A task awaits you
“It’s impossible to fuck up the budget.”
Professor James, who offered this guidance, meant that any holes in the budget could be repaired by moving money from one line of the spreadsheet to another. If the creative writing professors spent more money on the literary series than the chair budgeted, the remaining expense could be paid with money budgeted for conference travel or some other item.
Along with these words of advice, James gave me a short tutorial on two of the essential functions of a department chair: approving faculty expenses and staff working hours. Looking over his shoulder, I read one of the notification emails automatically generated by Workday, the one-size-fits-all accounting program used by the college. “A Task Awaits You”: the subject line struck an ominous note suggestive of a quest in a fantasy role playing game, but the assigned role was “Cost Center Manager” rather than knight, sage, or thief.
I received hundreds of similar prompts during my time as chair, each one directing me to sign into Workday, submit my approval of an expense report, and send the report to the dean’s office. I approved all of them, even the ones that I suspected might not be perfectly legitimate. A few of them, before approval, I sent back to the office of finance to be “grossed up” because the report showed a smaller amount than the English department had promised to pay.
“It’s impossible to fuck up the budget.” I’m sure he meant these words to be comforting. They must have comforted him. Before coming to Pomona, he had chaired English departments at schools where, I imagine, resources were scarce, and the chair had to know the exact location of each dollar. Moving from Carbondale to Claremont, he once said, was like diving into a pool of honey. (I think he said honey instead of money, but I could be wrong.) They probably don’t have extra money lying around in Carbondale to plug up the holes in the operating budget.
Like James, Professor Toni went to grad school at a big public university. The kind of place where resources are abundant but a large bureaucracy stands between you and the money. At a place like that, Toni would have had to fill out a form if she wanted to use the fax machine. At a place like that, if James wanted $20,000 for a research center, he would have had to fill out several forms. He would have had to submit a detailed budget with justifications for each item. A committee would consider the forms and the proposed budget, then write a report and submit it to another committee. If his request was funded, James would have had to fill out additional forms to show that he spent the money according to the plan he had originally proposed.
Bureaucracies at schools like that are, I’m sure, a pain in the neck. They have some advantages: someone is looking at the expenses to see that money is being spent as intended.
James and Toni were so influenced by the seemingly inexhaustible wealth of the English department and by habits of casual spending that they were baffled by the suggestion that they should plan their spending.
The English department allocated $20,000 for James’s research center in 2019, another $20,000 in 2020, and another $20,000 in 2021. He never submitted an itemized budget for this request. He did submit a budget in 2021, because the new chair, Professor Dorothy, had managed to do something that I only dreamed of when I was chair: she created a budget form. On that occasion, when prompted to itemize the expenses on his form, James made a plea for “flexibility,” by which he meant that he would rather decide how to spend the money after spending it. Which is how the English department has traditionally handled its expenses. He wrote:
Balanced against the department’s very reasonable desire to know how its funds will be spent, we’re trying to weight our need to be nimble—to move money between our very different programs based on what comes in and other unpredictable factors. A department gift to support a given year’s programming writ large is the most helpful to us; if that’s too broad, support of (for instance) the Speakers Series would still let us use the money where we have needs. For us to ask, on the other hand, for specific amounts for specific events runs the risk that we won’t be able to use the money that’s being given—and we do certainly have financial needs.
In May 2019, Toni was allocated $15,000 to print a catalog for an art exhibition that she curated. The money was promptly paid to a firm called “Air Philosophy LLC.” The fact that the college made the payment might seem to indicate that the work was done, but it was not done. The book was never printed. In August 2021, Toni was allocated another $1,500 to pay for printing the book. As of this writing, the book still has not been printed.
The state of Illinois would not let you get away with something like that. Nor would they let you get away with that at state schools in South Carolina or California. If the University of California gave a subvention to a member of the faculty to pay for production costs for a book, an office at the school would expect to receive a copy of the book. And that office wouldn’t forget; they would keep calling until they received their copy.
I don’t think there is another English department in the world where a professor can walk into a department meeting without a plan and receive $20,000 just for asking. The dangers of such a system should be obvious to anyone. James and Toni didn’t see the dangers because they took this system for granted.
“It’s impossible to fuck up the budget.” One of my first actions as chair was a blunder that tested James’s statement. In the previous year’s department budget, each member of the English faculty had a personal research fund called an “opportunity fund” of $4,200. In my notes, I carelessly rounded up to $5,000.
“Are you sure it’s $5,000?” the department secretary asked.
“My notes say $5,000.”
The secretary must have thought that I was telling her to increase the amount in the opportunity fund, which she did by taking money out of a different fund. When professors started thanking me for increasing their opportunity funds, I became aware of the fact that I had acted irresponsibly and that a relic of my irresponsibility had become department policy.
Even if I tried, James had said, I couldn’t fuck it up. I found these words nerve-wracking rather than comforting. As the foregoing anecdote suggests and as future episodes of this chronicle will prove, I have no talent for numbers or money. To quote the actor Wesley Snipes: “I am an idealistic, passionate, naïve, truth-seeking, spiritually motivated artist, unschooled in the sciences of law and finance.” When I was chairing the English department, I never really knew how much money we had. Of course I did not know the original amounts of the gifts from donors which were the basis of the department’s wealth; it was not my job to manage investments. I also did not know the total available income from these gifts. I think the available income was somewhere in the high six figures; the operating budget was somewhere in the low six figures. A more serious problem was that I never knew at any time how much money remained in the operating budget. I knew the amounts that we had budgeted for various purposes, but I also knew, with every expense, the secretary might be moving money between funds, and I had no way of tracking the movements. That was alarming.
James’s advice was that my ignorance didn’t matter. My mistakes didn’t matter. We had so much money that I didn’t need to keep track of how much we had or how much we were spending. I didn’t like that feeling. It felt like incompetence. It felt like corruption. At least, it felt like an invitation to corruption.
I hesitate to publish this story. I have deleted the draft five times, and put it back five times. My fear is that this newsletter will, in future, cause me to lose my job at Pomona, and stain my reputation so that it will be impossible for me to find a job in any other English department; and this story in particular -- the detail that I rounded up from 4,200 to 5,000 -- will, I fear, render me unemployable in any other profession.
What I want this story to convey: this Kunin character, although shockingly careless with amounts of money, was the only voice of financial reform in the department.