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Wednesday, March 10, 2004

On having lots of free time

I was going to post something weeks ago on the subject of professors who don’t do half their jobs, but I didn’t have the time.  Now, however, one David Lester has illustrated the point quite nicely:  in a brief Chronicle of Higher Ed essay (being discussed around the academic blogs, here, here and here, for example), Lester writes that he finds academic work pretty easy as work goes.  So people should stop complaining.

Well, he has a point-- academics do like to complain, and some of them have absolutely no clue about what the rest of the workforce looks like.  (I remember refereeing a manuscript in which one essayist complained of the “relentless grind” and “misery” of academic work and in the same breath mentioned the pre-tenure sabbatical in which he briefly felt at peace.) But Lester’s essay is-- how shall I say-- a piece of work.  It seems you can decrease a lot of the “stress” of academic life by refusing all committee work, failing to answer your phone, and never showing up at meetings.  Who knew?

OK, deep breath:  I have a fabulous job and I love it.  I’m also the chair of my department’s Personnel Committee (overseeing ten promotion and tenure cases this year), and last year I chaired the Strategic Planning Committee.  I serve on the boards of the Rock Ethics Institute and the Institute for Arts and Humanities, as well as the College’s Curriculum Committee and Research and Graduate Studies Committee.  Since coming to Penn State I’ve also chaired a search committee for a new department head, co-chaired the Governance Document Revision Committee, and served on the Graduate Admissions Committee.  I’m also on the MLA Executive Council, on which I serve on two subcommittees.  And by no means is my record of service unusual-- I have colleagues who do much more than this.

Some of these committees are pro forma; some involve sudden bursts of work that knock out a couple of days in the middle of a semester; and some are absolutely essential to making the workplace work (the Governance Document committee, for example-- the intellectual equivalent of cleaning out the basement-- created a Fixed-Term Review Committee so that non-tenure-track faculty in the Penn State English department had a formal grievance procedure).

All told, committee work can account for anything between zero and thirty hours a week.  It’s not necessarily “stressful"-- in fact, I’m on a committee whose charge it is to ban the use of word “stress” altogether-- but it is time-consuming. 

There’s another kind of invisible faculty labor (again, not very stressful) that some people don’t do, namely, refereeing.  Each year I write about three or four letters for promotion and tenure cases, and read about a dozen manuscripts (articles and books) for various journals and presses, as well as proposals, fellowship applications, and so forth.  That’s actually a fairly light load, but if you want to do it right, it takes time and care-- and you want to do it right, because when it’s done wrong, it’s terrible for everyone concerned (applicants, candidates, presses, the profession, the environment, the universe).  Which leads me to a point that no one has ever made in the entire history of blogging.

Namely, that there’s an easy way to get out of all this committee work and refereeing work.  Simply declare that your entire profession is made up of charlatans and frauds! Yes, that’s right, announce to the world that your colleagues are craven or corrupt or politically correct-- that they no longer care about literature, say, or that they simply don’t meet your exacting intellectual standards, and guess what?  Very few people in your profession will trouble you for your considered, written opinion on the intellectual merits of your colleagues’ work!  Likewise, all you need to do to exempt yourself from the tedious, time-wasting reading of dissertations is to opine publicly that today’s dissertations are not worth reading!

I’ve been amazed by this phenomenon ever since my first weeks as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:  some (not all, but some) of the most scathing indictments of my profession come from people who no longer do any substantial work in it.  (And, of course, they construe this as a sign of their virtue.) I’ve seen people decline to review their junior colleagues on the grounds that they no longer have any interest in the work of the “younger generation” of scholars; I’ve seen senior colleagues publish books in which they claim that graduate students are jargon-spouting careerists who fail to meet the classes they’re assigned to teach (this is a real example, folks)-- but who (of course) do not know a damn thing about the graduate programs and graduate students in their own department.  These people think they’re lonely, principled voices of wisdom in the wilderness-- and meanwhile, they’ve basically said to their colleagues in their department and in their profession, don’t ever trust my judgment on anything pertaining to the workings of the department or the profession.  And as a result, they find themselves with lots and lots of free time.

OK, now back to grading papers.  It’s spring break here in central Pennsylvania-- that’s “spring break” in the sense one speaks of the Holy Roman Empire (i.e., neither holy nor Roman nor an empire)-- so I have a little extra ranting time, but still, work calls.

Posted by Michael on 03/10 at 06:18 AM
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