May 8, 2008...9:30 pm
On Collegiality and Service
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THEN:
Person: You are the tenured person and the one with the grownup house, so you should host the department party.
PZ: How novel and interesting to be in this position. Out of exoticism I will definitely host this party. Besides, it is now my duty to do so.
NOW:
Person: You are the tenured person and the one with the grownup house, so you should host the department party.
PZ: That is work. Women’s work. I think a man should do it.
Axé.
14 Comments
May 8, 2008 at 11:09 pm
My attitude would be: “I’ll try to — but you know the overall effect might be a bit eccentric, since this isn’t something that I normally do. I really will require all of your input if this is going to come out the way you hope it will!”
May 9, 2008 at 2:43 am
Love it.
May 9, 2008 at 1:41 pm
J - you do realize how inefficient that response is, you know! It means you have to handle all of this planning and buzzing, but then everyone will fall through at the last moment and then here come the students and their parents dressed to the nines, shiny and expectant. It is all too stressful and time consuming not to just say yes or no!
May 9, 2008 at 3:20 pm
At the end of each term our dept. chair reluctantly brings up the subject of the end-of-term get together. Heads drop, papers shuffle, silence abounds. No one wants a party; we’re all sick of each other and in need of a break; there’s not that much worth celebrating, except survival. Everyone would be just fine without a party, yet we all sign the list and volunteer to bring something.
The party happens. The food is very good. Conversation is superficial. We go home.
I’m starting to believe that the party is truly unavoidable.
May 9, 2008 at 3:39 pm
The departmental parties in my father’s department really were good. But that was in the days when there was collegiality - something an older colleague has informed me is gone.
May 9, 2008 at 5:16 pm
J - you do realize how inefficient that response is, you know! It means you have to handle all of this planning and buzzing, but then everyone will fall through at the last moment and then here come the students and their parents dressed to the nines, shiny and expectant. It is all too stressful and time consuming not to just say yes or no!
Why feel badly? If anything went wrong, I would be in a fine position to say, “But this is how you organised it!”
May 9, 2008 at 5:21 pm
It would be mean to the students and their parents to act out this morality play like that - and the colleagues wouldn’t appreciate it, either, and one doesn’t have time. Just say no, don’t play games.
May 9, 2008 at 6:32 pm
It’s not a morality play. It doesn’t have any meaning.
May 10, 2008 at 3:22 pm
But it would be taken as an attempt to teach a lesson and to do that in a mean way.
May 10, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Yeah I know. That is what I meant by you cannot really get away from femininity.
May 11, 2008 at 1:22 am
C’est vrai!!!
May 14, 2008 at 5:28 pm
If students and parents are present, you ought to throw it at a hotel and split the costs between the department members…pay an expert, that’s my idea.
May 14, 2008 at 9:27 pm
I’d be for that! Or at the Alumni House or something. It would seriously cost but even though we are broke there are some departmental monies we could use. Others will call that extravagant but for me it is extravagant not to.
May 15, 2008 at 11:52 am
Yeah, I’m for just say no for all of the reasons here. Unless you can find a way to totally big-dog with the adult house and a departmentally-funded caterer. My school pays a per-head reimbursement for entertaining students in the home, but it’s not enough to get a cleaning service before and after.
Nice thoughts on the femininity of collegiality and its transformations (no more faculty wives to do the work) in this recent article by Laurie Finke, “Performing Collegiality, Troubling Gender”:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/symploke/v013/13.1finke.html
Also worth looking, for this and so many other reasons, at Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, _The World of Goods_, in which they work out an anthropology of the meanings and hierarchies constituted through the economic practices of production and consumption.
Both these sources argue that high frequency, low status service work, or anything that looks like it, is declassing and hence, counterproductive to professional aspirations.
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