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
