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Searching for Sinister Motives

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By Jack Thomas

You are in the first weeks of your new tenure-track job, and you are ecstatic. Overwhelmed, exhausted, and jittery -- but ecstatic. You have achieved the dream you have been nurturing for years. You want to savor this, and make sure you get it right.

Your colleagues are mostly senior to you, in both age and experience, but you met a handful of junior colleagues during your campus interview, and you are one of two new hires in your department, so you have a partner for your trip down the tenure track. Happily, you and Fellow New Hire, or FNH, turn out to have quite a bit in common, and you form a friendship.

Together, you drift toward a junior colleague hired a few years before you, one who shares your extracurricular interests in such lowbrow hobbies as watching baseball and drinking beer. You feel comfortable in your relationships in the department and easy in these two friendships.

Naturally, on the occasional evening out at the bar, the talk turns to the college and the department and to your colleagues. Your Slightly Senior Junior Colleague (SSJC) has more experience, so you come to rely on him for information about your colleagues and their relationships with one another.

To your surprise, SSJC occasionally drops hints that all is not as it seems in the department, that you have to "watch your back," that you should be wary of certain people.

To his credit, he does not ram this information down your throat. Curious to learn more about the people with whom you work each day, you and FNH pump him frequently for information, for stories of old quarrels and rivalries, and for his opinion on each of your colleagues.

On those fishing expeditions, you learn from him that a bloc of your senior colleagues have formed a cabal to block any positive change in the department. You learn that everyone in the department hands out easy grades, that only one or two (including SSJC, of course) are brave enough to deliver the low grades the students deserve. You learn that your senior colleagues want to block the hiring of any young scholars with strong publishing potential, since they will make the current faculty members look less productive.

You find all of this surprising, but you begin to interpret things you hear in department meetings from SSJC's perspective, and much of what you see and hear seems to support his perspective.

When the department decides on a new hire in the spring of your first year, the vote breaks down along the lines that your colleague has outlined for you, with most of the senior faculty members in the cabal voting for the candidate who seems to you to have less publishing potential. The cabal loses that vote, and you think smugly that you have thwarted its efforts to stagnate the department.

The next year, the new hire joins your group of right-thinking junior colleagues, and all of you gradually fall under the sway of SSJC. The nights at the bar increasingly become gripe sessions about your senior colleagues, about anyone who doesn't share your view of the department, and about how you can plot to undermine any proposal they raise at departmental meetings.

SSJC dispenses information and secrets like favors, and you feel privileged to receive them. Some of them flatter you, like the ones he hears from students about your growing popularity as a teacher. Some demonstrate his loyalty to you; he tells the new hire, for example, who voted for her and who voted against her hiring.

Around this time, something very disturbing happens.

Another colleague, one who earned his tenure during your first year in the department, falls out favor with SSJC. You are not clear on the reason, but gradually this tenured colleague stops showing up on nights out. Occasionally SSJC lets slip meaningful hints about seeing Tenured Colleague slip into the offices of the members of the senior cabal. You have whispered conversations in the hallway about his falling to "the dark side."

But you like Tenured Colleague, even if his ideas about the department vary from yours. You enter into conspiratorial conversations about him with quiet shame, feeling as if you are betraying a friend. When SSJC isn't around, you maintain a friendly relationship with him.

Not SSJC. One day you are walking with SSJC from the cafeteria, and Tenured Colleague approaches on an oncoming path. You stop to talk, and SSJC walks off in another direction, unwilling even to acknowledge his colleague's presence. You find this silly, but you overlook it.

In the following year, SSJC makes his tenure bid, and it divides the department into bitter encampments. You and your junior colleagues support SSJC vehemently; some of your senior colleagues oppose him just as vehemently. Their reasons, you learn from hushed conversations in the dining hall, have to do with his temper and his attitude toward his colleagues.

You understand that both of those are problems. You have seen SSJC throw temper tantrums in department meetings, and you were disturbed by them, but you felt he had right on his side. You also heard him blow up at a student once, which you found even more disturbing. You were too cowardly to approach him about it; later, you apologized to the student for him and for the department. As for his attitude, you know he divides the department, but isn't that just because some members of the department can't handle the truth?

Occasionally, now, your fellow junior colleagues talk to one another outside of the presence of SSJC, and you worry about him. He seems to be taking on a bunker mentality, and he only seems to have time for you if you want to talk about his mistreatment at the hands of the department. He has become increasingly defensive. He can't seem to praise his own accomplishments, one of your colleagues notes, without insulting everyone else in the department.

To your relief, he gets his tenure. You all hope that it will ease the tension in the department, and that he will relax and stop seeing conspiracies against him behind every corner.

Your hopes are disappointed.

At the next departmental meeting, he throws another tantrum. Arguing for a position that you and your junior colleagues support, he begins to rant and insult the department head. Disturbed by the recurrence of this bad behavior, you wish to distance yourself from his position, and you and your fellow junior colleagues immediately back away from the argument he is making and strike a compromise with the injured chair.

Afterward, you and several of your junior colleagues approach SSJC, both personally and via e-mail, to let him know that while you support his causes, you wish he would argue for them without insulting your senior colleagues in public, which only hurts the causes you both support.

And that's it. With the delivery of that simple message, you fall out of favor. You are no longer among the trusted. You have dared to express your disagreement with SSJC's message and methods, and dissent -- you now come to understand -- is not tolerated. Your Fellow New Hire makes the same mistake; he, too, is banished from the inner circle.

You are emotionally racked by the experience, but you discover that what you feel is not despondency, but relief.

You feel as if you are breathing the free air again for the first time in years. You look at everyone around you, in the department and the college, with a fresh pair of eyes -- your own. You have climbed out of the tunnel of SSJC's perspective, and find that the landscape has changed entirely.

You slowly begin to re-establish relationships with your senior colleagues. You realize that they are no more members of a cabal than you were. You see that they have a particular vision of the department, one that they are willing to fight for, and that you do too. You remember that this is how democracy works.

You look back over your years in the department and realize that not one of your senior colleagues has treated you badly -- that the most they have been guilty of is voting against a proposal you supported, or vice versa. You begin to think some more about why they might have voted in those ways.

Ultimately, you begin to feel sorry for SSJC. He may remain miserable and isolated for the rest of his career. His views of the department border on clinical paranoia. He needs professional counseling. You and he may never talk again.

Now the experience is behind you, and you want to pass along the moral of your story to new faculty members around the country who are preparing to start their first tenure-track jobs this fall.

You want to tell them to remember that no one narrative of a colleague, or a department, or a college, will give them the whole truth. You want to remind them that a smart investigator will collect as many perspectives as possible before passing judgment or forming an opinion.

You want to warn them against letting the perspective of any of their new colleagues dominate their own view of the department -- against letting anyone tell them how to think about anyone else. You want to warn them to make decisions about people based only on their own observations and experiences.

You want to advise them to take everyone at face value, to assume that people have good reasons for the positions they hold, and to understand that multiple and competing visions of a department or a program ultimately create better departments and programs than visions created by a single person or an exercise in groupthink.

You don't want to push them into pollyannish views but you do want to assure them that constantly searching for sinister motives is a depressing and exhausting experience.