By Samantha Bonner

I'm a professor in a department of theater and dance at a liberal-arts college in the South. I had a professional career in the arts—and a pretty good one—before coming to academe. So when I say there's a lot of drama going on in my department, I know whence I speak. I've seen drama.

This is a college that feels like it could be home. My tenure seems to be on track, but I'm not sure. That's because the qualities that made me a successful actor seem to be the very things that give me trouble in academe.

At one time, I considered getting an Ed.D. degree. It wasn't so much that I wanted to be an administrator; I just wanted to understand what administrators thought about us—the "artistic" types. I think they often don't know what to make of us. We ask for weird school supplies, like yoga mats, pianos, rubber balls, and long bamboo sticks. We ask for renovations like sprung wood floors and soundproofing. Other departments ask for "smart" classrooms with the latest computer technology? We ask for large, open, empty spaces with natural light and no desks—as "dumb" a classroom as there ever was.

Our projects and grants don't fit into neatly parsed paragraphs that cite the current literature; often, there is no literature to cite. In addition, it's hard to measure our output: What is the worth of a dance or a play or a song? Is a student's performance, in its ephemeral one-night-only, rarely peer-reviewed existence, worth all of the effort it takes to make it happen? And how, my gosh, do we count that toward tenure?

I feel that my department spends a lot of time justifying its existence and the necessity for theater. Maybe that's true in other disciplines, too, although I doubt that anyone questions the need for history, English, math, or computer science. Things must be so much more peaceful in those halls.

Our lives in theater departments feel more like an episode of Slings & Arrows, only we really, really don't have the money to fix that broken light. (This is a show that almost gets it right.) You see, theater and dance departments are both businesses and teaching institutions. Weekdays we teach, and weekends we have paying customers who expect results. Someone has to write the press release, sew the costumes, sell the tickets, and clean the toilets, and usually it's the professors. (Can you imagine a medical-school professor cleaning a toilet before he entered the operating theater? And should that count toward tenure?)

It is impossible to work with young people day after day—to witness their small or large growth as actors, to see them transformed as artists—without feeling as though something significant is happening. We are trafficking in the future of art: This must matter. I wonder if administrators, many of whom do not spend their days in the classroom, feel that same primordial pull. Probably, when we get passionate, it just looks to them as though we're red in the face. And when they are at their most practical, we feel they don't care.

That is not to suggest that theater departments and their faculty members have problems only with the higher-ups. There is plenty of friction down here in the trenches. I've thought long and hard about this, in an effort to make my own life more pleasant. I've badgered my mentor, scoured The Chronicle's Forums for tenure-seeking wisdom, and talked it out with family and friends. Finally I was able to identify at least five reasons for so much drama in theater departments, and why I (and others who should know better) make so many rookie mistakes.

Problem 1: Energy transference. From the most entry-level performance courses to the most advanced, we teach about energy. Quite simply, one gives energy onstage, and one receives energy from other performers (and from the audience). A number of games played in acting courses teach and reinforce this process: Actors toss words, sounds, and balls (both imaginary and real) around a circle, and the goal is to never let the energy die, drop, or disappear. What you get from the person on your left, you take and send to the person on your right.

This exchange of energy is extremely exciting and dynamic onstage, and focused energy can distinguish a good actor from a bad one. Actors who have energy problems are often referred to as "black holes," since no matter how much energy goes in, nothing ever comes out.

Yet there have been many times in a faculty meeting when I wished to be just such a black hole. Put a bunch of performers in a room—with everyone picking up on everyone else's energy and keeping it up, up, up!—and soon emotions are at a fever pitch. And we still haven't chosen a search committee.

Problem 2: My body is my instrument. For years I trained to become the kind of actor whose every emotion was immediately visible on my face, in my eyes, my voice, my body. I strove for the transparency of stage legends like Kim Stanley, Judith Ivey, and Laurie Metcalf. I took speech classes, voice lessons, movement work, dance. The goal was for audience members in the back balcony to be able to discern even the subtlest nuance of feeling and intention in my "instrument."

I guess it worked, because now my colleagues tell me that everything I am thinking shows on my face. And no matter how many "I-messages" or diplomatic word choices I make, my voice betrays my thoughts. Forget voice and movement classes: Before the next faculty meeting, I need to invest in a pair of really dark sunglasses.

Problem 3: Saying yes to the conflict. Theater is conflict. Opposing wants, goals, and desires—those are the things that make a scene come to life. Unlike my dean, my mentor, and every self-help book I've ever read, Stanislavsky never said, "Don't sweat the small stuff." In a scene, an actor's job is to try to affect, change, or move one's partner. And all the small stuff counts.

Those of you who are nontenured faculty members know well the impossibility of moving a reluctant or unwilling tenured professor. Yet the actor in me will continue to try. Why? Because theater is conflict, and I have spent years learning how to battle. And so have my colleagues.

Problem 4: Acting before thinking. Scholars live in their heads. It's where they're most comfortable. But some acting techniques hold that actors must act—and react—before their brain engages. It's not that you mustn't think, it's just the order in which events occur. Actors train themselves to react before judgment and reason set in—to allow instinct, rather than intellect, to shape a performance.

That skill is of no use in the political environment of academe. To allow one's viscera to lead one's brain at a college will land you in the soup. But to unlearn that skill means to let go of something that—as an actor—is devoutly to be wished.

Problem 5: Acting is not lying. As I mentioned, I've sought a lot of advice. People often say, "You're an actor, so act!" Those folks mean well, but they're operating under a false principle. You see, actors are not liars. The actor's job is "to behave truthfully in imaginary circumstances." To say that a performance was "truthful" is the highest compliment an actor can receive.

But well-meaning folks seem to think that I can go into a meeting and pretend I don't care. The question for me is this: If I have been chosen to teach (and for me it does feel like a calling), why would I want to dishonor the profession by behaving dishonestly? I believe that what we do matters. I believe it so much that I chose a life in the theater over money, comfort, and the objections of my family. And now I have chosen to teach this craft. I did not come here to lie.

Who am I when I am at work? Can I fairly and authentically teach acting if I, myself, deliberately squelch those skills that make me an actor, and for which I have labored? Wasn't I hired exactly because of my talent and skill in this area? As Thoreau said, "The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact."

Then again, Oscar Wilde wrote: "Art is not to be taught in academies." But here I am—at least until tenure-review time. I'm not sure I can fix myself, because part of the problem is that I don't want to. For I've realized that to cure myself of the urge for drama is to make myself a worse actor.

To put it another way, to be a good colleague at a college may mean denying the things that make me a good actor. And to quote Wilde again: "To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's life. It is no less than a denial of the soul." Of course, he landed in gaol.

Samantha Bonner is the pseudonym of a faculty member in theater at a liberal-arts college in the South.