Meanwhile, in grad school, Ms. Mentor recommends that you work most on your writing. If you write well, with lively and interesting prose, you can get to the point where no one knows or cares what you look like. The great women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton was fat, and deliberately so; Gertrude Stein was monumental; Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds and other books, strides around and collects her millions in a muumuu.
Ms. Mentor cannot guarantee that all this will cure fatophobia and get you academic success, but she does know that activity is always better than brooding—just as eating is always better than starving. Toffee beats tofu.
And eventually, as Americans grow older and simply can't have tiny bodies, women of substance may be seen as a wise avant-garde. Ms. Mentor likes to imagine an alternative world in which anytime a woman starts to worry about calories or eating, she tells herself, “Eating well is a contribution to women's well-being and therefore to worldwide feminist revolution and the betterment of all.” Then she chows down, with relish, on those chocolate chip cookies and gooey fried cheese nachos and mile-high ice cream pies.
Imagine a world of happy, well-fed, self-loving, intellectually alert women instead of the bulimic, the cranky, the anorexic, or the walking-dead-from-dieting.
That would truly be revolutionary.
Dissertation Dilemma
Q: I'm choosing a dissertation topic, in literature. What should I keep in mind to be marketable?
A: Ms. Mentor is reluctant to contribute to her own growing reputation for fogeyism, for possessing antiquated ideas. Yet she cannot divest herself of the belief that pursuing one's own intellectual interests is the only valid reason to be in graduate school. And so, in her well-mannered way, Ms. Mentor periodically rails and sputters at the idea that dissertation writers must put “marketability” first.
Ms. Mentor hereby declares: Academia does not pay well enough for people to sell their souls in that way.
She further advises that before choosing any topic, you should undertake a serious self-study. Now, Ms. Mentor is not recommending therapy (or gynecology). Rather, she means for you to start a diary, write letters to yourself, and initiate thoughtful chats with nonacademic friends and family, in order to ask yourself truly:
WHAT DO I WANT FROM ACADEMIA?
Some possible answers:
• To follow my intellectual interests.
• To do new research about women, or people of color, or lesbian writers.
• To get a job with a clear structure of deadlines, rewards, and punishments.
• To continue the life that gives me ego boosts, since I've always been good at schoolwork.
• To make a good living as a professor.
The last is the worst reason, as the job crunch deepens and salaries fall even further behind those of other professionals. Many university faculties are now more than half part-timers, underpaid and without benefits. Some community colleges in the Northeast now consider a typical teaching load for a “part-time adjunct instructor” to be three courses per semester, $1500 per course, no benefits, no chance for tenure or promotion. (This information is available in the Chronicle of Higher Education.) Older professors are not dying or retiring at the expected rate, and when they are, they are often not being replaced at all.
You need better reasons to stay in school. For some students, familiar routines are powerful pulls: they need deadlines and grades, carrots and sticks. Overwhelmingly busy with reading, students too rarely ask, “What for?” (beyond the fact that it's assigned). Few grad students will dare say, “This is boring.” As Leslie Fiedler pointed out a generation ago, academic types generally have a huge tolerance for boredom and an equally enormous fear of risk. The real world is scary. Stay in school and do your homework.
(In reality, there are many highly structured 9-to-5 jobs, such as technical writing, that pay better than academia does. They don't require homework, and technical writers also don't risk being publicly heckled by teenagers.)
Further, Ms. Mentor probably does not need to tell you that graduate school rarely provides ego boosts: one of its unspoken functions is to make students squirm. Even in his youth, at Johns Hopkins University, Professor Stanley Fish was famous for telling classes that “Studying literature should be painful. If it isn't, you're not doing it right.” His then-colleague, Professor Eugenio Donato, used to accuse the rare smiling student: “You think literature is pretty.”
But Ms. Mentor assumes that you have signed up for the rigors of graduate school, accepting years of poverty, for the best and most valid reason: driving intellectual curiosity. There are things you want to read and know and learn, and as you approach your dissertation, you get to ask yourself:
• What am I really interested in?
• What do I want to do with my life?
The topic you choose will determine which jobs you can aim for, and what you can teach, and what you will be expected to write about for publication. If you select Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for instance, you will be “marketable” in Women's Studies; American literature, nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and possibly nonfiction, autobiography, and cultural studies. You may love Renaissance poetry, but you will have to bid it adieu as a subject for scholarly inquiry.
What not to do. Ms. Mentor shudders at the current proliferation of cross-century dissertations, such as “The Rhetoric of Ignatia Quicksilver as Applied to the Works of Shakespeare, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, and Beavis and Butt-head.” Supposedly the student—should she live to complete such a sweeping, impossible dissertation—will then be deemed qualified for jobs in Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature, the novel, modernism, rhetoric, African American literature, cultural studies, postmodernism, gender studies, and Ignatia Quicksilver.
(Ms. Mentor finds it particularly offensive that many a white graduate student who's written one chapter on Toni Morrison—and who hasn't?—purports to be an expert on African American literature. That insults African Americans, who have a distinct, rich culture and literature very different from white folks'.)
In reality, the student with the conglomerate dissertation will come across to hiring committees as a jill-of-all-trades who may be hired for “generalist” positions, but those are usually non-tenure-track instructorships. If she wants a Real Job, she needs a Real Subject for her dissertation: an author, a period, a genre, a critical approach, a community of authors more closely meshed. She needs to demonstrate, through her dissertation, that she knows something well, something that she's passionately interested in pursuing.
Time matters, too. Ms. Mentor advises you to choose a topic that you can complete quickly. No vast syntheses; no biographies (they take too long and require too much money and travel). No need to write the definitive word. Just the completed one.
With well-focused subjects, some highly motivated students can write their dissertations in a year. Ms. Mentor did hers in just under two, she thinks—although they used different calendars then, in the Pleistocene era. It is not uncommon for dissertations to take four years, some of them part-time while the student is teaching, working at another career, or involved with family.
But some students take up to eight years or more—an ominous sign. Often they were never really inspired in the first place, and now they are dithering and procrastinating. Frequently they are people who genuinely do not enjoy writing—or who would rather write lampoons and letters than literary criticism. They prefer real life to lit crit, and that is a perfectly rational choice.
They should stop punishing themselves, Ms. Mentor decrees. There is no shame in not completing a dissertation, for the average person changes careers five to ten times in a lifetime. The shame is to continue in something one does not love, just because one has begun it. Smart folks stop.
Meanwhile other smart folks, the incorrigible literature lovers, try