30 SECONDS: Emily Toth

Once a month, LSU English professor Emily Toth assumes the alter ego of Ms. Mentor and serves as academia’s answer to Miss Manners.

Her monthly column appears in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and it’s the longest-running column on the Chronicle’s Web site. She landed the gig, perhaps not surprisingly, after publishing a book called Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia.

Aside from her role as Ms. Mentor, Toth is considered one of the foremost authorities on Kate Chopin and has written several books on The Awakening author. Actress Sandra Bullock recently purchased an option to make Toth’s biography, Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious into a movie.

Why do you speak of Ms. Mentor as another person?

I like to think of it as third person haughty, borrowed from Miss Manners. I also like to make the distinction because Ms. Mentor sometimes says things more bluntly than I would. Sometimes when you are writing something, things come to you. I guess they call it the muse, and Ms. Mentor will say things that are very clever or witty, great turns of phrase that I don’t know where they came from, and I don’t think they came from me. I like to give her all of the credit.

How many e-mails do you receive?

About 15 to 50 a month. Ms. Mentor doesn’t answer them personally; she just answers them in the column, so she is really only able to answer 12 questions a year. Sometimes they write questions that are really urgent that she just can’t answer like, “What should I wear this Thursday?” Then there are ones that are just not answerable like, “Should I go for a Ph.D. in astronomy or marry Max and move to Norway?”

Well, how do you decide which ones to answer?

It depends, but the ones that really get Ms. Mentor’s attention are those about academic politics: how you get along with people and how you decide which battles are worth fighting.

Check out Ms. Mentor columns at this link.