Post Academic

Like Bob Sutton, Tim Gunn is waging a verbal battle against assholes in the workplace. It would appear that, after stints in the fashion world and academia, Gunn has encountered more than his fair share of assholes. (You can go ahead and giggle at that joke, but it’s not like that. In fact, Gunn claims he’s celibate!)

After spending so much time with Betty Backstabbers and Debbie Downers, Gunn knows how to cope, and his advice is similar to that of Bob Sutton and David Yamada: Minimize all interaction with assholes, and get out as soon as you can. He writes,

The abuser could be your boss, and in a case like that you just need to try to keep your integrity, even as you’re being mistreated, and try to get out of the situation as soon as you possibly can.

In fact, Gunn applies the policy to his personal life as best he can, cutting out jerks whenever possible. In a story about a producer who treated Gunn and others like dirt on a TV set:

We got through it somehow. But I thought: I am never working for this man again. And I never have. One day my wonderful assistant told me, “I have your old boss on the line. He’s at Ralph Lauren and wants to buy you a suit?”

“Hang up on him,” I said.

Although Gunn often advises people to (and this will seem familiar) “take the high road,” this story shows that there are limits. The key to dealing with an asshole is to make sure they don’t break you. You can protect yourself in many ways, but it’s all up to you to improve your academic (or hamster!) workplace situation.

Tim Gunn is best known for his mentoring skills in the Project Runway workroom. He has helped designers do their best work without doing all their work for them. He offers guidance, but success is in the hands of the designer. It seems that he cultivated a similar hands-off attitude at Parsons because some of his students suffered from other authority figures being too hands-on:

In my later years of teaching, I started to see a disturbing trend: students who couldn’t function without their parents’ help. They were so overpraised and overprotected that they were incapable of handling any problem, whether it was dealing with a teacher they didn’t like, sharing space with a roommate, or struggling with a class for which they didn’t have an affinity.

Gunn offers advice for teachers coping with snowflake students who can’t manage themselves: flunk ’em. His logic is that if they’re not trying, they obviously want to quit. So, do them a favor:

[On a fellow teacher who felt guilty about flunking a talented student who stopped showing up to class] As I expected, we never heard from the student. Ever. So the F stood. And we all learned something: the teacher wanted the student to succeed more than the student did.

People send each other messages all the time through their behavior, and the message here was, Fail me. I don’t want to be in school anymore. Instead of admitting that she wanted to get out of fashion, she forced the faculty to make her decision for her. From a faculty member’s point of view, I have this refrain: Why should I want you to succeed more than you do?

When I don’t believe that “kids these days” are all lazy, entitled snowflakes out to torture their TAs, I think that students and college teachers can benefit from Gunn’s advice: Take a step back, and let the student choose if she wants to succeed or fail.

And, in the final installment of the Tim Gunn philosophy, why you should listen to him–because he and Bob Sutton have the same basic message.

Image of Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum by Michael Williams from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.

Gunn’s Golden Rules gained notoriety because Gunn dared to call out some of the biggest names in the fashion world. Yet he didn’t chide Anna Winotour, Andre Leon Talley or Isaac Mizrahi for a lack of talent. He chided them for reprehensible diva behavior. For example, Winotour had bodyguards carry her down multiple flights of stairs because she didn’t want to ride in an elevator with proles.

One fact was missed in the press avalanche: Tim Gunn called a few academics divas, too. He encountered one poorly behaved individual at Parsons who had a toddler’s sensitivity when it came to cuisine:

In academia, too, you see this kind of outrageous behavior. I knew a dean who had soup delivered to his office. I once saw him bring a spoonful up to his mouth, scream, “This soup isn’t hot enough!” and hurl the container across his office onto a wall, which I noticed already had stains on it.

Gunn also dings his fellow academics for a flaw that he couldn’t possibly apply to the relatively cutting-edge Winotour, Talley and Mizrahi–an aversion to change.

Image of Tim Gunn showing that nice academics can finish first at the 81st academy awards by Chrisa Hickey from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
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Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn is one of the few people on reality television who has some brains to back up the bluster. The man is clearly a fashion expert, but did you know that his wisdom extends to post academics?

Before becoming a reality-show mentor, Gunn was a chair at Parsons The New School for Design, so he knows plenty about moving from academia to another gig. While he isn’t a hamster proper, his new book, Gunn’s Golden Rules, could also be called Advisor-in-a-Box. Like many advisors, he’s rambling, and not everyone is into the fashion thing, but he has many brilliant career tips and even advice for current academics.

The tips will be spread out over the next few days, kind of like a reality-tv season, but the core of his advice is the same as what’s on the show: “Make it work!”

That seems kind of cheesy, especially if you are faced with something as difficult as changing careers or figuring out how to get a tenure-track position in a bad job market. But the mantra to “make it work” is all about working with constraints and obstacles. In fact, what Tim Gunn says is similar to what I’ve advocated in the post “The Benefits of Boundaries.”
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