As The Department Turns: What Causes Conflict, Drama And Other Energy Sapping Dynamics

Things can explode when you least expect it!

 This week's Chronicle of Higher Education features a blog post by David Perlmutter entitled "It's Not Your Fault."  Aimed mostly at helping assistant professors and graduate students understand how they might have unintentionally become the target of a senior person's anger or jealousy, Perlmutter explores six factors that might cause unwelcome behaviors by senior people.  While it is sometimes the case that a younger person's actions might have provoked the incident or ongoing dynamic, it is also likely that it didn't. The project of figuring out what went wrong can be just as agonizing for a younger person as the reprisals and criticisms themselves. 

As Perlmutter notes wisely, "sometimes the quickest relief comes from merely figuring out that a single tussle or a longstanding feud is not your fault but rather originates in the minds, culture, politics, or economic situation of others. So don't bang your head on the office door trying to uncover what you did to create an enemy. Sometimes the enemy is the problem, not you."  Knowing that you are not at fault does provide quick relief -- but real change can only come when a whole department adopts an ethic of civility and respect, and works hard to maintain it.

What makes the behaviors Perlmutter describes tolerable and normal in an academic setting, whereas in other settings they would be considered aberrant?  For example, a student who repeatedly shouted at other students would be perceived as an asocial bully; a corporate executive who schemed, cheated and manipulated things to serve only personal interests would be seen as a weak link in a well-run business; a politician who tolerates only his own values and enforces them ruthlessly is known as a dictator.

One answer to the question of how academia's maintains its exceptionalism is our rigid seniority system.  The tenure and promotion system gives some people absolute power over the fortunes of others, and it can easily transform nontenured people into bargaining chips, allies, enemies and/or surrogates.  A second, and less frequently discussed, dynamic of tenure is the tendency of faculty to work at one institution over the course of decades, causing them to over-invest in their sense of control and authority within the department rather than be ambitious in a larger world that is less easily controlled.

Perlmutter's theory suggests a kind of deference to the status quo:  be clear about what you are, and are not, responsible for in a department that will not change.  Alter behaviors of your own that are drawing negative attention if you can; accept those dynamics that you cannot change, and work hard to leave, if these dynamics are impossible to evade. This is one good approach, and I would certainly advocate it over participating in draining, time-consuming personal struggles against people who will cheerfully stab you in the back to get you out of their hair.  But how might a department's dynamics actually be altered over time to diminish or eliminate the conditions I have described above?  Here are a few suggestions.

Vote as little as possible.  I would put voting at the top of the list of department practices that create cascading damage.  Department cliques form around common ideological predilections that not only harden over time, but require recruitment to maintain themselves.  This affects hiring and promotion decisions as cliques strive to maintain dominance over department policies by controlling more votes.  It also means that younger and more vulnerable members of a department are always being scrutinized for their loyalties in ways that prevent them from making independent decisions for fear that they will be punished by one clique or another.  If you work in a department where there is a high insistence on secret ballots, you can be sure of three things:  that everyone knows, or will know, who voted which way; that the final vote does not reflect any collective agreement about what should happen; and that there is a system of informal punishment in play, probably run by those people who are insisting on the secret ballot in the name of "protecting" everyone who is not a full professor from retribution (by some other person, over there.)

If you must vote, find ways to reincorporate the minority and make compromises with it.  Department power brokers don't do this, not only because they don't have to, but because every time they win a vote their endorphins go off the scale.  This is what they live for:  to them, each vote won is another brick in the wall of their ideological fortress.

But it doesn't have to be that way.  Did you win a vote about a line going to one field rather than another?  This is the moment to reach out to the other group and find a way to define the line to take account of their interests; or to promise that the next available line will be dedicated to their excellent proposal.  Questions of department policy can be trickier, and for this reason, should never be voted on.  Because of the right to autonomy that disagreeable senior people can claim, a privilege that few administrators will challenge, no senior person has to abide by a policy that s/he did not vote for.  More time has to be taken to establish the grounds for a policy, and to establish a policy that everyone can live with.  Consider having these discussions facilitated by a professional if your department is very fragmented and can't make these decisions on its own.

Be creative in finding ways for younger people to practice contributing their views and running things.  All department committees do not have to be run by a tenured person, or have a tenured person on them.  Conversely, all departmental committees ought to have one untenured person on them, unless there are so few untenured people that this places an undue burden on them.  The transfer of influence to younger generations should be a project so continuous that it is hardly visible.  Instead, what many departments have is a situation where a few aging faculty are grimly holding onto the reins of everything until they retire.  What that conveys to younger generations (we can even be talking about people in their forties and fifties who are themselves fully promoted and well-regarded in their fields) is that they only way to get what you want is to become that same person. 

Have a department handbook and review it regularly to make sure that it matches desirable department practices.  We don't like to spend our time hashing these things out and writing things down, but a department that makes a practice of saying what it means and meaning what it says is going to be less vulnerable to power plays and the factionalism that is incited by bad guys.  The result of not having an updated handbook can be an unspoken sense of "how things are done" that is not written down anywhere, cannot be conveyed to others precisely, and is tremendously powerful because it represents "rules" that are invisible to all but those who wield enough influence to enforce them.  Often practices are "recalled" at a moment of decision-making, which politicizes the process and allows self-interest to substitute for transparent procedure. One version of this is the notion of "precedent,"which has tremendous force in my institution and in my department, even though it is only appropriate to the legal system.  When someone starts talking about "precedent" you know you are in the danger zone, and that an outcome will be determined by the most powerful people in the room because a) they have the longest memories; and b) even if their memories are not accurate, they have the power to enforce their memory anyway.  Remember:  there are things that are governed by the department handbook, and everything else is up for discussion. Ruling by precedent is another way of saying, "Things ain't gonna change.  Not in my lifetime."

Don't naturalize abuses of power by ignoring them.  One problem with Perlmutter's view about correctly locating responsibility for bad behavior is that it locates abuse of power in the dyad.  Any good executive, manager or shrink would tell you that asocial actions have a corrosive effect on everyone, not just the person at which they are aimed.

When acts of abusiveness and factionalism are perceived as isolated and not contextualized by the department's tolerance for them, something else occurs.  The department divides itself into bullies, the directly bullied, and the people who watch -- who are themselves being indirectly bullied.  Here's a scenario for you:  in the midst of a departmental disagreement, a member of the department starts screaming at another.  Silence falls.   This has happened before.  After a pause, the two actors in this drama drop out of the discussion, a decision is reached, the meeting ends.  The screamer leaves the room, and a number of well-wishers run up to the person who was screamed at and ask sympathetically:  "Are you all right?"

What is wrong with this picture?  First of all, it doesn't actually matter what decision was reached, it was a bad one because it was made under the wrong conditions.  Furthermore, having gotten away with this form of venting in the past, the screamer has done it again, and has corrupted the process of decision making completely without being censured by the group.  While the group has established its capacity to be sympathetic, it hasn't demonstrated its capacity to be ethical.

Don't gossip. Don't make commitments as to what you will support, or have conversations about departmental matters, unless you are actually in a meeting.  If you are doing this, for whatever reasons, you are subverting the group decision-making process.  The other thing you are doing is letting departmental business expand to fill time that would be better spent writing, reading, prepping for class, going to the gym or watching YouTube videos featuring cats doing tricks.

The following activities, conducted outside department meetings, contribute to factionalization that will eventually bite you in the butt:  saying spiteful things about people, regardless of how horrible they are; relating things as fact that are only speculation; representing someone else's thoughts on a matter; allowing another person to persuade you that you are uninformed and should follow the lead of your elders; receiving or seeking tales (that can never be completely true and may be false) about some other colleague's views about you and obsessing about them; becoming persuaded that only your group is right and the other group is not only wrong but that their success will be a disaster; assembling, or participating in, a bloc of committed votes prior to a departmental conversation about the issue at hand; and assuming that because someone has been nasty to you and your allies that you can be nasty to that person and hir allies without accelerating the damage.

I'm sure I could add to this list, and that readers will.  My point is that anything that happens in a department is part of a group dynamic that implicates every person who is a member of the group.  This is why departments acquire reputations for good or bad behavior, and it is why troubled departments cycle through the same scandals and difficulties over and over again.  Acting systematically to prevent that is as important as understanding and addressing any of the individual events and decisions that are the symptoms of dysfunction.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Gendering War In The Hurt Locker

It may turn out that I am one of the few people in the United States who didn't like The Hurt Locker, a movie about a bomb disposal team in Iraq which is all the rage. Yes, I know it won six Academy Awards, including the first Oscar ever awarded to a woman director, Katherine Bigelow. I realize that I am always supposed to cheer for the woman, but as a feminist historian and cultural critic I found this film terribly disturbing.

(Speaking of history: Bigelow's Wikipedia entry lists her as married to James Cameron; go to his, and you will discover that they divorced in 1991, and Cameron has added one ex and a current wife since.)

There were the good disturbing parts, of course. Bigelow, a director of several action and horror films, was exactly the candidate for the scenes where Staff Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) has to figure out, not where the bomb is, but how many bombs there are. These moments are positively chilling. Bigelow plays with the scene by trigering the emotions -- suspense, relief, dread and "gotcha" surprise -- that are a staple of the horror film, twisting them to suit and transform another genre. In one early scene James, having defused one IED, begins to pull on a wire only to discover that the bomb he disabled is attached to six others live devices, and he is standing right in the middle of all of them. (Imagine a similar scene where a young woman sticks her hand in a cereal box, looking for a snack, and comes out with a handful of spiders.) The horror if war in Iraq, Bigelow tells us by switching up her genres, makes it historically unique among wars. Similarly, there is a grisly scene where the squad discovers a bomb factory: in an inner room, there is a child's corpse with a bomb sewn inside; James must defuse the bomb by plunging his hands into the freshly butchered body. These scenes are outlandish, but their deftness makes them read true.

That said, one problem with The Hurt Locker is that, for a war movie, it is also strangely dull, despite Bigelow's perfect skills as a director and several lively combat scenes. It relies for its narrative on a series of tense scenes: in each, the bomb disposal team deals with excruciating danger as the devious bombers challenge James' skills as a defuser. Each episode is beautifully crafted, but quite similar; they are interspersed with far too sketchy glimpses into the inner lives of the men who do such work (they drink, they fight, they smoke, they play video games.) Recreation for the squad consists of getting nasty drunk and belting each other in the stomach until one guy collapses (because you have to feel the pain somehow, right? Duh.)

Lesson? The inner lives of these men have been completely evacuated by the work they do; they are dead men walking. As I recall, one soldier actually describes himself as "already dead" early in the film. James, in one of the few scenes where the men speak about something other than their work, cannot seem to remember whether he is actually married or not. He knows he has a son, and that his son has a mother, but the woman's precise social relationship to him is foggy, in contrast to the acute sense of space and time he can access when defusing an IED.



Since I tend to not be interested in men or women who have lost empathy for other living things, it may be my limitation that I had trouble connecting to the characters. However, I also didn't love the lack of plot in The Hurt Locker, even though this is probably a skillful political device if you want to win an Oscar about a charged subject. The movie is neither pro-war or anti-war; it just is. Furthermore, I occasionally found the action outside of the bomb disposal and combat scenes confusing -- like why, for example, does James hunt down the family of the murdered child only to terrorize them and then run away? What does he think they did to deserve him storming their house? Is the point that he doesn't know what he wants from them? Is it supposed to be a metaphor for the whole rotten enterprise? None of this is clear. Or why, at the end of film, does he ends up back in Iraq? I thought he had re-hitched because he was no longer suited for civilian life (a common trope for twentieth century wartime masculinity dating back to Erich Maria Remarque's 1928 World War I novel All Quiet On The Western Front.) My friend, on the other hand, thought he had actually been killed, and was doomed for all eternity to dress in the fat suit and wander the dusty streets of (name your favorite city in Iraq here.)

Like Kimberley Pierce, who directed the haunting and lightly released Stop-Loss (2008), I suspect that Bigelow is trying to break out into the big time (and succeeding, as Pierce did not) by marketing herself as a woman director who "knows men." This may be one explanation for the most more serious historical problem with The Hurt Locker in my view: there are no women in it, minus a brief glimpse of the mother of James' son and shots of Iraqi women who literally scuttle around the streets during the various crises. In these scenes even male Iraqi bystanders have agency: they study American soldiers with empty, unreadable expressions (we are expected to experience the soldiers' constant watchfulness that any one of these men might trigger the bomb; the racist effect is that they all become terrorists.) Given the fact that collectively women have served over 150,000 tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and 2,000 of them have won the Bronze Star for valor in combat, I find it inexplicable that there are no uniformed women in this movie. None, not even in crowd scenes where men get to be the stars. In other words, part of what has been erased in The Hurt Locker is what makes this war historically distinctive -- so that Bigelow can hook us with portraits of wounded masculinity from past wars with which we are already (un)comfortable.

Therefore, it mattered that a woman directed this movie because....?

One explanation, and what ought to be of greater concern about The Hurt Locker, is that it skates over much of what is distinctive about this war to beat us over the head with an old story about war: irreparably wounded masculinity. Will James is Natty Bumpo, the man who knows Indians who, as Richard Slotkin taught us, will be central to American regeneration through violence but will forever remain outside civilization as a consequence. Furthermore, the cultural work of The Hurt Locker is similar to that of the Viet Nam movies that Jerry Lembke discusses so intelligently in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998): to persuade us that returning veterans are likely to be crazed, lost misfits who will never fit into society again. Following on a grisly discovery in London that one trendy chain store is selling a Travis Bickle fashion line (here's another link to a US store that will help you dress like the homicidal Viet Nam vet from Martin Scorcese's 1976 hit, Taxi Driver), I think this cultural trend should be of greater concern. Granted, many soldiers returned from Viet Nam terribly damaged, and some remain traumatized by their experiences to this day (although they weren't helped by the fact that shell-shock had been removed from the DSM-III, so they were given diagnoses that articulated their condition as unrelated to their war experiences.) Many men and women have, and will, return from Iraq requiring far more care than I suspect they will get.

But the legacy of Viet Nam movies, as Lembke argues, is the cultural expectation that once a man has gone to war he never really returns to a normal social world. Bigelow underlines this promise by turning James into a one-trick pony, who lectures his baby son about how he has come to only love bombs. There is also an idiotic psychotherapist who appears periodically in the film to remind us that no one --particularly those whose job it is to do so -- cares about what soldiers are going through. The pompous shrink delivers endless platitudes in the face of his client's growing despair and fear, and he refuses to actually engage the world that the bomb disposal unit inhabits. When challenged to do so by his angry client, for unexplained reasons the shrink finally agrees to go out on patrol with the squad. He does a variety of stupid things, utterly unsupervised by anyone, and gets blown up. Predictably, this adds to his client's burden of guilt and shame.

So yes, The Hurt Locker won six Academy Awards -- but in my view it doesn't hold a candle to the Iraq movies that have been overlooked, most prominently In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007). But the verdict from this historian? Thumbs down.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.