David Lester has come under fire in a number of places for, among other things, not attending faculty meetings. But judging from the tenor of the piece he is doing his colleagues a favour by not attending. Don’t we all have colleagues to whom we are grateful when they refrain from doing committee work, attending meetings, etc? Lester sounds as if he is, very generously, sparing his colleagues torment.
{ 16 comments }
Rich Puchalsky 03.11.04 at 4:49 pm
From Lester’s article: “Since it opened in 1971, I have founded the psychology program, set up the social-work program, and rescued the criminal-justice program at a time when there were thoughts of disbanding it. […] For most of the 32 years, I have taught more than the required load each semester, and for each of the first 30 summers, I taught two summer-school courses. ”
This does not sound like a guy who is shirking his fair share of work. It sounds like he is avoiding part of it and making up for that by doing more work elsewhere.
I still think that a lot of the hostility towards him has to do with him making the coal miner comparison.
Henry 03.11.04 at 5:08 pm
Rich – the difference is that most or all of the additional duties which he took on were duties which he would probably have gotten extra pay for. Committee work, and pure administration is something that you don’t usually get paid for, but have to do. Nobody much likes having to do it – and there’s a fair amount of justified resentment at freeloaders. Even if none of us academics have as hard a time of it as coalminers, Lester is probably still a jerk.
Ayjay 03.11.04 at 5:24 pm
There are really two distinct components to Lester’s essay, and they deserve two distinct responses. First, when he argues that academics’ complaints about their stresses and miseries are unseemly at best, given what many other people in the world have to suffer, he is absolutely right on. We academics are among the whiniest people in the world, and we deserve to get called on it.
But then he moves on to part 2, in which he holds himself up as a shining example of How To Do It Right — and that’s where he pisses people off, because Lester has obviously focused a lot more attention on padding his vita (note that he speaks of his work only in quantitative terms, as numbers of articles) than in being what the wise fellow Timothy Burke calls a mensch, a solid academic citizen.
If Lester had just said “quit your bitching” he’d have performed a good service. It’s the “and look at how successful and happy I am” part that chaps a few cheeks, and rightly so.
Tuttle 03.11.04 at 5:38 pm
He thought it was going to be a good skive and all that, you know? But he took one look at the time table and just checked out, man. I mean, it was ridiculous. They had, they had faculty meetings at, like, first thing, in the afternoon. We’re talking half-past twelve everyday. Who’s together by then? You can still taste the toothpaste!
Oh, wait… Lester, not Lister.
Rich Puchalsky 03.11.04 at 5:52 pm
ayjay, I think that part of the article comes off as “a shining example of How To Do It Right” only if it’s read out of context. Lester was replying to an article by Cady Wells in which she says that she gave up a tenured position largely because she found this kind of committee and service work stressful. In that context, I read what Lester is saying as more “you have tenure — go ahead and blow the committees off if they stress you out.” I can see how people who think that every tenured professor should do an equal share of research, teaching, and service would be annoyed by this, but it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. After all, it is the *attitude* that everyone had better chip in or be stigmatized as a freeloader that stressed out Cady Wells in the first place.
Back to coal mining. Glancing over the comments in various places, I’ve seen this rhetorical device ridiculed by comparison to others I paraphrase as “hey, at least we’re not starving in the Ukrainian famine!”, “at least we still have one limb left like Max Cleland and haven’t lost all of them!” There really is a difference. Coal mining is a routine job, part of a set of jobs that are at least as necessary to the functioning of our society as academia is. For an academic to have a job to complain about, a coal miner somewhere has to be mining coal. Complaining about the general problems of your own job without complaining about the problems in the coal miner’s job, or at least trying to link those problems to larger societal problems in some way, is a failure of social solidarity. I don’t mean that no one should be able to say make any complaint without mentioning the plight of the coal miner — there’s an annoying leftist stereotype for you — but that Lester in raising the issue isn’t quite being as rhetorically empty as people think.
Kevin Brancato 03.11.04 at 6:08 pm
My company (RAND), which is quasi-academic, has a policy that researchers should regularly perform recruiting, committee, administrative, and organizational tasks in addition to research. Not checking that box annually has financial consequences.
Henry, is this not so in any academic departments?
Are freeloaders ever punished in any way? If rarely, where are the institutional reformers?
Jacob T. Levy 03.11.04 at 6:52 pm
Princeton operates on a point system, whereby committee work and dissertation-advising are fungible with teaching. One has to perform a certain number of points of duty per time period. Eventually, someone who does less committee work is going to have more teaching.
That’s unusual, in my experience. Most departments give some course relief for being chair, some for other offices like DGS, but few for committee work as such. While there may be norms of rotation of service, there’s typically no mechanism for enforcing those norms on tenured faculty.
Timothy Burke 03.11.04 at 6:58 pm
Some freeloaders, in fact, are perversely rewarded for their behavior, and not because they get more time to publish. In fact, it’s precisely what Harry suggests here: a person who is enough of a nuisance or deadweight when it comes to service and collegiality can get perks simply by upping the nuisance ante, as it were. At many institutions, it’s easier to throw a bone at such a person and get them out of the way. Which is why, though Harry may be right, I hardly want to endorse the point he’s making. It goes back to something I was muttering about on my own blog a few months ago, about what the actual incentive structure of academic institutions tends to be. It seems to me that it is a very bad thing when you’ve got an incentive structure that rewards in multiple ways the person who is nuisance or deadweight (though this is not necessarily unique to academia).
A pity we don’t have coal mines *on* our campuses, so we’d have a sufficiently onerous job to consign such faculty to.
harry 03.11.04 at 7:59 pm
bq. Which is why, though Harry may be right, I hardly want to endorse the point he’s making.
No no no Timothy, we’re completely on the same page. Or more or less. Had I but time I’d have gone on to make the Jerry Cohen-ish point that what I am saying about people putatively like Lester in their putative defence is something they can hardly say themselves. For the record I believe that while there are a few people who are incapable consitituionally of managing themselves to do committee work and to behave cooperatively in meetings, a lot of other people are capable but have every incentive not to learn because if they refrain from learning their colleagues will prefer to do the work themselves as it will then be less work.
I learned how to chair meetings outside of academia and did so largely because I figured that since I was committed to sitting through the meetings I’d be better off if they were well chaired than if they were chaired by people who did not know how to chair. Unfortunately this has left me with an even lower tolerance for badly chaired meetings.
harry 03.11.04 at 8:00 pm
bq. Which is why, though Harry may be right, I hardly want to endorse the point he’s making.
No no no Timothy, we’re completely on the same page. Or more or less. Had I but time I’d have gone on to make the Jerry Cohen-ish point that what I am saying about people putatively like Lester in their putative defence is something they can hardly say themselves. For the record I believe that while there are a few people who are incapable consitituionally of managing themselves to do committee work and to behave cooperatively in meetings, a lot of other people are capable but have every incentive not to learn because if they refrain from learning their colleagues will prefer to do the work themselves as it will then be less work.
I learned how to chair meetings outside of academia and did so largely because I figured that since I was committed to sitting through the meetings I’d be better off if they were well chaired than if they were chaired by people who did not know how to chair. Unfortunately this has left me with an even lower tolerance for badly chaired meetings.
Timothy Burke 03.11.04 at 8:19 pm
Ah, so as Mr. Spock once said, “We reach.” In a way, I admire the brilliance of those who can make themselves such a drag on meetings that there is a positive incentive to exclude them or avoid them, or those who understand that being a PITA is a quick ticket to being given various small licenses and privileges. It’s an inspired form of low animal cunning. But it’s a real bugbear for everyone who’s left holding the bag.
yami 03.11.04 at 10:19 pm
You know, I read the Wells/Lester exchange in a wider context of academics, disgruntled or otherwise, trying to make academia function more effectively. Certainly not the only context available, but it allows one to interpret an academic’s complaints as something other than “whining”, which I think is quite an uncharitable characterization.
Cady Wells isn’t just complaining about being pressured to do scut work, she’s complaining about being extra-pressured to do scut work because she’s a woman. She may not have explicitly invoked the tradition of feminist consciousness-raising, but it’s still there behind her. Awareness of sexism is part of the solution, “just be glad you’re not a coal miner” is not.
Which is all to say that Lester (whose three wives probably did more than half the housework, unlike Wells’s working male partner) is not just a probably unpleasant individual, he’s also an implicit defender of the patriarchy. Yowza!
Stephen 03.12.04 at 3:40 am
Well, he does say:
I have founded the psychology program, set up the social-work program, and rescued the criminal-justice program at a time when there were thoughts of disbanding it.
Which does make it seem like he is involved.
Just not in the meetings many non-academics don’t understand anyway.
Keith M Ellis 03.12.04 at 5:43 am
I have a friend, an astrophysicist, whose mother, a women’s studies prof, was disapointed that she wasn’t active politically as a woman in the context of her professional life. But this friend was very apolitical and she just wanted to do astronomy.
My thoughts and sentiments were that it is significant that she was one of only a few woman astronomers at her institution, that even if she herself wasn’t aware of it or was mostly immune to it, there are various barriers against women in astronomy and so she could be helpful to others trying to overcome those barriers. Even so, I said, it was no one’s place to tell her that it was her responsibility to do such things; and, anyway, “merely” doing what she does with excellence (which is the case)—being an example—is probably the most substantial thing she can do to help other women in astronomy.
I don’t know if this is appropriate to this discussion, or not. But I strongly empathize with Wells for this reason.
…and the fact that I believe that much “service” is petty, counterproductive, academic politics. I’m not an academic, but this is what I’ve seen looking in from the outside.
Keith M Ellis 03.12.04 at 9:43 am
I see that I misunderstood Wells and Yami’s account of Wells. Although, I think an interesting point to be made is that people in similar situations are either treated disrespectfully (I worked with a group of eight programmers, only one of whom was female—the manager asked her to bake the birthday cakes, when necessary, for the observed teammembers’ birthdays) or are put in a position of doing extra work because they are expected to play a certain role since they’re female, or a minority, or whatever. Either way, these sort of things are an example of how many people like Lester might ought to consider not only how fortunate he is to not be a coal miner, but not to be a female academic.
That said, I think my allegiance ultimately goes to Lester because A) he’s right that academics can be awfully whiny; and, B) a good portion of “service” is bunk.
On the former, I’d like to make a point that hasn’t been yet made: most of these folks do what they do because they love what they do and can’t imagine doing anything else. For example, the academic physicists I’ve known work unbelivably hard for little pay; but they do so clearly because it’s a labor of love the way another person is, say, an artist. This is exactly why both are “underpaid” in a sense—and academics are “underpaid” in general—because that pay differential (versus, say, law or medicine) is probably pretty close to what being able to do the work they want to do is worth to them.
chujoe 03.13.04 at 3:15 pm
Seems to me that there are positions intermediate between blowing off all service & driving yourself crazy with committee work. One needs to pick & choose. While I agree that the tenured life is “easy” in many ways, it is exactly that easiness that implies responsibilities–both in & out of the academy.
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