Predictably, his survival guide is one densely packed manual of information and advice about how to suck up remorselessly to get ahead. It is indeed a most informative manual for toadying, and I would not be all that critical of aspiring tenurees who slink along the corridors of their departments hiding this book under their shirts, casting a surreptitious glance at it when they think no-one is looking.
Most of it is basic common sense when it isn't boring. For example, one should of course try to be a good teacher (but, he adds, never, never give the impression that you're too interested in teaching!Quote, page 17:"You do not want to develop the reputation in your new department of someone who teaches to the exclusion of all else -- hangs out with the students night and day, spends untold hours preparing extra lessons and handouts, and so forth. Quite frankly, behavior such as this makes it appear that you have no perspective on the job, that perhaps you are immature, and that you are simply reveling in the puerile pleasures of hanging out with eighteen-year-old kids")Like E. Galois, Dr. Krantz?
You must see to it that you get the world's attention in performing your "service" (entirely to the department and college; not one word about community service. In the Glossary, under the heading "service",Krantz writes: "Every tenure-track faculty member will have duties in the department, ranging from committee service, to acting as Vice-Chair, to supervising a task force. The aggregate of these activities is refered to as service). The tone of Krantz's survival guide is relentlessly serious- (style of Look man, I've been through it: life's a jungle out there!) - but, despite the no-nonsense 'lessons in life', and extensive padding with bureaucratic boiler-plate, there are places where humor, of the unconscious self-parody sort, breaks through:
For example, Dr. Krantz relates that when he began teaching at UCLA there was a departmental poker game in which all the influential and politically important faculty participated. He wasn't invited, but he knew that all the major decisions were made at that game. (When I read something like that I get a picture of a mathematics department as a place filled with strong intellects yet with no intellectual horizon).He therefore advises anyone who wants to get ahead to make sure they find a way to join the poker game, even if they hate playing poker!And much else along the same lines.
As is normal with a book of this sort, I began to browse through it for helpful tips in areas of particular interest to me."Writing a textbook" gave hope of learning things I might really find useful.Had this been the case, I might have chosen to refrain from panning the book!
It turns out, however, that the only pragmatic information one finds in this section has to do with where the money is: lots of money in the highly competitive pre-calculus level,less at the graduate level which, however is much less competitive. There is nothing whatsoever about the really difficult issues of craft and content: what to include, how to make it accessible, which models to follow, how to structure demonstrations, what to put into the problems, how to work in the history of mathematics, science, humanity, etc. Thus,"Writing a Textbook" is not about writing a textbook, but how to make money writing a textbook.
About avoiding off-color comments that someone or other may just consider not exactly "PC", and may even goes to the trouble of registering a complaint, Dr. Krantz advises the novice to watch his step, practicing consideration and courtesy at all times. Now, in her review of "The Dream of Sonya Kovalevskaya" by Joan Spicci, Ann Koblitz quotes Dr. Krantz as follows:
".....just last year in Mathematical Apocrypha Steven Krantz perpetuated the canard that Kovalevskaia and her colleague Mittag-Leffler had been sexually intimate. Krantz also saw fit to illustrate his little anecdote with a photograph of 'the lovely Sonja Kowalewska dressed up as a kitty kat.'"
My own interactions with Dr. Krantz began somewhat inauspiciously. He chanced upon my website. After perusing it he sent me an E-mail, chiding me for mentioning, somewhere in my website, that I'd entered the university at the age of 15 in a graduate level mathematics program. This indicated conceit, which he thought was not a good thing for someone to have.
I then checked his own website, and discovered that he lists every award, every honor, every paper, every review, every lecture, every mentored PhD student , and every public activity (all in academic administration, no Food for Bombs affiliations, civil rights or grass-roots housing organizations) no matter how petty, since elementary school. As it turns out I am not a mathematician, in the professional sense. I can't compile such lists because I am only the kind of amateur that an ex-professional becomes. However if you want to read my papers on Ferment Magazine you are welcome to do so.
As I've said, the book is intentionally humorless; all the humor is unintentional. It has, of course given me an abundant supply of ammunition in my endless Quixotic jousting with the academic windmill ( or it is windbag?).
In conclusion, let me recommend to you another survival guide that has the virtues of being both more informative and much better written:You'll Never Nanny In This Town Again: The True Adventures of a HOLLYWOOD NANNY Suzanne Hansen, 2005, Crown Publishing Group
(i)The entire department is encouraged to attend. In fact the lecture is billed as being open to the whole university. Only the graduate students and perhaps a few faculty,largely for political reasons, actually show up.
(ii) The lecturer is a post-doc from another university. The invitation to speak came to him from a friend on the faculty.
(iii) The friend introduces the speaker by listing his degrees, his teachers and co-workers. He deems it unprofessional to say anything about him as a human being .
(iv) The speaker announces that nothing beyond calculus, topology and other very basic prerequisites are required to understand his talk.
(v) The lecture begins. The speaker draws a faint diagram on the blackboard. The board is slate-green, the chalk is grey-white and the lighting is terrible. It is impossible for anyone to read the equations or interpret the drawings,. No-one would dream of pointing this out.
(vi)The first ten minutes are devoted to defining the vocabulary and basic concepts of the subject to be discussed.
(vii) Like the sudden eruption of the Exposition of a Beethoven Symphony (#7 for example) after a slow introduction, the speaker jumps spontaneously to the incredibly narrow specialty in which he is working, thereby losing 95% of his audience. This state of affairs persists throughout the rest of the lecture.
(viii) The members of the audience now select one or more from this set of possible responses:
(a) Pretend to follow what's being said. Mimic enthusiasm.
(b) Bury their heads in their hands; appear to be deep in thought, which may or may not be related to the talk.
(c) Dare to be honest, look bored and confused.
(d) Fall asleep.
(e) Do something else, like grading homework papers or one's own research.
(f) Ask questions, thereby exposing one's own ignorance and bringing down ridicule on one's head from, fearing exposure, the rest of the audience.
(g) Get up and leave:
(1) Discretely
(2) Rudely
(h) Be among the 1 to 3 people in the audience who understand the topic. In fact they didn't need to come to the lecture because the material was already familiar to them. They may, however, ostentatiously engage the speaker in long-winded arguments about minutiae, thus increasing the boredom and resentment of everybody else.
(ix) The lecture is followed by deafening applause. Afterwards everyone retires to the lounge. They sit around eating stale pizza and talking about baseball scores and local politics.