Ms. Mentor

Who's the Dweeb, My Boss or Me?

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Question (from "Lila"): My dissertation adviser ("Dr. Selden") is a well-regarded scholar, and we work together easily except for social and family matters. We're about the same age (40ish), but his career path has been strictly academic, while I've taken detours into business and family. He has no partner or progeny, and that's an issue for him. He likes to socialize with his students and has suggested that he and I "go drinking" sometime.

Then at a recent conference where a colleague talked about a children's study, I put in my two cents about being a parent-participant -- whereupon Dr. Selden rolled his eyes and made a snarky comment about "mommy data." That rattled me, but also led me to conceal the fact that I had brought my family to the conference. I declined his group invitation to go "bar hopping," claiming that I had to get up early. Am I correct to hide my staid mommy life?

Answer: Ms. Mentor thinks that Dr. Selden's life is the troubling one.

"Experts" are forever pontificating about women -- but scarcely anyone notices the silence and loneliness in the lives of middle-aged, single, heterosexual men. Sometimes they're portrayed as gadabouts, playboys of the Western world in New York and L.A. But in academe, they are not life's winners.

Your life has been adventurous so far. You have (or had) a partner; you have children; you've worked in business and practical programs. A graduate degree opens new opportunities, and you have drive and intuition. Your life is a tapestry full of color and curiosity.

Dr. Selden seems to have a much narrower little rug.

A few decades ago, there was a pattern for academic men: college, graduate school, marriage, tenure track, 2.5 children, and a secure job at the same place for 30 years or more. Mrs. Professor might work part-time, but she was mainly the homemaker who kept the children away from Daddy when he was thinking, preparing for classes, or snoozing in his leather arm chair in front of the TV after another excellent home-cooked meal.

Ms. Mentor grows a little snide about that idyll, because it depended, as Friedrich Engels famously wrote, on the "open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife." After the children grew up, though, Mrs. Professor might go back to school -- unless, as in many an academic novel, her husband had a midlife crisis, started romancing a student, and dumped his long-suffering wife. The choices were all his in the vanishing world that Dr. Selden might have occupied a couple of decades ago.

But in the 1970s, the nest split open. Lila and Dr. Selden were in grade school when law and medical schools ended quotas on women and Ivy League male bastions went coed. Abortion became legal, and wife beating illegal; women got sports (Title IX), women's studies programs, and a spirit of independence that lawyer Florynce Kennedy proclaimed in speeches around the country: "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."

Still, academe preserved the notion that scholarship was open to only the most monastically dedicated. Women wanting Ph.D.'s were routinely discouraged or shunted off to the impermanent "mommy track." Some English departments called their instructors "the harem." Their opinions on high literary theory were not sought.

And so the mental map of many academics, even the most sensitive, was binary. Men were thinkers; women were worker-mommies. Even today, some scholars shudder at the thought that a family ("outsiders") might also come along to an academic conference. And the thought of a breast-feeding scholar is, well, unthinkable.

Ms. Mentor is not against separating home and work. Often one is a respite from the other, and a woman who wants to be a writer does need a room of her own. What's troublesome is Dr. Selden's belief that a "mommy" isn't to be taken seriously, and that "mommy data" -- what mothers know -- isn't serious knowledge. Around him, Lila may need to be all business, without the braided, bonding talk that women share so easily. It makes single men fidgety.

And straight men don't bare their secrets with each other -- a poignant fact that Norah Vincent discovered when she went undercover for Self-Made Man. Bowling teammates bonded through homophobic jokes, until she came out as a woman -- whereupon they were desperate to tell her their personal problems. Husbands have wives as confidantes, but a single academic man runs the risk of becoming like that legendary professor -- let's call him "Simon the Squatter" -- who lived alone and spent his university afternoons trolling the halls in search of open office doors. Simon was hard to dislodge -- though, like Dr. Selden, he did have one other place to go.

Some graduate advisers are convivial drinkers who like to hit the bars with their grad students. But once the professor's old enough to be the students' father, or grandfather, it grows awkward and intense. Students may try to explain that he's "an odd duck" or "maybe an alcoholic" or "maybe a dirty old man." He seems to lack adult social skills. He doesn't have friends his own age.

Academics as a group are not notable for drinking. Some were barflies in their 20s, but by their 40s, they're more apt to head for the gym or the coffeehouse, or to dinner with their partners. In deep, cold winter, many would just as soon cocoon -- except those who can't stand to be alone. They need noise, and people, and booze. But Lila does not need that scene.

Does she need to "go drinking" with Dr. Selden so he'll take her seriously? Ms. Mentor votes no.

Cordial scholarly work during the day is excellent; so are coffee breaks, lunch meetings, and networking with visiting scholars. But it is a far, far better thing for Lila to be respected as a scholar than praised as a drinking buddy. She does not need to bar hop at conferences, either, especially if she's one of few women. Some wine in a hotel lobby after the day's sessions is a pleasant getting-to-know-you, and so are group dinners. "I have to work on my paper" is always an acceptable way to excuse oneself (whereupon Lila can run upstairs and be with her little ones).

She can also call her partner or a close friend for those "How was your day?" conversations that are the lifeblood of long-term relationships, cemented through groaning and laughter. ("You won't believe what Professor Yakety Yak had to say.")

Dr. Selden does not have that comfort, but it is not up to Lila to provide him with a community or even an ever-listening ear (as sometimes happens to women graduate students). It would seem tacky for her to buy him a subscription to Match.com, but she can mention online dating. It works well for many academics, because it rewards good writers.

Lila's rewards should be scholarly ones, products of the lab and library, not the saloon. If Dr. Selden says, "mommy data," she can say, "qualitative research" and "participant observation." As she quietly educates her adviser, she can laugh to herself, or save the best to share with her partner or best friend.

But she needn't ever go drinking unless she really wants to.

Question: New on the job, I've come to loathe one of my colleagues (the sniveling hypochondriac with the absurd opinions). Are my feelings normal?

Answer: Yes.

Sage Readers: The academic job season can mean great joy or bitter disappointment. Ms. Mentor reminds her flock that they are the best-educated and the best-read people in the United States -- and that the "real world" is open to them. Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius's So What Are You Going to Do With That?: Finding Careers Outside Academia is one starting point, and so are discussion threads on the Chronicle's Forums.

As always, Ms. Mentor welcomes rants and queries. Confidentiality is guaranteed, and identifying details are always smudged. She can rarely answer letters personally, and so directs readers to her archive and her tome, Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia. Her new volume, Ms. Mentor's Perfect Wisdom for the Academic Soul, will be out soon.