All in the Game

Letting Go

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person It's Not a Zero-Sum Game Are a moderately heavy teaching load and an active research program mutually exclusive? First Person Pothead Ph.D. This is most definitely not a cautionary tale. First Person Subject Experts Need Not Apply Recent job postings and hires suggest that many academic libraries are losing interest in hiring humanities Ph.D.'s. Career News When Laptops Disappear Stolen computers containing sensitive data are a growing and costly problem for colleges. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Stanley Fish BACKUP

By the time you read this, I will have turned 66 and I will have begun the last month or two of my tenure as the dean of a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Life, I know, is supposed to move forward, but I find myself exactly in the same position I was in six and a half years ago when I was trying to decide whether to take the job I am now leaving. In the late spring of 1998, I had three choices. I could stay at Duke University and enjoy a very pleasant life of teaching and writing. I could retire and perfect the routines of leisure. Or I could stay in the academy, but try something new and different.

I went for option three, and now I have the same choice to make all over again. I could stay at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I could retire. Or I could boldly go where at least this one man has never gone before.

At this writing I haven't the slightest idea of what I'm going to do, but I do think about it, and because I think about it I carry a double perspective into the meetings that fill my day: the perspective, first, of whatever issue or problem has brought me to a particular room at an appointed hour, and, second, of my imminent departure from the scene over which I (at least nominally) still preside.

The result is that I'm never quite sure about what I should say, in part because I'm never quite sure what or whose interests I should be advancing and protecting. Now I can't pretend that my situation, fascinating though it may be to me, holds any fascination at all for anyone else, but I do believe that it can be generalized, for I am not the only one struggling with a question everyone must answer eventually: What do you do when you're on your way out?

Let me enumerate a few situations. (The names will be omitted in order to protect the guilty.)

I am sitting across from someone who believes, on good evidence, that she is about to receive an offer from a very prestigious university. We are pretending to have a collegial conversation, but we both know that what is really going on is a negotiation. The ground rules are clear. Each of us wants to secure an advantage over the other. She wants me to put something on the table before the offer comes through so that (a) she can be sure that her employment package is improved no matter what, and (b) in the event the offer is made she can bargain with both institutions from the improved position I will have put her in.

I, on the other hand, want to limit her options, either by (a) stonewalling until there is actually something in writing to respond to (this strategy courts the danger of pushing her into the arms of my rival, for she can read it as evidence of insufficient ardor) or (b) making a pre-emptive offer, one she can accept only on the condition that she inform the other institution that she is no longer on the market. The best strategy is (b), especially if I really want her to stay (of course I say to everyone, "I really want you to stay").

That's the game, but I'm having difficulty playing it because I'm having trouble remaining on my side of the table, and the reason is that I am acutely aware that pretty soon it will not be my table, but somebody else's, and I will be on the beach or selling real estate.

I hear myself uttering sentences that begin, "If I were you, I would ...," and at that moment I have turned from being the dean of a college to being a career counselor to a friend, which is not the job I'm paid to do.

Or consider another situation. I'm sitting down with the head of a department, and we are discussing appointments, and I am saying (as I should be), "Well, times are tough; next year we'll have very few positions if any, and it is likely to be a year or two after that before your department gets a new hire."

But then, somewhere in the middle of this speech, I begin to think, "Now that I'm exiting, wouldn't it be honest (and indeed a favor) to say, 'Let's face it; given budgetary constraints and the imperative (passed down to us by the provost's office) to make hard choices, you guys are never going to be given another position and you'd better start thinking about downsizing or consolidating or ending that graduate program.'"

But halfway through this heretical and undiplomatic thought, too much on the brutal side of honesty, I have another: "Wait a minute! For all I know my successor, whoever he or she may be, may not have that view at all. What I see as an enterprise past its time a new dean may see as an opportunity for academic investment that will pay big dividends just down the road. I guess I'll keep quiet and say the usual and expected thing."

If I have trouble knowing how to speak to individual faculty members and to department heads, I am virtually tongue-tied when I am trying either to persuade associate deans not to abandon the ship -- after all, I'm the chief rat -- or to recruit new associate deans to fill the vacancies that always open up at this time of the year when fellowships and grants and other forms of leave are awarded. Here the questions are obvious and unanswerable: For whom will I be working? How can I be sure that I will have the same responsibilities and the same degree of autonomy I have now? Will the office be organized in the same way? Won't the new dean want to bring in his or her own people?

Beats me! The best I can do is murmur something about the importance of institutional memory and call on the loyalty I have already betrayed. My last resort, which has quickly become my first, and won't work at all when I'm talking to support staff, is to say, "You can always resign if the new order of things is not to your liking."

I experience a version of this difficulty every Monday at our weekly meeting when the discussions are all about plans for the future and when every decision turns on variables that in six months may no longer be in play or may have been replaced by new ones not yet dreamt of in our philosophy. I join in and have my say (which is by definition decisive) but in the back of my mind I'm always thinking either (a) "What do I care? This will soon be someone else's problem," or (b) "Anything we settle on could, and probably will, be undone in a minute," or both.

But by far the most dicey moments are those when I'm talking to a colleague who is considering retirement and desires, reasonably enough, to go out in style and with a measure of dignity. The situation is tricky and delicate: A career is winding down, and the veteran faculty member is seeking both validation of his or her achievements and an assurance that retirement will mean neither financial distress nor professional nonbeing.

What one wants is leisure and employment, security and opportunity, diminished responsibility and better space -- all at the same time. It's not a package any one can deliver, and I invariably grow impatient as I listen to someone who wants to stop working but wants also to have an office ready whenever he has a mind to drop in, someone who is tired of teaching, but who wants the right to teach courses any time he likes at three times the compensation I would have to pay a younger, more energetic lecturer, someone who says he's ready to pack it in, but wants a guarantee that his favorite programs will be continued.

And then I remember the final line of a poem by George Herbert, a poem in which the first-person voice spends 75 lines berating the sins of others before realizing at the last instant that "My God, I mean myself," or, in even more biblical terms, "Thou art the man."

So I am at once the person discussing retirement and the person facing retirement, the person who wants to strike the best deal possible for the college and the university and the person who wants the college and the university to say, "We can't live without you and we'll give you anything you want if you'll only stay."

I won't be staying (at least not in this position), but I'm at the watch for a while yet, and in the meantime I have to figure out an answer to the question I began with: "What do you do when you're on your way out?" The obvious answer -- and it is one I believe in and have preached -- is just do your job; but as I have been realizing more and more, that's not as easy as it sounds.