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The Attrition Bug

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By Irwin Trout

Let's face it, summer is a great time to be a college professor. Ample parking, no teaching, and huge blocks of uninterrupted time to devote to research.

This year that wonderful realization was tempered by the arrival of the moving truck, as I had to face yet another year of losing several good colleagues. The attrition bug has moved into my department with a vengeance, leaving me and the remaining survivors bewildered about our future.

To be fair, attrition is a fact of life. People come and go in any profession. The losses that my department has suffered in the past three years have resulted as junior faculty members moved up to more prestigious institutions -- got a proverbial call to the "Big Leagues" -- leaving the hardscrabble world of Double-A ball behind.

I don't begrudge them their success. I'm thrilled that their hard work has been rewarded -- and, to be honest, I hope my phone will ring someday as well. It's just that our hallway looks less and less like a row of offices and increasingly like a row of deck chairs on the Titanic.

My university is typical of institutions struggling to find an identity; we lack the resources to fully support both a quality undergraduate and graduate program, and as a result departments across the university are forced to make a tough choice between the two.

With turnover in my department, the old guard has often squared off against younger reformers determined to find new ways to solve old problems. Thus, our perestroika is gradually losing steam as reformers leave the university in search of wealthier institutions with fewer constraints.

Few of my esteemed senior colleagues seem to find this exodus troubling. (Then again, nothing really seems to bother them.) One of them once spent a lunch hour listing all the people who had occupied my office before me, as if he were recounting some saga that needed to be retold years from now. People have been coming and going for decades, the thinking goes, so the latest round of departures is nothing new. In some sense, a period of low turnover is merely a lull in the action, a semester or two to relish not having to read job packets or attend meetings.

Others have at least attempted to diagnose the problem. A university official was asked about the extent of the university's turnover problem, and he seemed to think that geography was destiny: "Let's face it," he said, "we don't have mountains here." Strangely, though, topography was not the key reason given by my colleagues for their departures. No doubt hill construction will be a priority in the university's budget in the coming year.

Still other colleagues have responded with bullishness rather than resignation. My department chairman, for whom filling positions is an annual affair, seems to regard the exodus as another exciting round in some sort of perverse personnel rodeo.

Indeed, he has portrayed our turnover problem as an indicator of our desirability: "People want to come here!" (Just as I never thought of this place as topographically challenged, I also never thought of it as Disneyworld).

At other times, he has reminded us that the university faces budget cutbacks. As a result, we should respond to the opportunity for a new round of hiring with gratitude and humility; unlike certain other departments, at least we get to fill our vacancies. (This is generally followed by a toast to the dean.)

In the end, the only people troubled about the attack of the attrition bug are me and my remaining junior-faculty colleagues. Why should we care?

We care for a variety of reasons: The intellectual life of the department will suffer, and we're losing several allies who fought with us in the trenches to improve the department on a number of fronts. And, sure, our social calendars will no doubt be a little barer as well.

All of the survivors have expressed similar concerns. Left unsaid has been a larger issue: It was easier to cope with life in the asylum when you had many friends around, but now the circle is rapidly shrinking, and no one wants to be left alone with the rest of the inmates. Each and every one of us has the same silent hope: "Next year, let it be me."

It's clear that things will be different in the new academic year. I wonder if the turnover is going to change how we relate to one another in the coming year. Having started my job with a cohort of colleagues determined to make our department a better place, it's now an open question whether our motives will be to leave it better than we found it, or just plain leave.

If the road to advancement lies in research, will we compete to get to the office first and stay the longest? Will we shun our collegial lunches in lieu of working at our desks? Will we move from being a "door open" department to being a "door closed" department? Will I find myself sitting at home a lot on Saturday nights?

Finally, having cast our lot as modernizers, will we revert to the old ways in the name of self-interest? Will we turn our backs on the fiery statements we made in faculty meetings about the importance of quality undergraduate teaching? Will we start laughing when someone says, "We ought to change this"?

It could be that there's a cycle here, too, and that those who preceded us out the door also came in with big ideas and a bold agenda. Over time, perhaps they decided that the most important thing you can do for your career is to better yourself rather than those around you.

Is the reason why my senior colleagues don't care about the departures because they would rather stick with the status quo than retain colleagues who would push them to perform? Are they merely waiting for us to make the same choice?

I don't know what is going to happen with my friends in the coming year. I do know that our schedules will be filled with meetings, and the hallways will be filled with discussions about the merits of various candidates. I also know that some questions that candidates ask me about department life will make me uncomfortable, but I hope not visibly so.

I can only hope that at the end of the next year, with our bout of interviews completed, when we've told all those little white lies to aspiring applicants, that there will be room in the lifeboat for all of us.