Although you may spend your whole career at Z University, always keep alert to other opportunities: sabbaticals, retrainings, institutes, conferences. Get to know powerful senior professors. Especially in science, where peer review is the norm, one must Be Known.
Too, the world of science is in a ferment today, as government funding folds. You're among the most talented and lucky ones to have a tenure-track job—plus you're wise enough to write Ms. Mentor for advice.
Surely you're on your way to being a star.
Sneering and Sniding
Q: I've just been subjected to the world's snidest job interview. How can I get revenge?
A: Ms. Mentor presumes that you are seeking an assistant professorship, for the truly snide job interviews rarely take place on the senior level. (There, people turn smarmy instead.)
Ms. Mentor can also imagine the nature of the snideness. Condescending and sexist remarks; maybe racist or homophobic ones, too. Your age or appearance may have been a matter of comment; your marital status may have been discussed; and you may have been asked inappropriate, embarrassing, or crude questions about nonprofessional matters.
(A job candidate at a former teachers' college in New Jersey was once asked her opinion of pantyhose. And then the interviewer told her, in graphic detail, what he thought about undergarments that kept him from getting at…, whereupon the candidate stood up abruptly and said she needed to go to the bathroom. When she returned, that particular interviewer was no longer in the room.)
Since many of the snidest questions are illegal, and all are unethical if not rude, Ms. Mentor suspects that you would like her to roar: “Sue the scumbags!” But Ms. Mentor cannot do so. She would never utter the word “scumbag” (she prefers “malefactor,” “miscreant,” or “ill-bred ding-a-ling”). She also knows that a lawsuit would be a waste of time and money.
There are, of course, other forms of revenge, some civilized and some not. A harmless treat is to rent 9 to 5 (Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin) and chortle at the superb revenge fantasy sequence. Less benign is to send strange or unexpected gifts in the mail. A literary character—perhaps in an Erica Jong novel?—once got satisfactory revenge by sending used tampons to a swain who mistreated her. More recently, a singer in the band L7 threw a used tampon at a disrespectful audience member. Ms. Mentor shudders at the indelicacy.
There are also grandiose ways to kill with kindness. An acquaintance of Ms. Mentor's once sent a disliked relative a life-sized Mexican statue of a donkey, which threw the recipient into a tizzy: Was the donkey a tacky piece of kitsch or a rare find in folk art? Was it an insult or a tribute? The stymied recipient gnashed teeth for days.
But your response should be simpler, and unfailingly gracious. Do write notes to all the miscreants, thanking them for their interest in you. If acquaintances inquire, you can suggest the truth through subtle aspersions: “They were interested in me, but—well, you know the _______ Department at _____ University. Personalities do always get in the way.” Be enigmatic; smile ruefully.
Ms. Mentor implores you not to tell the story publicly until you have tenure at a place where you intend to stay. Academia is small, and word does get around, and there will always be someone who wants to blame the victim (you) for whatever happened.
Nevertheless, you can manage to make the story known. Tell your closest friends (and your mentor, if you have one) exactly what happened, in minutest detail. Then they—not you—can spread the word, and the ill-bred ding-a-lings will quickly become the subject of sly innuendo and wicked satire. You can also write up the entire event, a few details changed, and send it to Lingua Franca, Concerns, or another suitable journal, to be published anonymously or pseudonymously.
But what if you get the job offer? It can happen, even after an interview from hell. And what if it is your only offer?
Ms. Mentor says to take the job and love it: consider it a stepping stone. You can learn about teaching and have time to publish; and it's much easier to get a job once you've had one. (At the university where Ms. Mentor currently parks her ivory tower, almost every new assistant professor started out with a temporary job somewhere else.) From the malefactors, you can learn how to conduct yourself gracefully in an adversarial culture. On your own, you can continue to apply for jobs elsewhere—but in the meantime, collecting a paycheck may be the best revenge.
And once you're safely tenured and happy somewhere else, you can always think about sending them a donkey.
The Conference Scene
A distraught reader writes to Ms. Mentor:
I gave a paper—my first—at our major professional conference. It's very prestigious, and hardly any graduate students' papers are ever accepted. Yet not one of my professors attended my session. I was crushed. Is there any explanation for their behavior?
Indeed there is, and this was the start of Ms. Mentor's reply:
Ms. Mentor hopes that you did not spend any time crying into your pillow. Mourning for boors is a waste of one's time, faculties, and tear ducts.
Ms. Mentor also deplores the absence of your professors at your début—the understudy becomes a star!—although she is not surprised. Ms. Mentor is a venerable and jaded soul, who knows that too many entrenched senior professors see the younger generation not as followers in the pursuit of pure knowledge, but as upstarts who need to be humiliated or ignored. Especially among academic men, it is an Oedipal drama, in which the fathers and sons try to crush each other.
Women, though, need not act in that play, and it is a far, far better thing to learn to work the conference scene for your own knowledge and pleasure.
Still, you may ask yourself, or Ms. Mentor: Why do senior professors so rarely attend other people's conference presentations? Do they know it all? Do they have back trouble, so that they cannot bear more than a few minutes in the spindly, grotesquely uncomfortable chairs that pass for furniture in most convention hotels?
Ms. Mentor suspects it's something else: that senior professors are playing their own version of Scarlett O'Hara's Approach to Life. As Margaret Mitchell notes early in Gone with the Wind, when her heroine is just sixteen: “Scarlett O'Hara could never long endure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject.” Similarly, many a full professor cannot bear any presentation in which he and his work are not at the center.
(Here Ms. Mentor murmurs to her astute readers that this is the same behavior exhibited by the famous Hollywood director who reportedly spent several hours—well, forty-five minutes—in a monologue about his own greatness, only to turn to his hapless audience of one and say, “Well, enough about me. What do you think of my latest picture?”)
Most senior professors would rather be stars—either as presenters or as subjects of the admiring papers of young graduate students. Such adoration being hard to come by, most wind up opting out of the big national conferences in favor of smaller, invitational ones. Those are also valuable for another reason: they're more apt to pay their speakers, since the honor is not sufficient reward.
What are the rewards for attending an academic conference?
There is intellectual stimulation. Academics go to conferences to share their research findings, compare notes on what they've discovered, and ask pointed and useful questions about the research of other scholars. This goal is usually achieved among scientists, for whom conference papers have standard formats (such as poster