Will Beth be able to embrace the jargon of literary theory—or will it make her mewl and twitch?
For Anne, Beth, Cassie, and all their fellow students, graduate school will be a series of rituals, some dating back to German education a century and a half ago. (There are those who think Ms. Mentor was present at the creation, but she denies it.)
All graduate students today, in lockstep or death grip, enroll in required seminars and classes—some exciting, some deadly. If they're in science, they'll do labs and fieldwork. If they're in applied practical fields, they may do internships or clerkships or residencies. They may need to be proficient with certain languages or computer programs or machines. They may be sent to ask strangers eccentric or peculiar questions, which their sociology or statistics bosses will then manipulate, via numerical hocus-pocus, into conclusions about human behavior.
Graduate students may also be coaxed into doing other very odd things for their major professors. A group of food science graduate students at a Big Ten university were once seduced into swallowing huge quantities of hot sauce so that their professor could photograph, with fiber optic equipment, the effects on their stomach linings. (The students who suffered the most were those who took aspirin.)
Similarly, some science graduate students at Johns Hopkins University were once enlisted to help protect their major professor's prized gardens from rabbit incursions. Following his directions, the students hied themselves to the Baltimore Zoo, where they beseeched the zoo keepers to give them tiger dung. Then they hauled it out to their professor's estate, where they spent the rest of the day slathering it about his carrots and marigolds.
They did get Big Macs for lunch.
More mundanely, though, students are required to take oral and written exams, sometimes several in different subject areas. Then, finally, they're turned loose to write theses or dissertations—the stage at which the uncommitted are most likely to drop out, and disappear.
If, as sometimes happens, graduate students
• cannot bring themselves to do one more reading assignment—or
• cannot get out of bed to go to the library—or
• get nauseous at the smell of a lab or the thought of a rat—or
• spend hours, days, or weeks in useless housekeeping chores, such as folding sheets or curtains, while avoiding all academic work—or
• fuss and dither for months, never finding a dissertation topic that really grabs them…
Those are all danger signals. Academia may not be for them, and dropping out can be the smartest thing to do. It is never a sign of failure.
For at every stage, Ms. Mentor proclaims, graduate students should be asking themselves: “Am I leading up to what I want to do?” and “What are my goals for this week, this month, this year?” and “Do I want to do this for the rest of my life?”
If Anne finds something new about Michelangelo; and Beth discovers a forgotten novelist whose work anticipates Edith Wharton's; and Cassie forges ahead with an historical study of several kinky anthropologists' lives—then they will have the intellectual excitement that will keep them learning and growing, getting their doctorates and making genuinely new contributions to the world of knowledge.
Then it will all be worthwhile, and Ms. Mentor hopes their parents will live to see the great day. She herself will cheer and sing and perhaps even flick her tambourine.
But not all of Ms. Mentor's correspondents reach that pleasant pinnacle, as sage readers will now discover.
Up Against the Balls
Q: One of my most outspoken professors (I'm in political science) told me that “most of the guys who go to grad school these days don't have the balls to go into the real world.” Assuming that “guys” means all of us (he usually includes women), is he right?
A: Ms. Mentor has always been intrigued by the idea that one needs “balls” in order to do anything other than the work for which they were intended—i.e., the propagation of our species and the recreational pleasures of the bearer thereof.
She recalls Mary Ellmann's clever dissection, in Thinking About Women, and Kate Millett's, in Sexual Politics, of Norman Mailer's claim that a writer can do without anything “except the remnant of his balls.” Besides wondering, as feminist critics have a habit of doing, where one would place a pen—or, these days, a computer—in a testicular vicinity, Ms. Mentor…well, she thinks it all quite silly.
Still, your query, like all those Ms. Mentor selects, deserves a thoughtful reply. If your professor's claim is to be taken literally—that most of the people in grad school lack balls—that is certainly true in the humanities, where well over half of incoming graduate students are women. In political science, however, nearly 75 percent of graduate students receiving Ph.D.s are men. Ms. Mentor thinks it unlikely that they are all eunuchs.
Ms. Mentor therefore understands your professor to be saying, in a crudely symbolic way, that guys “with balls,” those who enroll in the “real world” rather than in graduate school, have the qualities attributed to true masculinity—such as courage, intelligence, and resourcefulness.
Ms. Mentor thinks it fortunate and delightful that all women, whether they are in graduate school or not, have those qualities.
Plotting One's Courses
Q: My department's director of graduate studies, when he advises students about classes to take, has an unfortunate habit of placing course lists in his lap—so that the advisee has to look at his crotch. I am interested in getting a Ph.D. in rhetoric. I am not interested in his crotch.
Last time I went to ask about my program of study, his crotch was—well—bulging.
I am grossed out.
A: Do you have a sympathetic woman professor who can subtly tell Dr. Crotch to knock it off?
If not, there is no easy way—given his power over your career—to confront him honestly and openly. What he is doing is a kind of sexual harassment, a “micro-inequity” that is difficult to combat. If you try, by filing a complaint, you might be accused of “making a mountain out of a…” Well, you get the point.
As there is no clean way to confront Dr. Crotch, Ms. Mentor sighs and offers a sneaky way. One might, for instance, leave an anonymous note in his mailbox: “We, the graduate students, suggest that you not put course lists in your lap when you're advising us. We do not like to look at your crotch. Thank you!”
This should do the trick, especially since Dr. Crotch will have no idea who sent the note. He will suspect everyone. But if the note does not change his behavior, and if—as is often the case with Dr. Crotches—he is hyper-heterosexual or even homophobic, you can torment him with a second anonymous note: “We, the grad student guys, love it when you hold the course lists in your crotch. Keep up the good work!”
After such a truly dirty trick, the superstraight male who won't change his behavior, pronto, is beyond hope.
Don't Know Much
Q: I have returned to graduate school to get a Ph.D. in women's literature. When I was originally an undergraduate back in the 1950s, I chafed under what I have learned to call the requirements of the patriarchy—to read and appreciate literature by men that demeans or makes invisible women and girls. Back then, I just called it being bored by the bullshit.
However, I was what was then referred to as “well educated” : I was well read in the literature, history, and philosophy of the white boys. I'd had my three years of Latin and two years of French, I'd done a research paper in high school every year since ninth grade, I'd taken English classes where