Wit and Wisdom from the Academic Life

Well, sort of an academic. I started my career as an aspiring scholar/critic, but parted ways with the real scholarly world decades ago (the world of graduate and research institutions). Anyone who wishes may construe my memories as the sour grapes of someone who did not get tenure at my “starter” institution.

But several pithy remarks have stuck in my memory (N.B. I have put the remarks in quotes for dramatic effect. The words may not be exactly what the speaker said, but the substance is accurate. Thucydides is my precedent.):

a. “Never give a position to someone who wants it.” Overheard from a senior department member who was worried about the overheated competition and intense lobbying among mid-level faculty for the soon-to-be-open department chair’s position.
b. “In the academic world, the lower the stakes, the more ferocious and bitter the conflict.” In the context of department meetings at Wayne State University, where the English Department had meeting after meeting trying to hash out the terms of a department charter, the writing of which had been “assigned” by the dean of liberal arts. The discussions were quite rancorous, especially as regarded the participation of junior faculty in the selection of the most qualified tenure candidates. Senior faculty felt their turf was in danger of usurpation, when they were the ones who had most at stake in the decision. Junior faculty who aligned themselves with senior faculty later got tenure recommendations, but also later left the institution anyway for more fertile and hospitable institutions. This happened in many cases.
c. “The junior faculty are acting like a bunch of spoiled children.” A tenured faculty member in one of the above-mentioned meetings.
d. “In a meeting the first item on the agenda, important or not, will get 75% of the discussion time. Therefore, the way to organize the agenda is to put relatively minor issues first, chew up the time on them, and then push the important issues to a vote at the last minute to limit discussion.” The same tenured faculty member, considering strategy for an upcoming meeting on participation of junior faculty in the tenure-deliberation process.
e. “You’ve heard that tenure depends on research, teaching, and publication. What it really depends on is publication, publication, publication.” Dean of Liberal Arts to a meeting of tenure-track junior faculty at Wayne State University, sometime between 1970 and 1974.
f. “Dr. Smallenburg will never be one of our major scholars.” Dr. Ralph Nash, in a confidential evaluation of yours truly. On the principle that it’s a good idea to have recent evaluations entered into one’s job-application folder, I had Nash’s evaluation entered before I knew what it said. A friend in the business world offered to request my folder from the UC Berkeley job-placement office (claiming that I was a prospective employee), so I agreed, and there was this comment. I had the evaluation removed shortly thereafter.

The above constitute the “wit” section. Now, for the wisdom.

In the academic world (and other jobs as well, I suppose), you should not only always have an exit strategy, you should have a strategy for knowing what’s being said about you. The “confidentiality” canard is that an evaluator must be able to be honest. However, the candidate is always, under such a system, potentially the victim of someone else’s unsuspected ill will. The dishonesty involved in getting hold of my own application portfolio and looking at “confidential” evaluations is entirely justified. In my case, the evaluator was giving his honest opinion without any malicious intent. And he was right: it was already becoming apparent that I was not a good fit for an academic department of Wayne’s stripe. I hold no grudges about Nash’s comments. He was doing his job.

But confidentiality can also mask outright betrayal. You can’t depend on your sense of trust for an evaluator.

This happened to a friend, who asked two professors to write on his behalf when he was looking for a job after graduating with his PhD from the UC Berkeley English Department. From his relations with both these professors, he had no reason to expect anything but glowing reports. At least one, however, attacked him savagely, and this “recommendation” was among the documents sent to institutions my friend was applying to. He wound up getting a job in spite of it, but discovered what had happened several years later. He went on to contribute solidly and creatively to the world of letters, but harbors intense bitterness about UC Berkeley.

In another case, when I was on the hiring committee at Wayne State, an applicant for a position in anthropology was unaware of a terrible letter in his folder. I was still under the impression that the confidentiality system had to be supported (this before I discovered the breach in my own fortifications), but a colleague of mine said he was going to tip off the candidate because the professor had been very unfair to him in the recommendation. Although I would not have done so myself, I appreciated the sense of fairness this covert revelation involved, and I began to change my own opinions.

This same colleague mentioned, in the case of this same candidate, that in our hiring interviews, he had observed that the candidate was becoming the victim of a prejudice over which he could have no control. The candidate was a soft-spoken southerner, from a southern university. He spoke slowly, with a drawl. Apparently, my colleague had overheard remarks to the effect that the candidate was inferior because he wasn’t “quick” in his answers—they didn’t come out with the readiness northerners and people from the east associate with a “bright,” “energetic” person, someone with “chutzpah,” as an associate chair said.

Though I am rarely in a position to write recommendations for jobs, I am frequently asked to write recommendations for scholarships. My policy is not to write a recommendation I would not want to give to the candidate. This is only fair. If an evaluator can’t, in honesty, write positively, he/she should not write at all, concealing under the cover of “confidentiality” reservations that could well hurt the candidate.

Another, perhaps more insidious consequence of the confidentiality rule (though it could as well be unrelated, and I just bring it up here because I recall thinking this was an egregious violation of a candidate’s trust): a professor writes on behalf of several students. From my service on a recent hiring committee (not in English, this time), I noticed that the same CSULA professor had written on behalf of three different candidates. Comparing the remarks, I discovered that she (the writer was female) had practically boiler-plated each evaluation: professing in all three to have a close and professional relationship with the candidate that enabled her to assess the candidate’s excellent qualifications and recommend him without hesitation. The same claim was made in each case, but none of the candidates could be distinguished on the basis of the letter, which could as well have been printed out from a computer file copy by an assistant who had been advised to make the appropriate name changes.

(This is similar to the candidate who forgets to change the name of the institution he/she applied to last in a letter addressed to another institution. This has led to instant rejection.)

One final word of wisdom: never place commitment to an institution ahead of your own self-interest. The institution will not hesitate to sacrifice you when its self interest is at stake.

I suspect people more closely and continuously involved in the academic world, especially four year and graduate institutions, have much more to contribute in the way of wit and wisdom.