First Person

Administrative Trials and Errors

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By Frank Midler

"Damn it." I had cut my finger. It was 5:30 p.m., and I expected my first guests in a half hour. A bit of blood oozed onto a cube of cantaloupe. I resisted the urge to rinse it off and toss it into the bowl next to its brethren cubes. After performing a little triage, I moved on to the honeydew melon.

Who would have guessed that life as director of graduate studies would involve carving fruit?

Following a tradition begun by my predecessor in the job, I was throwing a party at my house for doctoral students and colleagues. It would cap off two days of orientations for our new graduate students. The orientation had gone so well that I began to understand how a holder of high office gets puffed up by status and a title: I genuinely felt the part of an administrator whose work was of great importance. My smile was fresh and my enthusiasm genuine.

I figured 30 people or so were coming: a few key colleagues, all of our new faculty members, and, most important, the incoming graduate students, with whom I was trying to establish a connection. My predecessor had catered everything. By "catered," I mean that he had driven out to the grocery store and ordered a few trays of vegetables and dip along with some cubes of processed cheese.

I, instead, had followed the advice of our department administrator, who had gently pushed me toward the fresh fruit and vegetables. The model of the generous and underpaid staff member, she herself had gone shopping with me at an upscale local market, paying for our supplies with the department credit card.

And although the cut on my hand stung for the next week, and 60 people came, and we ran out of wine, it was worth it. The party was a great success. People who didn't know one another well had good conversations, and our new graduate students, so fresh and shiny and full of talent and energy, began to feel more comfortable with the university and our program. My tenure as director was off to a great start.

That is, it was until the next morning when I checked my e-mail. One of my colleagues -- a reveler from the night before -- had written to question one of the curricular requirements in the graduate program. His message, written early Saturday morning after the party, suggested that the requirement was illegal, since it hadn't been included in the most recent university catalog. He needed to know by Monday to be able to advise his incoming students who were, naturally, a brilliant group born for greatness.

I suspected immediately that this senior colleague, himself a brilliant scholar and skilled program builder, was testing my authority. Or, worse, he was showing me who was boss.

In any event, his message compelled me into a wasted weekend spent delving into our departmental archives in search of minutes from committee meetings long before my arrival at the university that would document the legitimacy of the requirement. My first days on the job, and I was already sending frantic messages to my predecessor (sunning himself on a beach somewhere) and calling my department head at home on a Saturday night. I pored through our department bylaws like a lawyer, and I prepared my arguments.

Although the chairman and my predecessor were completely supportive, I had spent most of Saturday night fearfully awake. I was afraid of this challenge from my powerful senior colleague and had more or less determined to give in. However, the chairman and the previous director of graduate studies -- like good football coaches encouraging a nervous rookie -- steeled me for the steady bombardment of phone calls and e-mail messages to come.

With their help, I prevailed, bolstered by de facto practice of many years and by our department's written regulations. Indeed, it turned out that my badgering colleague, who was soon joined by one of his chums in the "challenge the new director" sweepstakes, had been present at the very meeting those many years ago at which the requirement had been debated and passed.

By the time Tuesday rolled around, I was feeling confident again. We had an important faculty meeting that day. We were going to consider what positions to fill during the coming hiring season. The dean had showered us with the relative riches of two junior positions, but there were at least four proposed fields for those two positions, each with influential support.

We do things democratically here, as I've mentioned in my previous columns, and democracy has its strong and weak points. Our department does not make important decisions without the explicit endorsement of its faculty members -- even if the small turnout at department meetings and the sense here that it's more important to make people feel OK than to make hard and uncomfortable decisions ensures that we are not mired in nitpicking micromanagement.

In this case, many faculty members thought that a promise that had been made last September to hire a junior professor in a specific subfield should not necessarily be honored because the immediate hiring needs of the department had changed. I thought it was important to uphold our commitment of the year before, even though I agreed that our needs had changed.

And I couldn't keep my mouth shut. Using new parliamentary skills I'd honed studying Robert's Rules of Order, I offered motions that pushed the department first to honor its promise from the year before and then to close off debate and take a vote on the remaining position. The majority agreed. In the end, democracy was served, but the doctoral program was slighted, as the two hires are going to be made in areas least necessary for graduate students.

After the final vote faculty members slinked out of the meeting room. A good friend whose subfield had been slighted in the vote caught me as I was opening the door to my office and pointed his index finger at his head as if to say, "Shoot me now." He seemed to blame me for what had just occurred.

Later that evening I got a nice e-mail message from the powerful colleague who had been testing me just days before. Although he hadn't come to the department meeting, he was thanking me for my work: The promised position I had helped to save was in his subfield. I had followed my conscience, inadvertently rewarding the man who had made my first week miserable and wounding a good friend whose program really could have used my support. Instead of filling the real needs of the department, we were paying for past mistakes.

I walked down to the bus stop shaken, not knowing if I had done the right thing during the meeting. Just as toppling Saddam Hussein was relatively easy, but the bogged-down aftermath in Iraq has become dangerous and unpredictable, earning tenure seems to have left me with a different position on the ground from what I had expected.

Perhaps the plans I had concocted last spring for my triumphant reign as director of graduate studies had been too hastily drawn up and unrealistic. My work world has become a more complicated place. Not only do top-level administrators approach me at social events with haggard looks, desperate to enlist me in their ventures and relieve them of some of their burden, but the graduate students and staff members are a little less friendly, a little more respectful.

I don't trust the "respect" that has come with tenure and my administrative post. The distraught colleague who blamed me for derailing his preferred hire is my friend again. It's like we have a barely acknowledged secret pact: We're here together, forever, and we're among the "good guys." We'll be staring at each other over the conference table until our hair -- or what's left of it -- is gray. We can hate each other and like each other on alternate days. It doesn't matter, since there's nowhere else to go.

The passive resistance of Herman Melville's character, Bartleby the Scrivener, suddenly seems personally appealing, a self-help tactic rather than a biting critique of society. Can I just say, "I prefer not to," and spend all day reading The New York Times with a steaming cup of coffee?

I really enjoyed my life as an assistant professor. I was lucky enough to have great mentors who introduced me into faculty life at my universities and in my scholarly discipline. The world then seemed fresh and brimming with possibility.

My life is now constricted. As director, my time is less my own, and I have been squeezed into a number of university-level service commitments. I have less time for undergraduates and no time for shooting the breeze with friends. The haze of the moment seems to obscure the relief of having received tenure, and I can't remember feeling this professionally depressed since my first failed foray on the job market.

But there have been some good things this fall, too. The new faculty members we hired last year have been great additions to our department, and being a mentor to one of them has become a joy of my professional life. In my next column I'll talk about that, as a responsibility and a burden, an opportunity for good and a dangerous temptation.