AWM Book Review

Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia

Emily Toth, University of Pennsyvania Press, Philadelphia 1997. xiv+222. ISBN 0-8122-1566-4 (paper), $15.95.

From: AWM Newsletter, March/April 1998.

Reviewed by: Marge Murray, Book Review Editor, Department of Mathematics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0123; email: murray@calvin.math.vt.edu.

Ms. Mentor is academia's answer to Miss Manners -- a wise, all-knowing fount of advice to women at (nearly) every stage of their academic lives. Ms. Mentor is, in real life, Emily Toth, professor of English and women's studies at Louisiana State University. In 1992, Emily Toth donned the persona of Ms. Mentor and began writing an advice column in the journal of the Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages, Concerns. In the years that followed, it became clear that her incisive, witty commentaries on the academic life had an appeal far beyond departments of English and foreign languages. In the interest of reaching women in all corners of academe, the present book was born.

The book is an anthology of letters to Ms. Mentor, organized chronologically, covering the stages of the academic life from graduate school through tenure and beyond. The book's greatest appeal is for those who have not yet achieved tenure; eight of the eleven chapters are devoted to pre-tenure issues. As Ms. Mentor writes in the preface, "Only tenured professors have the power in academia -- and so women need to get tenure. Ms. Mentor can help them, and will."

While the tone is amusing and pithy -- and occasionally hilarious -- throughout, this book provides valuable insight into the realities of life for women in higher education in the 1990s. The advice is informed by equal doses of feminist idealism and real-world pragmatism. The topics addressed range from writing and completing a doctoral dissertation, to appropriate and inappropriate dress, to surviving and enjoying an academic conference, to getting along with colleagues and students, to strategies for publication. While most of the specific examples clearly come from the humanities and social sciences, there are occasional queries about scientific fields, and most of the situations described have natural analogues in other disciplines.

One particularly helpful piece of advice to the untenured is the suggestion that they keep a Tenure Diary.

The Tenure Diary, which every wise woman academic should begin to keep during the first year of her first tenure-track job, is the place for noting and filing every piece of paper about her work and worth...copies of her contract and contractual agreements; student evaluations; peer reports from colleagues who observed her teaching; and favorable reactions to her publications or research plans. (p. 60)

Moreover, the Tenure Diary is the place to record short- and long-term goals in research, teaching and service, as well as troubling incidents involving colleagues, students, and institutional violations of official policy and procedure. The Tenure Diary is intended to provide a complete record of the pre-tenure experience, and as such it probably should be called the Tenure Scrapbook, the Tenure File, the Tenure Box, or even the Tenure Trunk. Whatever its size or shape, the Tenure Diary seems like a prudent idea.

The advice of Ms. Mentor, perhaps more frequently than that of Miss Manners, is occasionally open to question. For example, while her recommendations on dress for job interviews seem appropriately conservative, her (numerous) discussions of dress for teaching seem open to debate and discussion. Mathematics and science departments often have less rigorous standards of appropriate dress than the humanities and social science departments from which many of Ms. Mentor's examples are drawn. Moreover, Ms. Mentor is categorically opposed to one of my favorite activities, bicycling to work. Needless to say, Ms. Mentor's advice must be adapted to the conditions which prevail at your particular institution. If nothing else, Ms. Mentor's commentaries underscore the importance of having a sense of where you are. Joining an academic department is an anthropological adventure, and the wise new hire will make it her business to understand the local culture and mores if she hopes to be kept on as a permanent member.

Regrettably, Ms. Mentor devotes relatively little space to what the woman academic might do with tenure once she's earned it. But perhaps that's the material for another book. One of the added bonuses of this volume is its concluding seven-page bibliography which surveys the terrain of scholarly and non-scholarly writing on the subject of women in academia and in the workplace more generally. Many of the books and articles listed there are eminently worth a look. On balance, Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia is a book which you will enjoy reading (aloud, on occasion) again and again.