Ms. Mentor's New and Ever More Impeccable Advice for Women and Men in Academia

Emily Toth

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812208122
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Counseling in Career Development

Ms. Mentor, that uniquely brilliant and irascible intellectual, is your all-knowing guide through the jungle that is academia today. In the last decade Ms. Mentor's mailbox has been filled to overflowing with thousands of plaintive epistles, rants, and gossipy screeds. A mere fraction has appeared in her celebrated monthly online and print Q&A columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education; her readers' colorful and rebellious ripostes have gone unpublished—until now.Hearing the call for a follow-up to the wildly successful Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia, Ms. Mentor now broadens her counsel to include academics of the male variety. Ms. Mentor knows all about foraging for jobs, about graduate school stars and serfs, and about mentors and underminers, backbiters and whiners. She answers burning questions: Am I too old, too working class, too perfect, too blonde? When should I reproduce? When do I speak up, laugh, and spill the secrets I've gathered? Do I really have to erase my own blackboard? Does academic sex have to be reptilian?From the ivory tower that affords her an unparalleled view of the academic landscape, Ms. Mentor dispenses her perfect wisdom to the huddled masses of professorial newbies, hardbitten oldies, and anxious midcareerists. She gives etiquette lessons to academic couples and the tough-talking low-down on adjunct positions. She tells you what to wear, how to make yourself popular, and how to decode academic language.She introduces you to characters you must know: Professor Pelvic, Dr. Iron Fist, Mr. Upstart Whelp, Dean Titan, Professor McShameless.In this volume Ms. Mentor once again shares her wide-ranging unexpurgated wisdom, giving tips on bizarre writing rituals, tenure diaries, and time management (Exploding Head Syndrome). She decodes department meetings and teaches you the tricks for getting stellar teaching evaluations.Raw, shocking, precise, clever, absurd—Ms. Mentor has it all.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• The Petty and the Profound: What They Write to Ms. Mentor
• Stewing in Graduate School
• Foraging for an Academic Job
• Love and Sex in Academia
• You’re Hired! Early Years in a Strange New World
• The Fine and Quirky Art of Teaching
• Working and Playing Well with Others
• Questions Great and Small
• Adjuncts
• The Tenure Trek
• What Is Life After Tenure?
• Are You the Retiring Type?
• Daring to Create Your Own Life
• Ms. Mentor’s Exemplary Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments