2. Admit that experience whispers convincingly that the issues and concerns that rob young people of time and energy actually do not warrant time and energy.
3. Remember that most people asking for advice seek validation for what they already want to do, or...
4. Understand that most young people asking for advice are doing so to assure your signature on their tenure or promotion application and as you talk are imaging how to rearrange the furniture once they get your office.
5. Realize that in the eyes of the young old men do not offer something new; don’t try to refute that, and never ever point out that your department has already tried what the young people are suggesting as young people ardently believe new ideas arrived on campus only when they did.
6. Accept that young people render kind, supportive, constructive criticism as criticism, that is, in their views, random personal attacks.
7. Compliment young people often; they expect approval and agreement, so compliments do not confuse them.
8. Embrace that the less an old man says—about anything—the less he annoys young people; however...
9. Remember that as most young people do not find old people humorous, interesting, attractive, necessary, helpful, insightful, friendly, sincere, current, intelligent, important, or valuable, if you must talk, talk only about gardening, recipes with garam masala
or lemongrass
, your new convertible, your summer place, the success of your children, your ability to max out your 403B and the huge tax benefits of doing so, the room in your big office and the great view from the corner, and your appreciation of having the entire summer off (even if you work just as hard as they do); doing so reinforces what they already believe about you, so annoying them in this way avoids confusing them and thus is a kind act.
Oh bravo, sir!
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much of this translates for older women? My sense is that they (we?) are expected to be even more invisible, except when nurturing and/or detail-laden, important but unglamorous work needs to be done, in which case we suddenly, if briefly, become visible ("oh, Jane's really good at this sort of stuff; we should ask her"). When we do land in positions with power and/or high pay, the resentment seems to be magnified, and the scrutiny intensified.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, I think it translates, though I'm not sure whether females can technically be "silverbacks" (though we can certainly be symbolically so, just as we, in some situations, acquire symbolic phalluses. And then there are a few of us who strap on actual phalluses for moral suppport in difficult situations -- speaking of which, where's BlackDog these days? I hope she and her students made it back from Starvistan in one piece -- or, rather, the same number of pieces they started with).
Cassandra, I was just going to bring up women here. The assumptions that all older profs are men or that all the young profs are "young men" is kinda blatant. And distracting in an otherwise fine post.
ReplyDeleteHi, Of course Cassandra shows up with the excellent point! My advice is as an older man to silverbacks. But I promise that by the phrase young people I intended both women and men. I wish that I had made that clearer; thanks for reading!
ReplyDeleteCassandra, I am so glad I read your contribution because I was just going to ask this and point out that perhaps women don't NEED advice? :o)
ReplyDeleteMy observation is that senior women tend to be viewed as 'grandmothers' and become near invisible, unless they adopt an eccentricity that supersedes the category of 'grandmother.'
@Monkey and Cynic: to be fair, I think there are some fields where most of the senior professors still are male (I'm not sure whether the Tuba is a hobby or part of TPP's professional repertoire; a good many scientists and mathematicians, for instance, are also musicians, and those fields still skew male, especially at the top). Mine, however, is not one of them, and it's interesting to watch people get their minds around the idea of Grand Old Women of the profession (not to mention female Deans, Provosts, college/university Presidents, etc. At least in the departments in which I've worked, Chair is really more a service than a prestige/power job, so I'm not including it; basically, one can be chair while hewing pretty close to at least one traditional "mom" model -- a fairly no-nonsense, practical one, but still not exactly gender-norm-bending).
ReplyDeleteI'm also watching my church adjust to a female senior pastor (we've had female associates before) -- another interesting and, I think, related phenomenon. The senior pastor is, among other things, the Chief of Staff and the chief decision-maker for many things, and it's interesting to see people react to a female pastor who is actually somewhat more decisive/executive in her approach than the man she succeeded, who tended more to a collaborative/consensus approach. It's hard to tell how much of the occasional bristling has to do with the change in style, and how much has to do with a woman taking a traditionally "male" approach to the job.
I loved this. Women's adaptive mechanisms tend towards invisibility as we get older; the fact that our entire culture ceases to be able to see us as we get older helps, of course. At twelve we pass under the unforgiving lens of collective cultural sexual expectations, and remain fixed there until 45 or thereabouts, when the collective critical gaze slides indifferently away from us at last and damn, it's a relief.
ReplyDeleteMy advice for older female academics is to be grateful for the Older Woman Cloak of Invisibility. At last you can get some frigging work done without being interrupted every five minutes.
Yes, Merely! To paraphrase a story by Ursula K. Le Guin, older women are free to belly laugh for the first time.
ReplyDelete(Though I find that I actually enjoy the gaze towards the end of my run. It's no longer threatening. I know how to enjoy it and blow it off, so to speak.)
@TubaPlayingProf: May I add one more piece of advice for silverbacks?
10. Remember that young people might find your rambling stories entertaining or charming, or may simply listen because they need your vote on the tenure committee. But they're pressed for time. You are emeritus/a or near retirement, and your children (if any) are grown; they are working their tails off to get tenure while caring for young kids and/or aging parents. You (if you're male) probably didn't have to do much on the home front even at the start of your career. They (both men and women, but especially the women) have demands from all sides. When they politely ask how you're doing, they don't really want to hear the details.
This must make Yaro sad.
ReplyDeleteI love and respect the silverbacks in my department who are not spitting and wildly gesticulating as they try to make sure we hire a younger them or savage the people we have already hired.
I've been feeling out my new department and listening to everybody's concerns and hear a lot of "Yeah we already tried that 15 years ago..." as noted above.
ReplyDeleteThere doesn't seem to be any adequate response to this. If you're on a University committee where the Dean wants you to try X again, people in your department let you know it failed years ago, you bring that up at the next meeting and everybody's like "Oh that's okay, it'll be different now..."
...short of complaining over beer to said Silverback is there no way to not appear young, idealistic, and kinda dumb? (I am young and idealistic, I'm trying to avoid the third...)
If you're untenured you should not be on a Dean's committee. If you're tenured, you should have the guts to say, "There's no support in my department for that."
ReplyDelete