Editor’s note: This excerpt from a new book, How to Chair a Department, has been adapted and published with permission from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Academe runs on a secret economy of gifts. It’s helpful to understand this via Marcel Mauss whose groundbreaking ethnography has influenced all modern thinking about the giving and receiving of gifts since it was published in 1925. His signal claim is that there is no such thing as a free gift:
It is indeed ownership that one obtains with the gift that one receives. But it is ownership of a certain kind. … It is ownership and possession, a pledge and something hired out, a thing sold and bought, and at the same time deposited, mandated, and bequeathed in order to be passed on to another. For it is only given you on condition that you make use of it for another or pass it on to a third person, the “distant partner.”
Following Mauss’s insight that “a gift is received ‘with a burden attached,’” I want to sketch out what I’ll call the “scholarly gift.” An “ordinary” gift puts me under obligation to repay the giver; the title of the first subsection of Mauss’s introduction is “The Gift, and Especially the Obligation to Return It.” But scholarly gifts are different. These are the gifts we receive from those “above” us in the profession, whether they are of higher rank, have more seniority or greater professional stature, or are associated with a more prestigious institution. That, in part, is what makes the gift of a letter of recommendation, for instance, so valuable.
Here’s the paradox: Although I’m deeply grateful for such gifts, there’s no way I can repay them directly because my “coin” is no good in their realm. The scholarly gift is characterized by a dynamic of asymmetrical reciprocity: An ethical obligation to give back is combined with a structural inability to repay directly those I owe.
How, then, do we even begin to pay back these scholarly gifts? The answer, in short, is that we turn around and pay them down the line: Pay them to younger or less well-situated scholars we are in a position to help. Which is to say that the profession runs, albeit secretly, on an intergenerational economy of debt and indebtedness, an exchange of quiet acts of professional courtesy and generosity. And this deep well of debt and indebtedness is, in the final analysis, a good rather than a bad thing.
It’s important, for my purposes, to distinguish the gift of the mentor from the gift of the peer or colleague. We talk about and understand collegiality — even if we’re often not very good at practicing it. Collegiality, however, is an example of symmetrical reciprocity, whereas the scholarly gift is characterized by asymmetrical reciprocity. And this exchange of gifts between unequals remains undiscussed.
I’m talking not primarily about generosity toward students — crucial though that is — but about generosity toward peers and colleagues (although at the upper end of the spectrum, of course, the boundary between graduate student and colleague is both fuzzy and fluid).
Perhaps it’s more useful to differentiate the kind of generosity that is more or less obligatory, implicitly a condition of employment (serving on dissertation committees, writing letters of recommendation when asked), from what we might call entrepreneurial generosity, a professional generosity that actively searches for colleagues to invest in. It’s a question, perhaps, of devoting our scholarly capital to those who have less, with the understanding that they’ll at some point turn around and make that same investment in others.
When it comes to the gifts we’ve received from our mentors in the profession, we must “pay them forward” because there’s no way for us to pay them back. We can do this in many ways:
- writing letters of recommendation.
- agreeing to do outside tenure reviews.
- reading the manuscripts of colleagues, both for colleagues we know and for journals and presses.
- providing book reviews.
- serving in scholarly organizations.
- contributing to collective publishing projects that don’t immediately or obviously burnish our scholarly reputations.
- chairing our departments.
One of the most famous invocations of the gift in the Western tradition is Paul’s statement in the book of Romans: “The free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The Greek word for “free gift” in that passage is “charisma.” To the extent that we have any charisma, any star cachet, we need to turn it into a gift.
This is the unpaid labor by which our profession remains professional. And just like most of our scholarly work, these works of generosity are largely done when we’re off the clock at night, on weekends, during unpaid summer months. What are the institutional, structural rewards for this service? Well they’re just awful, of course — but perhaps that’s not the point.
For some of us, at a certain stage of our careers, administrative work is no longer something to dread or to apologize for. For some of us, serving as chair of a department or dean of a college comes unbidden as a second, midcareer calling. Too often, perhaps, it calls us away from the work we were destined to do, and those tend to be the stories we hear. But sometimes, taking on administrative duties is precisely the culmination and fulfillment of that scholarly work, allowing us to recognize our past as prologue for the first time.
We don’t talk enough about the fact that, besides representing an obligation or a noble sacrifice, academic administration can be a calling; that the work can be incredibly rewarding instead of draining or distracting; that while it requires training and accomplishment as a scholar to qualify for such an appointment, success in it relies on a set of gifts that, for the most part, have nothing to do with those who sent us off to graduate school in the first place.
Administration is a category of academic work that faculty-reward systems refuse to recognize adequately. Some institutions offer department heads a small additional stipend; some reduce the chair’s teaching load. Some do both. But these never fully compensate for the additional work; and tenure-and-promotion systems may recognize the chair’s service but at a discount. We’re taught from early on how to value our accomplishments as scholars, and we choose mentors whose research has distinguished them in their fields. At most prestigious colleges and universities, good teaching alone won’t suffice to establish a distinguished career, but every institution worth its salt at least professes to care about teaching and very publicly rewards it. It’s easy enough, then, to feel good about being a good teacher, and it’s certainly in that guise that an often-hostile public likes us best.
But academic administration is abject: It requires gifts that one apologizes for possessing. I probably feel that way more acutely than most owing to the particulars of my situation. I didn’t get my current position at midcareer because my name was on everyone’s lips and my books in everyone’s offices. No, I snuck in through the servant’s entrance as a department chair.
Being good at academic administration paradoxically makes one feel bad about oneself. We scholars tend to function, unconsciously, with a spurious binary in place: Those who can (teach, research, write), do; those who can’t, or can no longer, chair. Surely this is wrong. What I’m advocating here is not a prescription for every Ph.D. It’s a path for only some of us.
But for those few — having taught well, published articles and papers and books, and created a scholarly identity — the next challenge and source of career fulfillment lies in taking on the job of hiring and mentoring younger scholars and devoting our experience to the task of clearing obstacles for them so that they might enjoy the same rewards and fulfillment as scholars and teachers that we have.
