In an earlier life, Dr. M. served as chair of a large academic department at a state university out here in the American west. On the whole, the teachers that Dr. M. nominally supervised did their work very well. They were responsible, self-motivated, liked their teaching and reading and writing, and fortunately, did not expect to be lavishly rewarded either in salary or appreciation or assistance. But there were a few employees who were difficult. There always are. Ten per cent of the people take 90% of your time, no matter what the enterprise.
We had very little secretarial staff -- not even enough people to take and relay telephone messages, So (this was before the advent of sophisticated electronic communication), innovative chair that I was, I took some scarce departmental funds and purchased inexpensive, tape-driven answering machines and attached one to each professorial telephone. The theory was simple: most of the faculty weren't in their office many hours a week (nor were they paid to be), but the new technology would allow them to come to work, listen to yesterday's telephone calls, and return messages rapidly and efficiently. Ninety-five per cent of the faculty was happy with the new system. But a few of them rebelled. One particularly recalictrant member of the faculty -- let us call him RR -- categorically refused to touch his new machine. His reasoning: pushing the button and playing back the tape was not a "professorial responsibilty"; it was mere secretarial work, and in his view the new system asked that a professor lower himself to the level of staff. It would be "unprofessional" for him to listen to recorded telephone call, asserted RR..
I should mention that RR was the least distinguished member of our faculty. He was a poor teacher and his contributions to scholarship lay somewhere between non-existent and negligible, depending on the decade. You might think that his sense of nobility derived from a ducal or regal grandfather, but not so --he came from a working-class Kansas background, if I remember correctly.
"Professional" is a word about which I have ambivalent feelings. In its best incarnation, when it denotes adherence to an internalized set of responsible and shared values, it's a damn good word and an uplifting concept. But there are many occasions when "professional" is used to camouflage willfulness, laziness, and privilege, and then it is a word of which I am ashamed. I take the case of RR to be an example of "professional" used in order to justify indolence. For the rest of my faculty, it was "professional" to make ourselves available to the students whom they state paid us to educate and assist; not for RR.
I think that RR had a peculiar, retrogressive understanding of university life. He didn't like students or scholarship, but he did enjoy ceremony. He was the parliamentarian at meetings of the university's governing board. And every year, at commencement, he was the person who led the procession, bearing the university's mace (or whatever the heck that strange object was). Not a born teacher, he was a born presider at rituals. A large, ponderous fellow, he was a terrific mace-bearer -- and a truly crappy colleague.
I never did find a way to make him use his answering machine. If I owned the company, I would have fired him in a flash. But the university likes to separate responsibility from authority, so all I could do was cajole and beseech and shame -- a procedure that proved in his case to be totally without effect. You can't shame the shameless.
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