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This general fear of conflict and emphasis on consensus and
accommodation is typical academic drivel. How do you ever arrive at consensus
before you have conflict? In fact, of course, conflict is the vital core of an
open society; if you were going to express democracy in a musical score, your
major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.
—Saul
Alinsky
Periodically, I read through the job ads in The Chronicle of Higher Education,
now and then also checking out the articles and always ending up with
the feeling of being totally out of that scene— totally disconnected from the average
higher-education professor court jester.
The
following is a sample of the plethora of unbelievably lame articles favored by
the editorial management of The
Chronicle of Higher Education, which enjoys a monopoly on higher-ed news. They illustrate the type of inane
drivel being written en masse for money by the nation's English professors
and others. Scroll down for the full articles.
—"The Year of Dressing
Formally" by pseudonym
—"The Meaning of Risk" by pseudonym
—"The Model Graduation Speaker,"
Jay Parini, English, professor at
Middlebury College (My alma mater! Come on Breadloaf School, can't you do any
better???),
May 25, 2007
—"50 Columns Later,"
Thomas H. Benton (William
Pannapacker, associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI)
Two unanswered emails
sent to WP
—"The Secrets of Our Success?,"
Jane Cook (pseudonym of a gutless professor)
—"Hold Your Tongue, Part II," Jennifer S.
Furlong and Julie Miller Vick (Are we all drooling in wait for part III?)
—"Managing
Up," David D.
Perlmutter, professor
and associate dean for graduate studies and research at the William Allen White
School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas
—"A Creature of Our Own Making,"
Gary A. Olson, dean
of the College of Arts & Sciences at Illinois State University
Email Open Letter to
Olson, "The Shepherd's Players" [unanswered... of course]
—"Ms. Dr.
Prof. Amanda,"
Amanda I. Seligman
The Year of Dressing Formally
By Thomas
H. Benton
An Academic in
America
"Thomas H. Benton,"
an associate professor of English, offers his take on academic work and life.
I am approaching the one-year anniversary of a
dramatic change in my personal style as an English professor at a liberal-arts
college in the rural Midwest.
It started after a post-tenure sabbatical during
which I lost more than 40 pounds (see my
2004 column, "On Being a Fat Professor"). Apart from shoes and accessories,
I no longer had any clothes that fit properly. I also realized that, for the
past seven years -- while I was keeping my untenured backside glued to an office
chair -- I had, more or less, started to dress like I worked in a
bait-and-tackle shop. Nearly all of my clothes came from L. L. Bean and the
Tractor Supply Company. Sometimes I would buy my shoes at the local supermarket,
along with some beef jerky and a case of Budweiser.
Male professors do tend to dress casually at my
college. And it was my plan, you see, to assimilate -- at least until I received
tenure.
Dear reader, you must know that I have since
trimmed my mullet, shaved my mutton chops, and donated my Carhardtt duck-billed
overalls to Goodwill. In the evenings, when our kids are in bed, my wife and I
watch Tim Gunn's Guide to Style on cable. We drink Cosmopolitans and make
snarky comments about Gunn's penchant for trench coats and foundation garments,
while the professor in me adores his gentle mentoring of the pitiably
fashion-challenged: "Oh, you are now so lovely, so perfect, and I am so moved.
Look: tears of joy."
Of course, like most academics, I have not
limited my research to TV programs; I have also searched the Internet. There I
discovered
a fabulous blog: "The Fashionable Academic: Where One Academic Wages War
Against Frump." It was she -- I assume she -- who introduced me to Dolce &
Gabbana, riding boots, and the inevitable revival of an icon of Orientalist
leisure wear: the fez. The Web site also directs readers to sales that place
fashionable clothes within range of an academic budget.
Eventually I did consult a number of books on the
subject of men's clothing. I began with Colin McDowell's The Man of Fashion:
Peacock Males and Perfect Gentlemen (Thames and Hudson, 1997), which details
the origin and development of the codpiece and the zoot suit and provides
mini-biographies of such masculine exemplars as Beau Brummell, Comte d'Orsay,
Oscar Wilde, and Liberace.
McDowell shows how, in one century, men dressed
as Puritan ministers and, in the next, were transformed into Versailles
courtiers, complete with rouge, applied moles, and cascades of powdered wiggery.
The apotheosis of style in The Man of Fashion seems to be form-fitting
black hose surmounted by a Renaissance doublet encrusted with 10,000 pearls,
which is sure to get one attention at the local farm bureau.
Like any regular American guy, I respect
Thoreau's warning against enterprises that require new clothes, and my sartorial
tastes were mainly set in childhood. I went to parochial schools, where I wore a
jacket and tie from the age of 6 to 18. And after that -- when I temporarily
aspired to a career in advertising -- I based my work style on John T. Molloy's
Dress for Success (P.H. Wyden, 1975), in which he advised men to combine
dark, three-piece suits with red ties if they wanted to look both sexy and
professional. He denounced pocket squares as old-fashioned and affected; bearded
men, he thought, seemed unkempt and possibly subversive.
That was in the days when women wore enormous
shoulder pads, like linebackers, to complement their Aqua Net encrusted, leonine
hairdos.
Even with some caution, I suppose we are all
doomed to be embarrassed by the fashion debacles of previous decades. There was
a time when I tried very hard to mimic -- ironically, I now tell myself -- the
spiky hair of Billy Idol (see my high school yearbook, for more information).
And I think I still own a pair of parachute pants. But, dear reader, please
withhold judgment; as William Blake said, "The road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom," at which I hope I have now arrived.
I am turning 40 this year. I haven't lost my
hair, but I am getting a few strands of gray. More and more, I embrace my age. I
don't want to be like the high-school guidance counselor who wears Converse high
tops; nor do I want to be the choral director who covers the classic works of
the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I admire the sober suits of the Hasidim and elderly
librarians with eyeglass chains. I am no longer in solidarity with the young; I
want my students to grow up. And what better way to achieve that than by seeming
to grow up myself?
So my current project -- now that I am a
"respectable, middle-aged professional" -- is to learn how to build a classic
wardrobe that will last for decades with simple upkeep and minor updates, one
that won't embarrass me 20 years from now. To that end, once again, I turned to
the books.
I liked the no-nonsense title of a small, black
volume called A Gentleman Gets Dressed Up, by Bryan Curtis and John
Bridges (Rutledge Hill Press, 2003), but it contained no pictures and little
more than a sequence of pseudo-proper tips such as "A gentleman does not fill
his pants with unnecessary paraphernalia" (define unnecessary, one wag might
ask), along with a few useful diagrams like "Five Ways to Fold a Pocket Square."
On the other ostrich-gloved hand, Carson
Kressley's chapter in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Clarkson/Potter,
2004) seemed mainly intended for the guy who is too macho for grooming, who
cannot use a battery-powered nose clipper unless it's called a "power tool."
The Metrosexual Guide to Style: A Handbook for
the Modern Man (Da Capo, 2003), by Michael Flocker, is a marginally better book,
somewhat less condescending, with lots of basic information for the
semi-clueless. His most important advice about clothing is to "avoid ridicule"
and "dress your age." Unlike the flamboyant Cressley, there's nothing
particularly "metro" about Flocker's advice; I would expect to get the same
guidance from a young John Wayne.
Gentleman: A Timeless Fashion
(Koneman, 2004), by Bernhard Roetzel, is well-illustrated, with hundreds of
color photos. It focuses less on grooming than on well-made, luxurious clothing,
along with interesting detours such as the history of the electric shaver.
Wholly Eurocentric, and mostly Anglophile, in outlook, Roetzel shows one how to
tie a cravat, where to shop on Saville Row, and where to purchase the finest
umbrella (Swaine, Adeney, Brigg). He has some arbitrary and fussy rules, like
Ms. Manners without the irony: "Knitted and woolen neckties do not form part of
the English gentleman's wardrobe." It's a gorgeous coffee-table tome, perhaps
better browsed than read.
The best book I found on men's clothing is Alan
J. Flusser's Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion
(HarperCollins, 2002). Another sumptuously illustrated volume, complete with
gatefolds on suit fabrics and detailed chapters on every element of the
wardrobe, Dressing the Man is also worth reading for balanced advice that
takes its primary cue from the classic era of Hollywood. Flusser's heroes are
Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant (though he also nods to the English
aristocrats with amiable postcolonial bemusement).
Among other things, Mr. Flusser has led me to
discover the value of the male garter for holding up slouchy socks, but, most
significantly, he emphasizes that a lasting style must complement one's physique
and complexion; fit and proportion come before everything else.
I regret that I found most of those books --
particularly the last one -- late in the year of my self-refashioning. I made
some mistakes, particularly regarding the matter of contextual propriety. I
progressed rapidly from sport coats to suits and ties. I even experimented for a
time with French cuffs and pocket squares.
The apex of that trajectory was an absurd moment
when I came to an administrative meeting more formally dressed than our provost,
a matter on which he commented with some humor.
If one dresses too formally at my college -- or
most colleges -- one might be mistaken for an administrator, which is a clear
violation of the unwritten sumptuary laws. One might be given inappropriate
deference by the unknowing. And I did find more students holding doors for me
and calling me "sir" as if I were a person of importance.
Such gestures embarrassed me a little, but they
also made me feel more confident and capable. I began to think I could exert
some pressure on my institution to raise the bar of formality a little by
raising it a lot for myself.
In the process, I probably irritated some of my
colleagues, a few of whom are aggressively informal on principle: denim, work
boots, sandals -- anything goes but formality. The situation is not unique to my
home institution. Professors (in the humanities, at least) don't make much money
relative to other professionals, so we press our sour grapes into the sweeter
wine of smugness: "We are too important to pay attention to such trivial,
privileged matters as clothing."
One day you put on a tie, the next day you are
driving a Hummer and voting Republican.
There is some truth to that criticism. After a
while, the dramatic change in my clothing began to make larger demands for a
complete change in my lifestyle. How could I possibly live on a farm? And drive
a 10-year-old Jeep Cherokee? I started to covet glass and steel urban loft
apartments, and I began visiting the Web sites of Volvo and Mercedes. If I
pursued this course to its logical end, I would need to get an entirely new
life, when I am mostly happy with the one I have.
Although it got out of hand, I think my year of
dressing formally was a worthwhile experiment. In general, professors at
liberal-art colleges are encouraged to be nurturing. But I found that a higher
level of formality improved my students' learning. My larger classes ran more
smoothly. I had fewer disruptions, less chatter, more note-taking. I had fewer
grade appeals, even though I graded more rigorously and made larger demands. I
saw fewer bare feet, boxer shorts, bed hair, and pajama pants in my classrooms.
E-mail messages to me almost invariably began with "Dear Professor" instead of
"Hey."
And, in a weird way, being formal in the
classroom made my less formal, sweater-clad self more effective in one-on-one
meetings. The unexpected softness of my appearance in my office seemed to cause
students to open up and speak more honestly of their difficulties and
aspirations.
In the end, as nearly every writer on the subject
advised with varying degrees of emphasis, the most important thing about
clothing is contextual appropriateness, in addition to quality and fit. In an
academic context, clothes are a complex negotiation -- a means of communication
-- among students, faculty members, administrators, and staff. You want to find
the mot juste without being too highfalutin.
Over the course of a year, I straightened the
bent stick of my personal appearance by bending it in the other direction. And
now I have come to rest somewhere between business casual and business formal: I
have fewer clothes but the ones I do have are of higher quality, with better
tailoring. Above all, when I dress, I pay careful attention to context,
including my age, rank, and the nature of the task at hand, even if that means
adjusting my clothes in the middle of the day -- like superman in a phone booth
-- as I change from professor to counselor to administrator and back again.
Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William
Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Mich.
He writes about academic culture and welcomes reader mail directed to his
attention at careers@chronicle.com
The Meaning
of Risk
by Isabelle Rogers, a pseudonym... but of course!
FIRST PERSON
Academics share
their personal experiences
When I became a tenure-track professor I gave up
motorcycling because it no longer brought me joy.
Back when I was a graduate student, academe --
with its manicured quads, polite receptions, and rational conclusions -- seemed
to be a world that extinguished risk-taking. So I started riding scooters,
embracing risk as a mode of rebellion.
Gradually I progressed from scooters to
motocycles. My history in academe can be charted through the kind of bike I
drove and the way those bikes expressed my difficult adaptation to academic
life, a life so different from that my family had imagined for me.
The Motor Scooter and the Preliminary Exams
In graduate school, you learn how to live on a
shoestring. Driving a cheap motor scooter became part of my survival strategy.
Everyone in my family drove four-wheel-drive SUVs
and pickup trucks, so the scooter became an instrument of rebellion against my
family's beliefs about the American Way of Life. Yes, I was a vegetarian; no,
vegetarians don't eat chicken; no, they don't eat meatballs either; no, I don't
want kids; yes, I am living with that artist guy with the long hair. Those were
heady days of freedom from my working-class family's views.
On the scooter, it was still possible to believe
that I had special powers, that I could take risks and emerge unscathed. Those
feelings of uniqueness did not survive my first scooter accident.
A week before my preliminary exams, I drove home
from the library with my backpack resting on the platform beneath my feet. When
a car cut me off, my backpack, containing my precious notes, fell onto the
street. I pulled the scooter over and, just as I was running toward the
backpack, it was sucked up into the undercarriage of a large, gray Buick.
For a moment, I could still see the Buick as it
drove away into the sunset, but the license plate was too far away for me to
read.
I did get most of my notes back eventually, after
the Buick's owner took it to a mechanic wondering what that knocking sound was
under the car. In retrospect I wonder if that experience was a message from the
universe urging me to understand that it was OK to let go and improvise, to
creatively rework what I had learned.
I wasn't yet ready to take real risks with my
work or in my everyday life, but I did taste risk by driving the motor scooter.
Driving it assured me that, even though I was spending all my time in a library
carrel, I was like Pinky Tuscadero, Fonzie's sexy ex-girlfriend on Happy
Days. (OK, I was actually more like an academic version of Penny Marshall's
character Laverne DeFazio on Laverne & Shirley.)
The Motorcycle and the Dissertation
I managed the terrifying challenge of creating a
book-length project from scratch by graduating from a motor scooter to a
motorcycle. My scooter was so light that a thief could lift it into a pickup
truck and drive away; that happened three times. For all the money I spent on
the scooters and on the motorcycle, I could have purchased a car.
Instead, I financed a small motorcycle, a "chick
bike." Metallic blue with shiny chrome, it was just the right size, and I was
strong enough to pick it up if it tipped (an important consideration). The bike
could reach speeds of more than 80 miles per hour as I found out when I took it
out on the highway.
One night, I was coming home from the library,
where I had been writing my dissertation proposal. Waiting at a red light, I
scanned the rear-view mirrors. The driver of the car coming behind me had not
seen the red light in time and was skidding toward me, desperately trying to
stop her car. I quickly moved into the center lane just as she screeched past.
She stopped her car in time to catch the light, and looked over at me to mouth
the word, "Sorry."
Such close calls -- and there were many -- left
me feeling how vulnerable any motorcycle rider is to the carelessness of other
drivers. At the same time, I was feeling how vulnerable I had become to the
risks that any graduate student faces: Would I be able to write the
dissertation? Would I be able to get a job? Would I be able to pay off the
student loan?
I did finish, thanks to a wonderful dissertation
adviser and graduate program, and I was hired as an assistant professor at a
university in Faraway City. The motorcycle would make the cross-country move
with me and my husband.
The Economy Car and the Professorship
From the beginning, accepting the tenure-track
job forced me to admit my lack of special powers. My husband and I packed and
drove the moving truck ourselves. We rolled the motorcycle up a bookshelf into
the back of the truck, tied it with a rope, and moved it along with the lamps
and the futons. We would use it for transportation in Faraway City until we
could save enough for a downpayment on a car.
The driving culture in Faraway City, where people
tailgate and manueuver at high speeds, was distinctly motorcycle-unfriendly. At
work I attempted to project an image of security, although each aspect of my
life -- including getting to work -- seemed full of risk. The only path to
stability was to keep my mouth shut and publish.
One morning I took a break from my research to
ride the motorcycle to the grocery store. Just as I pulled out of the store's
parking lot into the center lane, a man in an Oldsmobile came out of the
driveway across the street and sped toward me, looking the other way.
The steel gray grille of his car came on like a
great-white shark that would swallow me whole. I jumped off the bike but didn't
make it all the way off. I shouldn't have been thrown clear of that car but I
was. I should be dead right now, and I don't understand why I'm not.
Instead, I woke up, lips on pavement in the
center lane. An audience had gathered. The ambulance arrived. All my arms,
hands, legs, and feet were still attached. My helmet was cracked in two. My
beautiful motorcycle was underneath the front wheels of the Oldsmobile, a
mangled wad of blue metal and black rubber. I walked away.
The motorcycle collision insurance paid me enough
to get an economy car, more appropriate transportation for an assistant
professor anyway. I taught with a concussion and covered the massive black and
eggplant bruises with long-sleeved sweaters and long pants. I sought to disguise
my injuries as well as the fact that I had been traumatized, but my co-workers
probably understood more than I gave them credit for.
As a graduate student, the motorcycle gave me a
feeling of power at a time when I had none. That illusion was repeatedly
deconstructed until I had to think about the nature of risk: What kind of risks
can I take in my academic work? In what ways can my very expensive education
make a difference in the lives of others? Working within a system that can seem
to discourage risk-taking, what kind of real risks can improve my work?
Sometimes it takes a decade of graduate study,
thousands of dollars, and a near-death experience to be able to ask honest
questions.
Recently I was driving home when I saw a line of
motorcycles stretched into the horizon inwhat must have been a funeral
procession for a motorcyclist. It had caused gridlock, so I pulled over and got
out of the car to watch, flashing the peace sign to the passing riders. As they
drove by, I wished -- for just a minute -- that I could go back to being the
graduate student "chick biker" who felt the hot wind on her face and the
movement under her boots as the gears caught.
Isabelle Rogers is the pseudonym of an assistant
professor in the humanities at a state university.
The Model Graduation Speaker
by
Jay Parini,
English professor at
Middlebury College (My alma mater! Come on Breadloaf School, can't you do any
better???),
May 25, 2007
I tend
to cry at weddings and graduations, though rarely at funerals. There is
something so final about funerals that emptiness itself seems the only place to
occupy. Weddings and graduations, on the other hand, mark beginnings, and
usually hopeful ones; they move me powerfully. I like to see young people (and
older ones, too) take a step forward, putting behind them a certain discrete
period in their lives, moving with the world all before them.
Graduation is
not a ceremony that, as a faculty member, I ever want to miss. I look forward on
this day to marking an array of changes.
There is saying goodbye to older faculty members who are taking the bold step
into retirement; they will possibly return at future graduations, but only in
the role of an emeritus professor — an ambiguous honor, at best, as many of them
seem a bit lost on the campus, knowing few of the younger faculty members and
probably none of the students about to graduate. I like seeing those who
have made tenure congratulated at graduation and welcomed into the community on
a permanent basis. Yet there is often a double edge, as I think of those who
have not gotten tenure (a situation I was once in myself, so I have a visceral
sense of the pain involved). A faculty has a way of reshaping itself, always
shifting, always adding and subtracting. And then there are the students: waves
of them, breaking on the shores of adult life. They love this day, as do
their parents behind them.
I know the
deal only too well, with three sons of my own, two currently in college.
Graduation is, for every family, a time to celebrate the conclusion of a massive
joint effort that has taken many years. One recalls the nights of horrendous
homework assignments, the research projects, the school plays and games, the
examinations taken well or badly, the financial anxieties. For many in the
audience, this day marks the turning of a huge aircraft carrier, and such
maneuvers do not happen easily.
At the center
of the ceremony, for most, is the speech. This is one of the few occasions in
life when speeches really matter. Everyone sits up, hopeful. I am always
quite certain that my life will be changed. In that, I'm a fairly typical
American, in the mold of Ben Franklin: always eager to improve myself, to take
instruction, to shift my way of looking at the world in a manner that will
benefit me and those around me. I really want the graduation speaker to do a
bang-up job — to inspire and challenge me in unexpected ways — and when he or
she doesn't, the disappointment hollows me out.
I've attended
more than 30 graduations as a member of a faculty, and so I've heard quite a
range of speeches (and given several myself). In too many cases, I can't recall
who gave the speeches, which cannot be a good thing. A forgettable speech is by
definition a poor one. One can recite the bare outline, as it rarely varies: How
nice to see you on this important and beautiful day. Here is a little joke my
uncle told me when I graduated. The future lies ahead of you. You should take
note of how accomplished I am, which may inspire you to become accomplished
yourself. Go forward, not backward. Congratulations to you all. You look so
happy and handsome. Do I really have to stay to lunch? Is the plane on the
runway? Where is my next stop?
Sometimes a
famous name is enough to carry the day. This year, at Middlebury College, we
have Bill Clinton lined up, and everyone is thrilled.
We know exactly what the speech will sound and look like, right down to the
puffed-out lip and the wincing aside. That he will say anything especially
moving is unlikely, and it doesn't really matter. (I saw him give a graduation
speech at the University of Oxford when he was still in office, and it was a
splendid occasion, with the presidential helicopter landing beforehand in Christ
Church meadows. The sheer spectacle of a president, even when he's become a
former president, carries the day.) Were Bill Clinton to cancel suddenly,
there would be no joy in Middlebury.
For the most
part, however, politicians are the worst graduation speakers. I have a vivid
image of the former senator Bill Bradley in my head. I like Bradley, mind you.
I'd vote for him in a minute. But he was terrible. He had those strange
semi-invisible prompters before him, and he read his boring speech as though he
were speaking a foreign language, sounding out the words by phonetics, and doing
a bad job of it. Rudy Giuliani, whom I would never vote for, at least made an
effort to connect to the crowd and showed some life. But it's a bad idea to
invite politicians to graduations for the simple reason that they are partisan
by definition. Politics of an obviously partisan character should be put
aside on this sacred day. It's a time to think deeper, about issues that really
matter. It's a time to think structurally, wondering what is right or wrong
about the system. It's a time to ask what our duties to our neighbors really
are, and how the young people about to graduate should begin to think about
their purpose in life. Is it all about the money? Does fame matter? Do spiritual
values obtain? What are those values anyway?
My favorite
speaker was Mr. Rogers, the pioneer in television for children. He came to
the campus only a year or two before he died and was as modest and kind as you
would expect. I can't think how many mornings as a young parent I had sat before
the television and watched that skinny, awkward fellow singing so movingly in
his awful voice. I loved to watch him put on his sweater, button it up slowly,
and welcome us to his neighborhood. I felt included, as did my children. His
values were obviously based on a genuine sense of community. He didn't have to
say much. Everyone knew him and what he represented. He only had to speak
softly, as he did. His presence called us back to what Abe Lincoln famously
termed the "better angels of our nature." I really did break into tears when
he came to the podium and invited the audience to sing the neighborhood song,
and everyone in the audience sang. Community itself became real, concrete, and
deeply loved.
A famous
professor from Harvard University gave the speech that most disappointed me. I
liked writing that phrase: a famous professor. He was famous to me, at least,
and many members of the faculty had read his books and essays. I won't say his
name, in part because he is dead, and in part because he was so terrible as a
graduation speaker — perhaps as a consequence of his final illness. He was
making notes for the speech on the back of an envelope on his lap before he
stood up, at which point it became utterly apparent that he had forgotten to
prepare a speech of any kind. He rambled, hemmed and hawed, misquoted a few
famous lines. There was a huge relief everywhere when, after a mercifully short
spell of perhaps 10 minutes, he sat down in bewilderment, to tepid applause. I
saw him standing by himself after the graduation, as if wondering where he was.
In a moment of fellow feeling, I approached him, my hand out to shake his. "I
have liked your books so much," I said, and meant it. He gave me a wan smile,
bowed, and withdrew into the shadows.
For the most
part, I think it's good when scholars — or "public intellectuals" — give the
graduation speech. Scholarship and the acquisition of knowledge are the point
of academic villages. We should celebrate those who have lived their lives
accordingly, putting aside the pursuit of great wealth or power. A graduation
speaker is, implicitly, a model for the students to emulate, admire, acknowledge
as good. If the speaker has done nothing but accumulate wealth at the expense
of the community or become a "personality" in the media, that is not enough.
I always find it discouraging when well-known people who mirror the worst values
in society are given honorary degrees. There should be honor in honorary
degrees. And the person chosen to speak to graduates should understand that he
or she has 15 or 20 minutes to talk frankly about life as he or she sees it,
asking important questions. What are lessons in the art of life? What does the
effort to acquire an education mean? What obligations and responsibilities come
with that amazing privilege — one that so many in the audience will take for
granted, but which most people in the world will never experience?
Ah, Bill
Clinton has his work cut out for him.
50 Columns Later
by
Thomas H. Benton (William Pannapacker, associate professor of English at Hope
College in Holland, MI)
An Academic in
America"Thomas H. Benton," an associate professor of English, offers his take on
academic work and life.
I am often asked
why I chose "Thomas H. Benton" as a pen name. I didn't give the name a lot of
thought. I didn't think the series would last more than a few columns. But I've
been writing as "Benton" now for more than five years, and this is my 50th
column.
I chose the name
because I had just seen the Ken Burns documentary, Thomas Hart Benton (1988).
Benton was a leading spokesman for Regionalism, a style of painting -- "Okie
Baroque" -- that celebrated the Midwest and American folk culture. There was a
lot of Know Nothing jingoism in the movement. Benton was given to posturing
against snobby New Yorkers and Europhiles -- the high theorists of his
generation -- and, in particular, the dominance of abstract expressionism over
more accessible styles of painting.
I didn't agree with
the nastier elements of Benton's chauvinism (I didn't know all that much about
him at the time), but I liked his feistiness. I thought most of my generation of
would-be academics was too deferential to the pieties of the boomer elders who,
for all their radical posturing, fiddled while the profession burned. I thought
adopting Benton's personality in the columns would give me some much-needed
backbone after 10 years as an insecure graduate student and desperate job
seeker.
I thought Benton
also offered some useful biographical parallels and cultural resonances. Benton
was someone who had spent time in the elite artistic circles of the East Coast,
but he turned against that world and went to live in Missouri. I was making the
transition from an Ivy League graduate school to my first real job at a small
liberal-arts college in the Midwest. The parallels seemed to multiply with time
like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I eventually chose "An Academic in America"
as the title of my series because An Artist in America was the title of Benton's
autobiography, which was first published in 1937.
When I started my
series I was already notorious in a small way for making a fuss about the state
of the academic job market, and I liked the pro-labor memories associated with
Benton and the other muralists of his era. Benton seemed to offer a model of
populism and multiracial labor solidarity untainted by Stalinist orthodoxy --
something like Whitman's vision of American democracy -- long before those
cultural energies were co-opted and used to destroy labor unions and the dream
of being able to own a small home and support a family on one salary.
More than anything
else, when I first began the series, I wanted people to know that graduate
school in the humanities has become comparable to a pyramid scheme with cultlike
dimensions.
I never thought of
myself as a conservative, even though that's how some readers have come to think
of me. I do have deep-rooted affections for traditional things: I am a Roman
Catholic, and fond of old books, libraries, secondhand bookstores, historic
sites, museums, and the rituals of academic life -- all of which I've written
about. (To read Benton's earliest columns, click here.)
I don't believe in
mandatory gender roles, but I desire -- as does my spouse -- to have a
more-or-less traditional family life. We even home-school our three daughters,
not because we are fundamentalists but because we enjoy learning with our
children, and I have seen enough of the public schools to want my daughters to
be spared the experience.
I might also be
regarded as conservative because I regard "Theory," despite its radical claims,
as an elitist enterprise that does nothing to help the kind of people it
purports to care about (as opposed to "theory," which constitutes the tools that
are necessary for scholarly work).
I enjoy traditional
scholarly research and value reference books more than books by academic
celebrities, but I also believe in using new technologies for learning. I don't
insist that everyone share my beliefs or preferences, but I also see no reason
to apologize for expressing them in my own column.
Apart from
advocating larger, structural reforms for the profession, I have argued that
individual professors should attempt to restore the seriousness of the
teacher-student relationship, even when it jeopardizes their job security within
the new customer-service model of higher education.
Perhaps the larger
question is why I chose to be pseudonymous in the first place. I had been a
graduate-student diarist for The Chronicle's Careers section before, using my
real name. At that time, I was strongly cautioned by my advisers against that
kind of writing. They warned me that popular writing -- particularly anything
critical of the profession -- would harm my viability in a tight job market.
My advisers were
right. I am sure the columns I wrote under my own name were regarded by most
employers as a red flag that my academic accomplishments were not strong enough
to overshadow.
When I started the
Benton columns, I was still recovering from my experiences on the job market. My
spouse and I were expecting a new baby. We also had a new mortgage, and I was
our sole means of support. I was not yet sure of my institution's commitment to
academic freedom or respect for popular writing of this kind. I hadn't even
passed my third-year review yet.
And there was, no
doubt, a satirical reality-TV dimension to First Person column writing that was
unusual in the era just before the blog became the universal public
confessional. It just seemed safer to be anonymous if I was going to write about
my struggle with my weight, my procrastination, my anxieties about advising
students, and my desire for a bigger paycheck.
I owe a lot to my
current employer. If the college hadn't taken a chance on me, I might be
delivering pizzas now in Northeast Philadelphia. I am grateful that the college
continues to stand behind me, even when I express controversial opinions that
it, by no means, always endorses.
It was a reflection
of trust in my employer that, two years after I started the series, I decided to
quietly "out" myself on my department's Web site. Some people had already
guessed that I was Benton from the accumulation of clues, and I decided that I
didn't want the revelation to come up in the middle of my tenure decision. What
else could I be concealing, my colleagues might wonder: tawdry romance novels, a
secret life as a blogger?
I wanted to be
tenured without anything to hide, and -- though I didn't know it yet -- I wanted
a career that included all kinds of writing in addition to the usual output of
scholarly books and articles.
People often
complain that using a pseudonym detracts from one's credibility. Letter writers
who have taken the trouble to Google me sometimes ask why I don't just sign my
columns now that my identity is not really a secret and I have tenure. But I
don't really see any point in doing so. Benton has become a known persona in a
small subculture, and he has developed -- like all autobiographical personae --
in ways that don't exactly reflect the more circumspect views I might express
under the name I use for scholarly writing. Like an actor, I get a lot of
creative energy from a mask, even if people can easily discover who is behind
it.
And, besides, why
should anybody care who I am? I am not a name that anyone would recognize. I
don't have any special claims on the public's attention. If there's any reason
to read my columns, it is because of the content, not the author; it doesn't
matter who is speaking. You read a pseudonymous column in a different way than
you read one by an established scholar writing on his or her area of expertise.
I think there are lots of ways of being a writer, just as there are lots of ways
of being a reader.
In any case, my
relationship with Benton is a continuing negotiation: He rants on general topics
that animate me on some level, without too much reflection about complexities or
consequences. Sometimes that might lead him into seemingly reactionary views,
sentimentality, or self-pity. In general, I see Benton as someone who was shaped
by traditional institutions, who maintained a belief in his exceptionality
(notwithstanding contrary evidence), and who experienced a deep sense of
humiliation at not being able to succeed at an elite level. Institutional biases
exist, but sometimes people do not rise to the top because they are mediocrities
in the larger scheme of things. In the end, Benton is a loser who is trying to
redeem himself.
It's pointless to
deny that I possess some of those qualities. But I work harder in my real life
to hide and overcome them. My alter ego is a caricature of who I am, if only
because of my limitations as a writer.
I don't make any
big claims for column writing. A column is something people read while they are
eating breakfast; it's something they use to spark a conversation. A column is
not poetry; it's not the Great American Novel; it's not a research project with
footnotes. A column should have short paragraphs and conversational prose; it
should not be written in precise jargon for members of an academic subculture.
Columns are exploratory and impressionistic; the detail work is left to abler
hands. The result is that sometimes columnists make big generalizations that are
supported with little more than personal anecdotes.
Someone once said
that the most important quality in a columnist is to be outrageously wrong. The
columnist who tries to be scrupulously correct -- however laudable that might be
-- provokes little more than a shrug of affirmation. A columnist who is wrong --
and maybe even a little warped -- gives readers the pleasure of showing how
right and sane they are by comparison.
A column is an
eccentric little dance; it's a shtick, and it can get tedious if you prefer
novelty. An established column -- like a comic strip -- can linger for many
years, while readers return, again and again, hoping for a flash of whatever it
was they once liked about the series, while the author tries to make the old new
again. Sometimes the persona degenerates into repetition and self-parody, but --
with good will on both sides -- the author-reader relationship can continue,
like the conversations of longtime colleagues.
On the other hand,
it may be that something new and exciting is always coming next month, forced
into print by an unforeseen experience.
Thank you for
reading, for your generosity in so many letters, and for your patience. I feel
deeply privileged -- and very lucky -- to have the chance to write this column.
Thomas H. Benton is
the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope
College in Holland, Mich. He writes about academic culture and welcomes reader
mail directed to his attention at
careers@chronicle.com
...........................................................................................................
Dear William
Pannapacker, assn’t prof at Hope College:
So, pseudo-Benton was actually Pannapacker! Was I surprised? Not at all. Lame
articles, one after the next, each lacking in balls, each crying for promotion
and fit-in insertion, each very careful not to offend, each lacking in
fundamental harsh rude truths about the situation in higher education… just what
the college deans and presidents ordered. Perhaps Hope College needs to change
its name to Civility University… and dub you a dean. Ask yourself one simple
question: Why would the Chronicle of Higher Education want you to author 50
columns and not permit one single column to a professor who dares speak truth?
Hint: the answer is in this email.
Sincerely, G. Tod
Slone, Founding editor, The American Dissident [No response]
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 13:17:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: "George Slone" <todslone@yahoo.com> Add to
Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Subject: William Pannapacker is American Dissident
cartoon of the month...
To: pannapacker@hope.edu
CC: careers@chronicle.com
To WP,
You have been designated "Lit Rogue of the Month of
April" for The American Dissident. You may view the cartoon using the link
below.
Sincerely,
G. Tod Slone, founding editor
The American Dissident
http://www.theamericandissident.org/LitToon.htm
The Secrets of Our Success?
by Jane Cook
BALANCING ACT
How to find a
balance between work and family
Well, we did
it. My spouse and I are now tenured associate professors at the same public
university.
Coming out of
our second-tier graduate programs in the late 90s and faced with absolutely
terrifying job prospects in our disciplines of literature and philosophy, we
nevertheless got married, promising to love, honor, and never live apart -- no
matter how great the job offer.
Numerous
friends and colleagues started out just as we did. For most of them, something
had to be abandoned along the way: either the relationship itself, the promise
to live together, or one partner's (guess which? hint: the decision usually
postdates the arrival of the first child) pursuit of a tenure-track job.
Yet here I am
with a fine job teaching philosophy in a place I want to live, with good-natured
colleagues, a cohabitational marriage that is entering its second decade, and no
complaints about any of it.
Still, ever
since we were tenured, a lyric from the Talking Heads song "Once in a Lifetime"
keeps popping into my head: "And you may ask yourself -- Well, how did I get
here?"
Inquiring
minds seem to want to know. I often get e-mail messages from grad students at my
alma mater asking for advice on negotiating the "two-body problem" in their job
searches. And colleagues will sometimes direct new hires and their "trailing"
partners to my office to discover the secrets of our success.
The thing is,
there are none.
I got the idea
for writing this essay while reading one of those Choose Your Own Adventure
books with my son. I had devoured them as a child and was delighted to find them
back in print. For the uninitiated, the books are multiple-choice narratives in
which you are the main character. Depending on your choices, dozens of different
scenarios will play out, with endings that range from dreadful to supremely
satisfying.
Returning to
those books as an adult, I found myself frustrated with having to make choices
under conditions of extreme uncertainty, not to mention the arbitrary way in
which one event followed another. (Read: I got killed a lot.)
Then it hit
me: Getting to the end of one of those books felt a lot like the last nine years
of my life.
When I chat
with new faculty members, I find myself talking about "what happened" rather
than "what we did," or, in philosophical terms, about "events" rather than
"actions." And while our few identifiable choices turned out eventually to be
good ones, we made them with fear and trepidation.
Our first job
hunt out of the gate was mine, and I had two offers on the table, both from
state universities. One, from a Northern university, boasted a great location
but a heavy teaching load in a shrinking department. The other, from a
university in the West, was basically the inverse.
Of the first
offer, my adviser wrote, "Unless you have twice my energy, this will be your
first and last academic position."
Hmm, every
ounce of my energy would fit neatly into her multitasking pinkie finger. "But
what about the distance from our loved ones?" I asked.
Ever the
hand-holder, she replied: "This is what airplanes and telephones are for."
Eventually I
went for the position out West because that university was more likely to find a
job for my spouse. Almost immediately, of course, the governor of the Northern
state announced a plan to pump large sums of money, and several new hires, into
the departments that we coulda, shoulda, woulda -- if only we had known --
called home.
Still, the
Western university seemed promising. It was growing rapidly and had a lot of
junior faculty members as well as a department that, improbably, combined our
two disciplines. The department offered my partner a full-time visiting position
in English, and then things fell apart. Not my marriage. The department.
Midyear, the
department had an acrimonious split. I would have been truly entertained at the
Khrushchev-like vehemence with which one apoplectic professor pounded her fist
on the table demanding the "independence" of her 16-member English unit from our
apparently tyrannical five-member philosophy group if I hadn't seen our dream of
two secure jobs dispersing like so much dust.
That same
year, my spouse went on the market with no luck -- by which I mean he wasn't
offered any jobs he wanted. You could say we were arrogant, or stupid, for
turning down the offers he did get. But I prefer to say that we always viewed
academic employment as one part of a good life, and we weren't willing to
sacrifice all of the other parts in its pursuit.
I embarked on
a stationary job search, as I was heavily pregnant at the time, and managed to
get an offer. (My other telephone interview didn't pan out. I'm thinking it was
my attempt to conduct it while my son was about to be ritually circumcised in
the next room. Tip: Sometimes it really is a good idea to say "no" when the head
of a search committee asks, "Is this a good time?")
The job was
marginally superior to the one I had but was in a more desirable location, with
better, although not assured, prospects for my spouse.
A few short
months later, we moved to the other side of the country for job No. 2. At a
cocktail hour for new hires, I sidled over and warmly introduced myself to a
fellow female newcomer in the sociology department. Smiling back at me, she put
her hand on the arm of the man next to her and asked, "Have you met my partner,
John? He's in the English department -- just a visitor this year but we're
keeping our fingers crossed."
You don't say.
Seven years
later, my husband and I are still here, newly tenured and promoted.
How, exactly,
did my partner manage to get on the tenure track? Well, it happened in the
spring of our first year on the campus and it required about 4,927
serendipitously converging events (not an exact count), the top four of which I
shall enumerate here:
·
I was the only woman in a department that had lost two women in recent years to
the two-body problem.
·
A senior English professor split midyear for greener pastures, leaving the chair
nervously guarding an unclaimed salary against a covetous dean.
·
The ghosts of nonreplaced faculty members attended every department meeting,
serving as constant reminders that an "opportunity hire" in the hand was worth
more than an IOU for a national search next year.
·
And, not least, my dear spouse secured an offer from a better institution, to
which I, with much sighing and hand-wringing straight out of the Myrna Loy
playbook, faxed my CV. Nothing like your spouse getting a job offer elsewhere to
get your university to pony up.
OK, but what
did we, as academics, contribute to our university? Well, to use my students'
lingo, we didn't suck. But we weren't exactly stars either. Most of our friends
and colleagues who haven't gotten two tenure-track jobs within spitting distance
of one another are as good or better than we are.
(And, heck,
maybe we haven't really succeeded either. According to the most widely read blog
in my discipline, a job like mine, with a 3-3 teaching load and no graduate
courses, at a mediocre public university, is the job-search equivalent of one of
those dreaded outcomes in a Choose Your Own Adventure book.)
The academic
couples we know who didn't "succeed" were also hemmed in by circumstances, and
made decisions, based on incomplete information, that seemed like the best idea
at the time. They can no more be blamed for the outcome of their choices than we
can be praised for ours.
I've been
reading columns like this one for years, so I'm aware that I need to conclude
with a "take home" message. I'm not sure what lesson can be distilled from my
own topsy-turvy experience, except maybe an endorsement of equanimity.
Luckily -- and
this point is likely to irritate some folks, inviting as it does accusations of
a kind of indifference that only smug tenureds can enjoy -- not all that much
seems to hang on the outcome. Viewed from outside the academic bubble, there's
very little difference between our lives and the lives of our friends who did
not solve the two-body problem the way we did. They had kids, traveled (often to
academic conferences), studied tai chi, bought fixer-uppers, painted still lifes,
served as hospice volunteers or Big Sisters, protested the war in Iraq, taught
and did research in their disciplines, ran 5Ks, attended too many committee
meetings, and wasted too much time online.
Would it be
better to do all of that with the imprimatur and potential security of two
tenure-track jobs? Yes, of course.
I just wish I
could tell you how.
Jane Cook
is the pseudonym of an associate professor of philosophy at a state university
in the East
Hold Your
Tongue, Part II by Jennifer S. Furlong and Julie
Miller Vick
Career TalkPractical guidance for academic job
seekers from professional career counselors
We received a lot of letters about our October
column, "Hold Your Tongue," on changing jobs. So we thought we would revisit the
topic of how to gracefully explain to potential employers why you're on the
market again.
In the October column, we interviewed faculty
members who had successfully moved to new jobs. They advised job candidates to
keep quiet about their real reasons for leaving their old jobs. One professor we
talked to said that in the few interviews where she had told a search committee
about her troubled former department, it had been "a huge mistake." Instead, she
advised, candidates should focus on the positives of what they like about the
new opportunity.
Some readers, however, were surprised by that
advice. Shouldn't job candidates be more forthright?, they wondered. "Won't so
much close-mouthedness lead search committees to be suspicious of any assistant
professor seeking a job?"
Keep in mind that different search committees have
different priorities. Some interviewers will be terribly curious to know why you
want to leave your old job, especially if your department or institution is
famous for squabbles and strife. Other interviewers might focus their line of
questioning on your credentials rather than your current situation. In that
case, if your recommenders have discussed in their letters your reasons for
leaving, the search committee's questions may have been already answered.
Still, while you should focus on showing your
enthusiasm for the position you are seeking, you need to be prepared to explain
why you want out of the position you are leaving. One reader summarized that
dilemma nicely: "The challenge is that the question 'Why are you interested in
coming here?' is a different question from 'Why were you looking in the first
place?'"
Try to answer the latter question by offering an
"objective" reason for your departure, such as the location or the type of
institution. If pressed, you may have to discuss the more "intangible" reasons.
Rather than casting aspersions about your department, which might leave the
search committee with a bad feeling about you, respond in a way that focuses the
panel's attention on you as a job seeker. You might say something like:
"I didn't feel there was as good a fit as I had
hoped."
"The priorities of the department (or the
university) were different from my own."
If you are pressed further, you should simply cite,
in a calm manner, the actual facts, such as:
"In the last 10 years, more than half the faculty
has left the department."
"A majority of new faculty members have had
significant difficulty getting tenure."
Those facts can be offered without complaint or
judgment. You do not want to be perceived as someone who speaks negatively
about colleagues or has trouble functioning within an organization.
It is also important to be prepared to answer
questions about specific people in your department. You may be interviewed by
people who know (and like) colleagues you hope to leave behind. Difficult people
tend to get a reputation as difficult, and you may be asked about a current or
former colleague with whom you did not have the best relationship. Again, it's
best not to sound judgmental or angry. Instead, focus on how your styles were
different or some other objective reason.
Anyone embarking on a job search should have a
strategy for dealing with the problem people in their world. That might be a
difficult adviser, or it might be a colleague who disagrees with your
methodology, has a very different working style, or is simply known to be a
curmudgeon. If you are worried about being asked about a problem person,
practice talking about your relationship with that person in terms that are as
neutral as possible.
Another issue we touched on in the October column
also brought in letters. We had interviewed a professor in the sciences about
the challenges of moving a laboratory from one institution to another. Some
readers were concerned that we had made it sound a lot simpler than it was.
One researcher who wrote in described how he had
once transferred his lab from a research institution to a research hospital.
While it was a smooth transition, he said, he was "amazed and surprised" by the
level of bureaucracy involved, and dismayed to learn he was not the owner of
resources and intellectual property in his lab that he had thought belonged to
him. Instead, he discovered, they belonged to the institution.
Since then, this researcher, who is now a scientist
at the National Institutes of Health, said he had witnessed several transitions
that were draining for all involved. He asked us to issue this reminder: Junior
faculty members should be aware that NIH (and a number of other granting
agencies), for the most part, award grants to the research institute or the
university, not to the individual scientist. Equipment and supplies purchased
from that grant are legally the property of the institution, as are scientific
notebooks and primary data.
Frequently, academic scientists who move to a
different institute are able to obtain permission to move their equipment and
supplies. That negotiation would presumably be more difficult if the
investigator is leaving on bad terms. Every grant-making agency has its own
policies, and someone in the sponsored-research office at your institution could
probably give you a detailed overview on how to move a lab.
Changing institutions can be complicated for
scientists. We strongly caution readers to be cognizant of ownership issues with
respect to lab equipment and supplies as well as ideas. Anyone in the sciences
or engineering who is contemplating a possible move needs to do some homework
about those ownership issues well before starting to look for a new position.
Finally, a reader pointed out that some academics
leave their jobs purely to seek a better opportunity. Maybe they want to improve
their salary or work at a higher-ranked college. That reader wondered why we
hadn't discussed those issues.
Certainly, seeking an opportunity that provides
better remuneration and benefits is a good reason to move. If you went on the
market at a moment when jobs in your field were tight, you may feel that having
had few (or no) other offers at the time lessened your negotiating power. Or
maybe your research has been well received, and you would now like to seek a
position in a more prestigious or supportive department.
If either your market or your record have markedly
improved, feel free to test the waters and to tell search committees your
reasoning.
Raising the money issue too early on, however, can
be risky. One of our readers, an academic in a business discipline, said it is
more common for candidates in business-related disciplines to speak openly about
seeking better compensation and prestige than those in other fields. And we
concur.
Anyone who has successfully changed institutions
will have a distinct story to tell. Some job candidates will negotiate the
transition with ease. For others, it will be a challenge. Some will be pressed
to explain what they disliked about their current employer; others will skate
easily around the question. Because of that, job candidates may feel they are
receiving conflicting advice. Well, you probably are.
We strongly suggest that you seek out mentors,
colleagues, and friends who have gone through similar transitions and whose
advice is trustworthy. If you can, try to find a candid adviser in your current
department or institution who will be willing to guide you through your
transition and speak on your behalf. Evaluate that person's advice carefully,
consider your own needs and priorities, and then make a decision that seems best
for you.
Managing Up by
David D. Perlmutter,
is a professor and associate dean for graduate studies and research at the
William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the
University of Kansas (January
5, 2007)
First PersonPersonal
experiences on the job market
There comes a time when every
assistant professor, if he or she is to survive in academe, must learn how to
"manage up." By that, I mean learning how to negotiate the intricacies of a
relationship with a dean or department head.
That skill seems to come
naturally to some new Ph.D.'s; for others, like myself, not so much.
I recall that a few years into
my first teaching job a student wrote to my dean to criticize my classroom
conduct. The dean sent me a note asking to see me. I refused, replying that he
should simply dismiss the student complaint and "take my side." The dean again
requested to see me, explaining that he could not reject a student petition
without investigation. After further (and increasingly terse) memo exchanges,
there came a confrontation in the hallway. Voices were raised, tempers spiked,
and one shocked secretary told me later that she thought that a fistfight was
about to erupt.
I backed down, grudgingly,
described my side of the student dispute, and, even though the dean decided in
my favor, drove home later in a fury. But sometime that evening it occurred to
me that I was angry at my supervisor for doing his job, which was both unfair to
him and shortsighted of me, since I had fantasies of one day being in his
position.
No one teaches you "managing
up" in graduate school. So it is no surprise that one of the leading complaints
I hear about junior faculty members, across fields, is that they don't know how
to deal with authority.
Shouldn't we all know better?
Certainly, for a good deal of
our apprenticeship, we are students beholden to advisers, committee members, and
-- probably somewhat more distantly -- administrators. But drawing from
observations offered in these pages, and from the experiences of friends and
colleagues, it seems quite easy to sail through the graduate-student years and
not comprehend what it means to have a "boss."
Many of us approach our
academic careers with a certain amount of idealism and even elitism. Isn't the
professoriate "different," in that we are granted autonomy in our work and have
little in common with those poor cubicle dwellers of the vulgar trades?
The answers to such questions
lie in individual experience. Being an assistant professor in a department of
French at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, is indeed a different
experience from being a sales associate at a midrange paper supply company in
Scranton. In no profession, however, are immune to the need to learn how to
navigate the organization so that our achievements will produce the benefits
they deserve. Getting along with an academic boss, then, involves a set of basic
strategies that probably make sense in any workplace.
Before I proceed, let me offer
this caveat: If your chair reminds you of the regional manager in the television
series The Office or of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, your only recourse is
keep smiling and look for a job elsewhere.
But if you are dealing with
rational human behavior among reasonable folk, here are some things you need to
know as you learn how to manage your relationship with your bosses:
It's Not All About You. You
work at an institution with many layers of managers who each have their own
goals and aspirations. Luckily, your interests often coincide with theirs. If
you publish enough, teach competently, and stay out of trouble, you and they
both look good. But it is vital to be aware of the benchmarks that are
particularly attractive to the leadership of your institution.
I recently attended a
managerial workshop in which a senior university official urged us to "know the
mission," meaning that we should familiarize ourselves with the master plan and
mission statement of the university. The advice seemed self-evident until I
realized that I had never read my university's plan or statement.
Likewise, each unit itself has
(or should have) a mission statement and a five-year plan. Read them. Ponder
them. Talk to senior professors and your department head about ways in which you
can contribute to both.
That you would do so in the
first place will be noteworthy: Most of a department head's meetings with junior
faculty members begin with the latter asking for something. One dean told me
about an assistant professor who began every exchange -- no matter the occasion
or subject -- with "I want." Occasionally, you need to ask what you can do for
your department.
Pick Your Whines. Gaining a
reputation as a malcontent will not enhance your career. Certainly you may take
legitimate grievances to the boss: a leaking office roof, a lazy teaching
assistant, a need for more lab money. But it is all too easy, when you are the
suffering party, to get tunnel vision about the relative importance of such
problems and amnesia about the frequency with which you raise them.
One tip on maintaining a
macro-perspective is to keep a diary of your interactions with authority
figures: How many times have you made requests, and for how much? Were they
issues that were truly "deanworthy," or could you have handled the problem
yourself?
As important as the frequency
of your complaints are the tone and style. Do you present your petitions as
reasonable queries or as petulant demands? A simple rule: Never approach a boss
with a problem without having investigated two or three practical solutions.
Don't Make Threats. It is often
said that power in academe is not as clearly defined as in most other realms. A
professor can outrank a provost in some matters; alternately, according to
human-resources rules, a staff assistant might be nearly unfireable. It is
tempting for a junior faculty member, overly flattered about his or her own
achievements, to try to play the power game. But assuming that you have more
power than you actually possess will most likely lead to embarrassment and
disaster.
It is certainly possible to get
what you want by threatening to resign, for example, and some life-or-death
issues may warrant such a threat. But that weapon can only be used once and
leaves a trace of acrid smoke in the department ever afterward.
No matter how valuable a junior
faculty member is, people who have a reputation for all-or-nothing antagonism, a
tendency toward the dramatic, or a habit of dropping hints about accepting
another job elsewhere will eventually compromise their value.
I know of junior faculty
members who announced they would accept job offers elsewhere unless they got
what they wanted. In two cases, the bosses said, "Fine. Do it." In one of those
cases, the unfortunate assistant professor, it turned out, was bluffing and had
to plead momentary insanity as an excuse.
The lesson: While there are
full professors out there who seem to be getting away with murder, those on the
tenure track are probably only indulged a few misdemeanors.
Don't Dodge the Grunt Work.
Show up for meetings. Answer your e-mail. Attend your office hours. Every
profession, every job, entails activities that are unromantic and seemingly
lacking in value for the individual. Academe is full of pointless committee
assignments, problem-student advising, and reports that no one will read.
It would be criminal for a
supervisor to load up junior faculty members with such tasks to the point that
they couldn't focus on their primary goals of research and teaching. On the
other hand, no assistant professor should think that personal gratification --
teaching only the courses you like, advising only the students who intrigue you,
and doing only the committee work directly related to your research -- is
possible or politically acceptable.
Ralph Izard, a professor
emeritus of mass communication at Ohio University, advises junior professors to
have an honest conversation with their supervisors about time management and at
some point feel free to say, "I can do that. What would you like me to give up
for it?" The key to making that argument is that you be perceived as already
fully booked.
Avoid Bad Blood. Only after you
start a new job do you discover the factional fissures and intradepartmental
rivalries. Senior professors may try to involve you in their fights or ask you
to take a side. You should state clearly, if asked, "I think while I'm on the
tenure track I should just concentrate on my work and not get into a battle with
anyone." Only the most churlish senior professor will, at that point, keep
pushing you to join in his crusade.
Then there is the allure of
joining in when others -- the tenured class -- are belittling the
administrators. It is oh-so-tempting to take part in the fun, and oh-so-fatal
when a supervisor later hears about your witticism made at her expense.
It seems obvious but apparently
needs to be said: Don't publicly deride anyone who is going to vote on your
future or decide your salary. Remember also, when you trash-talk someone, other
people might be laughing but they're also thinking, "What does he say about me
when I'm not in the room?"
Dissent Is Fine; Discord Is
Not. One chairman told me of a new assistant professor who argued about almost
every subject the department faced. "In some cases he was right," the chairman
said. "But in all cases, he was tedious and alarming. Even people who agreed
with him on a point were thinking, 'Whoa, do we really want this guy around for
30 years?'"
Obviously, you need to strike a
balance here. There is no reason to become a toady, but your "no's" should never
take on the appearance of personal attack or vendetta.
Finally, Learn to Acknowledge
Defeat. Faculties vote, bosses make decisions, and you will be judged not only
by the quality of your opposition but by how graciously you accept that it did
not carry the day. Every good employer appreciates an employee with this
philosophy: "I'll tell you what I think even if you don't want to hear it, but
at the end of the day, if we go in another direction, I'll do my best to make it
happen."
Following these guidelines will
not convert you into a vocational mouse, nor will you be groveling before your
"betters." Academe is indeed all about mutual respect. But for the newly minted
Ph.D., respect must be earned, slowly, over time, by your efforts in research,
teaching, and service. Integral to success in all three categories is managing
your manager.
David D. Perlmutter is a
professor and associate dean for graduate studies and research at the William
Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of
Kansas.
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:50:42 -0800 (PST)
From: "George Slone" <todslone@yahoo.com>
Subject: The Perlmutter article
To: opinion@chronicle.com
Dear Chronicle of Higher Education:
Yet another lame, vacuous article authored by David
D. Perlmutter! Is it really possible? Is he slated to become Mr. Mentor, that
is, when Ms. Mentor finally retires? Why has that flatulent fellow been given
the podium? Is it because his articles are in fact lame, thus do not upset
anybody, that is, anybody but thinking individuals unbridled by the gods of
collegiality and the do-not-offend-politically-correct ideology bridling all
higher-ed careerists? What is wrong with the Chronicle of Higher Education
management… or should I rather ask, what is wrong with the university
professorate and administrator herd spread across the nation, like thousands of
job-secure cows and sheep, who would actually think Perlmutter’s pap
interesting, passionate, challenging, or worse yet, even tweed-suit witty? Yes,
as higher education continues on its merry way to full corporate co-optation and
the democracy becomes less recognizable as a democracy, let’s write and publish
yet another article on collegial kowtowing, but we’ll give it a smarter name
like “managing up.”
Question: When will we ever see an article in the
Chronicle of Higher Education on why it is so crucially important for America
that professors, both tenured and not tenured, distinguished and less
distinguished, “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways”
(Emerson) and to let their lives “be a counterfriction to stop the machine”
(Thoreau) even at the risk of their All-Mighty Careers?
Answer: Never.
Why? Ask Bush. He knows.
Professor G. Tod Slone
Dept. of Humanities and Foreign Languages
Grambling State University
P.O. Box 4235
Grambling, LA 71245
A Creature of Our Own Making
by Gary A. Olson is dean of the College
of Arts & Sciences at Illinois State University and can be contacted at
golson@ilstu.edu
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