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.
The Job Hunt
It used to be that, ’round about the time he was finishing his course work and starting on his dissertation, a young man's fancy would turn to his future employment.
And so, he would talk to his major professor, who would call his friends at a select number of schools and find out who needed, for instance, “a man in American literature” or “a new fellow in economics.” The major professor would recommend “my brightest student, a fine young man.” By the following fall, the young man would be teaching, possibly at an Ivy League university or a fine Seven Sisters college. Most likely he would remain there, easily tenured along the way, for his entire career. Now and then he might publish an article or a review or a poem, but he would not be pushed to do so. Nor could anyone in a small college be expected to do publishable scientific research.
Rather, he would always spend some of his leisure time sipping sherry with students (some of whom might also be his bedmates). He would also pride himself on his taste, culture, and intellect.
Had she known such a young man, Ms. Mentor would have shuddered in his presence, and she would have loathed his major professor. For both were pillars of the establishment that kept out women, and Jews, and open lesbians, and people of color, and anyone else who wasn't, in the terms of the day, “our kind.”
Before the 1960s, American colleges were mostly for “our kind,” not for the masses. Although the G.I. Bill opened college to many a (male) veteran who might not otherwise have attended, there were still few graduate schools. Many colleges kept blacks out entirely; most colleges also had quotas on Jews and women (who might be restricted to 20 to 40 percent of the student body), and most women students did not finish college. According to Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963)—a book that Ms. Mentor still highly recommends—some 60 percent of women college students in the 1950s dropped out to marry. Many, presumably, were pregnant, in those days before the Pill (1960) or Roe vs. Wade (1973).
When Stephen Ambrose, later to be the biographer of Richard Nixon and the major historian of D-Day and much more, was finishing his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, he received twenty-five job offers.
Today, a Stephanie Ambrose would be delighted with one.
Ms. Mentor wants women to grow and learn and thrive and share their knowledge—but academic women also need to be realists. There are very few jobs, and the job market for professors has been in an almost continuous slump for a quarter-century. Yet applications to grad schools continue to rise, especially from adults who've been out of school for some years. Often they give their all as teachers and graders and scholars-in-training—and then, there are no permanent positions for them.
The job hunt itself is now a full-time pursuit, for which graduate students need to budget hundreds of dollars for photocopies, dossiers, postage, telephone calls, and travel to the academic conventions where “job markets” are held. There, crammed into overheated hotel rooms, new Ph.D.s may have just thirty minutes with an interviewing committee—half an hour to sell themselves and their life's dream.
Later, in on-campus interviews, would-be assistant professors must be neat, smart, personable, good-humored, thoroughly knowledgeable, and fully alert and engaging, sometimes for two full twelve-hour days that may include meeting up to fifty different people. And even then, offers may be long in coming—or positions may be canceled, thanks to acts of God or state legislatures.
And so aspiring academics are also mortgaging their psyches. They must consider living apart from loved ones who also have careers; they must be willing to be academic gypsies.
In the humanities, it is not uncommon for Ph.D.s to spend five years or more as part-timers or adjuncts or temporary replacements before they finally get on the blessed tenure track. The same is true for post-Ph.D. scientists who spend years moving about as “post-docs.” In 1995, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy revealed that among chemistry Ph.D.s only about one in five—21 percent—held an academic job.
Although she has many marvelous powers, Ms. Mentor cannot change the American economy, nor conjure up jobs where there are none. But she can help bright new academics—those wise enough to
