Forget blogging, most of my colleagues can't even handle a listserv.
Our department, like many others, uses an e-mail discussion list to trumpet faculty accomplishments, announce meetings and speakers, and ask for baby-sitting help. I love the instant communication. Although I sometimes wish it weren't quite so easy to hit the "send" key, the occasional e-mail mishaps do make great fodder for David Lodge-like academic novels.
I know of one new assistant professor who mistakenly sent a message intended for her graduate-school adviser to her small college's campuswide listserv. Everyone there, from the janitor to the college president, learned that she hated her job, her students, her colleagues, and the college, and that she was desperate to get out. She told me she slouched to the campus for a month, teaching her classes but moving her office hours to the local coffee shop until she figured people had moved on to a different scandal. Fortunately, her story has a happy ending. She managed to be hired soon afterward to a congenial position at a large university.
Many of us can share similar stories. As a graduate student, I observed my adviser inadvertently insult senior faculty members at several elite institutions. On an e-mail list for our discipline's professional association, he saw a posting that he wanted to forward to me, but mistakenly sent the message out to our colleagues nationwide. In that characteristically acerbic message, he labeled a group of scholars I had disagreed with "ridiculous assholes." He became known briefly as "Professor Asshole" and I as his ill-tempered protégé.
The ease of communication via e-mail outweighs the potential for disaster in most matters of departmental interest, though. When you're discussing the curriculum, even the hastiness and testiness of collegial disputation usually doesn't create long-term hostility. Down the line nobody will care that you thought colleague Y was a Neanderthal for favoring one set of prerequisites over another.
When hiring is at stake, however, a listserv can be downright dangerous.
I've witnessed such problems in various departments over the years. The story I relate here is from an institution where I once worked. I only know about it because I am still -- several years later -- receiving e-mail messages related to that department's business. (Note to administrators: Scour departmental e-mail lists to make sure that former faculty members are no longer receiving messages.)
Most of the postings I receive from my old department are pretty banal. People ask for the titles of movies they forgot or they argue for changes of language in obscure departmental guidelines. But I've been privy to more spicy fare, including a hiring controversy.
One of the first postings in that controversy announced that the administration had authorized a senior-level hire in the department, but had demanded that the new hire be an internationally prominent scholar. I believe the theory was that by following the Stanley Fish model of superstar, free-agent signings, the department would elevate itself from Montreal Expos status to, say, the Cleveland Indians.
In practice, though, top scholars seem loath to moving to relatively unprestigious posts unless the money is stratospheric. Top-dog universities in little-dog states can usually afford something merely substratospheric. And so, burdened by insecurity and poor judgment, faculty members at such institutions tend to overpay for mediocrity when they hire at the senior level.
Still, a senior hire is a senior hire, and my friends there were looking forward to welcoming a new colleague. Early in the process, the most prominent full professors began jockeying to see who would be able to use the promised position as patronage.
"My good friend Professor X says that he's really interested," the story would go. The department had been burned by such "good friends" in the past: Those friends tended either to be very famous scholars whose friendship to our colleague was dubious (and whose interest in us nil), or run-of-the-mill faculty members who used their "friendship" to get raises at their current institutions, which they never intended to leave.
This search for an "internationally prominent" scholar promised to be a bit different, and after the initial conversations in a faculty meeting, I heard that the dean had agreed to consider two candidates. The first was a hard-working full professor at a peer institution who was known more for his editing than his writing, but was savvy, worked well with students, and would make a great colleague. His degree, however, was from a large state university, a peer institution rather than something from on high.
The second candidate, supported by a different faction of the department, was initially perceived as a dark horse: an American-born -- and American-trained -- scholar who had been teaching in Europe for the past 15 years, accumulating a large number of largely unnoticed publications in a very trendy area of study.
Because the dean was focused on the candidates' graduate-school training as indicative of status, he rejected the first candidate and set his sights on Professor Europe.
Professor Europe came to the campus to deliver a scholarly paper and meet professors and students. Even his detractors admitted that the visit was a success. Professor Europe was deemed both personable and erudite, although his bearing occasioned a few snickers. I couldn't quite figure from the messages if he stuttered or had some other quirk of presentation. In any case, the dean loved him and prepared to make an offer.
At that point, opposition to his candidacy moved from genteel to aggressive. Strenuous debate before and after the scholar's campus visit was inevitable and appropriate. The university was planning to pay him above the normal pay scale of the department and work out a reduced teaching schedule. What went wrong after the campus visit involves the use of the e-mail list and the way that such a white-hot medium tends to inflame rhetoric and create rancor. With their backs against the wall, those opposing the appointment began posting harsh denunciations of the candidate.
All those publications? Mostly in European vanity presses.
His erudite manner? Well, if you like affectation.
His ability to attract prominent graduate students wishing to study with the master? More fourth-rate Ph.D. applicants will be steamrolling the department's way, only this time some of them will come from Europe.
Those denunciations were answered by equally strong defenses of the candidate, which tended to focus on institutional weaknesses rather than Professor Europe's strengths. I'm caricaturing the arguments, but they were similar to: "Look, our legislature won't give us any money and our upper administration is made up of hacks. We should take what we can get."
To give my former department credit, it is made up of smart people with strong opinions, and even though their comments could be passed around and commented on outside of the circle of discussion-list members -- as they must have realized -- one might defend the e-debate as true to the intensity of opinion on the subject.
But then there was the inevitable colossal misfire. The professor who had spearheaded the senior hire from the beginning thought he was sending a personal message to a friend. Instead it went out to the whole department (I've changed the names to protect the department's anonymity):
"Thanks Bob -- I am still twisting arms -- but so far no one important has been opposed to Professor Europe, not even Krank, Betty, or Walter (I saw his ballot marked), Richard, Maureen, etc. Seamus is the only one I know for sure voted against him, although probably Kate and Zora did too, especially as they didn't attend the meeting (what a surprise). Yours most truly, Juan."
Oops.
What followed was amusing -- at least from a distance. When Juan realized his private missive had gone out to the whole department, he offered an obsequious e-mail apology in which he explained his reference to snooping on Walter's ballot by discussing their long, close friendship. Juan said he had meant no offense, signed himself a "repentant sinner," and blamed the messenger. The devil made him do it: If it weren't for that damned listserv everything would be hunky-dory.
With a shared sense of guilt -- it could have been any of us! -- the sympathy came pouring in, followed by accolades for the integrity and decency of the beloved colleague who had so abjectly apologized for his electronic misdeed. From a field of acrimonious debate, the e-mail list turned into a temporary love fest. And miraculously, despite several colleagues subsequently threatening to leave the departmental list forever, everyone seems to have remained. "Yes, I'm still here," was the weary end to a recent post by the most vociferous of those who had vociferously vowed to leave the department's virtual communal space.
Maybe it is just to be expected that people will misuse, but be unable to wean themselves from, electronic debate. But what most of my colleagues, present as well as past, don't seem to realize when they make such gaffes -- or even just ill-tempered or too-candid comments -- is that their remarks remain helpfully archived for their future computer-savvy colleagues to unearth with just a few simple keystrokes. Many e-mail lists automatically create repositories of messages that remain available to list members for years, perhaps indefinitely. Even a novice can figure out how to delve into those archives for juicy information about her or his hire.
I know whereof I speak.
Shortly after being hired and added to my current department's e-mail list, I did a bit of cyber-sleuthing myself. I had heard that there had been some debate about my scholarly merit during hiring discussions, and sure enough I found a couple of tasty bits in the archive that I continue to treasure -- silently to this point.
One colleague -- someone who has grown to be a friend and whom I respect a great deal as a scholar and forward-thinking academic -- used an imaginative culinary metaphor to argue against making me a job offer. He likened my production of scholarship to the dining experience available at the Olive Garden, the moderately priced purveyor of all-you-can-eat pasta meals. Sure, if you needed to grab something to eat, my future colleague argued, you might reconcile yourself to chain Italian, but shouldn't we decide to eat at our town's (sole) East Coast-style restaurant?
Despite finding that delectable morsel, I've done OK here, I think. I work comfortably alongside the colleagues who I learned supported hiring me as well as those who I discovered did not. I have a thick skin and, now, tenure. I am sufficiently outspoken to forgive, even if I will not forget.
But what about Professor Europe? How will he react once he gets to his new department? Will he unearth -- or be fed -- the comments made in opposition to his hire? Will he reach out and embrace his opponents? Will he cringe at Juan's pushing his hire in such unseemly (and probably unethical) ways?
Perhaps all departments in such dithers should just schedule a retreat to kiss and make up. Item one on the agenda: Do not use the e-mail list to discuss personnel matters.
