Q: Are we here to make friends or money? A: Money!
Why was the English department paying this guy?
Walls is the person-to-person specialist honing in on the human connection and increasing ones productivity in “The Now” moment. This is when you and a potential client have met, and the stakes are at a peak to be compelling by conveying value.
His mission is to help ten thousand small business owners and entrepreneurs find and achieve a business development/sales strategy that focuses on their sustainable, competitive advantage so they may thrive better than ever before.
[Note: I am quoting the blurb from the 2018 version of the website willwalls dot com. Walls has tidied up the style of the 2023 version. His relationship to literary studies remains doubtful.]
How did it come to pass that the English department paid $2,990 to the firm “Will Walls S Sales Strategies”? Do other academic departments have mysterious expenses like this? How did the English department decide what to do with its money? How did the English department decide anything?
Before 2018, the English department had no system of rules for making decisions. Nobody was assigned to take minutes at department meetings, so we had no record of our decisions. We sometimes forgot decisions that we had discussed and voted on a few years ago. Or we had the same discussion more than once, and made the same decision more than once.
Here’s an example of something that can happen when your organization has a problem remembering its own decisions. Since 2005, we have completely rewritten the curriculum three times.
Sometimes we voted on big decisions like changes to the curriculum. Sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes we voted by show of hands. Sometimes we voted by email. We sometimes used proxy voting. Sometimes we used proxies without making an arrangement beforehand. (“Professor Jane isn’t here. What does she think? I believe she would vote ‘yes.’”) We sometimes got into tangled disputes over email.
Here’s a trick you can try to play if your organization has no rules. In 2005, when the department hired a poet to teach creative writing, we voted in four stages. First the chair, Professor Marcel, asked untenured professors to vote, then tenured professors, with the idea that the former could make their choices without being influenced by the choices of the latter. It turned out that the two groups supported different poets. Since junior faculty outnumbered senior faculty, their candidate won. Apparently the chair did not like that result, because he had the department vote again, this time with tenured professors voting before untenured professors. It seemed that he wanted the junior faculty to be influenced by the senior faculty after all.
Many of the department’s decisions relied on a method that Professor Jacques, borrowing a term from computing, called “weak consensus.” No one had a strong inclination, so everyone drifted wherever everyone else seemed to be going. These decisions were, in a sense, unanimous; in another sense, no one supported them.
I vividly recall an instance of this method of weak decision-making from the first department meeting I attended as an assistant professor in 2005. Professor Virginia, an emeritus member of the department, had submitted a request: he wanted the department to sponsor a public reading of his poetry, and he wanted to be paid an honorarium of $1,000.
Everyone was outraged by this request. What? Virginia’s coming back? He wants to recite his poetry (while crying – he was famous for reciting poetry while crying)? He wants us to listen to it? He wants money?
They hooted, they shook their heads, they rolled their eyes.
No one wanted Virginia’s poetry reading. And yet, after venting their outrage, they allowed the event to take place. He got his poetry reading, and he was paid $1,000. My colleagues couldn’t say no. They spent the department’s money on something they didn’t want because they couldn’t say no.
I enjoyed the benefits of this profligacy like everyone else in the department. It never occurred to me that there was a problem until the summer of 2018, when I started chairing. Then the messages from the accounting program Workday started to appear in my inbox: “A Task Awaits You: Approval by Cost Center Manager.” I was shocked by the amount of money we had, the amount of money we spent, and the lack of administrative oversight. There were obvious opportunities for misuse and self-dealing. I saw that it would be easy to have the department pay for expenses unrelated to teaching or research. It would also be easy to submit invoices or receipts so that money from the department’s restricted funds would be paid to one’s friends or family, or to oneself.
What do I mean by misuse? Here’s something I saw in the summer of 2018: the English department made two payments to “Will Walls S Sales Strategies.” In total, the payments amounted to $2,990.
According to the college’s chair handbook, restricted funds can be used for teaching expenses (such as field trips) or research expenses (such as conference travel). They are not supposed to be used for small business ventures, or workshops teaching strategies for small business ventures (the service that Walls seems to offer), or haircuts, or therapy, or personal travel. (I strongly suspect that the English department’s restricted funds have paid for some personal travel.)
Misuse and self-dealing would be bad in themselves. The appearance of misuse could also create problems. If misuse occurred, the dean’s office would have a reason to take the department’s money away. And the chair would be blamed.
How was I going to handle the unexpectedly perilous role of the chair? I didn’t think that I could do what Professor James did. During the nine years when he was chair, James made all of the decisions about the budget by himself. No one else saw the budget. No one else saw the requests for money. He kept everything in his head.
I didn’t see how I could do that.
At the first meeting that I chaired, September 11, 2018 (exactly one year before the scene in “How I Was Investigated for Saying Please”), I asked for two reforms: I wanted to use Robert’s Rules in department meetings, and I wanted the department to vote on large expenses. The main effect of these reforms was to limit the powers of the chair, distributing responsibility so that everyone oversaw the department’s spending.
The department voted unanimously to adopt the less stringent set of rules that Robert recommends for “small boards” (deliberative bodies with 12 members or fewer), and to institute a practice of voting on large expenses. Smaller expenses (less than $1,000) would be left to the discretion of the chair.
In the discussion, I emphasized an important requirement of these rules. If a member of the faculty requested a small amount of money, and later requested another small amount of money for the same purpose, the chair would be compelled to reject the second request. Otherwise, there would be no meaningful difference between small expenses and large expenses. A professor who, for whatever reason, wanted to hide a large expense from the department could not be permitted to break it up into a series of smaller expenses and present them to the chair. Borrowing a term from Thomas Schelling, the theorist of conflict and strategy, I referred to this forbidden practice as “hot dog slicing.”
If you want just a slice, I said, the chair can decide. If you want the whole salami, the department has to vote on it.
My colleagues seemed to have a lot of trouble understanding the rule against hot dog slicing. I explained it many times that year and the following year.
If I had it all to do over . . . scratch that. I mean, if I had it all to do over, I would never agree to chair the English department. With an entirely new set of people, maybe I would consider it. Maybe if every member of the department were replaced by a different person, and every member of the college’s administration were replaced by a different person . . .
But, okay, if, contrary to my better judgment, I became chair again, I would ask for more rules. A complete handbook of department business. For example, I would want to have a rule that requests for money could only be considered in advance. In 2018, I didn’t know we needed such a rule. I would have thought that was just professional behavior.
The English department had few rules when I chaired in 2018-2019. Even so, we had trouble following the rules. When Professor James requested money without saying how much he wanted, or when Professor Toni planned to spend money without requesting any, it might seem as though they were flouting the rules. But it might be more accurate to say that they were adjusting to them.
I wasn’t used to the rules either. Just like my senior colleagues, I was learning the rules, trying to follow them, encouraging others to follow them.
Or maybe it would be accurate to say that we were pretending to have rules, like high school students in a mock trial competition. Maybe, if we kept pretending, we might start following the rules.
[Edited to fix a malapropism. AK, 12/28/2023.]