|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
AS I cast my thoughts back to the after-dinner scene that was the occasion for this talk, I distinctly recall looking out from the podium and detecting behind the many encouraging smiles a certain habitual submission, the product of countless interminable guest speakers and poetry readings, of suffering intellectual fools gladly during office hours, anti-intellectual administrative bureaucrats during university meetings, and self-serving politicians at legislative hearings (at tax-supported institutions), or corporate idiot-trustees (at private schools). To paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan, “A chairperson's lot is not a happy one.” Still, it teaches us to assume a semblance of forbearance, humility, and tolerance and, like Prufrock, to prepare “a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Well, my aim here is to resurrect Prufrock's specter, to spit out the butt ends of my days and ways.
My argument wends its way through tedium and switches from conditional to past tense to answer Prufrock's and now my overwhelming question, Was it “worth it, after all?” Being more of an optimist than that fastidious, whining, coffee-slurping little prig, I think it was. Indeed my whole life as a chair was the inevitable outcome of my early training at the Wharton School and my later practical experience as a used-car salesman and eventually manager (of the one other salesman) at the automotive establishment C. Jamstremski, Polish Purveyor of Fine Used Cars. While this was not exactly a Fortune 500 firm, its lessons for academic life were priceless. Cutting a semblance of tread into bald tires became an indispensable lesson in revitalizing the teaching of older, jaded faculty members; financing the unfinanceable buyer, a recipe for preparing the department travel budget; haggling over the price of an untrustworthy machine, a textbook case for obtaining funding for a new program; mollifying an irate buyer with a rod through the engine block, a strategy for appeasing apoplectic faculty members after they receive their annual raise notices; offering meaningless fifty-fifty guarantees on parts and labor, a pattern for calming the anxieties of publicationless faculty members approaching tenure decisions—the list goes on and on.
I was prepared for life as a corporal in the administrative army by a mother who was both an opera singer and an A.F. of L. organizer in the Ladies Garment Workers Union and by a father who was manager of an automobile agency. Two more disparate characters one is not likely to find: she a vociferous leftist and he a resolute conservative; their common tie, indulging me (their only child) in showing off. I am at it again here. My parents' after-dinner sideporch battles were epic, their voices, particularly my mothers'—trained as it was and cultivated on the picket line at the Gotham Hosiery Company—rising in incantation to gender, social, and political diversity. I grew up precocious and fat, each condition militating against the other in terms of social acceptance. To counterbalance my inflated, egomaniacal inner self, I had my overinflated, socially denigrated corporeal exterior. Used to satiating every legally obtainable desire, I tried to make the best of two noxious traits by counterbalancing them into a virtue, hardly an Apollonian ideal but nevertheless one I am here to share with you in all its permutations in my life as a chair.
My paper is about making the most of our imaginaries to construct helpful dialogical self-narratives—or simply split personalities that work to advantage in solving administrative problems. The process is not much different from becoming an antihero with a thousand faces. Constructing a rationale for one's place in the universe comes easily to people who make a living pontificating on the meaning, or, more recently, the meaninglessness, of literary metaphors and mirror-image reflections. Like many of you, I began at an early age to identify with characters in the literature I read, lavishing my self-identification with comic hyperbole.“Why comic hyperbole?” you may well ask (but probably wouldn't).
I think I did so because I already had a sense of inherited schizophrenia, coupled with diametrically opposed ego problems. A coping maneuver was to develop a mindset that stressed comic exaggeration as an art form and to cling to the disparate hope that a round peg might after all fit into the square hole of life. Exaggeration of spirit seemed to go hand in hand with the fleshy exaggeration of my body. Thinking big has its drawbacks, however; it inspired dark suspicions, as I am sure some readers are even now beginning to harbor, of sincerity, commitment, veracity—that sort of thing. But I was always viscerally opposed to righteousness as an announced agenda and to people firmly even if quietly rooted in the absolute strength of unalterable conviction.
Of course, certainty need not always be harmful. I remember one day back in Binghamton when I was on the university tenure appeals board. The academic year had officially ended, and members of the panel were desperate to finish our last meeting and get away for the summer. The case involved a neighbor of mine in the philosophy department. He insisted, in the twilight hour of our last afternoon of the spring semester, on beginning his case with an hour-and-a-half-long definition of education. Six o'clock came and went, and his tedious recitation showed no signs of abatement. As the committee members grew increasingly restive, the chair finally forced closure to the philosophic peroration and began to call witnesses. Nearly all the department faculty members enlisted to testify, but only three survived the definitional preamble. Despite the late hour, all three, including the chair, testified that my neighbor's teaching was superb, his publication record strong, his university services unimpeachable. So what was the problem? On philosophical grounds (opposition to any system of hierarchical values or concept of permanence), the plaintiff was unalterably opposed to the university's decision to grant him promotion and tenure, and the appeals committee had to decide whether he could be forced to accept the new rank and status. He threatened to quit rather than suffer the indignity of cooperating in any such anathematized scheme, but he was, despite his abberant behavior, as valuable and accomplished a faculty member as his colleagues claimed. The argument for finding for (that is, against) him was that if he were allowed to reject the new appointment, somehow the whole tenure and promotion review process would be jeopardized. Near comic convulsions, I tried to listen with a reflective seriousness, knitting my eyebrows thoughtfully, biting the corner of my lower lip, and gripping the chair arm so hard that my knuckles turned white. After we finally put the entire tenure process at risk by granting the plaintiff his wishes, it occurred to me that no narrative I had ever invented was as apt a metaphor for academic life. But the incident had confirmed my worst tendency to regard academe as something to be savored, like Alice in Wonderland or some Nabokovian comic permutation. So I chose the trickster road as one that, if less traveled by, was the more interesting and a lot more fun.
I have survived for more than a quarter of a century as a minor university administrator by applying the same schizoid narrativizing strategy to the art of running, and being run by, an academic department. When hyperbole infuses narrative formations, particularly dialogical ones, they become caricatures, easier to understand, harder to dismiss simply because of their ludicrousness. Take my introductory paragraph, involving Prufrock and the usedcar salesman as a demonstration of competing paradigms of an old department chair—a fat man in the delicate position of dealing with intelligent people ever ready to devise their own defensive narratives of themselves in interaction with him. The point is to have them come away feeling amused and slightly superior but sensing the entire action was not a total waste of time and maybe even a little fun.
Should you choose to embark on the devious course of trying to have fun being a chair or a director of graduate studies, choose your paradigms from literature. I read both parts of Henry IV early on and immediately identified with Falstaff, whose clever comic self-exaggerations mitigate the damages of his grubby, hedonistic antiheroism. I adopted him as my coordinating trickster figure. It was the Falstaffian persona that marshaled my other fictive personalities. I looked a lot like Falstaff, so it didn't take a lot to convince people of the similarity. Then I recognized myself in both Quixote and Sancho Panza, the absurd bookish idealist and the grubby, fawning servant who is his comic alter ego. Like Quixote, I was taken with the notion that I could actually help my colleagues and the department, that I might bring about some sort of Camelot where we would all sit at a round table with no head or foot to plan the ideal curriculum and establish a disciplinary utopia together. Like Quixote, I needed the scheming Sancho in me to scrounge budgets, TA and faculty lines, and a share of the merit raise treasure from the worldly provost. When Sancho got to be governor of his island, he wasn't so bad.
In the absence of any Aristotelian poetics of comedy, I had no theoretical basis for my applied schizophrenia. Then from deep in the wastes of Kazakhstan came Bakhtin's revelations on the carnivalesque and on the low comic side of life, which I had always instinctively embraced. Now with the scriptures at hand, I was able to throw off the shackles of self-pity for systematic, productive comic delusion. Like many other chairs, I had spent years convinced that my idealistic, tender concern for others resulted in my being a self-condemned tragic hero or scapegoat enslaved by circumstance and fate, surrounded by the embittered and the power-hungry.
After Bakhtin, I began to think in terms of carnivalesque spectacle and conceived the idea of constructing an enormous wooden cross and bearing it to the department meetings to inform the faculty of my martyrdom on their unpitying, uncooperative behalf. I could hardly lift the wood, and, unwilling to risk a herniated martyrdom, I finally settled for a blood pressure machine. During uncivil exchanges, I wrapped the strap around my arm and began vigorously pumping the ball, wheezing slightly all the while. Department members invariably quieted down as they silently watched the column rise.
This attempt to instill pity was only one aspect of my Sancho persona as a bumbling, humble, defeated idiot, a persona especially useful for covering mistakes. Incidentally, all errors should be accompanied by a major grovel (groveling being a necessary part of every chair's repertoire), especially when the errors are trivial boo-boos. Such appeasing insincerity silences the offended faculty member, and at the same time conveys the uneasy impression that the display of humility is so disproportionate to the insignificance of the offense that, despite all protestations, the chair is not half so addlepated or abject as he or she claims to be. I often apologized profusely for things I was sure I hadn't done, since an apology takes the onus off the real malefactor while underscoring the malefaction's insignificance and inspires guilt without triggering a righteous faculty defense mechanism.
Dealing with the upper levels of administration evokes another set of alter egos, most of them habitually antagonistic. In these roles at least I was my mother's shop steward. Anyone who wants the job of chair badly enough to participate in what is not in the department's or its members' best interests should not be a chair. Anyone who sees the role of chair as a stepping stone to exalted administrative office should join a corporate enterprise, like the ones many administrators try so hard to emulate. For chairs, satisfaction must ultimately lie in small victories like the granting of a deserved but disputed promotion, the funding of a new line or program, the long-awaited publication of a good book after years of encouragement and support, or praise in a peer review for a remarkably well taught hour-in short, in the achievements of the people chairs represent.
But even in good times, chairs should never let the administration know they like the job. I used to keep a stack of purple dittoed resignation letters on my desk. I dated and signed one to put on the dean's desk whenever I entered his office simply to assure him that I regarded the matter to be discussed as serious. I don't know that this stance is for everyone's stomach, but I always regarded my interaction with the administration essentially as labor negotiations, and I learned never to admit any departmental weaknesses I thought the dean or provost didn't already know about.
I always tried to add a layer of hyperbolic humor to mitigate the insults I regularly heaped on the higher-ups. It didn't always work. Once in a spirited and public debate with our president over his exercise of university charter prerogatives during a dean's search, he drew himself up and announced that he had chosen the deans for twelve of the university's thirteen schools. I suggested that perhaps any dozen random derelicts off the commuter-rail platform would have had a better statistical chance of success than the crowd he had hired. This remark was not entirely true and even a bit out of line, but I thought its hyperbole was funny. I guessed from his apoplexy that the president didn't appreciate all the comic subtlety of the comparison.
I ultimately discovered how convenient it is to pick out an administrative scapegoat, some doddering, fawning, or vindictive associate vice president or sub-subprovost who can't really retaliate against the department for whatever slander is heaped on him. There are a lot of nincompoops in business suits wandering around every administrative building, people who richly deserve whatever vilification they get. Choose a scapegoat (preferably male, for political purposes) and publicly and loudly blame everything that happens on him—you can't find your glasses because he or his minions have stolen them, or your parking space was taken by one of his operatives, or it began to rain as you were walking to class—nothing is beneath him. Then when you screw up something meaningful—you can't find somebody's sabbatical leave form or a travel reimbursement check—you can blame the scapegoat and comically undercut your need for perpetual penance.
Now that I have left the faculty-administrative wars, I can admit that many of the administrators I dealt with over the years were decent, warm people and that I count several among my best friends. But that is all personal, not business. If professionally I responded to administrators antagonistically, it was because I always felt it my primary, if admittedly patriarchal, obligation to protect and enhance the careers and programs of those who elected me by challenging the false sense of infallibility and privilege power conveys. I was lucky over the years that most of the administrators with whom I crossed verbal swords were good, tolerant people, and when I wrote them to that effect after I left the position of chair, several seemed surprised, and I'm not sure they believed me. I was sincere. I am sorry about that, but as Don Corleone tells Sollozzo, “Business is business.”
All Sancho's grubby, low-life tricks finally give way to a few Quixotic admonitions. I have already pontificated that sort of advice in the yellowing ADE Bulletins of yesteryear. But in one last strain on your patience and credulity, I offer a final Polonius-like (“politic, deferential, glad to be of use”) admonition or two. I am sure this is to most of you the oldest, most self-evident nonnews anyone could impart, but like the national anthem before a prize fight, it has a traditional purpose.
For new chairs and for chairs of long experience, established written departmental procedures are indispensable. People should know exactly what is expected of them for tenure and promotions and raises, in terms as explicit and realistic as the department can devise. Any and all department policy should be approved by the collective group. Your first allegiance is to the people who depend on you to represent them, and in the rare instances when you feel you have to oppose a departmental decision, give everyone all the reasons you can without embarrassing the affected party. You must be able honestly to doubt the wisdom of the decisions you make regarding meaningful aspects of faculty members' lives: salaries, jobs, the quality of teaching and scholarship, service to the department and the university. Whenever possible, you should solicit collective decisions; I have honestly found such decisions to be generally better than my own. Pedants and kooks abound in departments, but when trusted with shared responsibility, department members more often than not collectively become thoughtful, sensible people.
The illusion of power is a dangerous delusion to harbor consciously or unconsciously in either its comic or heroic form. The experience of being a chair points toward just the opposite. Our worst enemy is the frustration of any long-term goals we have for our departments—the department's or the college's failure to cooperate, an administrator's refusal to fund a project, the unavailability of outside funding, and a whole litany of other problems.
With teaching, where interaction is instantly gratifying, parameters are set, success is measurable, and feedback is honest if baffling, but chairing is a whole other ballgame. Programmatic changes seem glacially slow, and when they do come, they are always the product of an entire faculty or at least of a major segment of it.
Even keeping a detailed year-by-year departmental statistical record of changes (an absolute necessity for use in budgetary battles) does not necessarily afford any measure of one's individual worth as a chair. The growth of enrollments may result from changes in general education or major requirements or from increasing demands that law school applicants be literate—in short, from things for which individual chairs cannot take credit. It is self-delusion to identify oneself completely with the department, to see the department's progress or regression as one's own. Yet the responsibility of the everyday nuts and bolts, of keeping the ship afloat, is to a large extent the chair's. It is a task made problematic by increasing paperwork and even more dramatic by the evolution of our discipline as a whole.
I want to close with what I think are the two most difficult issues academics, particularly English department chairs, face. Though these issues are seemingly separable, they are intrinsically related. The first is the state of the academic economy. This June the news commentators trumpeted the robust job market for college graduates, average starting corporate salary offers in the mid-thirties, and a new high in the Dow Jones index. But as Archangel Greenspan, guardian of the gates of prosperity, let us know, the whole house of cards depends on fear. People insecure in their jobs don't ask for more money, better working conditions, or anything remotely resembling tenure. The lesson for many academic administrators, in what used to be the last bastion of some semblance of freedom of speech and thought, is to reduce whatever interferes with corporate efficiency, including the impediments of outspoken professors, the sticky business of full-time personnel with fringe benefits and ever-increasing salaries in a world where everyone except CEOs must expect to hold down inflation by working more for less.
How can we think that academe can escape this allpervasive tendency? Our job market in English is apparently eroding at the same time that more and more kids and adults are going to college. I think the need for English teachers has never dropped; rather, increases in course loads, class size, and, most important, the use of part-time labor have turned us into a McDonald's with billions of fast-fried, semiliterate students made on the cheap by part-timers and a faculty grateful on good days to have any work at all. At the University of Miami, our newly created postdoctoral teaching fellowships, whose recipients must teach six courses a year, pay one half the announced rate for a BA or BS job. The salary was decided by a vote of the graduate students themselves, whose collective fear made them choose more fellowships at lower salaries. The point is that, as chairs, the lowest, most functionary level of university administration, we have been and are in some measure to blame for letting our institutions get away with it. If we submit to corporate fear or to some aspiration to join exalted ranks by willing submission, we have let our faculties and our profession down. To whatever extent we are able to resist unwarranted incursions into the rights of our faculty members, their economic well-being, or the health of our programs, I think we are obligated to do so. Many chairs may be surprised at how much weight their simple refusal to go along will carry. If chairs don't give the power structure maximum grief over some arbitrary or inhuman scheme, nobody else will.
If all faculty positions were filled with full-time PhDs, there would be no glut of English teachers, and perhaps undergraduates would be able to read with understanding and write with alacrity by the time they pick up their diplomas and start drawing $35,000 salaries—even the business majors.
The second issue is of course related to the economics of our profession but is more overtly political than even corporate capitalism in academe. Inspired by the evolving gender composition of our faculties and the political effect of official pronouncement during the Vietnam War, the intellectual and academic community has increasingly questioned our culture's stability, its resistance to change, its power structure, its verbalizations, and even the validity of its existence. Whatever these insights may be, the evolution or revolution of disciplinary thought ushered in a new era of thinking as profoundly important as it is radical, even as it settles and devolves into the continuum of intellectual history. Our job is first to try to understand what it is all about, then to recognize its existing importance in our discipline and to make the most of it. The ideas expressed in our departments, what we teach, and our ways of teaching it are neither moral nor philosophical issues so much as observable phenomena, part of continuing cultural and intellectual evolution. We as department chairs should do our best to accommodate intellectual diversity. When we have found demons, they are us. Our enterprise is about intellectual curiosity, about constructing and reconstructing our personal narratives as well as the narratives germane to the world around us, and at least to me the whole business is interesting. The heat of the evangelicals on either side involves overtones of both morality and religion, and it is our job to try to replace righteousness with understanding, polarity with intellectual curiosity, censoriousness with whatever comic sensibility or grotesque masks we can raise and to ensure that we and our colleagues get on with the stern task of surviving by enjoying the whole enterprise as much as we can.
The author is Professor of English at the University of Miami. This paper was presented at the 1997 ADE Summer Seminar East at Florida Atlantic University.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
