COVID Chronicles XXII: The Great Resignation Hits Home – Colleagues Begin to Leave

 COVID 19, Psychological coping, psychoanalysis of the great resignation, what's up with the great resignation?

 

As the airwaves are alive with debates about COVID vaccination booster shots and the profits that would accompany those shots both for the manufacturers and the drugstores who administer them, the Great Resignation is also receiving lots of attention.  An NPR story stated that on some polls 90% of people polled said they are considering quitting their jobs.  The Reluctant Wife, who works with large amounts of job satisfaction data, states that opinion polls about retirement track reasonably closely to actual behavior with one half to three quarters of people who say they’re going to retire doing so, but only about ¼ to 1/3 of people who threated to quit actually do so.  But a quarter of 90% is big bunch of people!

In some of our industries, notably the restaurant industry, there are huge shortages of workers.  People who were laid off have found other things to do and/or are simply not returning – and many pundits are positing that workers are reconsidering their careers and deciding whether they really want to be investing the majority of their waking hours in washing dishes, peeling potatoes, or being spattered with hot grease while customers and managers complain that they are not working hard enough.

As compelling as this narrative is, and as true as it may be in any individual case, it is almost surely, in those cases where it is true, one strand in a really complex web of considerations.  We have just had one planned retirement, one unplanned retirement, one resignation, and one leave in our academic department.  One of the hallmarks of academic departments is stability, and this level of resignation is unprecedented.  There are, I think, common elements in each of the four resignations – and quality of (work) life, and work/life imbalance – is an important consideration in each of the four.  We have met as a departmental faculty to address work/life balance and are working to systemically improve that, but this has not proven sufficient to stem the outflow.

A significant factor within our little world has been an administration that is insisting that we be flexible with our students while they are inflexible with us, something that I wrote about in my last COVID post.  They are also being recalcitrant and not listening to our department about program issues and resources to handle influxes of students.  The most difficult part is the failure of the administration to realize the pressure that parents are under when daycare or school closes for extended periods of time due to COVID and a parent simply cannot leave an infant or a toddler to go to teach a class, something that they insist we do in person, even when virtually all of the students are attending by zoom - at which point we should use other, more effective forms of pedagogy than teaching with masks to small groups of students while the majority watch us interact via zoom.

If the reluctant kids were still at home, this would intersect with my own wish to be more present to them and the guilt that I felt about leaving them to fend for themselves in the world.  It was only years later that I learned that the plastic dinosaur that the reluctant son took to school every day had magical powers and would grow to life size and protect him when he needed it. 

COVID fatigue is also very real.  Teaching in the above mentioned split classroom with the majority of students on zoom and having to teach with a mask on to those in the room while also trying to connect with those whose cameras are turned off is a Sisyphean task.  It gets old. Fast.  But it keeps on being a thing...

This past week, after our initial rate of quarantine on campus plummeted from a new high to a much more reasonable level, I implored the zoom students to come back to the classroom.  All but about three of them did.  After class, as I was walking across campus, three students from the class stopped me to let me know how much fun it was to be in class again with their peers.  They acknowledged that it was better socially, but they also spontaneously offered that they learned better in the classroom than in the zoom room.  How could that not be the case?

I’m really not sure what we did before COVID that was so much less draining.  Was it really all that invigorating to teach in person?  On our free time, did going out to dinner with friends or going to a movie really improve the quality of our lives that much?  Or was it just not as concerning to be able to see people who are, horror of horrors, unmasked, and to wonder whether being near them threatens our well-being?  Is this an opportunity to have an empathic bond with paranoid people everywhere about how energy zapping it is to never be able to trust anyone?

I also think that there is a certain kind of isolation that takes place.  The loss of water cooler contact - the moments before a class starts, which on zoom are awkward at best.  You can't have a semi private conversation there.

Recently, I have been having many more dreams of family reunions – and there is a gathering planned for weekend after next in a state and county that has a very rate of infection.  We have reservations to go, but I fear the rest of the family is not going to risk the travel and the connection in public places that will be part of it.  I feel that I cannot miss it.  I feel so hungry for familial (and familiar) contact that the benefits outweigh any potential risks.  I will be masked and take precautions, and I will have at least some contact, so I will justify to myself going, even if I am going without my immediate family.

So I can get that my peers are crawling out of their skin.  What is remarkable about that is that faculty positions, not just in my department, are such stable positions.  The downside of tenure is that there is not an open market for faculty – except at the very very top ranks.  So our salaries are relatively depressed compared to what they might be in an open market (I’m not complaining a great deal – our salaries are reasonable, and in an open market, we would have moving expenses – and the psychological expense of adjusting to new communities on a regular basis). 

Tenure, as much as universities are trying to get rid of it, is actually a good deal for them, too.  They don’t have to spend time and money attracting talent the way they would if the market were more open.  We will have to do many searches over the next year or two – or we will have to figure out how to share a greater load among fewer people – who will burn out, so we will have even fewer people to share the work.  When things are functioning along the old normal, reunions – even twenty five year reunions – allow students to count on seeing faculty they remember and feel connected to.

But in the new normal, especially in fields like mine, where it is possible to go directly into business rather than working for an institution, will people flirt with academia – teach for a few years, and then move on to working in a practice that is more flexible than the University in terms of the work required?  Will a few old hands guard the administration of the department while adjunct faculty – teaching as a sideline to their more lucrative jobs as therapists – teach the courses?  Will this kind of specialization actually be good for students?  This is already the norm in many institution in the liberal arts.  We have largely avoided that at my University, but our administration has been limiting the number of tenured slots, especially when there are so many applicants for every open position.

Or is this resignation really more profound than that?  Will we move away from our current cultural norm of two income families?  Will we decide that a lower standard of economic living may allow for a better quality of life?  Will the pool of talent in many fields shrink?  Does our desire for greater connection with others predate the pandemic?  Does our concern about the consumerism that gets fueled by our incomes and then contributes to climate change cause us to pull back? 

Of course I am asking this in the context of incredibly privileged individuals frequently with partners who are able to support a family.  They are also individuals with very high levels of education that they can employ in alternative ways.  Is serving students like serving hamburgers?  It may seem like a tone deaf question, but are there points of convergence as well as divergence?  What do we want to do with the rest of our days?  It seems like the environment is conspiring to let us ask this question in a meaningful way. 

I first asked these questions in high school.  As a student at an alternative high school, I imagined running away to live in an agriculturally based commune (Twin Oaks, still running in Virginia).  When it came time to go to college, which I never doubted that I would, I had no interest in going to a school that would teach me a vocation.  I wanted to learn about the world.  I found that at a great books school, St. John’s College.  

After college, and working at jobs (in banking, construction and as an actuarial trainee) that I found unfulfilling, I went to graduate school to pursue a career that would be meaningful – both intellectually (I was interested in understanding how emotion and intellect are related) and in service (I wanted to help people lead better lives). 

I have worked at that career for more than thirty years in various ways.  I have a much better understanding, especially recently, of ways to address my intellectual questions, and I continue to develop as both a clinician and a teacher, hopefully helping others.  I have also had the opportunity to become a parent and a stepparent.  And, as an added bonus, plying my trade has provided a reliable and steady income.  I have lived my own version of the American Dream.

I am also discontent.  Something that the pandemic and social and climate crises have helped expose.  There have been considerable costs in pursuing the goals that I have set for myself.  Including that I don’t want to give up the pursuits that I have invested so heavily in being able to engage, even to the point that I don’t have a clear exit strategy for retirement.

On some very deep level, I admire the courage that my colleagues are showing in deciding to re-examine the decisions they have made that have led them to be in the places in their lives where they have found themselves.  I am glad that I am no longer chair of our department and don’t have to deal with the downstream effects of both the administration's foibles and the decisions of the faculty, admirable though they may, in some ways, be.  I am reasonably buffered from the decisions they have made.

The University will carry on.  The department will do so as well.  Both of those entities may engage in some soul searching of their own (the department has already begun that).  As someone recently pointed out, the only finite resource we have is time – and we don’t really know how much of that we actually have.  Sometimes we have to resign ourselves to determine how best to move forward and live the lives that we believe we were meant to live.

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

  For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

Downton Abbey: Trying to Capture Lightning in a Jar.

 Downton Abbey, Psychoanalysis, Comfort, Modernity, Psychology of Downton Abbey

My father had an irritating and endearing trait.  When we would watch movies on TV, he would say the next line before it was spoken.  This was not because we were seeing Casablanca for the umpteenth time and he had memorized the classic lines, but because he could anticipate the dramatic moment and knew something about the ways that Hollywood writers capture them.

Much to my children’s dismay, I practice this habit.  Of course, it feels different from the inside.  I have a sense of what is occurring and feel able to “co-author” it.  It feels less annoying and more powerful.  My children let me know that, of course, from their position it is as annoying now as it ever was.

Nowhere have I had the feeling of knowing what was coming, and feeling powerfully on top of it, than when watching Downton Abbey.  The plot lines in this six season series and the first movie following that are predictable – but not to the point of triteness, and the resulting convergences are comforting.  This is a world that, even as it is falling apart, is about regularity and, oddly, exposes some of the bedrock principles of western romantic thought as being based in a fantasy that could only be produced in the lives of incredible privilege – lives lived with a certain kind of oblivion to the lives of others all around – including the servants living under the same roof – while also engaging in what appears to be noblesse oblige.

Despite the predictability of the individual plots, the writers of this series have learned from Seinfeld – and before that M*A*S*H; they have multiple interrelated plots creating a musical experience for the watcher, especially as they shift between plot-lines, often using the opening of a door in a new scene as the mildly disorienting transition point from the closing of the door in the prior scene. 

Another important element in a series of this length is managing to keep the characters and plot lines closely enough aligned that the series doesn’t become so unfocused that it falls flat.  Like Schitt’s Creek, this series uses a nuclear family and the de facto family of servants that care for them as the critical mass holding the action in a tight orbit.  The writers rotate in, but at least as importantly, rotate out the characters that fill in around the edges.  They seem especially good at letting one or two dimensional characters – characters that are either too morally upright to be true or too thoroughly despicable to be redeemable – to disappear.  Those that initially appear unidimensional and end up staying develop in interesting ways and we discover they have flaws – or virtues – that we couldn’t initially appreciate.

All of this is very well and good, but the primary reason that this series resonates for me as a psychoanalyst has to do with the particular time frame that it is representing and the social fabric that it is calling attention to.  Even though most of the action centers on the “everyday” lives of a minor royal family and the people who serve them, the action spans the psychoanalytically critical time from 1912 – just before the First World War – the time when Freud had finished describing his second great model of the mind – to 1926  – the time  when Freud had finished his third and final revision his theory of the mind. 

Freud’s change in mental models was necessitated apparently, according to the dominant narrative, by the need to account for the massive slaughter of human beings that occurred in the war.  We needed a model that was not just based on love (OK, sex) but one that acknowledge aggression (OK, he called it the Death Instinct).  The Downton Abbey series allows us to expand our thinking about why it is that Freud’s model of the mind had to become more complex.

In the beginning of the fictional series, the household headed by Robert Crowley (Hugh Bonneville), the 7^th Earl of Grantham, and presided over by his butler, Mr. Carson (Jim Carter), is in crisis because Robert’s union with his wife, Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) has ‘only’ three daughters – and thus no male heir, and the closest living relative, to whom the eldest daughter, pretty but sharp-tongued and conniving Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) has been betrothed, dies, along with his brother, aboard the Titanic, and the new distant cousin who is now going to be in line to become the Earl is (gasp) someone who earns his living;  Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) is a lawyer of all shocking things.  And he is not too keen on leaving the world of earning a living to join the aristocracy, but he and his equally upper middle class mother Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) move to Downton Abbey to see what all the fuss is about.  Even as Matthew comes to see the virtues of the aristocratic lifestyle, his mother continues to have liberal, progressive and very bourgeoisie values – values that put her at odds with the family matriarch, Robert Crowley’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Grantham (played by the great Dame Maggie Smith).  There is a helpful family tree on the Wikipedia Page.

Meanwhile, downstairs, the house is run not just by the butler, but by the chief housemaid, Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan).  The gender politics that play out between them, and between all of the characters, is a central theme of the series.  Indeed, my Mother-in-law, who loves period pieces, could not continue watching the series because of the (reality based) treatment of women.  As difficult as it can be to watch, the plots upstairs and downstairs frequently revolve around the women who, despite having a power structure that is stacked against them, are generally more than a match for the men who, stuck in their roles and wielding their inherent power, do not have to be as nimble or creative in the inevitable power struggles. 

The series begins with an unholy alliance between Cora Crowley’s Lady’s Maid Sarah O’Brien (Siobhan Finnernan) and Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), the forces of evil, and Robert Crowley’s valet, Mr. Bates (Brendan Coyle) who is maligned, physically challenged and allied with young Mary Crowley’s Lady’s Maid Anna (Joanne Froggatt), the endearing and beleaguered forces of good.  Additional members of the downstairs contingent include the cook and her assistant, various footmen and maids, and the servants at other houses, including especially the Dowager Countess’s.

The first great turmoil involves the First World War, the war that would change Freud’s viewpoint on the world.  In the British Census of both 1900 and 1910, there were more people employed in service than in agriculture.  Service was necessary to make a house run – there weren’t washing machines or even electric irons, much less automatic dishwashers and central heating.  Indeed plumbing and electricity were in short supply and survival required a group effort.  A rigid hierarchy of class and role supported civilized living, and the rules that governed this hierarchy extended beyond such things as choice (or lack thereof) of profession and extended into how various courses of meals were served and what implements were used to serve them. 

In England, and throughout Europe, this hierarchical system, which had arisen during agrarian times, was still very much tied to the land, though the wealth that was being generated was increasingly occurring through exploiting colonies and through commerce.  The aristocracy, tied to the land and to traditional ways of supporting themselves were being replaced by a capitalistic system that was reliant on a meritocracy less focused on position and connection and more on one’s ability to wield capital to create new wealth.

Freud’s patients were largely children of industrialists who had achieved their wealth through hard work (like the newspaper man whose ability to be ruthless leads him to be wealthy enough to woo Mary Crawley.  He recognizes in her a kindred spirit, but she doesn’t like it when someone else uses her connivances against her).  Like the newspaper man, Freud's patients' families were former members of the middle class who used their new wealth to live like aristocrats, with hot and cold running servants, and their children were “ruled” by aristocratic top down rules that didn’t leave much room for things like free sexual expression.  Freud helped to loosen the rules against sexual expression and this led his patients, but also the class as a whole to become less symptomatic.

One of the central plotlines in Downton Abbey has to do with a downstairs/upstairs love affair where the potential for moving between worlds and the tension involved in that is played out.  One of the other plotlines is a perfectly lovely affair between a proper English aristocratic woman and a man who is in a marriage that is a marriage in name only.  We recognize (and ultimately even the dowager recognizes) the inhumanity that the proper British rules have imposed on this deeply loving couple.

Freud’s articulation of sex as a deeply human expression helped fuel some of the transitions that occurred in social mores and ethics in the modern era that is dawning at Downton Abbey.  But this also opened us up to a variety of things that weren’t allowed before – and these included the upward mobility of classes of individuals who had previously not been educated.  And we now have to contend with aggression as well as sex not just because of war, but because of industry.  We also have to contend with minds that are not as docile as they had been.  Whether a member of the upstairs class or the one downstairs, everyone is thinking more consistently about their survival and they are struggling with how best to manage that in a world that is not as rigidly scripted as it once was.

This modern world – the world of agendas and multitasking and trying to get ahead, not as the dowager does through intrigue and intimidation but as the head footman does through getting the goods on others (OK, the dowager is not above doing that, too), but a world that will become ruled one day by a news feed that tries to grab our attention away from what’s important – the people that are in the room with us and about whom we deeply care - this is a world that I am loathe to enter.

So, Downton Abbey is reassuring.  When I grew up, I was taught that every man at the table should stand when a woman was being seated, and one of those men should be pushing the chair in for her.  Seriously, when I was growing up, I pushed my mother’s chair in for her every night at the beginning of dinner.  Now let the record show that she had just prepared that dinner, brought it to the table, and would, after she sat through dinner, supervise the cleaning of the dishes and the kitchen, but by golly I was chivalrous.  And let the record show that I no longer do this.  And if I did, the reluctant wife would not approve!

By this I mean to point out that the Downton Abbey rules were part of what we would now call institutionalized sexism (and there is plenty of institutionalized classism, the first cousin of racism, on display).  The old ways were not better – unless the rules were working for you – but they were clearly defined.  There were rules.  As we move towards a world of gender bending, work/life balance bending, disruption worshipping, and climate upheaval, it is nice to return to a place that feels safer and more predictable, even as the telephone and electricity and motorized vehicles intrude into the sacred spaces that have been inhabited in more or less the same way for centuries.  Because we have navigated those changes, they are less threatening than those that we will face tomorrow morning.

So Freud’s multiple achievements shine through. Not only did he question the status quo before the first world war, helping to expose that we have much more complex subjectivities than the objectively defined romantic/classist world suspected, he adjusted to the sweeping changes that he had been part of and revised his model of the mind not just because he wanted to more fully account for the human condition, but to track the ways in which that condition was changing as people relied more and more on living by their wits and revising the way they engaged with the world on the fly rather than consciously accepting the world and its rules while the unconscious rebelled – and became symptomatic as a means of expressing that rebellion.

Where the pre-war Crawleys and their servants know their places and operated from within those places, the post war Crawleys and their servants adapted to changing situations: 

·       The Dowager Countess moves from seeing her distant, relative by in-law middle class nursing member of the family Isobel as someone to be discounted and dominated, to a worthy adversary and, ultimately, to a close kin with whom she has much in common and upon whom she can rely. 

·       Mr. Carson, the butler who is the soul of decorum and doing everything properly, becomes, in the movie sequel, a henchman in a minor palace coup, taking part in deceiving none other than the King’s butler, something that decorum would never have allowed in the old world.

·       The servant who is transformed, against his principles, into a family member, fights against the forces that he once swore his fealty to.  (I am straining here to be vague enough that if you haven’t yet seen this, it won’t spoil it for you).  In an upstream irony, the young revolutionary comes to appreciate the virtues of the old ways (siding with the viewers in being comforted by them).

·       The servant who is vile and repugnant turns out to be a tortured soul, repressing himself in ways that make him alienate those around him (pre-war), and then develops, post-war, into a self-possessed and productive leader of a team that once rejected him.  No longer needing to hide behind a veil of superiority as a means of hiding his defects, he can allow his virtues to shine.

I think there are plenty of other examples, but I will let those central plot and character development lines make the case that Downton Abbey presents the shift from the repressive pre-war period where anxiety was focused on a fear of following the rules to a post war experience of being anxious about being able to find one’s way in a changing and more complex world.  We moved from being victims, if you will, of what others expected of us – whether we lived upstairs or downstairs – to being at the mercy of what we expect of ourselves.

Downton Abbey, for all its predictability (and in part because of that predictability), has been a reliable and comforting companion as we have drifted back into isolation and uncertainty about the future of the pandemic.  That said, it has played a bit of havoc with my dreams.  I find myself sliding into a state of unknowing in them – as if I, too, had become caught up in doing things right – and not in finding my own path (a lifelong conflict for me).  Here I am, facing the last part of my life, happy with having successfully navigating the first part of it, but what have I sacrificed by following a traditional path to comfort and well-being?

Part of what becomes exciting – in those moments when I can come out of feeling mired in the isolation and uncertainty of COVID related issues – is the possibility that in my own smaller reflection of Freud’s achievement, I might be able to make sense of the brave new world that we will encounter whenever it is that we are free to move about the world again.  Who is it that we are in process of becoming?  What new models of the mind do we need to have available to us to help us understand the turmoil that we are embroiling ourselves in and the new opportunities that are only just now available to us? 

This identification with Freud and with developing along with the world into new ways of being sounds noble, but it is in conflict with the comfort that I feel in the connection with the Crowleys and the old ways of functioning.  Couldn’t we just linger a little longer with what is familiar?  I guess there will be a new movie version of the series coming out in the spring, and that will afford a moment to slip back into something more comfortable.  

 

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The Chair: Taking on multiple difficult tasks is part of adulting.

 

Psychoanalysis of The Chair; Psychology of The Chair; The Chair as a representation of life in the academy.

Sayre’s law maintains that academic fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low.

 

My father did not want me to get a Ph.D.  If I was going to go to graduate school, he said, I should get an M.B.A. so that I would understand how the business world, his world, works.  When I let him know that I was applying to graduate schools in psychology, he wanted me to go into Industrial Organizational Psychology, not Clinical Psychology, for the same reason.  I wanted to do neither of the things he recommended because I had no interest in becoming a middle manager.

So, in the middle of my academic career, when I was “promoted” to chair (the Dean offered me his congratudolances on my appointment), I found I was a middle manager without the training.  Of course by that time I had been teaching for many years with lots of training in psychology and being a psychologist but very little in how to teach psychology, so I suppose it seemed natural to move into something about which I knew very little.

The Netflix series “The Chair”, which has, not surprisingly, been garnering a lot of attention from academics.  As an academic ex-chair, I am reminded of a physician friend's response to E.R. - he felt retraumatized as he remembered his own stint as a med student in an E.R.  But I think E.R. and The Chair both have a broader reach because they are capturing something about the complexity and drama of living in an environment of what feels like life and death and what it feels like to be tasked with managing a situation that feels all but uncontrollable.

I think the series gets a number of things right about being a chair, but especially that the task of living; even when you are bright and accomplished and capable, isn’t easy.  It is a strain.  Though the series ignores the pandemic, I think that we have all experienced the sense of being on a roller coaster that is threatening to jump the tracks at any moment over the course of the past year and a half and we have recently had to buckle up for more.  And this first season feels something like the roller coaster ride we have all been on.

When I was appointed Chair, the previous chair left me a few things in the desk, just as Ji-Yoon Kim’s (Sandra Oh) prior chair Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) left her a plaque saying, “Fucker in Charge of You Fucking Fucks.”  The most useful thing the former chair left me was a mimeographed manual on being chair (so you know it was old and many chairs had passed it along).  It started with a statement that said something like, “If you are the kind of person who likes to plan their day and then have that day conform with your plans, being chair is probably not the right job for you.” 

Ji-Yoon starts one of her days as chair hustling across campus to join a meeting that she has set up with an older faculty member, Joan Hambling (Holland Taylor) whose Title IX complaint Ji-Yoon is supporting when she discovers that Bill – who has gone off the rails since leaving the chair position and becoming widowed far too young – is not yet in the class he is supposed to teach this morning.  She finds him sleeping in her office, so she props him up, literally ties his shoes and gets him out the door to teach, leaving Joan to alienate the woman Ji-Yoon has intended to be Joan's ally.  As absurd as this sounds, it rings true.

Though I never got my MBA, when I became chair I did go to a boot camp for new chairs.  The first thing they taught us was not to let the administration woo us over to the dark side; we needed to remember that we were leading our peers, not acting as an agent of the Board, the President, the Provost, or the Dean.  Yes, we represented the faculty to them, and communicated with the faculty on their behalf, but we were not enforcers, snitches, or “bosses”.  We were representatives who were working with our team to have our department be the best it could possibly be.

A central dynamic in the series is that the Dean wants Ji-Yoon to do his dirty work, and the central dramatic narrative revolves around whether she will buckle after initially working to inhabit the office as an advocate for her department.  She wavers in her support of her faculty, and this makes sense.  They aren’t doing their part.  One of the frustrations of being a chair is that most of the faculty are protected by tenure and really don’t have to do what you tell them.  As frustrating as that is, I think that this is balanced, or at least it was in my case, by having faculty who really care about the quality of the work that they do and that are passionate about the enterprise as a whole.  Without giving too much away (this time), The Chair ultimately delivers on this front.  We see the ways that faculty can forget that teaching is the primary reason that they are there, but we also see, especially in the younger faculty, the passion that is required for and results from connecting people to the great art, thought, and achievements of the world they will soon be joining and leading.  Again, The Chair rings true (with grace points for needed dramatic effect).

Being a faculty member – and perhaps even more so – being the chair, creates pressures on the personal lives of faculty members.  We can struggle to give our families the time and attention they deserve.  And we put pressure on them as we ask for support for those things that seem so life and death to us and somewhat abstract to them.  I don’t think this is the exclusive pressure of academia.  I think it is a universal conflict in our culture.  We could call it work/life balance.  I think that conflict is amplified for working women – and the pandemic has exacerbated these strains across the lifespan, though the strain is particularly acute, and portrayed in snippets, in caring for young children where daycare/schooling becomes unreliable and being Mom (and increasingly Dad) conflicts with being professor or chair or whatever.

This series focuses on the life of a woman of color in the chair.  She is the first woman and first POC in the chair.  As I pass through the arc of my career, I am now somewhere in between being the immediate past chair (Bill) and not quite to the point of being the deadwood of the ancients who can no longer attract students to their classes and should leave so that young, vital faculty can take their place (though it is certainly possible that I am simply in denial…).  I was the first non-Catholic chair in my Catholic institution, but I don’t think this compares to the margins that Ji-Yoon is working from.  That said, I think that the impostor phenomenon is a real thing.  We all question whether we belong, and while institutions are finally getting this and addressing it with their students – including especially first generation students and students of color, I don’t think they get it with regard to faculty and administrators.

With the cautionary tale of Copernicus in mind, colleges and universities have been set up to protect academic freedom.  They have, then, been administratively organized to support the autonomy of faculty members over their needs to be a member of a group.  Sports and teams (both as athletes and as fans) and coaches and, to a certain extent, classes and clubs and dances fill this role for students.  At some colleges, faculty eating facilities, unions, but ultimately the department fills this role.  The chair, responsible for supporting this function, because they are in an administrative role and responsible for things like evaluations, frequently doesn’t feel the support that they are trying to facilitate for the departments they serve.  Ji-Yoon’s sense of aloneness is palpable in this series.

Faculty should be free to engage in whatever thoughts they might entertain and to try them out in an atmosphere of open enquiry, which is the reason for academic freedom.  Students, too, should participate in this.  In The Chair, lines of conflict open along this fault line.  The students decide that Bill’s mocking of Nazism is a sign of his being a despotic and authoritarian figure.  As a teacher, he is a figure of authority.  And his efforts to engage in the students in dialogue around this are some of the most intriguing moments in the series.

I also struggled with these moments as I watched them.  They seem manufactured.  He is being maligned when he finally steps up to the plate and is engages in the process of teaching, a process that he clearly cares deeply about.  The controversy seems manufactured and, frankly, fake.  As I have wrestled with this, I have come to experience it as a representation, no matter how artificial, of something true – that the academy exists as a place where students can observe models of what it looks like to be an adult and to struggle with the confusion of living in a world that is far from ideal and figuring out how to object to that world while working with it to become a better version of itself.  In the process of doing that, they wrestle with the world that is presented by its representatives – the faculty – and hold that group to unrealistically high standards and struggle with how to make use of them as models while also seeing their faults.

I think the reason that I have had trouble with this corner of the series is that it is at odds with what I see as a more dominant need on the part of the students – and that is the need to learn; to learn from the faculty, to learn from each other, and, as part of their maturation, to learn from their parents.  The inclusion of Ji-Yoon’s parenting – and her daughter’s apparent rejection of her as an adequate parent mirrors her department’s rejection of her chairing, the Dean’s rejection of that, and Bill’s rejection of her honest efforts to get him back on the rails.  It can be a very lonely role to be the only adult in the room, but it is a role that Ji-Yoon plays with passion and, ultimately, believability. 

I assume this series will continue, but if its first season is its last, it will stand as a sensitive testament to the complexities of stepping into the roles that are necessary and playing them, whether we have been trained for them or not, to the best of our abilities.  

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