are you smarter than a postdoc?

[intertribal]

My mother is taking me to a "hooding" ceremony for the new graduating graduates getting their Ph.D.s.  Everyone is invited.  She says she didn't want to go in the past because she never got her doctoral degree, but now that I've announced I want one, she considers it an educational/motivational experience. 

I've been reading The Chronicle of Higher Education's advice columnist, Ms. Mentor.  I really like her.

***

As a schoolgirl, little Ms. Mentor never indulged in spitballing and squealing. Even when a class discussion degenerated into a mosh pit of diverse learning styles, she would be the one shrieking, "Define your terms! Define your terms!"

Question: I'm a new teacher with a go-getter student who wants to put his student-government election poster on my office door. But my senior colleague says it will look like I'm favoring one student over another and grossly electioneering, and it'll cause bad feelings that might fester. Am I a horrible coward and a traitor to the lofty goals of academic freedom if I decline the poster?

Answer: No.

Meanwhile, nearly three dozen letter writers have now outed themselves and their friends as fans of Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, that hugely underrated movie about a women's studies professor. Ms. Mentor had thought it was her own little fetish. Instead, she's gotten boasts from locals ("the jungle is on campus at UC-Riverside, and I watched them film it!") -- and she's heard from "I-laughed-my-head-off" devotees in a dozen other states, including an 85-year-old man who says it's his reason for living.

Question: A colleague called me the department chair's "bitch." Even though I'm male, I should consider this an insult, yes?

Answer: Yes.

Ms. Mentor believes that students deserve to be taught, not groped -- but some artistic souls, mostly men in certain avant garde and very high-tuition programs in woodsy areas, have always viewed students as their "playground." Yet what seems like paradise to certain philandering men can be a pit of jealousy, grief, self-loathing, and wrist-slitting, especially for vulnerable young women -- the ones most likely to be poets. ("A woman who writes feels too much," wrote the gifted, suicidal Anne Sexton.)

Question: After I get tenure, when do I get to wave a two-bird salute to the self-promoting, self-important, truth-bending director of our program?

Answer: Whenever.

Once upon a time at Far West Big U., for instance, a search-committee member wondered aloud: "Can job candidate Venerable, who seems to have a little arthritis, get around this campus fast enough? Maybe we need his medical reports." Once told that asking for medical reports was illegal and that Mr. Venerable was the same age as Mick Jagger, the member retreated, harrumphing. (A decade later, Mr. Venerable was still hiking and cross-country skiing, Mick Jagger had had a hip replacement, and the committee member was dead.)

Question: Do I have to spend my summer regurgitating my academic failures and wallowing in regret and self-loathing?

Answer: No.

Except for mathematicians, who rather pride themselves on being socially dense, most academics think of themselves as exceptionally intuitive and analytical. What better laboratory than a department for studying rodents cooped up with each other for years, unable to shriek about what they really want, and yet still seeking food, space, self-aggrandizement?

Question: I know that pranksters sometimes put chili peppers (for "hotness") at random in teacher rankings on RateMyProfessors.com. But since I have four (4!) chili peppers, may I assume that I am truly hot, even though it won't get me tenure?

Answer: Yes.

But affluent adolescents -- call them "Trevor" and "Courtney" -- can happily cavort at Rich Private Party U. Since they'll be in the 20 percent of college seniors who don't have off-campus jobs, they'll have leisure time for tennis, for taste-testing beers from around the world, and for studying the works of Oprah and Dr. Phil. When they need to get a paper in, they'll pull all-nighters, fueled by expensive drugs.

Question: I notice that most of the people inveighing against cheating nowadays fail to spell "plagiarism" correctly. How does this bode?

Answer: Ill.

Question: Writing dissertation. Must be last person on earth, never see anyone anymore unless teaching. Does that count as seeing people? Think not. Need a laugh. Pray each night to write damn thing and finally finish Ph.D. without turning into bloviator. However, noticing that friends and family glaze over quite soon after asking about research. Hate to bloviate. Thus, no pronouns. Plan to eliminate other parts of speech as needed, maybe take vow of silence. Good?

Answer: Maybe. Maybe not.

Ms. Mentor obviously captivated by your writing style. Impressed by your efforts at minimalism. Thinks it's catching, but will try to extricate self and talk more ordinarily. (What is normal among academics? Discuss.)

Everyone knows dissertation stress. What you're doing will never be finished, or it will be laughable and absurd. In a just world, you would be hanged as an academic fraud and your remains fed to feral dogs (they'd call it recycling). Your B.A. would be yanked and your records deleted. Your high school would post your weaselly, smiling graduate photo on its Wall of Shame.

Or you could ignore all those febrile fantasies, decide to do a good-enough dissertation, and finish it -- or not.

Half of A.B.D.'s (All But Dissertationers) never finish, but they are not failures. They've chosen other things -- such as a social life, or children, or a career that doesn't require years of poverty (and maybe chastity) before a tenure-track job perhaps materializes in a Remote Village.

But suppose -- against all odds, and despite the clamoring of unschooled relatives ("You're writing about 'theory'? Will that get you on the bestseller list or something? Will they make a movie of it with somebody cool, not Tom Cruise?") -- you still want to "do the diss."

Finishing is character building, you say.

And your discoveries will revolutionize the field.

And, besides, you love the work -- and now, finally, you've gotten to where Ms. Mentor's impeccable wisdom might be of use. As Hegel (or perhaps Emerson) famously said: Nothing great is ever achieved without passion.

You have to be driven to do it, external rewards or not. If you're not passionate about your subject, why bother? But assuming that you are passionate, Ms. Mentor will now suggest ways to get yourself to finish the diss.

Writer's block is fear -- fear of getting something wrong, not getting an A, being unmasked as an impostor at last. Every writer except the most doltish of hacks approaches a blank page or screen with trepidation, and the hardest word to write is the first.

Ms. Mentor assumes you've already broken your dissertation into manageable parts and set up a timetable: one month for Chapter 1, one for Chapter 2, for instance. (Your director and your committee can help with planning, as can such books as Joan Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day.)

You also need to set weekly and daily goals: three pages a day, or two hours, or another unbreakable quota, preferably at the same time each day. If you have rambunctious children, try early morning or very late hours, when the world is quiet and no one is moving except a few randy ne'er-do-wells, logged on to their computers from strange time zones.

Do not get on the Internet.

Turn off all phones and put your cellphone where you cannot see it light up, vibrate, and dance.

Write by hand -- as Ms. Mentor writes her first drafts -- so as to sneak up on the work. Tell yourself, as Anne Lamott recommends in Bird by Bird, that you're about to write a "shitty first draft."

Then do it.

Editing a mess is much easier than grunting out the first draft. Anything is easier than the first draft (except, of course, root canals without anesthesia, or being devoured by wolves; those really hurt, or so Ms. Mentor has been told).

If you can isolate yourself totally from the stream of yammering humanity, do it for the first draft. Lock yourself in your carrel. Hide out in mountain caves. Let beauty-school students practice pedicures on you while you scribble.

Encourage roommates to surprise you with treats, but only on Fridays after 5 p.m. Ignore their grumbling. Put your fingers in your ears and chant, "La la la la la." True friends will understand.

Many people, of course, won't, and the Dissertation Era (which Ms. Mentor hopes will not be a Dissertation Decade for you, as it sometimes is for unfortunate literary scholars who must work as adjuncts in three places and grade thousands of compositions while grinding out their great opuses) may mean giving up on those people who, well, aren't into you.

Except for family members whose caprices are inescapable, you do not need narcissists who tell you their love problems incessantly (unless their stories are vivid, lurid, and ever-changing, and you can use them in your chapters about neurotic behavior). You do not need broken-winged people, addicts, or whiners who have to sleep on your couch for a few days to "get my head together." You do not need people who "will be great" once they get over their bigotries or their resentments of you ("Why are you always writing? Let's go get a beer and forget your silly homework.").

Anyone whose moods get you down, or who picks a fight when you're trying to finish a chapter, or who disparages your work, does not belong in your life.

Find a writing critique group, if you have a strong ego. If you're not sure, convene a group of friends in which all of you make deadlines for one another and meet once a week to celebrate what everyone has written, taught, sold, or cooked. Have lots of chocolate.

Yes, give up useless parts of speech, especially adverbs. They are the softeners, the wimps of the grammatical world. You need to be ruthless, self-protective, fierce, whatever your mode.

Some writers are gushers, bloviators who spew everything in their first drafts and then pick out the best chunks. But you may be a bleeder, a one-word-at-a-time agonizer (as Red Smith said, you sit at your desk "and open a vein"). Or you may be a Beavisite, converting all long jargonized theoretical explications into the simplest of language: "Cool" or "It sucks."

Now all you have to do is explain yourself to the world.

Good.

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

"Question: I know that pranksters sometimes put chili peppers (for "hotness") at random in teacher rankings on RateMyProfessors.com. But since I have four (4!) chili peppers, may I assume that I am truly hot, even though it won't get me tenure?

Answer: Yes."

That is fucking hilarious.

My response to this, strangely, is "I wish the dissertation advice could help Steve, but I doubt it..."

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

It was meant to help you. Why, what's wrong with Steve?

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

That's funny. Thanks (very seriously, and the whole, writing on paper, pretending it's a draft sort of strategy I think is helpful to me sometimes...). Steve hasn't finished his dissertation, that's what's wrong with him. Ha ha.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

also, what the hell is the cannibal women avocado thing?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Ahaha, something awful.

http://www.badmovies.org/movies/cannibalwomen/

"I've been thinking about changing my major from Home Economics to Feminist Studies, but I wasn't sure if you had any feminist cooking classes."

Jim: "Okay, let's see... ...so she's going to make love to me, that's, that's good - but she's going to kill me and eat me, that's bad."

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

wow.