January 19, 2013

The longest week in history. Ended it in the department common room hearing old stories of the university as it was. Most of the history seemed to happen just before I came.

Inconsequential near-tiff with a colleague reminds me that my resistance to the optional being presented as the necessary is nearly adamantine.

Conversation with a colleague on the rain-swept sidewalk. He’d been away for a semester on a prestigious residency in a foreign country, doing work that is much admired in his own field. When he returns, his faculty record notes not that, but rather that he has been away from his various committee assignments and local duties, and grades him down. It’s a little like an astronaut’s having his pay docked for spending too much time on the moon. I suppose the university administration doesn’t sense what a deep vein of resentment and frustration it strikes by being at once dysfunctional and imperious. I was listening to the chairman of Chrysler speak on the radio, and he notes that dysfunction begins at the top, and that is generally true in my experience (plays when they go wrong can nearly always blame the director) and specifically true at the place where I have spent twenty nine years observing. Rule from the top presupposes superior insight at the top, which is ludicrous in most cases, surely in ours. We are meant to understand that the administration is not uniform, and that some are on the side of the saints, yet the saints do not prevail. Every person who is not in the administration knows that a university cannot be run like a corporation (a corporation cannot be run like a corporation and have a life expectancy.) Every person who joins the administration seems to forget that, or lets his fire be tamped by the new culture roundabout. The yeoman raised to the aristocracy becomes an aristocrat overnight. “Administration” is a culture and not a job, and like other jobs that become cultures, its self-critical impulse is the first virtue to go. In the talk about the good old days in the common room it was observed that nobody was in charge back then, and that it was better. It was not nostalgia. It was better. Even when I arrived the quality of an idea was counted more than who’d had it; wisdom and common sense would guide one’s actions rather than fear of frowns from the summit. When the locus of authority and the locus of wisdom are not the same, nothing but chaos lies ahead.