symploke

The Ecology of Intellectual Work

When working, administrators may well think about persons and human relationships as often as professors think about ideas. Professors have their students to consider, of course, but what we commonly refer to as the faculty member's "own work" is the research and writing consequent to the manipulation of ideas. Administrators who continue to do academic work may admit to pre-dawn or nocturnal forays back into their scholarship. But when a member of the academic administration, Provost, Dean, or Department Chair, is on the job, the work he or she does concerns, above all else, the human relationships that make up the institution. Committees are appointed, funds are allocated, reviews are conducted, projects are supported, rewards are given or withheld, and in each instance what is foremost in mind are the human consequences of these decisions. Emblematically, an administrator must know the people involved. Compare to this the emblem of the faculty's faith in ideas, the blind submission. Essays arrive on the associate editor's desk without attribution; publication is blind, contingent solely on quality. The practice assures that ideas, not individuals, drive the field of inquiry. Blind administration, on the other hand, is so unthinkable as to be humorous, where nearly every decision made hinges upon the contingencies of personnel. An administrative appointment, moreover, is half job description (typically by vague and tenuous language) and half personality. In practice, the person shapes the office and the personality drives the work. Collegiality, the suggestion that we recognize and even enforce certain communal, behavioral norms, is the creation of the administrative mind, arising out of the conditions of administrative work, and in direct response to recent trends in the doing of academic work which discourages community.

Every subaltern administrator serves, in the common language of such appointments, "at the pleasure" of his or her superior. Chairs serve at the pleasure of Deans; Deans serve at the pleasure of Provosts. [End Page 30] Implicit in the phrase is the notion of administrative collegiality, and it signals an agreement, ipso facto, that the work conducted by administrators is the work of, by, and for the good will of persons. If the Chair continually displeases the Dean, he is dismissed, and he returns to the faculty, where the pleasure clause is outranked by tenure. Faculty members do not serve at the pleasure of department chairs, deans, or anyone else. The notion is unthinkable to the point of being satirical. Faculty members serve at their own pleasure; they work not with personalities but with ideas, contributing not to happiness nor even to contentedness but to the production of knowledge. The stereotypical absent-minded professor, in worn clothing, a little ditzy when it comes to practical matters, inept with social graces—the image implies cognitive brilliance and residence in a world apart from the more pedestrian existence of those who reside below.

To describe the birth of an intellectual, the emergence of a young mind out of the world of material things and into to the world of ideas, Willa Cather created a scene of student's ascent onto the top of a mesa, and a discovery there of an entirely new way of being, an ascent into "a world above the world" (217). The Professor's House (1925) creates a portrait of such an individual, at odds with family and colleagues, taken to task by his wife for his "intolerance" (24)—not of anyone or anything in particular, but for the material predicaments of existence generally. "Well, the habit of living with ideas grows on one," the professor tells his wife, in response to accusations of anti-social behavior (141). For Cather's professor, the "vivid consciousness" of ideas is "the realest of his lives," dating back to his first conception of himself as a sentient being, so much so that "all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside," and not from within, where his real life resides. "His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him" (240). Cather's professor quarrels with...