowed floors on her hands and knees inspecting the bumps and ridges of the imperfect teaching evaluation process. She does not fully disclose her own path to tenure in detail, but the empathy and specificity with which she answers each woman's question suggest an understanding that many uninitiated women, and probably as many men, need advice to steer them through rough shoals, safely into the harbor of tenure.
In the 222-page, eleven-chapter book, Ms. Toth introduces each chapter's theme in a page or two, then answers between five to ten questions from readers to expand upon the theme of the chapter. Impeccable Advice is organized much like a career is, beginning with a chapter whose theme is graduate school, proceeding to the interview and through the first year on the job. The reader then learns the "perils and pleasures of teaching" and how to solve the "muddles and puzzles" of the profession. Late in the book the reader learns how we in the academy go "slouching towards tenure." The book contains a bibliography which directs those unfamiliar with the state of the academy or with feminist thinking to important books and articles. The order is logical and straightforward, and no matter what the reader's career stage, he or she will find important information in this book.
Taken in aggregate, the questions posed by readers illustrate the problems that women in academe face, and Ms. Mentor easily moves from specific questions to explain larger feminist issues. For example, in the chapter on graduate school, a reader who perceives hostility and discrimination reveals, "I'm a grad student in education, and I'm very fat." In her response, Ms. Mentor first describes her anger about America's obsession with women's weight, as captured by our culture's mantra, "I must be thin." Then, she promotes an organization which provides support for overweight people and its newsletter, Fat? So! Next, Ms. Mentor offers fashion tips for what she calls "women of substance," advising them to wear dark clothing or to wear loose-fitting clothes to mislead "fatophobes" into thinking weight is being lost. Finally, she pep talks all women, urging us to be "happy, well-fed, and self-loving." It is okay, she maintains, for women to eat enough food to sustain life.
The use of the question format is friendly to women, who are likely to be comfortable hearing problems discussed simply as part of a kind of conversation. Indeed, the reader experiences something akin to listening to people chat. For the most part, the questions represent mainstream professional concerns, such as, "How forward should I be in advancing the critical nature of my research?" and "I'm new to teaching. Should I have students call me by my first name?" For the occasional question which reflects extraordinary experience ("Can I use my department Christmas party to come out as a lesbian?"), the reader can take comfort in the thought that at least someone else has problems worse than his or her own. Ms. Mentor does try to tackle the big challenges women face in academe. Miss Manners assumes, based upon her readers' letters, that people exist who are uncivil and ungracious and that advice is needed in dealing with them; Ms. Mentor likewise offers the experiences of those who write letters to her as evidence that academe contains elements of racism, sexism, and homophobia and that women must be ready to circumvent these forces. She flatly states that women, and by implication men as well, do not become college professors for the pay (it is low), for the potential number of jobs (they are relatively few), for the sympathetic understanding of one's colleagues (they can be boring and sniveling), or for the glory of pursuing knowledge (tenure is a more pressing concern). She describes an academic world where hoards of people vie for a few coveted positions. After a candidate receives the favor of employment, she toils for years working towards tenure, a state of grace that Ms. Mentor believes too often eludes women due to sexism, racism, or homophobia in academe. If the candidate is successful in her bid for tenure, Ms. Mentor says the now secure professor should work tirelessly toward changing the brutalizing process that she just endured. Ms. Mentor contrasts the academy with a concrete-sounding "real world," which is loosely defined as any place outside of academe.
Indeed, after reading Ms. Mentor, one wonders why a woman would ever become a professor at all. That the reader is left wondering why about this and other issues that the book raises is the major weakness in Impeccable Advice. As engaging as the question format is, it limits serious discussion and occasionally trivializes its important problems. Issues raised, such as the competition for scarce jobs and the nature of the tenure process, beg for analysis but only chat is offered, sometimes resulting in a less than satisfying experience. While Ms Mentor's advice is well taken, especially for women unfamiliar with the rules operative in higher education or under the illusion that academe is a meritocracy, still I would like to have heard thoughtful analysis of why the competition is keen and tenure so difficult to attain. It's true that, as Ms. Mentor says, many people do apply for each position. But she is perhaps overly influenced by overcrowding specific to her discipline, English, where jobs are extremely scarce. My cohorts in the communication discipline from graduate school all found employment within one year of completing their degrees, some of them at what look like grand salaries, and those who left academe for consulting and corporate life are rolling in relative clover.
Impeccable Advice offers only the description of how keen the competition is and no discussion of why. If the competition to get an academic job serves as evidence for how sought after academic jobs are, we might ask why is it that so many smart people want them? Could it be that academe, for all of its shortcomings, offers freedom in the work place not likely to be found elsewhere? Academics don't have to sell widgets when they know them to be useless, and they can value knowledge for the sake of something apart from its cash value, loving it not for what it will buy but for the sake of its beauty. People in academe don't need to toe the education equivalent of a company line quite so rigidly as those in the corporate world, and they are rewarded, even encouraged, to be contrary. Best of all, academics get to influence young people. The relative freedom that toilers in the academy enjoy is clear. The real world for professors is a relatively good one, and readers of Impeccable Advice hopefully understand beforehand why they might choose an academic life, because the book offers much discouragement about the profession itself. Just as no book is perfect, so do professions lack perfection, and Ms. Mentor over emphasizes the negative. Ms. Mentor reminds women that they will not have freedom unless they have tenure so relentlessly that the reader grows somewhat weary of the topic of tenure, as its importance is overplayed in the book. She admonishes women to avoid display of their personal tastes, as well as even preferences in their research interests, in pursuit of the grail of tenure. One of Ms. Mentor's questioners, a young Jewish professor, asked whether when approached to speak on Jewish issues, she should do so despite the fact that the subject held no professional interest for her. Ms. Mentor advised her to see Jewish studies as a possible niche topic, something which would help her to win community appreciation, thereby strengthening her tenure bid. Women should always be alert for impediments toward being tenured, Ms. Mentor claims. She casts tenure as a destination toward which women must single-mindedly drive, alert to what is coming towards them, watching warily through their professional rear view mirrors for the many potential catastrophes which could overtake them from racist, sexist, and homophobic thinking. According to Ms. Mentor, only after achieving the state of grace that tenure implies will women be free to assert themselves to change the tenure process.
The problem, as Ms. Mentor points out, is that tenure decisions, assuming the candidate is generally competent, are more questions of whether or not individual faculty "fit in." Women generally aren't fishing buddies, and much of women's scholarship challenges cherished notions of how the world is or ought to be. Also, women have complex personal lives, which higher education has had to accommodate. The notion of "stopping the tenure clock" for having a baby is one example of how academe has tried to accommodate imperatives unique to women.
However much the academy has adapted to women, the questions in Ms. Mentor's mailbag provide painful reminders that as tenure approaches many a woman has realized that she misunderstood which rules for earning tenure were in force. The journals the women published in weren't the same ones in which committee members published, or the articles the candidates wrote were judged lightweight. Ms. Mentor reflects upon questions posed by women in the throes of tenure pain, and she uses their experiences to incite all women: get tenure, then change the process.
Ms. Mentor does not seem to have considered that it is possible that after seven or so years of chameleon-like behavior women might be unable to recapture any urgency to change academe to make it a more hospitable place, assuming they ever thought it should be changed at all. Along the road to tenure, the candidate probably becomes accustomed to institutional practices which might have been initially objectionable. Women must find a way to keep their research interests intact, all the while educating tenure committees and colleges to embrace difference. Tenure is a bit like marriage after courtship: too much dissembling beforehand by either side will lead to an unhappy union.
As we leave our lunch, remarking that we hope to see more of each other in the future and how much fun it was to catch up, I walk away, reflecting upon the delight Ms. Mentor gave me. For her candor and honesty, I am grateful. A few days afterwards, I wonder almost aloud why we all are so focused on the negative aspects of our professions, the irksome and annoying, and why it is so difficult for us to articulate the good and the noble. Although Ms. Mentor's book is funny, she says very little that is positive about why people might want to become a professor. Days after finishing her book, I remember all the professors who modeled important values for me. I especially think about one woman at Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology and the then all male faculty at my University of Montana department. I admired and revered these professors, not because they held out hope that I would work in a place where racism and sexism were absent, but because the ideas they offered were liberating. For all the foibles and weaknesses of academics, there are few jobs which are more important than that of a college professor, and women and men often even do the job well. I hope to talk about this aspect of academe next time with my friend. Perhaps she can add to my understanding with more impeccable advice.