Don't thank me. Imitate me.
In October 2018, I read something that didn’t make sense. The department secretary had forwarded an email from the finance office. All I could make of it was that she was being charged ten dollars every month for storing Professor Toni’s data. The secretary was disputing the charge.
I went down to the office to find out what was going on.
The secretary explained that Toni was storing data using Dropbox. That was a problem because the college had switched to a different cloud storage service called Box. First the IT office sent messages to notify faculty of the change. Then Toni received personal messages: IT no longer supported Dropbox, and did Toni need help moving her data? Then she started receiving messages from the finance office: the college could not pay for data stored on Dropbox, in accordance with a policy that stated, “External Storage is not to be used as the sole storage location for any College data, or as a recordkeeping system.”
Okay, I said. I was having trouble following the story. Did that have something to do with the secretary? Why was she being charged?
The solution to the puzzle was that the department credit card bore the name of the department secretary. When the finance office penalized Toni for using the wrong external storage service, the charge reverted to the secretary’s account, not Toni’s.
The charge had been in dispute, and accumulating, for several months. At some point, the IT office had accepted the fact that Toni’s data was never going to be moved to Box. They were prepared to make an exception. They had made other exceptions, it seemed. Toni was not the only member of the faculty who resisted switching to a new cloud storage service. There was a list! And there was a process for adding Toni’s name to the list and removing the disputed charge. All they wanted was approval from Toni. They were waiting for an email from her that said, “Box did not meet her needs.” For some reason, Toni had not sent the email, and she was ignoring messages from the secretary and various IT workers and finance officers.
That seemed very wrong to me. It seemed a bad use of the secretary. What should I do, I said. I could talk to Toni. I could talk to someone in the finance office. Or I could pay the charge until Toni submitted her approval. (In my first days as chair, when presented with a problem, I often asked myself: how would Professor James handle a similar problem? He would probably pay the charge himself, I thought.)
Oh, no, don’t do that, the secretary said. She didn’t want me to do anything. She just wanted me to be informed of the existence of the dispute.
Her story made me uneasy. And now I wasn’t doing anything about it, just feeling uneasy. It seemed to me that I ought to be doing something. It seemed possible that I had a legal obligation -- that the secretary might reasonably complain about my inaction, just as she might complain about Toni’s inaction.
A month later, when I checked, the dispute had been resolved. Maybe Toni submitted her approval. Maybe the finance office elected to resolve the dispute without it.
This episode had an effect on me. It caused me to look at Toni with a new feeling of curiosity. I sympathized with her reluctance to create a new account with an unfamiliar cloud storage service. (My own relationship to machines is similarly backward.) I couldn’t understand why she delayed removing the secretary’s unfair charge.
It dawned on me that Toni might be incapable of chairing the department.
Readers may be surprised to learn that I ever saw Toni as a candidate for chair. Let’s go back a few years.
When I joined the department in 2005, chair succession was a problem. Professors at every rank believed they would never be chair. Three full professors thought so because, in the past, there had always been other full professors to do the job. (A fourth full professor had it written in his contract that he did not have to chair.) Three associate professors thought so because it couldn’t be their turn to chair as long as there were three full professors who had never done the job. Four assistant professors thought so because we saw the behavior of the tenured professors. And what we saw, we imitated.
The three full professors had reluctantly agreed to split up a three-year term of chairing. Professor William chaired in 2004-2005. Professor Marcel chaired in 2005-2006. Professor Jacques agreed to chair in 2006-2007 -- but here the plan fell apart, because Jacques ended his term prematurely, after a few months. For the remainder of the school year, the English department was chaired very unwillingly by Professor Oscar and Professor Oprah, two associate professors who both left for jobs at other institutions a few years afterwards (in the latter case) and immediately afterwards (in the former case).
In 2008, the English department hired Professor James to be chair. This hire solved the problem of chair succession, and compounded it. Now the literature professors knew for certain what we had always understood: that we had no obligation to govern ourselves. The college would always allow us to hire a new person to do it.
In 2010, when I was interviewed by the faculty committee in charge of my tenure case, one of the interviewers asked if I could see myself chairing the English department at some point in my career. I laughed. Ha, ha, ha! I assured her that no one in my department looked at me with such an eye.
It did not occur to me that the professor who asked the question worked in Media Studies, a department with numerous majors and only three tenure-line faculty. And yet they had no chair succession problem: the professors took turns occupying the undesirable post of chair in a regular rotation. They weren’t ambitious. They didn’t want to be administrators. It’s just, there were only three of them, and there was no one else to manage the business of the department.
In 2010, I thought that the example of James meant that I would never have to be chair. In the years that followed, I gradually became aware of a better, truer interpretation: the example of James meant that chairing was part of the job of being a literature professor. What professors in other departments did, literature professors could also do.
So, in 2017, when James polled the department about who should succeed him as chair, and who would be willing to chair, I said that Professor Toni should be the next chair, and that I would do it when it was my turn. The inevitable result was that I became the successor, because a few of my colleagues said that I should do it, and no one else said they would ever do it.
I didn’t think it was my turn yet. I thought that we should rotate the position in order of seniority. Toni, the vaunted senior member of the department, should take the first term as chair. Next in line of seniority was Professor Jane, who would be promoted to the rank of full professor by the end of Toni’s term. After her, Professor Herman, another associate professor who was senior to me. Then it would be my turn to chair, in, say, 2027.
For a few months, it seemed like I might get my wish. Toni expressed an interest in chairing. She seriously considered it, and even had a lunch date with the president of the college to discuss it. In the end, though, she declined. I met with Jane to try to convince her that she was senior to me, and therefore her turn as chair should come before mine. She countered that she had a teenaged daughter.
Then came a funny scene in a department meeting where it was announced that I was going to be the next chair, and everyone thanked Toni for considering the post that she turned down.
You don’t thank me? I churlishly thought. Then I thought: no, that isn’t what I want.
Somehow I thought that taking my turn out of order would remind my senior colleagues that their obligations were the same as mine. I convinced myself that I could set an example for them. The example was: you don’t have to be Professor James in order to chair the department. You don’t have to be liked. You don’t have to be a leader. You don’t have to be good at being chair. There are only ten of us; everyone has to do it sometime.
Don’t thank me. Imitate me.
Tell me you didn’t say that!, said the diversity officer. He looked horrified.
I should explain that this person was not the diversity officer who met with me in May 2019. Most of the personnel in the dean’s office were replaced by a new set of administrators during the summer months of 2019. The old diversity officer went on vacation in June, and I never spoke with her again. Now I had to start over with another associate dean. For the sake of clarity, I’ll refer to him as the new diversity officer -- although he is no longer new, and no longer employed by the college, having migrated to a different position at another school, and then a third position at yet another school, in the competitive job market of college administration.
He asked me for a meeting in September 2019, shortly after moving into his office.
Dear Aaron,
Please let me know if you have any availability for a meeting next week.
I would truly appreciate an opportunity to listen to, and understand your perspective concerning current (and longstanding) matters in the English Dept. Much of what I hear is filtered through other’s voices/perspective -- and there is just no substitute for a primary source.
Right now, Wednesday and Friday are completely open for me. And, of course, I have random blocks of time available throughout the week.
Best,
[Diversity Officer]
In the meeting, I repeated much of what I had said to the old diversity officer. This time around, I had a feeling that my story wasn’t getting through to him. The old diversity officer was a genius at reading people, full of energy, and, when demonstrating that she understood you, she was like Lyndon Johnson putting his hands on a senator whose vote he wanted. The new diversity officer had a more phlegmatic character. My impression is that he was in over his head. Admittedly, he might have said the same thing about me.
In a questionable passage in the investigation report, the new diversity officer is said to have described himself as “odd, distant.” “He stated that overall, he has had an ‘odd, distant’ role from the issues.” This is one of many moments in the investigation report where it appears that the investigator did not catch what was said in the recording but put some words down just to fill the space. I wonder if the new diversity officer even used the words in quotation marks. Maybe he tried to say that he found my manner odd and distant.
The most intense emotion I ever saw in him was the fear he expressed when he thought that I might have told Toni and Herman to imitate me.
Now he became animated. You didn’t imply that they were going to thank you!? You didn’t say that you wanted them to imitate you!? Tell me you didn’t say that!
Well --
I had to think about it. Just now, in this conversation, I had used the phrase, “don’t thank me, imitate me” to explain why I had agreed to chair the department in the first place, and why, although I hated the job, I didn’t intend to quit. It would send the wrong signal if I quit before my time was up. I wanted to prove that anyone could chair the department, and everyone should take a turn. I didn’t want to prove that chairing the department was essentially an impossible job that most people could not do.
As to my use of that phrase, I couldn’t absolutely swear that I hadn’t said it. I wouldn’t have said it directly to Toni or Herman, but it was a phrase that I used in my head, and I might have said it out loud.
The new diversity officer vigorously admonished me never to say those words again. He seemed frightened at first, as I said. Then his face settled into a look of satisfaction. Maybe he had been trying to match my manner in this conversation -- shy and awkward and gentle (and odd and distant?) -- with the reports that he had received of the belligerent chair of the English department who was on some kind of power trip. The offending phrase wasn’t exactly what had been reported, but it gave him some material to work with. Here was something he could grasp. Here was work that he knew how to do. In the words of the investigation report:
[The new diversity officer] stated that Kunin discussed the climate of the Department. [He] stated that he gave Kunin advice on managing the Department, including the manner in which he presented information.
I didn’t take anything away from this meeting that helped me manage the department. But I did learn something. I learned that my hypothesis was not supported by the results of the experiment. Toni’s dilatory response to the department secretary’s unfair charge gave me my first clue that I might be wrong in my theory that anyone could chair the department, even me. Maybe some people couldn’t chair the department. The diversity officer’s fearful response to my idea of trying to set an example for my colleagues showed that my whole approach was wrong.
I thought the deans and associate deans would want to see an English department that functioned like other departments where there were explicit rules for making decisions and overseeing spending, and where the junior faculty could look to the senior faculty for examples of how to do their jobs. But when I explained that I was trying to show by example that working as a professor at a small liberal arts college came with obligations to participate in faculty governance, the diversity officer seemed to be afraid. I think he correctly surmised that what I said would generate conflict, and he was afraid of that conflict.
The English department generated another kind of conflict as well. In Professor Herman’s words: “My workplace blew up with racial conflict.” The conflict was, she elaborated, “an extended six-year period of departmental strife centered on questions of race, racism, and retaliation, which was problematically managed and resolved at many turns, even when occasionally superbly handled by my own administration.” I think the staff in the dean’s office were afraid of that kind of conflict too. However, given a choice between kinds of conflict, they clearly preferred and therefore incentivized the kind that Herman called racial conflict.
That is why, despite all the pious talk in the dean’s office about leadership and mentoring, the college’s administrators consistently rewarded the English department for projecting an appearance of total chaos. In 2008, they responded to that appearance by hiring a new chair for the English department, confirming the impression that we had no obligation to govern ourselves. The college confirmed this impression again in 2020: after I stepped down from chairing, during an official hiring freeze, the English department was again given permission to hire a new chair.
Toni understood the strength of this example long before I did. She understood that an effective way of leading by example was to demonstrate that she was incapable of chairing the department, and that the department was not capable of managing its own affairs. About the hire authorized in 2020, she said (reportedly): We had to blow up the English department to make the college give us the hire we asked for.
I have to admit that she was right. The college valued that example, so that was the one she imitated.