Absurdity in Academia

One of the things that initially drew me to academia was the absurdity of it all. I don’t mean to suggest that all aspects of academic life are absurd or even the best parts of it are absurd, but certain things about the academic life encourage us to laugh at both ourselves and our situation.

For example, in graduate school, I loved the fact that some faculty appeared to care nothing for their appearance, I found the stories of researcher who literally lived for days at a time in their labs endlessly amusing, and marveled at emails from my advisor at 2 am. To me, these simple acts reflected an unwillingness to concede to the 9-5 life (such that I imagined still existed), refusal of professional expectations, and single-minded pursuit of one’s intellectual or academic goals (even if the results could be a bit stinky). 

On the flip side, I soon recognized administrators or aspiring administrators by their more professional comportment. They wore ties (or suits or gender appropriate corporate-style dress) and nice shoes. They seemed more bound by business hours (although today, I realize that deans and the like often work hours that are as long as anyone on campus). They spoke in the strange corporate patois and oversaw the complex bureaucracy that seemed to function by its own logic. 

A a student, the interaction of the administration and the faculty was almost always amusing because I assumed that somehow faculty had the upper hand. To my student mind, the faculty was smart, more agile, and rhetorically sophisticated. We reveled in the stories of how faculty out maneuvered witless administrators. Now that I am faculty, I find the interaction between faculty and administrators no less funny, but I understand the mutuality of it. Despite the fact that many administrators still hail from faculty ranks, they seem to intentionally do things to trigger faculty in how they imagine our motivation.

For example, our campus has recently started a program where we can earn digital badges for meaningless tasks like uploading a video to our online class or filing in certain paperwork on time. No thinking person believes that “digital badges” will motivate faculty to be “team players” or to “work hard and compete with their peers” but I am fairly certain that most people understand that such policies set off a certain group of faculty with predictably amusing results. For our part as faculty, pointing out that policies don’t make sense or open the door for novel abuses or gaming the system doesn’t actually tell administrators things that they don’t know. It does, however, create humorous awkwardness as a member of the English department, for example, dressed in dean’s clothing recites the latest wisdom imparted through a recently viewed webinar. With this relatively newly minted dean, it was actually possible to see him “talking out his neck” as his eyes and brain belied how little he believed what he was saying or its underlying logic. In another incident, another dean suggested that I adjust my teaching load in my contract by 3.33%.

(The insincerity of these gestures evokes a kind of colonial mimicry not so much at the level of deans and their minions, but certainly at the level of the department chair. I’d like to think about this more.) 

Faculty, for their part, return the favor. I once proposed an evaluation process for my department was so complex, absurd, and reflexive that, for a moment, it broke the system and drifted in the university ether before being rejected on technicalities. I’ve always enjoyed watching my colleagues from across campus advocate that their academic specialty is fundamental to the entire project of higher education and cutting it – even slightly – would make our institution a university in name only and significantly accelerated the decline of society. Just as we smile and nod as our English professor in dean’s clothing spouts the latest administrative jargon, we must imagine that our administrators, despite their earnest and understanding nods, must be chuckling. 

These regular performances of the absurd reflect the fundamental incommensurability of our two languages. For administrators, the highest priority it the fiscal and corporate health of the institution and that is mostly bound up in a set of behaviors defined by the logic of the business world and the bureaucratized, progressive, modern state. Many faculty, particularly in the humanities and arts, continue to see their work as craft and fundamentally incompatible with modern structures. We work on our couch at 2 am, wear jeans to work, and find even routine paperwork Byzantine in its logic and complexity. I suspect that this incommensurability has its roots in the two traditions that define higher education: the traditional and the progressive. Faculty tend to be drawn to the former; administrators to the latter.

Our willingness to see the absurdity in the language, behavior, and logic of administrators is effectively a safety valve that releases the tensions inherent in this system. It depends on both sides willingness to recognize the other’s logic as familiar (and maybe even compelling), but refusing to accept it as valid. The tension between recognition and rejection, comprehension and commensurability, and literally speaking and hearing creates a situation where both sides speak past one another in a theater of the absurd. For some this can lead to despair, of course, and we never can really forget that the stakes of this absurdity are real and involve people’s lives, careers, and sense of self. At the same time, there are moments when the sadness and anxiety breaks and we have to laugh. This is both cathartic and reinforces the incommensurability of our two positions. 

More tomorrow…