Ivory tower and other myths

OK, admittedly, when I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in English literature, I had fantasies of rising early every morning, crawling up in a fireside chair with my tea, a book and a long-haired cat, after which I’d make some notes toward an article, then go off to teach an earnest and intelligent group of young people just bursting with ideas and questions about the literature, about themselves, and about the complicated word in which we live.

I imagined an office with a leather chair and plenty of room for long discussions with the most earnest of students, calling me “Dr. Cole” until I corrected them (“just call me Lucinda”), and I imagined well-planned dinners with bright and amusing colleagues during which we’d talk about life and philosophy in ways that my lower-middle-class parents, both tired after working all day – and sometimes all night – never had the luxury to do. I thought I could go to the British Library every summer.

Fifteen years later, I can say with some assurance that the ivory tower doesn’t exist in my neck of the woods, and maybe not at all. I have a fireplace, sort of, and the students are there but half of them have full-time jobs and struggle to finish reading the assigned material, so that classes sometimes begin with me simply going over the plot. My office is a 6-by-10-foot concrete cubicle large enough for me, a few books and the occasional student, mostly there for scheduling.

My colleagues are indeed intelligent and amusing but have busy lives of their own, so that dinner conversation will often trend toward the topics my parents discussed: the economy, their bosses, child-rearing, how to afford a summer vacation. Because my partner lost his job about 10 months ago, I’m even worrying about how to pay this winter’s oil bill. As usual, I am hoping to teach a summer class, rather than writing that book.

Yet I know I’m lucky. We’re told that the average university professor makes about twice as much as does the average Mainer. We have health insurance. We have what at the moment appears to be a fairly stable retirement plan. We have summers off, if we can afford them. And at the University of Southern Maine and Orono, where research is part of our job description, we don’t teach as many classes as do our colleagues at some of the other campuses.

So I understand how much of the general public – and particularly people outside communities housing a targeted university – feel about recent faculty outcries at the UMS strategic plan. (The plan calls for the merger of University of Maine/Augusta with USM, and for the administrative consolidation of UMPI, Machias and Presque Isle.)

For faculty to resist efforts at saving money, as some of my nonacademic friends have told me, is to be “unrealistic” about economic realities, or to be – as a recent commentary by a member of the board of trustees charged – simply interested in “turf protection.” They suggest we come down from our “ivory tower” and join the “real world.”

As a faculty representative to the board of trustees during the unveiling of this strategic plan, I’ve had lots of time and incentive to think about this “real world.”

I’ve decided it, too, is a myth, much like that of the ivory tower.

What most people seem to mean by “real world” is that academia is a business. But academia is not a business – at least not in the strict sense of the term. After all, universities produce no traditional product. “Students” aren’t a product. At best, if forced to use the business metaphor, students are raw materials we’re expected to polish up. Nor are degrees a product, merely signs that one has successfully completed coursework at a nationally accredited university. The only real product we generate -and this depends on one’s campus mission – is scholarship, only some of which manifests direct income for the institution.

Universities have economic interests, of course. Not only are we always involved in capital campaign funds and trying to secure alumni donations but, particularly given the falling federal and state appropriations for public education, public institutions are compelled to partner with local business to make ourselves useful to students and potential employers. Program realignment can be beneficial to the state and its citizens.

But if the self-definition of universities becomes too tethered to local business interests, we run the risk of undermining our essential goals: we must offer tools to a broad range of Mainers. Universities educate not only accountants, but writers, and scientists, and historians, and geographers, and nurses, and teachers. Sometimes we graduate philosophers, too.

So the usual analogies just don’t work. Neither business nor ivory tower, universities fall betwixt and between modern categories of analysis.

That shouldn’t be surprising. Universities are very old entities. Indeed, I’ve always thought of the professoriate as being much like a “guild,” an old-fashioned term signifying a group of dedicated and highly trained professionals, like bricklayers and stone masons, who, during the Medieval and early modern periods, operated through an apprenticeship system. Students pay a fee and agree to enter into a rigorous method of training. At best, students are dedicated apprentices, and at best, academics are master teachers who never give up the search for adding knowledge to their respective fields.

Perhaps it is only by recognizing and acknowledging the somewhat archaic and time-honored identity of professors that nonacademics can appreciate the recent controversies surrounding the board of trustees’ strategic plan. Serious faculty have spent many years – in some case, entire lifetimes – training themselves, developing programs and trying to create institutions in which the state of Maine could take pride. Yet when the strategic planning process was initiated by the board of trustees, these same faculty were accorded mostly token input into what would become the largest restructuring effort of the university over the past thirty years.

Sure, to be excluded hurt our pride. Admittedly, some people are afraid of losing jobs. But mostly, the strategic plan and process threatened our collective sense of what universities were, are, and should be: institutions run by an aggregate of specialists doing their individual best to offer tools to a broad range of the populace, so that such students, regardless of their socioeconomic class, can in turn contribute to their families and communities in whatever ways their talents and desires lead them.

If academia were a business, individual faculty would just be glad not have lost a job. If academia were an ivory tower, nobody would really care about the state of Maine. But the professoriate, too, has a public trust. So we are fighting, as are the board of trustees, for a better university system.

My childhood fantasies notwithstanding, academics in Maine have never had the luxury of living in an ivory tower. And nobody – not even successful businesspeople – can claim to have a monopoly on “reality.”

This public pushing and shoving is a sign of mutual commitment. By also demonstrating some mutual respect, faculty and the board can be allies, or at least a system of checks and balances working together to make the Maine university system better.

But first we have to clean up our metaphors.

Lucinda Cole is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern Maine and USM’s faculty representative to the board of trustees.