Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Disobey The President: Transforming The Military In Historical Perspective

We move forward into a summer of political negotiating that might end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the Clinton-era policy that lifted the ban on gays in the military, provided said gays pretend to be straight (and, as an ironic touch, created a phrase popular among the sexually dishonest who claim to be in sophisticated open relationships when actually they are just cheating like everyone else.) Policy makers and GLBT lobbyists wishing to lift the ban might usefully consult Beth Bailey's America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Harvard, 2009) as they consider how to present what is perceived by many to be an unprecedented alteration in the United States Armed Forces. As Bailey observes, the transition from the draft to an all-volunteer Army was a political decision made by the Nixon administration in 1970 that military brass resisted vigorously despite what they perceived as the poor quality of the draftees they were receiving. Appealing for volunteers to what the Army viewed as a narcissistic and indulgent youth culture, rather than relying on compulsory service and the traditional disciplinary measures designed to subdue individuality, was a system that had been in place since World War II. Despite what many perceived as the difficulties of instilling good discipline in unwilling warriors, and an Army War College study that argued the draft was unsustainable, the Army was comfortable with the system it knew.

Bailey reminds us how dramatic the changes designed to recruit an all-volunteer force were at the time: allowing common soldiers to grow their hair, decorate their rooms with psychedelic posters, live off-base with their families, hiring contractors to cook and clean, and allowing the consumption of beer on post all seemed to signal Armageddon to traditionalists in the 1970s. It is not insignificant, I think that it was in the 1970s that gay civil rights activists imagined that the bars to GLBT service passed during the Truman administration might fall in such a liberalized atmosphere. But this goal was eclipsed, first by Reagan's DOD Directive 1332.14 stating that homosexuality was "incompatible with military service," and then by the mobilization of gay activism to force the federal government to act in the AIDS crisis.

One critical thread that runs throughout the book is fear that the bodies who would find the volunteer military attractive would be ungovernable under any conditions, a conversation that centered primarily on race. Would the Army be more Black as it designed its appeal around employment and educational opportunities that would be attractive to the motivated poor? Or could the Army potentially be less Black -- as those who were either afraid to arm and train African-American men at the height of the Black Power movement, or who saw the failures of Vietnam as the failures of Black draftees -- hoped. This is important because it demonstrates that integration of the military had, over two decades, not eliminated racism (although no one advocated a return to segregation); and that military policy was perceived as critically linked to the social and political fabric of the nation, where conversations about Black exploitation vied with demands for Black opportunity. It also illustrates the tendency to elevate concerns about the failures of the common soldier to perform are not infrequently elevated over more appropriate concerns that would focus on leadership, command, training and the political viability of a wartime mission that is faltering.

Two other things strike me here, both related to the comparison that is often made between ending DADT and racial desegregation in the military, initiated in 1951 three years after Harry S Truman's Executive Order 9981. Black officers, most notably Colin Powell, have resisted this comparison, a stance that has been viewed as purely homophobic by gay activists. And while it is a homophobic stance, what was less well explained during the 1993 debate that resulted in DADT was the extraordinary difficulty of implementing racial integration and dismantling racism in the services, a project that continues to this day. I repeat: desegregation was not even initiated until three years after Truman's order, and race was an extremely contentious policy matter two decades later (as Bailey points out graphically in America's Army.) Was the compromise of DADT -- which is no different from a ban from the point of anyone who is queer -- actually a compromise after all, rather than a political punt by the Clinton administration? This might be worth taking a closer look at.

Secondly, to avoid getting stuck on the comparison between African-American civil rights and GLBT civil rights (a difficult conversation that inevitably becomes a distraction) Congressional and GLBT advocates might wish to focus instead on the difficulties of transitioning to an all-volunteer force in the 1970s, and the fact that they were overcome. In 1970, when Nixon proposed this shift, officers and noncoms almost uniformly believed that accommodating and encouraging individualism in daily military life (not to mention expanding the number of women in the service) would be a threat to good order. We see the same issues arising as are being addressed today: the capacity to ready troops for battle, and that altering the gender order would undermine structures of authority and the unquestioned obedience necessary to success in field operations.

What should be pointed out is that, not only was this transformation successful over time, but that it was also initiated in the midst of a long, difficult and inconclusive war. And yet, because this transition was ordered by the President, General William Westmoreland put the full weight of his authority behind it. Although, as Bailey writes, Westmoreland shared many of the reservations common among all the officers he spoke to on October 13 1970 at the Army Commanders Conference, he also believed that it was his --and their -- job to make the transition work if the President so desired it. As Bailey writes, Westmoreland "believed he must carry out the orders of his commander in chief to the best of his ability. And that day, he declared an end to debate. 'The decision has been made,' he said. 'I expect your full support.'" (51) And he got it.

So what's the lesson here? All institutional transformations are difficult. Achieving domestic partner benefits has not eliminated homophobia in the academy, and white people -- even when they are gay -- often are the direct beneficiaries of racism and class prejudice. Making comparisons between oppressions, in other words, invariably leads us into murky and difficult territory, even if the moral point is similar. But we can, in fact, point to specific moments in which limitations on military service have been lifted, and draw two conclusions. The first is that the successful outcome of that transformation, by which I mean the full integration of the group into military service in a way that is perceived as non-problematic, will come many years down the road. As Bailey notes in a later chapter, the idea that an all-volunteer Army might be more black was still distressing in the 1970s to numerous constituencies, some conservative and some liberal, twenty years after integration had commenced. The second is that the military both resists change to its practices and has, perhaps, the capacity to effect change better than any other American institution, because of its culture of obedience.

College on $50 a Day: It's a Great Way to Fly

In "The Skies Are Alive With Fees", the New York Times' Joe Sharkey writes about Irish airline Ryanair's cutthroat pricing system. Boasting fares as low as $30 round trip on some European routes, Ryanair is also "the world champion among airlines in generating extra cash by charging customers fees for services and products that most airlines include in the ticket price: checked bags, beverages and — for a time before the idea was dropped amid public outcry — even using a wheelchair." What is called in business-speak "differential pricing," I believe, is not unknown to American travelers. Recently United offered me the opportunity to pay $25 extra for more leg room; there are special travel categories where travelers who pay more are checked in faster; and instead of the cute meals in little plastic dishes we used to get before 9/11, as Sharkey points out, flight attendants sell snack boxes that are full of all kinds of things only David Sedaris would eat.

Sounds undemocratic, doesn't it?

But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. This is a concept worth thinking about at the corporate university. Given rising tuition, faculty salaries that are barely keeping pace with inflation, and the inevitable accusations that some faculty work harder than others -- how about differential pricing for college students? Is it not true that some students do not ever feel the need to go to office hours? Is it not true that some faculty advise many students while others advise none? Is it not true that some faculty come in one day a week and others are on campus three to five days a week? Differential pricing could resolve all of these issues by creating a base price for college, and then giving undergraduates the opportunity to pay more for the frills. Those fees could then go directly to the faculty members providing the various services, thus permitting those faculty doing the most work to get paid for it.

The benefit to the budget-conscious student would be clear, since we know that many students' college experience is more about their friends and co-curricular experiences than any contact with faculty. How many generations of budding scholars have said romantically, "I learned so much more from conversations in the dining hall than I ever did in class?" Well, let's use this insight, and the Ryanair business model, to produce the leaner, meaner university. At Differentially Priced U. faculty attention would be a commodity, separated out from meals, dormitory, student fees, and whatnot, that students would pay for as needed. Not going to graduate school? Why pay for letters of recommendation you won't be using? Never go to office hours? Why should your tuition go to pay faculty to sit in their offices so other students can get help? Don't really give a damn about the comments on your papers? Well, why pay for them? Have the paper read quickly and processed for a grade, at the low-low price already included in your tuition.

You can see what I mean: this is a brilliant idea. And the reason this is a perfect system for students is that faculty who never attend their own office hours, don't put comments on papers anyway, and can't be trusted to write a letter of recommendation because they don't know your name -- won't get paid for it. Those who do know your name and can write for you will get paid. This also makes it the perfect system for popular faculty besieged by requests for letters of recommendation, whose only reward for teaching well is more students, and who complain that they are overwhelmed by grading and advising while other colleagues, who blow their students off, are home writing articles and getting more merit pay as a result.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Sticky Wiki

Cruising around the blogosphere as one does, and following link to link, I ended up on Academic Cog's December post about the academic job wiki. My favorite Cog was upbraiding midnight raiders who erased sections of the wiki, claiming that they had done so as a "political act" to protest the oppressions of the job market. I agree with Miss Cog, mutilating the wiki was a mean thing to do, although I think it was probably a function of wiki-madness itself, perhaps enhanced by drink, that gave some jerk the idea that hir own rotten year on the job market could be made better by destabilizing other people's peace of mind. Having never really thought much about this job market wiki before last year (when I stumbled upon it and, to my horror, found a colleague's divorce detailed by a disappointed job hunter as the reason why s/he was given a job, purportedly by sympathetic friends, that "should have" gone to someone junior), I have now encountered it accidentally several times in the last six weeks.

The first was at the AHA, where I had an exchange with another colleague who I don't know particularly well. Both of us are tenured full professors at SLACs, so neither of us (I think) fall into the category of people who might justifiably be enraged on our own, or our students', behalf by the state of the job market. I mentioned the incident I have sketched out above as a reason why I thought the wiki was not so great (not that there is anything one can, or should, do to stop it, as it is a wiki.) My colleague got fighting mad -- or at least it seemed so to me -- because, as s/he pointed out, the job market is so stacked against the job-seeker, anything that could give a candidate more information was justified.

OK, I said, trying to de-escalate, but any and all information? Including putting the personal business of strangers up? And how did more information about others really help a job seeker? (Academic Cog, by the way, makes a good point that being allowed to deal with disappointment privately is a benefit of the wiki.) As I also pointed out, one had to rely on the good will of other strangers that the information posted was accurate. And, although some of it seemed to be good sharing - "received phone interview 11/21" - some of it was bad sharing -- "I hear that there is a short list already." "I hear there is an inside candidate." Well, from whom did you hear that?

My colleague was unmoved by my skepticism and we agreed to disagree. I shimmered across the room to get another beer, and forgot about the wiki for another few weeks.

But once I started to ask around, I found that people actively on the job market give the wiki mixed reviews. For every jobless soul I have talked to who finds it helpful to have "more information" there is another who is made anxious by the compulsion to check the wiki and its inevitable failure to offer any concrete help in the job hunt. "I try to stay off it," more than one has confessed. "It makes me anxious, but I keep checking anyway," said another a few weeks back. And I get that: if you are a blogger, how many times a day do you check to see if there are any comments? Any comments responding to your response to a comment? A visit from the Diva that might need to be purged? (nb: the Diva has been very civil of late and we at Tenured Radical appreciate it.) How could you help but go on the wiki if you were on the market?

Okay, so when I decided to write about the Academic Job wiki, I went to the original wiki, and then followed Academic Cog's link to the scratchpad version that was established when the Raiders of the Lost Wiki took a number of pages down from the real one. And I found, in relation to my own American Studies searches at Zenith:

NB to candidates: Caution when applying here. Institutional cultures vary by department, last year's search for a [field censored by TR] specialist in [department censored by TR] was tanked by a hostile admin, and several junior fac of color were not granted tenure. Research well, ask around, and get the specs.

Now, this information is only partially accurate, to begin with. Furthermore, as neither of our American Studies searches were partnered with the named department, or in the designated field, and the search chairs are reporting to an entirely different administration (president, provost and divisional dean are all different people), I ask you: what did this have to do with the actual searches that candidates would be participating in? What does the wiki tell them that helps them be better candidates for our jobs? That there is racism at Zenith? Well I could have told you that if you had asked. And those who work at universities where there is no racism might want to write a comment for this post about what it is like to work under those conditions. Enquiring minds want to know.

I suspect that the person who wrote the wiki post is the same anonymous commenter who occasionally shows up on this blog to hint darkly about my naivete about the "troubles" at Zenith. I don't mind the insinuation, although as regular readers of this blog know, having been among the first round of casualties in those troubles, aka, the Unfortunate Events, it is not I who needs to be reminded that the past is not always a place we want to visit. But at what university or college have these things not happened? Where have deserving people not been misunderstood? Welcome to the academy.

Furthermore, I wonder -- is such a comment actually intended to hurt rather than help? Certainly suggesting that job candidates ask directly about whether the tenure process is biased against candidates of color seems like a bad strategy. Ask me that and you are asking the person who will be candid and think it is a reasonable conversation in a recruiting situation; ask some other search chair and they might suggest you pick up your dossier on the way out the door. You really have no way of knowing. But let's assume encouraging people to make themselves conspicuous by collecting gossip that they have no way of evaluating is not malicious: how would a candidate act on that advice? Not apply for a job s/he is qualified for and increase the risk of remaining an adjunct instead? Or apply for the job, perhaps get it, and then be permanently vigilant about what terrible thing will happen next at the hands of unknown enemies?

Alright, I'll stop fulminating. I know that it was a spiteful attempt, probably by someone who has all the reasons in the world, to slam Zenith more generally in response to having been slammed by the Zenith personnel process. But as to whether such comments "help" others? Let's not be naive. And this leads me to the problem with the wiki: there seems to be no wiki administrator who is in a position to address the question of whether a post, disingenuously claiming to be helpful, actually hurts job candidates in the end by complicating their feelings about places that people inevitably experience differently and search processes which do not privilege the individual.

As to what I learned from the wiki, I think it would be helpful for people running searches to read it to think about what not to do and how to be as respectful of candidates as possible. As Academic Cog points out, search committees keep candidates on the string for far too long. Candidates receive interview requests so much at the last minute that even knowing whether to pre-register for the convention is impossible -- a convention you really might not be able to bear going to if you have no interviews. (The Radical once received such an invitation on Christmas Eve.) These endless timelines are something we need to re-think, since job searches may be disappointing on many levels, but they don't have to be gruesome or dismissive: to this extent, I agree wholeheartedly with my AHA colleague that more transparency would help. Reading the wiki comments should be sobering about the level to which those running searches do not feel bound by common courtesy. Not returning response cards included in the application by the candidate; not acknowledging the receipt of applications; not letting people know they are out of the running; personal rudeness on interviews: the list is long, and these careless things happen everywhere, including Zenith, I am sorry to say.

After my own search is over, I will do a post about how to do a search that will include some things I wish I had done better this year -- maybe an article for AHA Perspectives. Someone should, at any rate, and I hope some of the comments on this post will give advice on that. But let me say that although the wiki does no terrible harm, the good it does may be undermined by the level to which it incites insecurity among job seekers and distributes questionable information (some of the clothing advice is truly useless obsessing: no one does-- or doesn't -- get a job because s/he did -- or didn't -- wear a dark suit.) What might make sense is if, alongside the wiki run by job seekers, each professional assocation maintained a wiki in which search chairs who had advertised with that association's newsletter posted a tentative schedule at the time of placing the ad, and were asked to either maintain that schedule or alter it if circumstances dictate. Comments about discourteous or unprofessional treatment that go directly and confidentially to the Vice President of the Professional Division of that association could also be a feature of this page. Job seekers have a perfect right to do what it takes to feel empowered, but having information made publicly available by the search committees themselves strikes me as an intervention that would allow those who want to get off the wiki to do so.

The No Asshole Rule: A Reflection

As you know if you make a close study of Tenured Radical 2.0 in all of its features, I have been reading Robert I. Sutton's The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. And to get to the punchline quickly: you should read it too. It is short, it is well written and Sutton -- a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University -- has written a book that nicely bridges the worlds of business and intellectual work.

What occasioned my purchase of this book? Well, it doesn't really matter, does it, because I loved it and I wish something like it had been available to me years ago. I would also say that the bulk of my labor this year will be administrative, and because there is no formal mentoring in this kind of work, I do what I can to learn management techniques, either by observing adminstrators at Zenith closely and seeing why they do or do not succeed, or by reading. This is the point at which the post could sprawl and take all morning but let me give you a few highlights that should get you to read this book, whether you are an administrator or a faculty member, whether you are an administrative assistant, a full professor, a student or a dean.

First, Sutton emphasizes that we can all be prone to acting badly, and that it is important to distinguish between temporary assholes who exhibit nasty behaviors occasionally (losing one's temper, telling a gossipy story as passive-aggressive revenge or as a self-agrandisement strategy, glaring at and belittling others, yelling) and certified assholes, who deploy bullying, intimidating and demeaning behavior toward others as a matter of course. He also notes that the first step in thinking about this is to categorize oneself. Be honest: are you an asshole? What have you done in the past that resembles this behavior, and how often in the course of daily life do you behave like an asshole? One of the differences between temporary and certified assholes is not just frequency of behavior, but that temporary assholes have enough objectivity and empathy to perceive the effect they have on others, understand that what they have done is wrong, apologize and change. Certified assholes believe that they are always right, often do not remember what they have done, and if they do, justify it as a normal response to being in struggle with stupid people who are a threat to them, their values, and the good of the institution. They don't change: they force the rest of us to accomodate to them, and because of this, create an atmosphere of fear and loathing among both the direct objects of their bullying and those who observe it second hand.

We'll start here: I can be a real asshole. Read some of the posts on this blog, prior to the 2.0 edition and when I thought I was anonymous, if you don't believe me. Better yet: don't. Just believe me.

But that said, I am not a certified asshole, and because it is too self-congratulatory -- even for me -- I'm not going to tell you why I know this. But here are some asshole behaviors that are particular to the academy, in my experience, and at one time or another I have been guilty of several:

1. Yelling at people to win an argument or force everyone to do things your way. Now, we all yell at people occasionally -- often when provoked by an asshole or an airline employee -- but not uncommonly yelling occurs in meetings, because that is where faculty do most of their business. Certified assholes use this as a consistent tactic, and it sometimes extends to tantrums. I have a friend elsewhere who has described a colleague that, when on the brink of losing his temper, begins to turn a different color, become physically tight and tense, and then, immediately prior to the explosion, appears almost to levitate. The threat of what is to come, she argues, is as oppressive to the atmosphere as the eventual outburst itself, and often results in people strategizing what they say in order to prevent the tantrum, not to discuss the issue at hand in the most open possible way.

2. Physical intimidation. This means getting in someone's personal space while yelling, saying intimidating things that threaten someone's future directly or obliquely, commenting on someone's appearance and/or weight relentlessly, and inappropriate or unwelcome touching. It can include telling people to shut up, interrupting, name calling, and persistent profanity. It can also include trapping people: demanding that someone "report" to your office, or entering theirs (worse in my view), and closing the door without permission.

3. Describing people as "not smart," and dismissing their intellectual work because you don't like them or you don't like their politics or they are in a field of which your disapproval is so vast that you read nothing in it. I am sorry to say that people on the left are just as guilty of this as people on the right, with the difference that people on the left --perhaps as the residue of feminist consciousness raising, historic leftist sexism and homophobia and Marxist criticism/self criticism sessions -- do it to each other as well as to their political opposites, whereas people on the right, in my experience, are willing to excuse a range of sins within the group in order to keep everyone who is conservative voting together.

4. Lying. Certified assholes use this as a consistent strategy to get what they want, which includes lying on behalf of their allies to promote their interests over the interests of those who are not their allies. They excuse it because they think what they want is always right, and when other people get in the way, they should be defeated by any means necessary. George W. Bush and Nanny Dick are like this, I think. And let me say -- I think lying can sometimes be a subset of gossiping, because often when people spread gossip, for whatever reason, they are often spreading damaging information that is not true, or has been twisted for a particular effect. When I was a newbie at Zenith, a friend told me that she made it a point never to gossip, and although I thought at the time it was kind of prissy -- I was in an information-gathering stage of life after all and needed gossip desperately -- much later in life I came to understand that this was, in fact, a highly ethical position. And by the way, if you are well-known as an indiscriminate gossip, you will also be well-known as someone who cannot keep a secret and should not be brought into a position where secrets need to be kept.

5. Accusing someone else of lying, publicly or to a third party, without confronting the other person privately. This is also something of which I do not believe I am guilty, but I have been accused of lying by others, and I have seen other people accused. At its best, it is a careless act; at its worst, I think it is one of the nastiest things one academic can do to another because personal integrity is so crucial to the scholarly world. Now, if someone has committed a serious ethical breach, that is one thing, but the things I have most frequently seen classified as lies are often far better characterized as misunderstandings, miscommunication, or someone leaping to a conclusion. Most frequently, in my experience, it is faculty accusing administrators of lying, in a conscious or unconscious move to disempower and humiliate in retaliation for some real or imagined slight.

6. Hitting on people sexually when they have evidenced no interest in either recreational sex with you or romantic love towards you. I would extend this to hitting on people sexually who have expressed this interest, but are interested in a kind of short-term personal gain or thrill that you know perfectly well will lead to tears. I would extend even this further to the whole question of responding to advances from those -- students, very junior faculty -- whose attraction to you is really an attraction to power, or some idealization of what you are or could be in their lives. Long-time readers might recall a series I did on the Pokey Chatman case, in which Chatman, a very talented basketball coach, appears to have had her resignation forced because a tangle of affairs with players and assistants came to light: click here and here. Several of my readers chastised me for not being hard enough on Chatman for this: well, I still don't think she should have had to leave her job. But there is no question that she was an asshole, and that LSU was willing to tolerate her messy love life until it became public information. That's the part that I think is a little more complicated, and needs to be examined and discussed, because Chatman may not have been an asshole in other ways. And other asshole behaviors persist at LSU that are not stigmatized, including what is commonly called sexual harassment, because the institution clearly tolerates assholes -- as nearly all academic institutions do.

7. Students can be assholes, to each other and to their teachers: it is a large, and ugly, subtext of the academic blogging world. And of course, some graduate students are assholes in training, and they learn to do it by watching professor assholes gain advantage over others through the range of tactics described here. Student asshole behaviors include: passing notes, giggling and whispering while other students are talking; repeating what someone else just said as if it were your idea; directing their remarks only to the teacher and not acknowledging the other students; interrupting; telling other students that something they have said is "wrong" or interrupting with a loud "no" when someone else is talking; publicly calling someone a bigot as a routine way of commenting on their lack of sophistication, their analysis or their apparent ideological position; saying thoughtless things about identity groups represented by people in the room; delegitimizing other students' right to speak because of their identity position or lack of sophistication in the field; and -- my favorite --anonymous, cruel attacks on others that are justified by a self-professed or actual lack of social power in a given situation. There is no justification, except perhaps being invaded and/or colonized by a foreign nation, for an anonymous attack, and what it expresses is rage and fear of the consequences, not actual powerlessness.

What is great about The No Asshole Rule is that Sutton's examples help identify the asshole behavior that is particular to one's own workplace, how to identify it in oneself, and how to resist it. He also demonstrates the damage caused by assholes, several of which seem particularly relevant to academic institutions, in my experience. One is that asshole behavior is contagious: if effective interventions are not made, people who are not certified assholes become more prone to temporary asshole behaviors as they try to resist domination and seizures of power.

Potentially, entire departments and faculties can be taken over, by assholes and by people who are forced into asshole management. Another crucial point -- and of course this resonated to my experience during the Unfortunate Events -- is that people who must resist being constantly demeaned and emotionally battered pay a terrific price in their energy and creativity, and do less and less well professionally, are less able to write, and often less able to function as teachers, scholars and colleagues on a day to day basis. Thus, what is often touted as a hierarchy of merit can also be a hierarchy of - can we say oppression? - where decent people are subject to the rule of the ruthless, and as a result their talents become hidden or submerged, and their capacity to function as university citizens who can and should be rewarded is severely eroded. Very often they simply withdraw and focus their lives at home: they come in, teach their classes and leave; do not come to meetings; and are not available for the work of running a department or a university. One of the benefits of going through a period of being bullied relentlessly by assholes is that you develop a kind of compassion for people who of whom you may have been previously dismissive.

Sutton can be visited on line at his blogs: click here and here. You might also want to look at a report on a conference on academic leadership, where a colleague of mine is quoted on the topic of "academic bullies."

Blowin' In The Wind

It looks like Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) are the most recent defectors from the War Party to join their Democratic Party colleagues in asking for a draw-down of U.S. trooops in Iraq that would begin in four months: read about it here. Pete Dominici (R-NM), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), and Richard Lugar (R-IN) beat them to the punch; John Warner (R-VA) is apparently involved in shaping the Republican insurgency, and will publicly break with President George "What--Me Worry?" Bush any day now. You can read the New York Times story here. Just to be nice let's call them Peace Republicans. Or Late to Dinner (did your mother ever say that -- "Call me anything, but don't call me late to dinner?") At least they finally got to dinner, which is more than many of our soldiers will ever do again.

As of today, the body count of U.S. soldiers alone (no Iraquis, no Coalition forces from other countries, no contractors) is 3,607, with three deaths pending confirmation: read about it here, Senators.

I guess the Republicans dropping over the side of the ship put the "grand" back in Grand Old Party, didn't they? Better late than never, is what I say. The fact that several of them are up for re-election next year -- Dominici is the most prominent -- should not exactly classify this as a cynical move, I suppose. But it does make you wonder whether they watch the Lehrer News Hour: I know Snowe and Hagel are sometimes on it. Those of us who see the casualties reported in silence day after day, week after week, month after month, would have voted to leave Iraq several years ago.

I also don't want to get snarky about the fact that both those advocating withdrawing our troops and those advocating that we fight until the last U.S. soldier is left standing, keep demanding that the "Iraquis" take "responsibility" for "their own country." When I try to parse a thought like that, I think of other phrases like, "Why do the gays have to flaunt their lifestyle," "Black men need to take responsibility for their actions," and "The government should stay out of people's lives." The subject of each sentence is so inclusive, and the action being taken so obscure, that such phrases inevitably say more about the speaker than the group or entity that is being spoken about. Another analogy might be the colleague who gets a bad set of exams and gets angry at the students rather than asking first what it is s/he hasn't taught them.

I don't mean to trivialize a horrible situation. But is the bipartisan coalition that finally gets us out of Iraq (and not, by the way, Afghanistan -- our next Iraq) really going to blame the people of bleeding Iraq for this? Really?

Stay tuned: this could be the most riveting summer since Watergate.

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While we are talking politics, did anybody read Joe Klein's piece in the June 7 issue of Time Magazine Beware the Bloggers' Bile? It's all about how he made a mistake on his blog about which way a congressperson would vote on the recent bill to (de)fund the war -- actually, she told him one thing and then changed her mind ("Women!") -- and left wing bloggers "blasted" him unmercifully. I'm sure they did -- it's a strange atmosphere, blogging, and it is uncivil and unpretty when in the wrong hands. But does this conclusion follow? "The spitballs aimed at me don't matter much," Klein writes. "The spitballs aimed at Harman, Clinton and Obama are another story. Despite their votes, each of those politicians believes the war must be funded. (Obama even said so in his statement explaining his vote.) Each knows, as Senator Jim Webb has said repeatedly, that we must be more careful getting out of Iraq than we were getting in. But they allowed themselves to be bullied into a more simplistic, more extreme position. Why? Partly because they fear the power of the bloggers to set the debate and raise money against them. They may be right--in the short (primary election) term; Harman faced a challenge from the left in 2006. In the long term, however, kowtowing to extremists is exactly the opposite of what this country is looking for after the lethal radicalism of the Bush Administration."

Oh. Please. Left wing bloggers are responsible for the incoherence and shilly-shallying of the Democratic party on this war? And it's not like writing that nasty novel about Bill Clinton was a huggy-kissy thing to do, Joe.

Might I also add, for those of us who have had to deal with right wing bloggers and their wacky poison-pen followers, Klein's view that the left is particularly prone to Extreme Blogging is just wrong and deliberately misleading.

Life as a Broker: The Role of the Committee Chair in Faculty-Administration Relations

In order to stay better informed, your Radical has signed up for the free daily updates from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Like every other periodical and newspaper that comes into this house, I can't read all of the update, much less all of the Chronicle, which is why I did not use my remaining research monies to buy a horrendously expensive on-line subscription. But I do like scanning the update for items of interest: I also started scanning Inside Higher Ed when they started linking me, which may be part of their strategy for linking bloggers: "Bring 'em into the light, boys!" Sometimes what I see in my daily scan are items of great interest, sometimes they are small pieces that cause me to think. And when I think, I blog. It's inescapable.

Today's food for thought was by a fellow named Gene Fant, who was a department chair at a small southern college, recently became a dean there, and is writing about how one is transformed in the eyes of one's colleagues upon becoming an administrator: you can read it yourself here. One thought that struck home was his description of a colleague watching him cut a piece of cake to see if, as a dean, he cut it differently. Ouch. One imagines folks peeking in the bedroom window to check how he is putting his pants on too. This is a good reminder that one of the down sides of taking on administrative responsibilities above the level of chair means having one's colleagues remind one of the possibility of pariah status that is imminent should one come to be perceived, as we say at Zenith, as "a tool of the administration."

In Tony Soprano's world, some of the things that are said to administrators, or faculty consorting with administrators, would cause a person to sleep with a semi-automatic under the pillow. I know this because although I have never been a dean (not at Zenith, anyway), I have been a chair of a major university committee. And after I became chair of the committee, I cannot tell you how many senior people came up to growl in my ear, "Just remember, you are there to defend the faculty from the administration." I was still an associate professor at the time, and it has occurred to me more than once that the Unfortunate Events were not entirely disassociated from the fact that I did well on this committee, which generated fear that I might Do Too Well and Rise Too High -- higher than a Radical ought, in any case. Some of the whisperers, and their cronies, were critically involved in the Events, and the connection seems - well, odd, shall we say.

But who's counting? As the working class kid in The History Boys says to one of his teachers, " 'Istory's just one fuckin' thing arfter another, in'nit Miss?"

Anyway. My experience differs from Dean Fant's in many ways, in that I was not in charge of budgetary matters. Specifically, Fant refers to the pain of having to say "no" to so many people, and worries -- in a play on the "girl who cain't say no" in the musical Oklahoma -- that he will be perceived as "The Dean Who Just Says No." When I look back on my experience as a committee chair, "no" would have been easier than some of the difficult things we had to figure out as a committee. I was in charge of trying to make policy and implement policy, mustering faculty votes on items of greater or lesser consequence (what changes are *not* seen by the faculty as matters of great consequence? I ask you), keeping a university committee moving as quickly as possible through an agenda without jamming my opinions down their throats, and making sure that the appropriate people were consulted about things.

Committee chairs are also in a strange position for which there are very few rules or customs. They are not administrators but, on a faculty that imagines it wants to govern itself without being told what to do by "the administration," they occupy numerous roles that could be described as "deaning lite": they are buffers between policy makers and those governed by policy; in a leadership position where they are more or less making policy on behalf of the faculty and persuading administrators to go along with it; conduits for administrative desires that the faculty is being asked to variously address or accept; and receivers of all opinions, great and small, about virtually everything. My committee had broad oversight of what was loosely termed "educational policy": this sometimes included what was taught (authorizing new majors, and major changes in existing majors); the conditions under which teaching occurred (schedules, grading modes, instructional computing that had a direct impact on faculty work); and shifts in pedagogical philosophy or strategy.



Without going into the details of what I did, let me say that it was a huge learning experience that has forever changed how I understand university politics and how universities work. And while, unlike Dean Gene, I did not have to say no to people who wanted money, I did sometimes have to say no to my different constituencies: no, that won't work; no, I can't put that on the agenda; no, I can't let you make that change because it will contradict other policies we are already committed to; no, you can't agree to one thing when you are alone with me and then go tell your friends, when it proves to be unpopular, that I am a shill for the administration and you never went along with that policy in the first place.

Have you ever been called a liar in public? I have. Actually, it was in an email written by one of the authors of the Events, so it was more or less private. Try less.

To conclude, except for a few really nasty people, it was actually a pretty positive experience, since there aren't a lot of opportunities in university life to learn something entirely new. I can't tell you everything I learned, but here are a few things that should be useful to all faculty, regardless of rank, when thinking about their relationship to the daily struggles we are involved in:

1. I was blessed with an extraordinarily thoughtful committee, including two wonderful students who had great ideas and were not shy about about expressing them, and who represented their constituency well. I also worked with some really good administrators, who were terrific resources at important moments. But even if you aren't working with the people you would have chosen, remember: everyone, absolutely everyone, has strengths that can be relied upon, even people you have had a dim view of previously. Find out what those strengths are and encourage them to employ them. Furthermore, those to whom you have been historically ideologically opposed have a point of view too, and often they share that point of view with a great many others. Hence, such people are an important liaison to that community. Try not to let discussions get polarized, and focus on converging points of view whenever possible. Taking the time for individual meetings to discuss what similarities can be assembled on any issue, before people take sides in public, is well worth it.

2. Because of the above dynamic, I would propose a theory that most universities operate in a huge ideological middle ground that has a tendency to isolate those on the left and on the right. Part of your job, when in charge, is to preserve that middle ground and help people on the margins make compromises; the other part of your job is to preserve the intellectual and pedagogical freedom of those on the left and on the right, and make sure that their interests remain connected to and supported by the broad middle.

3. Never allow a vote to be taken unless and until you know how it will turn out. I learned this from Lyndon Johnson.

4. You are in charge of preserving features of academic freedom on most committees you might ever be elected to or chair. That said, some of your colleagues will try to get away with all kinds of shit in the name of academic freedom that are really about bettering their own lot, or shutting down a discussion that they don't want to have. There are two ways of handling this, and saying "no" is rarely an option, because you really have no authority other than what people will consent to give you. One way to get around such an obstacle is to say, "Look, this is what I need from you and why. Now, here's something I might be able to do in return." It was always my philosophy that you should never go into a meeting without something on the table that you are willing to give away, even if you have put it on the agenda deliberately so that you can throw it away. And you should never go into a meeting without something that the other person hasn't thought of that they might really like: for me, these things never cost a dime, because I had no budgetary power -- but my committee did have the power to shape people's lives. And when you have a chance to do someone a favor by bending the rules appropriately, do it.

OK -- but when someone is trying to get away with something stupid and obnoxious, sometimes you just have to tell them to stuff it. This is -- and needs to be -- very, very rare. At one point I had to point-blank tell a chair s/he was going to make a certain change if I had to make it myself since *both* of us knew that the reason presented for not making the change was utterly ridiculous and designed only to block the policy on principle: a dean, and two people from the provost's office looked at me with horrified pleasure as I did something for which they would have been crucified on the college Great Lawn. I cannot tell you what this thing was because it breaks my final rule, which is:

5. Discretion. Never do or say anything that you would be ashamed to admit, publicly, in front of the entire faculty, but also -- part of brokering deals with people, or even forcing their hand, is not going out and making them look stupid or weak afterward. I learned this from the British Raj. In fact, you need to go out of your way to thank those who have conceded what you want from them and give them credit for the outcome, even if the negotiation has been very unpleasant. If your policy, once brokered, is to not founder at the point of implementation, your best move can sometimes be to present what has occurred in such a way as to put the other person in the best light possible and minimize your own role. This becomes particularly difficult at times because, I am sorry to say, people will lie, or say that you lied (see above) about what they have said or done to protect their own reputations at the expense of yours, and you have to suck it up. Defending yourself puts you in a position of weakness: move on to the next thing, and if the policy you have implemented is a good one, people will soon forget.

Lifting As We Climb (with all due respect to Anna Julia Cooper)

Today's thoughts are about Leadership.

Dean Dad has a new post up about mediating an emotion-laden disagreement between a faculty member and a fellow dean. It is an extremely lucid account of how he became aware of the conflict in the first place, how he collected information about it, and how he came to know that the two people had misunderstood each other and had acted on that misunderstanding, thus setting up a contest over authority. He then describes the actions he took to set everything straight. Because students were involved, and graduation requirements at stake, it was potentially quite messy (and even messier, I can imagine, at a community college where, unlike Zenith, students are often juggling a full work schedule, the college schedule, course availability, and graduation requirements.) The kind of conflict he describes is one that everyone will recognize having participated in at some point, regardless of where they work, and the description of it demonstrates that every bad situation offers an opportunity for leadership, as well as less good choices which are often easier to make. Or as Charlie Brown used to say, "You can be the Hero. Or you can be the Goat."

To translate: you can be a Leader or you can watch two people fight to the death. Dean Dad chose to be a Leader.

It is quite a graceful post, and I recommend it to all, particularly since Dean Dad argues that one criterion for someone becoming a department chair is the capacity to contain the impulse to go nuclear at imagined, or even real, slights. This is a particularly good moment for me to muse on this topic, since those individuals currently in charge of the Program and the Center to which it is attached are getting ready to hand their jobs over to me, and that process begins today at lunch. Coincidentally, before I logged into Dean Dad, I had been driving home from my rowing club and listening to Morning Edition on NPR. One of the segments addressed cynicism in the workplace (another informed us that wearing flip-flops and clothing that reveals your underwear to work is inadvisable. Take note, Zenith grads: no visible boxers or bras.) The segment offered a number of useful pieces of advice: encourage colleagues to speak up and ask people for solutions, rather than cultivating their criticisms and complaints, were two of them. What particularly stuck for me was this advice to what business people call the "team leader," but what we in academia might call the chair, the divisional dean, or the President: "Don't convey cynicism or pessimism yourself. Leaders of teams can have a strong positive or negative influence on team morale."

Followers of this blog know that, directly and indirectly, the Program has taken some hits this year (yet another landed in our laps yesterday) and may take more before the year is out, hits that endanger a carefully built and nurtured curriculum to which we are very committed. We have gradually seen those gains eroded, although probably not permanently, and rebuilding is a daunting, discouraging and difficult task. My recently established blogging ethic forbids me being specific about what has happened but to characterize, while our current leadership has ably guided us through a difficult year, it is I who will have to pick up the pieces, with very few faculty (because of leaves and losses) to help.

But this is where I have to take to heart some of the advice I have received by chance today. First, the loss of faculty when they do not get tenure and you don't agree with the decision may make you want to roar out of your office and start (metaphorically, of course) knocking heads, but I have come to believe that acting on that kind of rage is very stressful for me and accomplishes little. And of course the hiring of temporary faculty to cover losses is time-consuming and often unsatisfying (when was the last time you tried to supervise between two and four more or less novice teachers at the same time as running not one, but two, administrative units?) so if you really think about it, that is enraging too. But that we actually have the faculty available to us is one ray of light or, as my financial advisor would say, "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick." Furthermore, it signifies that our dean recognizes our plight and has helped us staunch the flow. And I have to take the perspective that it is *his* budget that is on steroids at this point, not either of mine. Here I would extrapolate, both from Dean Dad and the NPR piece, and say: this is the time to go visit the dean, acknowledge how he has helped us so far, and ask for his further help in staying on top of this situation and conveying its gravity to the provost's office. To not do so risks him believing that his efforts to date are underappreciated; to do so incorporates him, his resources, and his intellect, in my -- our -- struggle.

So after I finish lunch, I shall do just that: make an appointment for my next lunch. With the Dean.

But I would like to make another point too: it is wise, I have found, to disaggregate administrators one from another in everything one says and does when in a faculty leadership position, and to do otherwise is inevitably polarizing. So if you are annoyed about a policy or a decision, target the person who actually made it if you must, but do not curse "the administration" as a whole. This is not only strategically quite imperfect, but it alienates a lot of people who aren't responsible for your problem and feeds a resentment of faculty by administrators that is pretty intense on its own. One feature of this I have noted is that, as my blog is more widely read on my own campus, I have heard from a number of my administrative colleagues about ways they feel slighted by various posts -- not as individuals but, as we might say in Radical-speak, a *class.* I think this is quite telling, particularly since these have not been posts which were critical of administrators (as opposed to my posts on the T & P, a body which I criticize openly, relentlessly, and without remorse. Disaggregate yourselves, why don't you?) But the criticism was inferred all the same. Furthermore, the people who have had the courtesy to write and say what they are thinking are those people with whom I would say I have good relationships. So if those folks are on edge, Goddess knows how many other administrative colleagues are fuming about your beloved Radical.

To return to cynicism and leadership: if ever there was a moment for the director of the Program to be cynical, this would be it, I've got to say. So it was very helpful to be reminded that if I lose my common sense, so goeth a great many other people who will be better served next year by some confidence, no matter how thin, that I, and we, are doing something constructive to repair the damage and move on. Because really, unless we are going to sacrifice the joy in what we do, it's the only choice.

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For those of you who didn't know, Michael Berube is back and bloggin'! Welcome home, Professor B.