EIGHTAt Home in the Office

WITH BARRIE THORNE

As long-time inhabitants of academic departments, we are familiar—Barrie Thorne and I—with the routines of office hours, hallway chats, committee meetings, and mail pickups in the main office.1 An academic department is part of an orderly bureaucracy. It houses very smart, well-trained professionals and would seem to invite an attitude of dispassionate concern. So why, we got to wondering one day, do matters of recruitment, course scheduling, and office space occasionally make tempers flare? Why the gossip, occasional intrigue, and sometimes smoldering feuds? Perhaps it is because departments are like families.

Like families, departments are small, face-to-face groups that share space, material resources, and everyday life. Members do not, by and large, choose one another, and, given the tight job market, most anticipate being stuck with one another for the long haul. Periods of adoption or marriage (faculty hiring) tend to be especially contentious, raising issues of collective identity and fears that the existing balance of power may shift.

Department members sometimes leave home, having been “courted away” as happens to eligible young people under the rule of exogamy. Indeed, departments do not like to hire from among their own graduate students because it is too “incestuous.” Rather, the prospective hire should come from another village to bring in “fresh blood.” Members of a department may become estranged, or “get a divorce,” at which point the in-laws and children are tacitly required to take sides. Graduate students may walk into a Ph.D. exam with the hope of “bringing both parents together,” just as the children of divorce may try to reunite a broken family by becoming the symbol of unity at a Christmas party or birthday.

Departments have reputations. They can be known as friendly or stand-offish (“closed doors”). Departments, like families, are positioned in systems of social stratification. There is even a national blue-blood registry: the ranking of “top” departments by the National Academy of Sciences and the magazine U.S. News and World Report. Some departments wage campaigns for upward mobility—requiring six instead of four peer-reviewed articles for tenure. Others downshift or opt out, affirming missions that break with mainstream criteria for ranking.

Like families, departments have a long tradition of patriarchy. The vast majority have a male “head” who deploys the labor of other members, and who sits at the end of a long table as he presides over gatherings of the whole. Indeed, department meetings often resemble family dinners as scenes of ritual solidarity, replete with gestures of subtle defiance and dramatic fights.2

Department generations divide into older and younger parents (the tenured senior faculty and the untenured juniors), and graduate students who, like dependent children, are expected to move on after a period of training and nurture; faculty are pleased if their children “marry well.” The junior faculty are positioned much like adolescents, because the seniors keep secrets from them and actively control their fates. At faculty meetings (as at Victorian family dinners), the junior faculty tend to be seen but not heard, fearful of publicly challenging their more powerful elders. Behind the scenes, seniors may pressure junior faculty to take sides. The juniors maneuver for position because resources are limited and ascent to the highest, permanent tier (a form of inheritance) is not automatic. When a junior member is up for tenure and fears disinheritance, conflict often erupts.

Tension also surrounds other moments of generational succession, such as the timing of retirements, which will free up departmental offices and tenure lines (the equivalent of land and wealth), or struggles over who will become department chair. A faculty member who becomes chair may find that previously amicable colleagues turn hostile or begin to whine for special favors. The dynamics are like those among siblings when one of their numbers has been singled out and put in charge.

Generational relations often differ for men and women in departments, as they do in families. To advise a student’s dissertation is to engage in a professional relationship, but it involves managing dependence, nurture, and often frustration, as the child struggles to become acknowledged as an independent adult. So the dynamics can slide into those between parent and child. As more women become faculty members, mother-daughter and mother-son attachments, resentments, and conflicts have become more widespread.

Gender divisions are marked more subtly in departments than in families, but they persist. Men predominate in positions of authority, and there are relatively few women in the highest ranks.3 Women have challenged male dominance in departments, as in many families, often focusing on sexual harassment or sex discrimination in pay or promotion, for example. The results, in both cases, have been uneven.

At their core, most departments are also based on a deeply embedded clockwork of male careers.⁴ As women have been joining their ranks, many departments have taken on the surface look of equality. But the rules for getting ahead are still premised on the ideal of a full-time worker who has access to full-time help in family care for the rest of life—feeding the baby, taking children to the doctor or dentist, visiting elderly parents or grandparents, sending holiday cards, cooking and cleaning. Women are far less often relieved of these responsibilities than are men.

In departments, as in families, sometimes people complain that a certain faculty member is “never around.” Just as children are sometimes left to do homework unattended by hard-working parents, so do graduate students fear the retreat of their “parents” to their studies, leaving them “home alone.”

All families manage sexuality, and healthy families manage it well. Although departments do not maintain an incest taboo as well as families do, it is clear that sexual bonds between teachers and students are disturbing to members of the system, and, in a sense, signal trouble in it. There is ambiguity about erotic connections among faculty. They may be seen as mommies and daddies who are free to mate among themselves (for instance, it is seen as fine to have married couples in the same department). Or they may be seen as children of a patriarchal head, and so are less free to mate.

Departments, like families, are sites of a second shift.5 Just as there are tensions between parents over who should do the less-valued work of making a house a home, so, too, are there tensions over faculty who refuse to “do their share.” Some will do the housework (administration) but not take care of the kids (be on dissertation committees). Others do more than their share of both, and still others squirm out of doing either, creating resentment.

Like families, departments have a dominant ethos. Some value the “nurturant” work of the home (tending to student’s personal problems). Others only value publishing and politicking). As at home, women sometimes end up spending more time comforting, encouraging, and checking in with students.⁶ The tensions—and resolutions—are similar to those in families.

Faculty allocates some of the least desired tasks, such as grading and leading discussion sections, to graduate students. Advanced graduate students are sometimes given their own undergraduate courses to teach, just as older children are sometimes made responsible for younger ones. Like parents, the faculty justify this labor as “training” and “development,” but graduate students sometimes question this explanation and resent the work.

Departments, like families, have limited material resources, and professors struggle with one another to get them. The budget is controlled by the department chair, who “brings home the bacon.” Staff who have less lofty credentials are responsible for the least valued—clerical and bookkeeping—tasks. Some are seen as “one of the family”—a beloved nanny, a ruler-gripping aunt who is a stickler for procedure, or a sage elder; others are seen as behind-the-scenes service providers.

The chair, like a parent, has discretion in spending the department’s income and doles out salary increases (allowances) through an emotionally charged process of “merit review.” Sometimes the chair has a few gifts to bestow, such as new computers or extra research stipends. Like children, faculty vie for the extra goodies and sink into states of envy toward siblings who get more. Rumors circulate about parental (chair) favoritism. For in departments as in families, sibling rivalry often rises to the fore.

In both departments and families, space is a scarce and valued resource. Members of equal status are supposed to have equivalent private space, and, like siblings tussling over bedrooms, the faculty scan the size and location of one another’s private offices, looking for signs that hint “Daddy loves him best.” Sharing an office with a faculty sibling is like sharing a bedroom, a mark of lower status. The head controls the largest and often the most presentable office, which may function as a parlor—a place to receive outsiders and to try to make a favorable impression on behalf of the departmental family as a whole.

Every home has its problems, but in most cases we are so very lucky to be in one. It is the same with departmental “homes.” Once we have earned tenure, our department is committed to us. And the vast majority of us commit ourselves wholeheartedly to it. We may be overworked, but we’re doing work we love.

But alas, today academia has a rising problem of homelessness. A shocking 68 percent of all faculty appointments in American higher education are non-tenure track.7 Half are part time—not the “good” part time with health benefits and job security, but the “bad” part time of the contingency labor force, paid only for classroom hours and not for time preparing lectures or talking with students outside of class.⁸ To earn enough, many contingency workers commute between two or three colleges, preparing new courses on their own time. In this atmosphere of insecurity, they often avoid anything that might cause complaint—be it civic controversy or tough feedback on student papers—and miss out on meaningful ties with students.

Work homes are wonderful, and we need more of them. The challenge is to make them vital, healing, and thriving places to be. In the meantime, the next time some of us walk into our department’s office and feel anxious that we have been displaced by a younger colleague or ignored by a preoccupied elder colleague, we should smile and understand that we are lucky: we have “come home again”—at work.