I have just finished a six-year term as head of the English department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I am ready to recollect that experience in the tranquility called research leave.
Over the past two years I've written for Career Network about academic hiring and promotion and tenure from an administrative perspective. In this new series of essays I'll look at other issues I confronted -- some regularly, others rarely -- as a department executive officer: things like faculty problems (the big ego, the molester of students, the noisy colleague); student-related complaints, both from faculty members ("I caught a plagiarist!") and from students ("My teacher never comes to class."); alumni sensitivities ("You're not giving a scholarship with my mother's name on it to someone who writes this filthy poetry."); and budgets (now I remember why I went into English); among many others.
I'm going to start at the beginning, though, with a look at the orientation training offered to new department heads. When I started teaching I went to a new-teacher orientation where I learned three rules for success that I neither followed nor forgot:
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Give a quiz every day.
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Don't turn your back on the class.
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Never smile before Christmas.
The new administrators' orientation presented us with a lot of aphorisms as well. Some of these were even true:
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The [dean, provost, chancellor, president, Board of Trustees] is not your enemy.
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Don't attribute anything to malevolence that can be explained by simple incompetence.
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Two percent of your faculty will take up 90 percent of your time.
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No good deed goes unpunished.
Other bits of canned wisdom from the orientation just didn't apply:
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The first time you get sued is the hardest. I don't regret that I have no basis for judging the truth of this claim. There were several angry faculty members who pounded fists on my desk and assured me that I would hear from their lawyer. I never did.
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Manage your units by walking around. That's a great idea -- in theory. Talking to people is a lot less official when you do it in their offices, in the halls, or in the coffee room, although some people will think you're spying on them. But the pull of e-mail, the telephone, and the mounds of paper that still need to be pushed in our not-yet-paperless offices made the sheer effort of getting up from my desk one of the hardest tasks I faced. More often than not, people came to see me before I had a chance to go and find them.
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Set aside one day a week for your own research -- go to the lab, or the library, anywhere without a telephone. I saw right away that a department the size of mine -- 55 faculty members, plus grad students, instructors, and 1,000 majors -- couldn't be left on its own one day a week. It wasn't so much the number of hours the job required (a lot) as it was the simple need for me to be around when other people were around. Which meant squeezing my research into the brief and unpredictable moments of the day when things quieted down. Which, in turn, meant writing shorter pieces during the academic year, and saving longer ones for summers.
Much of the orientation consisted of us sitting in large groups being told things we would promptly forget, and getting reams of handouts we'd never find the time to read. For variety, we sometimes sat in small groups while the "facilitator" read the handouts to us. The teaching-center director lectured to us about active learning. There was no time for questions.
The one thing I still recall from the associate provost's summary of the rules and regulations is that there is a formal mechanism for changing the name of a department. "Why would anyone want to do that?" I stage-whispered to the new head of linguistics sitting next to me, but suddenly I knew the answer: "If we renamed my department 'finance' instead of 'English,' we could double the faculty salaries in one fell swoop." I got a stern look from the speaker and the reputation of being a wise guy.
In the session on advancement, the current euphemism for what used to be development and before that was simply begging, we were told by the representative from the university foundation that because of declining state support for higher education, departments would have to play a greater role in fund raising.
The university had just sold a lucrative "pouring rights" contract to Coca-Cola, so I asked, "What about selling advertising space on the department's Web page?" For a small consideration we could link bookstores or Amazon.com to our course lists. Students could get their books in one click, along with personalized recommendations: Students who bought The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction also bought Lacan for Dummies. "Another wise-guy suggestion" was the general reaction to my modest proposal. Six years later our department Web site is still not-for-profit -- we can barely pay someone to maintain it -- but I know that other departments are starting to cash in on their virtual space.
In Shakespeare's Tempest, Caliban complains to Prospero, "You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse." One lasting benefit of my orientation experience was that I learned to use administrative jargon. It wasn't long before I found myself speaking in whole sentences like:
We are moving the center of gravity of our units forward to move them up in the rankings and crack the top 10. To do this we write mission statements with names like Vision 2020 and five-year plans about benchmarking best practices. We grow our faculty and ask them to enhance their national reputations by putting more top-tier journals on their vitas (not their vitae, as less classically trained administrators often call academic résumés), and then because ICR is down we cancel our library subscriptions to those journals. We encourage our faculty to seek external funding, because the budget has taken a big hit and things aren't going to improve in out years. Accountability requires us to increase the efficiency of instructional delivery, so we will have to make hard choices about outsourcing general education and maintaining active learning in the absence of the class discussions we can no longer subsidize. ...
Early in my term as chairman I pleaded with the creative writers in the department to save me from this sort of executive-officer prose. They just smirked and kept their metaphors to themselves. But talking the talk has its uses. When it came time for these poets and novelists to demonstrate to the higher-education authorities how the new creative-writing program they wanted would provide an economic benefit to the citizens of the state of Illinois (no kidding), I translated their sincere and elegantly spare sentences into administrator-speak, because the reality of getting money for programs proved to be, No jargon, no dough.
I didn't realize when I signed on to head the English department that I would face more than hiring, tenure, budgets, and endless committees. What makes administrative life a walk on the wild side are the cease-and-desist orders, the federal-grant hanky panky, the intellectual-property food fights, the human-subjects-board fiascoes (it turns out that fiction can be harmful to one's health), the fitness-to-work investigations, and the nasty notes left on windshields.
New administrator orientation didn't prepare me to deal with those things. It wasn't supposed to. What it did do was put me in touch with colleagues from departments both similar to, and very different from, my own, who were about to face the same sorts of problems I was about to face.
Equally important, I met the go-to people long before I needed to go to them for help when something interesting turned up. I did need all of these go-to people: the lawyers, the deans, the vice chancellors, the university police, and especially the psychological counselors, because, to adapt Chico's reply to Groucho, "You can't fool me. In the academic world, there ain't no sanity clause."
