I remember sitting in a classroom in West Texas several years ago, listening to my English professor lecture on some British author. Actually, he was staring out the window and telling us about the remarkable attributes of mesquite trees — there was some connection between Lord Byron and southwestern vegetation. At that moment, like the heavenly light dazzling Saul on the road to Damascus, a voice inside me said, “That’s what I want to be, an English professor!” What a great job! You have nice colleagues, wear tweed sport coats with bow ties, give lectures on Byron and mesquite trees, and get paid for it! I could do this, I told myself (with only the vaguest sense of what “graduate school” was going to be like). Had the Fates been kind, they would have given me a copy of a book like Mentor in a Manual to read before mailing out those graduate school applications. Mentor in a Manual is something like a U.S. Army training manual as compared to the travel agency brochures one might find at a recruiting office (“See Hawaii!— Join the Marines!”). It is encyclopedic, loaded with useful hints and suggestions for survival, and it will disabuse anyone of romantic ideas about academe, just as reading about bayonets puts Hawaii in a different light. Not that I regret choosing a career in academe. The professorial calling does have its unique pleasures, but I might have considered my career alternatives as a librarian or navy midshipman more seriously had I known that being good is not always good enough in academe. As Schoenfeld and Magnan put it in their preface, “There is no entitlement to tenure based upon a record that is merely competent and satisfactory for a prescribed period of time” (xiii).