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THE title of my paper is intended to signal the in-between status of a department chair. A chair, structurally, is both faculty member and administrator and, psychologically, neither. Or, more accurately, he or she is sometimes one, sometimes the other--and is often regarded as the one when really trying to act in the role of the other. Although this in-between position can often be frustrating, however, it is ultimately the ideal vantage point from which to help direct the conversation about the role of the humanities (and especially English departments) in higher education.
Like any middle management position, the chair's job is based on a hierarchical organizational model. The chair is the go-between for the central administration and the faculty. In good times, the chair proudly announces the number of new lines "given" to the department or informs the dean that Professor X has just won the James Russell Lowell Prize. In times of crisis or cutbacks, the chair is the person who both delivers the bad news and assuages it. Studies of business and industry reiterate that the middle manager's job is one of the most stressful in any organization, especially in an era of downsizing. The same must be true of a department chair in a university or college. And yet--and here I leave the business model behind--it is the department chair whose leadership is crucial to everything the university represents.
Before going on to discuss the role of an English department chair within the modern university, I want to be clear about my own position in the institutional hierarchy. Since July 1998, I have been vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University. If I were in industry, you might call me a research and development person. I have a modest budget that I use as seed money to help create and facilitate new programs throughout the university. I administer a number of interdepartmental and interschool programs (most of them as bureaucratically complex and challenging as they are intellectually exciting). I have input into some of the decisions made at the provost level and help with some of the work that comes into the provost's office. Although I have never been a chair, my position requires that I constantly work with department chairs to help facilitate discussions about everything from the flow of new ideas to the equitable distribution of ICRs (indirect cost recovery) across departments, professional schools, and interdisciplinary institutes and centers. In other words, my job gives me an excellent vantage point from which to see the different ways chairs can represent their departments throughout the university.
Rhetorically, the chair is in the them-versus-us position often--whether talking to his or her faculty or talking to his or her dean. As someone new enough in a job to still be wondering if I'm a faculty member or an administrator, I can identify with this structural and organizational position of being continually one or the other pronoun. Yet the trick in negotiating these in-between positions is to find ways to close the gap between them and us, whichever discussion one happens to be in. It can be quick and easy to rely on antagonism as a way to support one's own power and position, but I am convinced that it is ultimately self-defeating and demoralizing.
I want to share some of what I've learned in my first year as an administrator. I often hear humanities colleagues around the country expressing a sense of beleagueredness and, more telling, a sense of beleagueredness in the face of administrators portrayed as the all-powerful "they" who will not like us or understand us or have our best interests at heart. In this rhetorical mode, administrators are monolithic sources of power, an ominous, foreboding they. Yet to ascribe so much power to them is to forget the precarious role that all of us in higher education play, vis à vis the public, state legislators, the federal government, or (for those in private universities) prospective donors and boards of trustees. However beleaguered we are or feel, the binaric language of power--the Foucauldian paradigm of resistance or subversion--serves to make us even more beleaguered. The tired division of them versus us is a binary that ultimately reiterates our position as powerless and thus worthy of disrespect.
English departments do have power within today's universities. Our numbers may be diminishing and our proportion of the total resources of the university shrinking, but to simply lament our situation is to underestimate the source of our strength. Unlike a number of other departments throughout the university (some outside the humanities) whose primary function is to train graduate students, English departments--through a variety of historical causes and accidents--have generally integrated their mission to train future English professors with the much larger general education mission of the university as a whole: namely, to teach sophisticated techniques for reading, writing, and sorting information into a coherent argument (the function of the formal research paper). If we spend too much of our energy lamenting the decline in the number of positions for our doctoral students and do not also claim our centrality to the modern university, we are giving up the single most compelling argument we have for our existence--and thereby contributing to the declining numbers of jobs for our English doctoral students.
We have one foolproof argument, and we have to make it over and over again: in the information age, English departments are more indispensable than ever. With the birth of the Internet, we have become, once again, a society of writers, and, for better or worse, English is becoming increasingly the lingua franca of global communication. Who would have thought that possible even a decade ago? Instead of becoming a paperless society, as was predicted at the beginning of the information age, we have become, on a scale never before conceivable, a global society of researchers, with information everywhere. Someone now has to teach students how to cull what is important. Someone has to teach students how to organize all this data into a logical and meaningful argument. Someone has to teach students how to read for subtext and not just surface; how to consider the source of their information and the inaccuracies, biases, perspective, and blindspots that source might harbor. Reading, writing, evaluating, and organizing information have probably never been more central to everyday life. If the English professor isn't indispensable in the information age, who is?
We live in a world that is changing faster than our imaginations. Thank goodness we have a whole literary history at our fingertips that helps us understand, on the most microscopic material, psychological, and spiritual levels, what it means to be human in the midst of gigantic world forces beyond individual control. We need literature--and trained teachers of English--to help us understand what change is, what the anxieties are that come along with the exuberance of discovery, what other social costs have been envisioned (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) in other times of speeded-up change: for example, the Protestant Reformation and the invention of movable type; the American Revolution and the advent of mass printing and public education; the end of the nineteenth century and the harnessing of electricity and the spread of the telegraph and telephone and the science of microscopy and bacteriology; the postÐWorld War II era and the invention of the television; or the cold war and the emphasis on science in the era of Sputnik and the bomb and the nascent computer era.
Writers--the purveyors of the culture's imagination--were there at times of crisis and at times of harrowing change, documenting the most minute social changes that resulted from new technologies (think of H. G. Wells, W. D. Howells, or Upton Sinclair). Writers have also provided us with some of our wildest speculations about new technologies (think of Mary Shelley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or Octavia Butler). In our own genomic era, Dolly the Sheep is aging much faster than she should. Any English professor knows how to read that allegorical twist, since it's a paradigmatic plot device of much literature from Greek myths of narcissism and hubris to The Picture of Dorian Gray to myriad science fictions. Because of possible consequences to insects and birds, not to mention humans, the European Union has banned the importation of corn that has been genetically altered. Any reader of C. P. Snow or Aldous Huxley could have predicted such a backlash against messing with the order of the food chain. Literary criticism--for better and, sometimes, for worse--trains us to read the signs closely and critically, to understand them in detail, to think of the possible downside in the midst of naive celebration--or to find reasons for hope when the world is in despair.
With that observation in mind, I want to get practical. If English departments are going to be convincing, they must be willing to show the ways that they are capable of thinking through their role and function, within the academy and within society. The minute tinkerings with curriculum that characterize most reforms in English departments do not convince administrators of the vitality of our field and its essentialness to the world of our students, a world, we must acknowledge, that is often alien to the administrators, whose job it is to deliver a curriculum that will serve these students. At least some of the anxiety of central administrators is that they are required to balance a budget, keep up-to-date with expensive and ever-changing technologies, keep tuition and fees stable, and try to create a relevant, cutting-edge education that a skeptical public will recognize as crucial to a future that most administrators (like most parents) cannot quite grasp.
It is an almost impossible task. Any chair or DGS who seems to have solutions to these problems (and not simply more problems that need solutions) will be welcomed by deans and provosts. Any English department that can present itself as one of the university's most forward-looking, concerned, and, indeed, inspired sites of learning in the midst of the information age has already won half the battle. Unlike many other departments throughout the university, we have the skills--the training in critical reading and writing--to be persuasive about our fundamental position and worth within a globally and technologically changing world.
By looking carefully at our own assumptions about what an English department is and rearticulating our vision and mission not only within the context of the academy but also beyond, we can claim our central place in the educational mission of the next century. To do this requires curricular introspection and a willingness to examine our resistance to any kind of fundamental reassessment of who or what we are. Too often we act as if any change in self-definition will make us the losers. Is this really true? I don't think so. I believe we are lucky in English departments because our skills as trained readers and writers carry. We need to keep saying this, and we need to show it by our willingness to read and write ourselves into the future.
In addressing English professors and especially English department administrators, I realize that we are all of us--no matter what side we are on--somehow survivors of the culture wars that diverted so much valuable energy in the eighties and nineties. We have all made changes and accommodations in the last decade; many of us have come of professional age in the midst of a debate that has been heated, hyperbolic, irrational, and often downright silly. The debate itself set the terms in a way both bombastic and trivial, and most people outside English departments can't begin to keep straight who was on what side or what, if anything, it all meant. A main task that faces English departments now is to reclaim a dignified, progressive, important, forward-looking place for our discipline.
Any chair, DGS, or faculty member willing to participate in the ADE or spend part of a summer vacation at an ADE seminar is already a valuable and productive member of the university community. The trick is communicating that sense of commitment to the larger university community. The best way to make a case to an administration about the value of an English department is to make it clear that we are willing to consider the larger picture of education. We do not consider ourselves separate from but rather integral to the fate of the contemporary American university.
In this task, department chairs have a major obstacle to overcome: you can probably count on the fingers of one hand (or, at most, two) the number of presidents and provosts at major institutions who were trained as English professors. Most high-level administrators (presidents, provosts, and even deans of arts and science) are scientists or social scientists. They were often trained in the culture of the lab, where they were accustomed to collaborative endeavors with a range of colleagues in different areas of specialization and with different kinds of expertise. Often they are dependent on grant funding and thus, to survive professionally, must be ever receptive to the new, constantly willing to reconsider their findings in the face of newer ones, and continually willing to retool or find new collaborators who work in new areas, often using new techniques and new technologies. Maintaining well into middle age the assumptions, subspecialty, and research agenda one had as a graduate student is simply not how to succeed in the sciences.
To someone trained in these more communal and evolutionary models of intellectual endeavor, the life of an English teacher can seem exotic and sometimes even alien. From conversations I've had with administrators across the country, I know that, relative to other departments, English departments are frequently embattled--and, seemingly, always have been. We have a reputation (apparently well earned) for being poor at intellectual negotiation or compromise. The viciousness of the recent culture wars was simply the latest manifestation of other battles our particular field has fought from its inception in the American academy. Why can't we get along? Perhaps because we spend most of our lives with our noses in books; perhaps because we do not have a culture that promotes collective endeavors; perhaps because we prize words (rather than substance or action) more than the average academic does. For any one of these reasons, we, unfortunately, are not often regarded as ideal university citizens.
I am not suggesting that English departments are the only ones filled with problems. Flexible, intellectually open economists? Engineers with "big think" vision? Adventurous historians? Gregarious mathematicians? Socially progressive political scientists? Sensible artists? Humanistic business professors? Other disciplines have to contend with other stereotypes. Our profession's particular gift to the world--our critical, intense, trained, sometimes skeptical but always skilled habit of attentive reading--is sometimes our curse to ourselves. The border between close, critical reading (of texts, of people) and simple paranoia is sometimes all too permeable. I also suspect that our training as literary critics makes us excel at a kind of anticipatory doublethink that does not serve us well as we try to negotiate difficult interactions, especially those in which the power relations are unequal.
I became aware of this lesson in professional identity when I was president of the American Studies Association. Before I took office, a predecessor predicted that one of the most fascinating things I would learn during my year as president was that people from different disciplines tend to think and act in different ways, that disciplines are their own cultures. "When historians are upset," my predecessor said, "they get together, they call one another, they talk through a problem, and come up with some possible solutions. You'll get a collective letter from them, with their signatures neatly at the bottom, and they'll even volunteer to do what it takes to help solve the problem."
"And English professors?" I asked, my voice catching in my throat.
"They never consult with one another before they complain. You'll get ten letters, each two or three pages long, with literary allusions and scathing eloquence and insulting analyses not only of your actions but also of the motives and the subtext of your actions. If you even try to suggest they help you solve the problem they've complained about, they'll say that they've already done their part because they wrote the letter."
During my year as the president of ASA, this scenario proved correct. We English professors sometimes think a letter to the editor pointing out a problem is the same thing as solving it. Not so.
Now that I'm an administrator, I'm not at all sure I like this quality in my English colleagues, which is to say in myself. I well remember how a former provost at Duke, whose own training was in divinity, said to me once, "I know it's a Monday morning because there's some letter or fax from Cathy Davidson pointing out something we've done wrong."
As a member of the provost's office, I blush to remember that comment. I've seen, over and over, how my training and predilections as an English professor do me both a service and a disservice in my new collective life. When I first started this job, I found that I was often able to get out an answer before anyone else in the room--an aptitude I am realizing is a disaster not only for collective decision making but also for collaborative, constructive, and creating thinking. The kid with her hand up first is not always the one who is interested in an exciting, creative, productive exchange of ideas. That is a painful lesson for an English professor to have to learn.
As the final part of my paper, then, I'm going to put forward ten lessons that I've found useful while I've been learning to think more institutionally and collaboratively and that could prove useful to chairs who are trying to make a department's case to the administration. Some of the lessons I've learned from my own mistakes. Others are inspired by some of the useful advice I've absorbed from various management seminars, group sessions on interpersonal relations, and books. Still others, and perhaps the most valuable lessons, come from colleagues who have been kind enough to share their wisdom. I've hardly mastered all these precepts. I present them here humbly, to anyone who shares the occupational hazard of our discipline, which often assumes that negotiation means accommodation, capitulation, acquiescence, or even defeat. As Roger Fisher and William Ury, of the famous Harvard Negotiation Project, argue (and, English teacher that I am, I cannot refrain from abjuring their mixed metaphors), "How you negotiate may determine whether the pie is expanded or merely divided, and whether you have a good relationship with the other side or a strained one. When the other side seems to hold all the cards, how you negotiate is absolutely critical" (177).
Lesson 1. Rather than assume administrators are evil, assume they just might not know (or remember) the details of even a major situation. Indeed, always be careful about the motives you ascribe to others, whether administrators or departmental colleagues.
You might be right about the motives you ascribe, but it might not be useful to be right.
This first lesson has proved so important in my new job (and so hard to remember) that I've developed a technique to use before I go into a potentially confrontational meeting. I've dubbed this technique "wakeful dreaming" because it is based on gestalt dream analysis. In this form of dream analysis, the dreamer treats every character in a dream as if that character were the self. Let me give an example. Say that last night I dreamt I was a graduate student again, at my orals, and my dissertation committee failed me. In gestalt dream analysis, I, as the wakeful person, must assume I am also the censorious examining committee who fails me. This dream is not just about a return to the site of powerless abjection but also about my own continuing self-tyranny, the way my self-condemnation (assuming and internalizing the negative judgment of others) continues to undermine me and contributes to my failure (at whatever actual, material, or emotional level that I feel I am somehow failing).
This is not a bad model for dealing with administrators or with any situation where the decision is out of one's control but influenced by one's input. If I am going into a difficult meeting, I find it useful to stand back and survey the situation as if I were doing a gestalt analysis of a dream. I analyze the situation as if each person in the interaction were me, representing some part of my own desires, frustrations, ambitions, or goals toward reaching a final decision. This exercise might not resolve the particular problem; I might not walk away with the additional resources I need to do the job; I might not convert the other persons to my point of view. But the analysis, before the meeting, might well yield insights into how the interaction can be structured to avoid a situation where one person is the nightmarish villain and the other person the helpless, pure, innocent victim who had nothing but good will to bring. This isn't just a model of seeing things from the other point of view. It's a way of reconceptualizing academic institutions less as binaric and hegemonic structures of power than as conglomerations of power, with elaborate checks and balances, advisory capabilities, democratic glimmerings, and complex levels of reporting and responsibility in which the individual--however minor a figure one cuts or feels like one cuts--has some shaping power.
Lesson 2. (This one proved quite difficult for me and would be, I suspect, for most English professors for whom writing, per se, is so central.) Learn to accept constructive or even unconstructive criticism of your proposals and be willing to incorporate as many changes as are necessary to get the job done.
Power always looks monolithic from below; two years ago, before I took this position, I would never have guessed how much of my new life is about compromise, negotiation, consultation, flexibility, rethinking, reversal, and change. Nor did I understand how much of my new job would require my skills as a writer (my useful Englisher training again) as well as my erstwhile skills as an editor. Now, I am the one edited.
One of my first jobs as vice provost for interdisciplinary studies was to write a proposal for an interdisciplinary research center for the humanities. I studied existing humanities centers. I created several alternative models and budgets. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant proposal. And I went into my first meeting expecting hosannas. Well, each of the fifteen people around the table had about fifteen criticisms to offer me. Some large. Some small. One physics professor had the audacity to correct a split infinitive! I left the meeting equal parts dejected and furious, convinced that my proposal had failed. Then one of my favorite administrative colleagues, John Piva, made a point of pulling me aside to say, in his typically exhilarated tone, "Cathy, that was a great meeting. I think we have one or two more people on board now. We're closer to a final draft."
Closer to a final draft? Tell an English teacher that her precious pearls of prose are a rough draft! My immediate reaction was to take the emendations personally, as a statement about my (in)competence. They weren't. Any big issue is going to have passionate, partisan reactions. As an administrator, I'm learning (slowly) that it is not my job to produce pearls of prose. This is a hard lesson.
My humanities center proposal went through so many more drafts in response to so many reactions, so much feedback, and so many critiques voiced at various meetings with different committees and subcommittees that I started, first, dating each new draft and ended up giving the date and time of day for each draft.
Many drafts later, the document was approved, and Duke now has a pretty terrific interdisciplinary humanities center, with our first program up and running this fall. We're even planning a permanent move into a wonderful renovated former dormitory that is large enough to hold an array of some of the university's most innovative interdisciplinary and international programs. Working with several colleagues to plan what should move to this space, in order to promote exciting (and unique) intellectual and pedagogical collaborations, is one of the most stimulating and rewarding projects with which I've been involved. Still, I remember vividly how a year ago, fresh from another meeting with an onslaught of criticisms of my proposal, I felt like throwing in the towel.
I now have a little card on my desk that reads, "We're closer to a final draft."
Lesson 3. When others engage in rhetorical excess (and they will), don't rise to the bait.
Skillful repartee rarely achieves one's goals. I have a funny example of the hyperbolic mode, and, in this one, thankfully, I was not the offender. Another one of my first jobs was to assemble a committee to investigate whether our women's studies program should have tenure lines. After this committee decided women's studies should have tenure lines, my task was to take our report before numerous university committees and governing bodies, culminating in a vote by the board of trustees. Through most of this, I was greatly aided in the process by the dean of arts and sciences, Bill Chafe, one of the country's most noted women's historians. It was wonderful to defer the question, "Is women's studies about hating men?" to Bill, who had funny answers such as, "Speaking as a man, I'd have to say the answer to that question is no."
However, the last faculty hurdle was gaining the approval of our academic council. On the day of the vote, one of our most conservative faculty members stood up and said, "You say Duke has marginalized women by not having a women's studies program with tenure lines. However, there are more insects in the world than women--and we do not have an entomology department. No one accuses us of marginalizing insects."
I was livid. Under my breath, I whispered to Bill Chafe, "There are more female insects in the world than humans of both genders."
Bill whispered back, "Don't dignify this quip with an answer, Cathy. Don't say a word. This motion is going to pass."
I stayed silent. It passed.
Lesson 4. Sometimes, you win an argument by not making one.
Lesson 5. And now I'm quoting from the politician Lindy Boggs: "You can accomplish an enormous amount if you don't need to take the credit."
Amen.
Lesson 6. (This may be the most difficult lesson of all.) Try not to assume others are responding to a given proposal for historical reasons out of revenge or resentment. Assume good will, especially if there is a history of genuine disagreement.
I have learned you can facilitate this attitude by opening a potentially treacherous meeting by saying something like, "No matter how much we've disagreed in the past, let's see if we can put those disagreements aside for the purposes of this meeting so we can arrive at a constructive solution to this dire problem. I'm very happy to try to do this, and I hope you will be too."
Lesson 7. Often daring "big think" is more effective than revisionist tinkering and hedging.
If you are willing to reconsider your most basic assumptions, tell administrators--even if your final solution seems more revision than revolution to someone outside the field. Are you no longer convinced that organizing your major by historical periods is best for your particular students and are you willing to go through the careful work of rethinking the entire structure of your departmental offerings? Make this the centerpiece of your pitch to the administration. Everyone respects a department that is willing to go back to founding principles, reexamine its role and mission, and then decide what works or doesn't work.
Lesson 8. If you are a chair, don't think you are doing a favor to the institution by voluntarily turning money back--or that it will serve your purposes later on to do so now.
Should your department be in the enviable position of having a little extra money at the end of the fiscal year, it would be more valuable to the institution in most situations if you wrote out a plan and a new budget where you used the money to solve some recurrent, nagging problem that hasn't gone away in the past. Except in moments of fiscal crisis, a plan is always more welcome than petty cash.
Lesson 9. Make alliances.
The more you can reach out to other departments and other programs, the more your department will be seen as a team player, a department concerned with larger educational issues and not with mere self-interest and survival. Reach out to other humanities departments as well as to social sciences and sciences. Invent exciting new introductory interdisciplinary programs that help recruit students--and keep English central to your institution. The more you can build on common ground, especially across departments or with different approaches and expertise, the more you will be valued.
Lesson 10. Do not be a Luddite.
Even if you are skeptical of technology, be informed enough to be enthusiastic. You will not reverse the tide of technology by protesting against it. Most administrators know that information technology will change higher education in crucial ways. No one knows how or how much. Fearful departments, and English departments are notorious examples, mirror back administrators' fear, and therefore must be derided.
As should be clear by now, my preferred tactic is to embrace new information technologies as one inevitable province of English departments. I'm convinced we can help with the uncertainties of an age of excess information. What is a term paper if not learning to gather and sort information into a valid and coherent argument? This is what we train our English students to do. English departments should hire people working in new technologies as part of writing programs, literary theory, cultural studies, English nonfiction narrative prose. Students love it, administrators love it, and it is part of our self-presentation as a forward-looking department.
What I am suggesting is that talking successfully to administrators requires listening successfully. It requires understanding the demands placed on the larger institution and being willing to conceptualize, articulate, and advocate for the English department's value within the larger institution. In the simplest terms, it requires avoiding a them-versus-us mentality and being willing to think collectively and creatively about the goals we in higher education share, the challenges we all face, and the special ways in which English departments--scrappy, critical, eloquent, and inventive--are ideally suited to meet those challenges.
The author is Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. This paper was presented at the 1999 ADE Summer Seminar West, hosted by Montana State University, Bozeman, and the University of Montana in Polson, Montana.
Fisher, Roger, and William Ury. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin, 1991.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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