A L S O_ T O D A Y

Saturday night fever
By Mindy Hung
Stomach flu, a batch of pot brownies and the '60s drug myth: Why one woman can't seem to take any of it seriously

T A B L E_ T A L K

Why do people love to hate Foucault? Discuss mainstream aversion to postmodern theory in Table Talk's Education area

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Check out books by Camille Paglia at BarnesandNoble.com
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R E C E N T L Y

The Big Lie
By Michael O'Donovan-Anderson
Why have today's students become a bunch of grade-grubbing morons?
(01/25/99)

Ditching school
By Eli Lehrer
Why would Marc Weiss, a tenure-track professor at Columbia University, give it all up to coordinate tour bus parking?
(01/22/99)

Justifying J-school
By Orville Schell
The dean of UC-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism responds to a recent article critical of institutions like (and including) his
(01/22/99)

In the letters of my name
By Isaac Zaur
Seduced by bad romantic verse, an editor of a college literary journal sets out to find his poetic stalker
(01/20/99)

Darwinian admissions
By Megan Olden
Are selective universities turning a blind eye to some students in need?
(01/18/99)

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--- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled ---

Warning!
Mentorship land mine ahead!

FEMALE GRADUATE STUDENTS SHOULD STEER CLEAR
OF COZY RELATIONS WITH THEIR ACADEMIC ADVISORS -- WHETHER
THEY ARE AFFECTIONATE MEN OR BITTER WOMEN.

---

Dear Camille:

I am not the only female grad student I know who has just about given up seeking out women professors as mentors. Instead, we find ourselves turning to men in their 40s and 50s who have developed the capacity to be warm, nurturing and enthusiastic, who don't feel the need to denigrate our work or capabilities, who can be critical without being harsh, politically savvy without being craven and have a sense of decorum that enables them to be solicitous without being intrusive or infantilizing.

Perhaps older male professors feel free to be supportive because of the comparative security of their positions, or because we don't push their buttons or threaten them the same way we might threaten older women, or because they frankly like us and in some cases are attracted to us. Perhaps we are naive to expect a certain level of warmth and regard from any professor, and are doubly naive to expect it from women professors simply because they are women. Perhaps bitterness and academia go together, and we should be surprised to encounter professorial warmth regardless of gender. Perhaps we just haven't met the right woman yet.

Some women professors seem amazingly bitter, and their hostile behavior could even be called abusive, which is very sad and kind of frightening. More than one person I know has changed focus specifically to avoid dealing with them, because who needs more trauma than graduate school already provides? Obviously this is not the case in every school, but it seems common enough to warrant comment. I was hoping that you could provide some perspective, as we are not yet in a position to approach these women and say, "What's your deal, anyway?"

Patty

P.S. A talk you gave at Harvard was just on C-Span 2 this morning. It's so inspiring to see someone of your stature speak out in favor of enthusiasm while calling for a return to intellectual rigor and historical depth in the humanities. I have sometimes been made to feel naive or childish for my enthusiasm and humor, so thank you for not being cowed by the relentless academic equation of rigor with professional disengagement.

Dear Patty,

Your bulletin from the trenches is most distressing. No feminist who has hoped for women to break through the "glass ceiling" could fail to feel uneasy at the revelations in your letter.

Your experience at one of the nation's most prestigious universities -- whose name must be cloaked for your sake -- provides yet more evidence of the current crisis in graduate education. How should professionals be trained in the humanities, social sciences and hard sciences? What balance between teaching and research skills should be sought in the various disciplines?

The mentoring of graduate students can be critical when, as in the humanities now, jobs are scarce. Ideally, the professor who sponsors a doctoral dissertation should generously provide suggestions for further inquiry or, if the student hits a snag, give practical help in shaping or refining an argument.

But it's best all around, I think, if graduate students can maintain their independence and not seek their identities through close and potentially volatile relationships with academic superiors. It is far better to engage deeply instead with the massive, 200-year-long record of scholarship that waits in every good campus library. Too many professors, who have their own wars and agendas, create a cult around themselves and turn students into passive acolytes.

The best advice I ever got was from my senior honors director in college, William Bysshe Stein, who warned, "Graduate school is hell for everyone, and you should just get through it as quickly as possible!" Four-year Ph.D. programs were then of fairly recent vintage. I have always felt that they represent a dilution of the highest academic degree, which should properly be awarded at the peak of a career to mark the completion of a major contribution to scholarship.

In the 1960s, Ph.D.s began to be ground out like sausages for the hurry-up staffing of overexpanded American colleges and universities (which are now, of course, steadily contracting, to the despair of job-seekers). That postwar process intensified the connection between subordinate grad student and paternalistic professor. Severe economic pressures have now produced an unsavory situation that encourages sycophancy in grad students and intellectual coercion in professors (at its bullying worst among leftist poststructuralists and postmodernists, who have the fanaticism of true believers).

Perhaps you are expecting too much from your professors. The supportive family model may seem attractive, in view of the bleakness and isolation of grad student life, but in the long run it may impede your intellectual maturing. Ultimately, every thinker must resolutely push beyond his or her father or mother figures.

Yes, sexual attraction often kindles between middle-aged male professors and women students -- just as there is subliminal, biological competition between aging, heterosexual female professors and their nubile young rivals. Sexual liaisons or flirtations between professors and students were going on all around me when I was in grad school -- something that I didn't object to on ethical grounds (it was the height of the sexual revolution) but that I steered away from in instinctive self-preservation. Young women who cross that generational line certainly do wonders for their careers, but they compromise the authority of their adult voices. Mimicry, rather than originality, is their fate.

I am fascinated by your remarks about the "bitterness" of women professors. Thanks to pork-barrel affirmative action, many of today's prominent women professors have been overpromoted way beyond their talents in the elite schools. Perhaps at midlife they've begun to see the limitations of their own work and realized that they've feathered their nests with tatty turkey plumes.

My advice is to avoid overpersonalizing your transitory grad school experience. Be businesslike in your passage through it, and focus on developing loyal ties with peers and with contacts outside academe, who will give you healthy perspective. Senior professors may be in a bit of a funk these days due to pressing matters like shrinking budgets and the steady loss of faculty power to übermensch administrators.

Your generation has its own story to write -- if you can find jobs secure enough to get your careers going. A long-overdue abolition of tenure and a systematic consolidation of part-time positions into dignified full-time ones with benefits would help immensely to reduce the tyranny of the senior professoriate and to open academic institutions to the free flow of cultural energy.

Anxiety and alienation are always the sour dishes of the novice. Spiritual appetites are best sated in the library, where you can be motivated by achievers from the past rather than by caretakers from the present.
SALON | Jan. 27, 1999

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