Ms. Mentor Unmasked

Here’s how Emily Toth accidentally became an academic advice columnist, gentle readers.

By Paula Krebs

Emily Toth, who writes the monthly “Ms. Mentor” academic advice column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, teaches in the English department at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. She is the author of Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia (1997), Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious (1981), and the forthcoming Ms. Mentor’s Perfect Wisdom for the Academic Soul, in addition to numerous essays on American literature and culture. Paula Krebs, Academe’s editor, interviewed her at the American Literature Association conference in Boston in May 2007.

Krebs: How did you get started with Ms. Mentor?

Toth: People associate advice with being in an inferior position. And a woman who’s giving advice to women, she’s their mom. And, of course, everybody’s got conflicted relationships with their moms.

I saw that people were making the same mistakes I was making, so I decided to write a book because people can read a book in the privacy of their own home or office, and no one will know. And my editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, Patricia Smith, recognized that academics needed advice, and so she was all for it. I had written a small column for Concerns, the journal of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages, but the Women’s Caucus had a very small membership. I got almost no responses to the column, except in the matter of academic fashion and what to wear, because that was very controversial then and still is now. So the book was really an effort to change the world for women in academia by giving them information.

And it’s now been ten years since Ms. Mentor’s book came out. And occasionally, I’ll get letters from women saying, “Thank you. Your book got me through grad school, and now, I’ve got tenure. It’s all thanks to you.” And I think, well, of course.

Krebs: Not many other authors can claim that.
 
Toth: But actually, the best letters to the column are the hostile ones; they’re funnier, because academics all tend to be verbal. And to be verbal in a negative or critical way is a lot more challenging—a lot more fun than being nice.

Actually, I wish Ms. Mentor got more nasty letters, because those are the ones with a lot of vigor. Mostly, when Ms. Mentor gets nasty letters, they’re about to what extent should you fit in with the system, and to what extent should you confront it.

Krebs: How do your colleagues at LSU feel about the column or your celebrity?

Toth: I think they mostly don’t know. We had a meeting of our faculty with a new provost a few years ago, and we all went around and said what we were working on and what we were writing, and I said I was working on my latest Ms. Mentor column. And our then-provost said, “You write that?” Apparently, a lot of people read it and don’t read down to the bottom. I’ve gotten a nasty e-mail saying, “You’ve got some nerve hiding behind a pseudonym.” I’m not hiding. It’s right there.

After Katrina, I had a little note in the column saying, “Thanks to people who’ve inquired,” because people had inquired. Ms. Mentor’s ivory tower is still standing, and someone wrote in her blog, “I didn’t know Ms. Mentor was on my campus.” So, yeah, I think that people think I’m a disembodied individual.

And I don’t see my colleagues very much, because I teach at night. So, I come into work when everybody else is going home.

Krebs: Is that just by choice?

Toth: It’s by choice, really. I’m a vampire, so—

Krebs: Hmmm.

Toth: I always thought Judith Martin [advice columnist Miss Manners] might be a vampire. I don’t know. I’ve never met her. Actually, I would love to meet her, to ask her about burnout. Because I’m in the stage now where I don’t get that many letters anymore, for two reasons. One is that I’ve covered a lot of things and the other is that the Chronicle of Higher Education forums pose a lot of questions, which get answers. And, you know, I can only answer twelve letters a year, really. I try to choose a representative letter to answer.

Krebs: Would people recognize their letters?

Toth: I think so, but their colleagues wouldn’t, necessarily. I change the details.

Krebs: But the voice of the letters often sounds a lot like Ms. Mentor’s voice.

Toth: Sometimes, I change them. Sometimes, I don’t. There are people who like to imitate Ms. Mentor’s voice.

There was a woman I met at a conference a few years ago who asked me if a specific letter that Ms. Mentor had published was from her school—it was a law school—because the dean of their faculty had called their faculty together, demanding to know if any of them had written a particular letter to Ms. Mentor. He bullied them all, and I don’t know if anyone confessed—but it wasn’t from them, anyway. It’s just that there are certain recurring themes.

Now, the first thing I do when I get a letter is to print it out without the person’s signature. So, I don’t know who it’s from.

Anonymity is guaranteed, and details are scrambled. And the only people I’ve ever heard from who were reluctant to tell their stories, even under e-mail pseudonyms, were gay and lesbian faculty.

And they would say, “I know you want to write about homophobia.” I do, but they said, “Well, I have my story to tell, but I don’t want to put it in writing, or I don’t want to put it in e-mail.” And I didn’t do anything beyond that, because Ms. Mentor doesn’t do independent investigations.

Ann Landers, at the height of her fame, had twelve full-time people answering letters. And I’ve had letters from people saying, “Would you have your staff look into this?” I don’t have a staff. My staff is my cat.

Krebs: Did you pitch the column to the Chronicle, or did they come to you?

Toth: They came to me. And actually, it was not after the book. It was after Elaine Showalter had a piece in Vogue called “The Professor Wore Prada.” And she quoted me about academic fashion, saying that academic women should be frumps. And— well, I can say my mother would have been so thrilled I got in Vogue, even as the enemy, but, you know, the Chronicle thought it was quite funny. And then, the Chronicle got in touch with me, and they were doing an article on academic fashion. They wanted a photograph of what I was wearing. At that point, I had never been in the Chronicle, and I always thought everybody should be in the Chronicle once. So, they sent a photographer out to Baton Rouge to photograph me, and they photographed my shoes, which were broken-down old loafers. And my shoes wound up on the front page of the Chronicle. So, that was my first appearance in the Chronicle, in 1998.

And actually, it’s a very funny article, because it was about academic fashion, such as it is. And then people responded by posting responses and including pictures of themselves in their favorite or worst outfits.

So, that was in January. And then, it was around May or June, the Chronicle got in touch with me asking me to do a column.
 
Krebs: You were saying that the letters are not coming in at the rate they used to. You’ve said before that the most common issue that people write to you about is the two-body problem, two academic careers in one household.

Toth: Right.

Krebs: That continues to be the case?

Toth: Not that much, because it’s hopeless. And what disheartens me is that there are still people who don’t know they’re going to have that problem. And I don’t know what more we could do, really, to let people know that there’s a crisis. In 1983, when the Modern Language Association had a centennial celebrating itself, the Marxist caucus talked about having a counterdemonstration, the parade of the adjuncts. That’s now more than twenty years ago.

Krebs: But do you find a growing generational divide between the new faculty and the old faculty? At my institution, it seems like we’re operating from completely different premises about faculty governance, about the value of tenure. The ones coming up don’t have the same assumptions we had. And I wonder if you’d found any generation gaps.
 
Toth: Well, one thing I could say is that at least at the research university newer faculty do know that their loyalty should not be to the particular institution, but to the profession. So, for instance, when you mention faculty governance, it’s hard for us to find people who are willing to serve on the faculty senate.

Ms. Mentor knows that faculty senates have no power. Once, when I was hired in a new job, I got myself elected to the faculty senate, because I thought it would be a good thing to do, and it might make a difference. And then we had a meeting of the committee I was on, on the status of women, actually, with one of the vice chancellors who said that nothing that the faculty senate had passed—ever passed— was enacted, that what the faculty senate was doing was passing feel-good resolutions. And actually, that’s true almost everywhere. The faculty senate gets on a high horse and says this, that, or the other thing should be done, or we support this, or we don’t support that. That has no impact, really.

Krebs: At my institution, we pass actual legislation.

Toth: You mean, like tenure policies?

Krebs: Exactly. The faculty decides. Maybe that’s the difference between a private and a public institution, or between a small and a large.

Toth: I think it’s probably both. Our faculty who are newly hired know they have to have a book done in five years or under, and that has to be their priority, because without that, they don’t get tenure. So, the faculty senate tends to be something that people shun.

There’s another generational difference that comes up, though—I see it in letters to Ms. Mentor and the Chronicle forums: academic women want to have more than my generation did. And they don’t realize that having two careers and children is generally incompatible with being an academic. What happens is that academic women, nowadays, still find themselves dropping out. And they don’t recognize that they’re going to have to drop out. And I think women of my generation—well, most of the women of my generation didn’t have kids—probably they were more self selected as women who didn’t want to have kids in the first place.

I can remember the first time I saw a pregnant faculty woman. You know, it was that unusual.

But generally, there are a lot of faculty women now who think that they’re going to be able to combine a full-time, high-powered career, marriage to another academic who’s also going to be able to live with them, and one or two kids.

And, of course, there are always some superwomen who do manage it. I spoke at a medical institute just a few years ago, and there was a woman there who was coming up for tenure who had huge amounts of grant money for science as well as four kids. She had the kids while she was on the tenure track. I’m sure she doesn’t sleep.

But I was kind of annoyed with her, because the effect was to say, “I can do it and if you can’t, what’s wrong with you?”

I think the assumption that a woman should be a superwoman was less prevalent, actually, in my generation. There wasn’t a sense that you also had to have kids and be a perfect mom along with your perfect career.

Krebs: Is this a terrible byproduct of feminism?

Toth: Hmm, maybe it is. You know, the idea of having it all. Because having it all sounds good. Doing it all doesn’t sound so good.

Krebs: Tell us about your work on Grace Metalious, the author of Peyton Place.

Toth: Well, in 1981 I published a biography of Grace Metalious, and I got profiled in People magazine, and I got on 20/20. And then, within a year or so, my book was gone without a trace. Then, about twenty years later, I suddenly started getting calls from Hollywood, and I don’t know how that happened. But, Sandra Bullock is interested in playing Grace, and she bought the rights. Sandra Bullock’s production company renews the option every six months, and then, if they make it, I get a big sum of money. Twenty percent of the movies of the properties (my book is now a “property”) that are optioned are finally made into movies, and the rest are not.

Krebs: Campuses can be like Peyton Place, can’t they?

Toth: Well, to the extent that every smallish village-type place has secrets and people who play certain roles. The evil uncle, everybody has the evil uncle. The paper that I’m giving later in this conference is about women’s secrets and Peyton Place. One of the things I talk about is how small-town behavior is different in different parts of the country, too.

Grace’s widower told me that people in New England small towns are really mean, and they use information to crucify each other. And that’s in Peyton Place. That’s a great fear in the New England town of Peyton Place. Now, that’s not true in the South in small towns. What people love in small towns is knowing everybody’s business, not so they can condemn it, but so they can share it. Storytelling is a big thing. And there really is a geographical difference there. Going back to academia, the academic job market forces people to consider living in parts of the country they don’t want to live in, they think. When Ms.Mentor used to get lots of letters, the two main subjects were the two career, two-body problem and geographical bigotry—that’s what I call it. A lot of academics think they don’t want to live in the South, which they sometimes define as Maryland, which I think is kind of weird. But they have all kinds of stereotypes about the South, which are not based on any kind of facts. And they stereotype things as southern, when, in fact, the South has over six million people who don’t all think alike, who aren’t all racist, and who, in fact, elect more African American officials than the North does. There are more black elected officials in Mississippi than New York. But faculty from the North who were hired and come to teach in Louisiana often view the world through certain lenses of northern provincialism. They don’t recognize that good manners smooth your life. And being confrontational doesn’t necessarily make your life better; it just makes your life edgier.

Krebs: What columns of yours have produced the most reaction in readers?

Toth: One that got the most reactions was a column called “He Doesn’t Like the Midwest.” The letter was from a woman who got a tenure-track job in the rural Midwest, and she liked her job a lot, but her husband hated it—hated being in the rural Midwest. He said he couldn’t stand it, and he was going to leave. And so she was torn between wanting to have her job, which she really liked, and her husband. I didn’t mention in the printed version that her job is in history, and only 30 percent of people with PhDs in history ever get tenure-track jobs. So she was in an elite category.

But her husband couldn’t stand the rural Midwest. So Ms. Mentor said that there were several options, that Ms. Mentor, in fact, would favor his finding good things to do in the town in the Midwest. But failing that, there were several considerations: the fact that the average marriage lasts six-and-a-half years, and the average career lasts thirty years; 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. And the odds were actually better for getting a new husband than for getting a new job. And I’ve since done a statistical study on that, and it’s actually true. Someone did an article to the effect that if you’re looking for a new husband—and I don’t know if this would apply to same sex or not, but it was studying heterosexual couples—if you’re looking for a new husband, you need to date thirty-seven men on the average before you find the prince. And one out of thirty-seven is much better than the odds of getting a job in history, you know, because two hundred people and more apply for each job in history.

Ms. Mentor’s conclusion, though, was mild: “Maybe you should try a commuter marriage, and see how it works.”

That column got scads of nasty letters, mostly from angry men who said that the wife needed counseling. Not the husband—the wife needed counseling. And they didn’t get it that her career was important. They saw hubby’s happiness as much more important. And I’m kind of kicking myself now, because it took me a couple of years—that column came out in 2003—to figure out what hubby was actually saying. The letter writers assumed that the wife was making a choice, to either continue the marriage or continue her career, but actually, the hubby had already made a choice. He had decided to leave her, and he wasn’t going to stay. So what he was saying is, “If you want to be with me, you have to quit your job.” So why in the hell should she stay with him? But I don’t know what finally happened. I’m very curious.
 
I think one of the biggest problems that people don’t write to Ms. Mentor about is also insoluble. That’s the fact that most courses now are taught by adjuncts; adjuncts are the only ones being hired. So I think those of us who have tenure are dinosaurs. If I retired, there would be three or four adjuncts hired.

Krebs: Is there a piece of advice that you can’t give in the column that you’d like to give?

Toth: If you don’t have a passion for your subject, don’t go to grad school because it’ll break your heart. If you’re going to grad school, some people say for enrichment, you’re probably not going to get enriched, not even in the money sense. I think the effect of grad school usually is not mind opening. Grad school socializes you into the norms of the profession and makes you feel ignorant. So I think one way to do grad school is to not hang out all the time with other grad students because if you do, you get a skewed view of the world, as if the whole world revolves around Derrida. And if your professor gives you a mean look, then your life is ruined.

Krebs: How about advice to mid-career people?
 
Toth: Oh, mid-career people. If you’re really miserable, get out. No one has to be an academic. There was someone who wrote to Ms. Mentor who felt inadequate as a teacher and got terrible evaluations. And Ms. Mentor said, “Maybe you’re not cut out for teaching.”

If you wake up and your jaw aches, because you’ve been clenching your jaw, you have to get out. Either change jobs or change your life. I don’t know anybody who’s left academia who’s regretted it. Even if they were kicked out or if they were denied tenure, it gave them a chance to really look at what they wanted to do with their lives. And people who go straight through school often haven’t really looked at other possibilities. So, Ms. Mentor would say if you’re unhappy and you can’t change your job, or change where you are, maybe your unhappiness is with academia—and you should get out.

Krebs: How about some positive advice for people? Is there any hope?

Toth: That’s so hard. When I give presentations about academia, I talk about the really positive things. It’s the only profession where we’re paid to think; we’re paid to think in public. With academic freedom after tenure, we really can say anything we want to publicly. We’re almost the only profession that can. After tenure, we’re the only profession where you can research anything you want to. And really have your thirst for knowledge fulfilled. I think it’s a wonderful profession, which makes it so disheartening to see the erosion of tenure. The adjuncts don’t have the power to pursue the lines of knowledge they want to. They don’t have the time. The adjunct situation is corrosive in academia.

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