If you serve long enough as head of a department, you will eventually preside over the creation of new academic programs and the reform of old ones. When I was chairman, my department tackled two major curriculum issues: We revised the English major and started a master's program in creative writing.
Those exercises in program development and redevelopment gave me new insights, not all of them positive, into human dynamics and the workings of higher education. The problems I encountered may give current and future department heads reading this column some idea of what roadblocks to expect.
Before tackling a redesign of the full major, the department restructured the English-education curriculum. It had been a course of study heavy on credentialing and light on subject matter. But I argued that high-school English teachers should know more than regular English majors, not less, and so we needed a teaching-of-English curriculum comprising a full English major, with additional coursework in writing and technology. This would bring us in line with the national trend requiring high-school teachers to have majored in a particular subject matter. There were no real objections to this model.
Restructuring the "real" English major -- the concentration in English and American literature -- captured the faculty's interest more than tinkering with English ed. That's because most of the faculty members don't see their mission as training secondary-school teachers. They believe that the only reason students major in English is to prepare for graduate school and an academic career.
But in fact, most English majors get jobs in the business sector, and of those who continue their education, most go to law school. The curriculum for the major had been set 20 years earlier; since then, the field of English studies has moved from the New Criticism to postmodernism, and it is now exploring what comes next. We'd accommodated the theory explosion. We'd dramatically expanded our scope to include film, popular culture, and the Internet. We'd developed a new focus on race, class, and gender. And traditional notions of periods and national literatures were being leavened by the study of multicultural, diasporic, and postcolonial writing.
A friend of mine in engineering, I'll call him Ray McCarthy, saw in this shift evidence of the international left-wing plot to hijack American universities. But no such plot exists. It's simply that English, like every other academic subject, has changed since the senior faculty members left graduate school.
We still require Shakespeare, but our world is no longer flat; our solar system revolves around multiple suns; and our universe is seething with dark energy. It was time to align our curricular requirements with the courses that we were actually teaching.
The revision process went smoothly. Unlike some departments torn apart by culture wars, ours had little trouble keeping up with the times, while retaining a sense of collegiality that was more than just veneer. Sure, there were faculty members who opposed newfangled ideas. They grumbled, "If it was good enough for Brooks and Warren (whose text, Understanding Poetry, was a classic of New Criticism), it's good enough for me," and ultimately they retired.
But people didn't take sides just according to age. Some younger faculty members proved remarkably conservative, and some older ones remained as radical as they had been in their early days.
Our curriculum is supervised by the associate department head, together with members of the curriculum committee. To revise the major, they consulted broadly with the faculty, and looked over senior surveys, and came up with a set of proposals. The department then met to consider the committee's recommendations.
The one fault line that emerged in our discussions at that meeting concerned a new required course in literary theory. Those in favor argued that they were tired of spending class time bringing students up to speed on the subject. Also, a theory course would be important preparation for graduate school. Those opposed didn't want their favorite students, or their favorite literature, corrupted by theory -- despite the fact that all literary analysis implies a theoretical framework. Or they feared that only the current theories would be taught. Or they objected that requiring theory wasn't fair to students not headed for grad school. Supporters scoffed that we wouldn't teach outdated theories, and that any requirement would be unfair to students not going on to grad school.
My own concern was a practical one: staffing. Although several faculty members insisted at the meeting that they would teach the theory course, I knew from experience that volunteers would be harder to come by when the annual course-preference sheets were finally handed out. The theory proposal passed by an overwhelming show of hands, and after some additional tinkering with the program, and a variety of approvals outside the department, the first generation of new majors entered the pipeline.
But shortly after the curriculum meeting, Gabrielle Kotter (not her real name) came to see me with a concern that I hadn't anticipated. She strongly supported the theory requirement, she said, but as an assistant professor she had been afraid to speak her mind at the meeting lest the "other side" punish her at tenure time.
I don't remember now whether Kotter voted at the meeting. But I didn't want a situation where the assistant professors were afraid to raise their hands. I assured Kotter that in my 20 years as a tenured faculty member I had never seen anyone punished either for defending (or attacking) literary theory, or for speaking out on any issue at faculty meetings. I subsequently conveyed that message to the rest of the assistant professors, offering ways for them to submit anonymous feedback, but I could tell that some of them still felt a need to keep their heads down. Their paranoia required more than a secret ballot. Perhaps in the end it's something that only tenure can solve.
Revising a program is easier than creating one from scratch, which is what the department did when some faculty members proposed a master's of fine arts in creative writing. People at just about every level of review wanted to shape -- and stop -- our proposal. And the approval, which was six years in coming, only brought a new set of issues to be resolved.
For many years, the senior creative writers in -- who often felt estranged from the rest of the department -- insisted that a graduate writing program would sap the energies of the undergraduate one. But when those writers retired, the younger poets and novelists revived the initiative: Every self-respecting English department had an M.F.A., they argued, and without one, no writers, themselves included, would want to work in the department.
So they drew up a proposal. The M.F.A. was approved by the department in 1994 and sent on to the arts-and-sciences college, the next step in the approval chain. Where it sat for four years.
The reasons given for the delay weren't altogether persuasive: It wasn't the right time. There was no money for new programs. Graduate programs were shrinking, not expanding. The tea leaves weren't configured auspiciously.
Shortly after I became chairman, the creative writers asked me to break the logjam. So I tracked down a copy of the original proposal and made some inquiries. The dean wanted to know what the original department vote had been. When I went back to the file I discovered that the vote hadn't been recorded. Apparently the meeting to discuss the M.F.A. had run overtime, and the minutes ended abruptly when the secretary left at 5 p.m. People recalled a vote -- most likely a show of hands -- and no one remembered any significant opposition.
I doubt that the dean was happy about the department's record keeping, but whatever objections he had to the program had evaporated, and he moved the proposal on to the provost. But the provost's office wanted revisions. The initial proposal had been written by novelists and poets, and while they were masters of irony and imagery, they couldn't craft the dry administrative prose that the proposal's audience expected.
After some consultation, I reworked the draft, adding some charts and tables to demonstrate that the program wouldn't require any new dollars. But mostly I substituted abstract nouns for concrete ones, stuffed sentences with nominalizations, and replaced active verbs with passives, violating the rules of writing that students in the M.F.A. program would be expected to follow. I deleted first-person pronouns right and left so that others could use them freely. It seemed a small sacrifice.
Back on track, the proposal worked its way through various university committees and finally reached the State Board of Higher Education, which must sign off on all new degree programs in Illinois. A staff member for the board returned the proposal with questions: What was student demand for the program? Would an M.F.A. duplicate already existing programs? Would its graduates get jobs? Would it benefit the state's economy?
Although our proposal already answered these questions, I answered each one again. One of our poets provided numbers that showed applications to M.F.A. programs far exceeded spaces available (I didn't mention that new programs can't count on a surplus of applicants till they become established). I noted that the two M.F.A. programs in Illinois were small and drew primarily from a local pool, while our program would attract applicants from around the country.
I was warned not to stress the quality of our instructors, since the board didn't want to hear that one department was better than others, even if it was. I reminded the board that employers demanded employees who could write and insisted that our program would produce those employees (I didn't point out that students don't typically see the M.F.A. as a ticket to big bucks, or even to a job). The state's economy was increasingly information-based, I argued, and who better to produce and process that information than writers? (Again, I omitted the fact that information economies rely more on machine-generated text than they do on literature.)
For all of my efforts to disguise the M.F.A. as a practical degree, the staff member killed the proposal anyway. I was ready to give up at this point, but the provost urged me try again, because staff members with no academic training shouldn't decide the fate of university programs. Plus, word had come down that this particular employee was retiring.
So, a year later, we resubmitted and found ourselves once more in waiting mode. Until one of the creative writers, Gully Jimson (not his real name), got fed up with waiting and complained to the university's vice president. Jimson offered to contact the board directly to find out what was up. The vice president didn't react favorably to Jimson's initiative. The VP e-mailed the provost, whose assistant called me. I was to convey the message to Jimson that faculty members were not to communicate with the board. They shouldn't even communicate with the vice president. Chain of command was to be strictly observed, along with proper respect for the passive voice.
It wasn't the first time an upper-level administrator had ordered me to tell a faculty member how to behave. But insulating administrators from the faculty members wasn't part of my job description, and when I told Jimson about the vice president, he only got more angry with what he characterized as an illiterate, art-hating bureaucracy. However, he did stop his e-mail campaign because he wanted the board to say yes.
The M.F.A., rejected the year before without explanation, was finally approved without discussion at the board's winter meeting. But approval brought new problems: skirmishes over budget (all new programs cost money), over fellowships, over courses, over admissions, over hiring, over governance. The writers felt they weren't getting their fair share. They still felt estranged from the rest of the department.
But these disputes are all business as usual in any department. New programs do have a claim on additional support to help them get started, but after that they must compete alongside other departmental groups for scarce resources and for recognition. So far, the new M.F.A. seems to be doing quite well, despite or perhaps because of the artistic temperament of its faculty members. The program is well on its way to graduating its first class, to starting a new literary magazine, and to spending the income from a very comfortable endowment. Ultimately, our M.F.A. will benefit the residents of the state by renewing its literary culture and providing the high-quality reading matter without which no postmodern civilization -- and certainly no English department -- can survive.
