A Slightly Sentimental Journey through the Company of the Academy

For an academic pragmatist like me, twenty years in the business, the title does not do justice to this book: Mentor in a Manual instantly conjures up images of an uncorked, smoke-engulfed, midriff-bared Barbara Eden smiling oh-so-alluringly at "Master" Larry Hagman. Or, in a more recent pop-cultural context, of a despondent Kevin Costner wandering the shoreline, inconsolable until he sends that precious message in a bottle, tender bidding for a romantic rendezvous. Cheesy symbols. Sentimental stuff. I simply cannot connect the book's glib title with what I know to be the serious, often treacherous business of tenure bids in higher education.

This cloying quality seeps past the dust jacket, further obliging me to believe that the tenure paths these authors traveled were, if not paved in yellow brick, certainly free of the wicked witches (not to mention the warlocks) who wend themselves into academic campuses no matter what the region (the West included, of course, but Dorothy's beloved Kansas is no safe haven, either). What specifically caught my eye? The book's foreword—its first page—where the word community appears three times in four paragraphs and where a president emeritus of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities writes proudly of campuses held together not so much by "a hierarchy of administrators" as by a "community of scholars" who seek to "nurture a steady flow of new members" (ix).

I took a moment to reflect on his statement, to recall past and present parts of my academic career. Quickly I realized that, contrary to President Ostar's sentiment, it was and still is the academic hierarchy—including administrative chairs and deans, as well as teaching faculty—that protects its class status, whatever egregious offenses colleagues might commit. These include numerous indisputable claims of sexual harassment; alcohol abuse (in and out of the classroom); workload exploitation (one choice example: a chair's unwell spouse who, instead of going on unpaid medical leave, managed quite nicely for two semesters not to teach a single session of any of her three courses by calling on every nontenured member of the department to do her duty); outright treachery (a former colleague, now president of a college, who changed the peer teaching evaluations of junior tenure-track colleagues whom he had personally lobbied to hire, but who he later decided were socially boorish and thus unfit for permanent employment).

Could such perpetrators be part of the "community of scholars" dedicated to "nurturing," as Schoenfeld and Magnan claim? Pretty to think so, but frankly impossible. My experience alone contradicts such ideals. Add to that the horrifying testimonials of at least fifty fellow academics, tenured and not, from community colleges to Ivy League universities, who continue to shock me when I think I have heard it all. When routine abuses exist—promises of spousal hires abruptly broken or, perhaps worse, casually tacked onto selected candidates' benefits packages; administrative aids ordered to break into e-mail accounts and change photocopier access codes to keep junior faculty "in line"; personal sexual insults traded across crowded faculty meetings—I can only shake my head at statements like Ostar's. Community nurturing in academe has been and still is more the ideal than the reality, the exception than the rule.

Fortunately, the saccharine aftertaste to Mentor in a Manual fades once the authors get down to delivering sound advice. About "faculty heterogeneity," they write: "The one thing all your judges will have in common: each will see it as his or her profound duty to academe to ensure that your career replicates and ratifies his or her own mode. The overwhelming biological desire of a species to reproduce itself is alive and well in academe today: no mutants need apply" (31). "Sad, but true," one of my coreviewers penned in the margin of the book. So much for "diversity." This concern about blending in while keeping...