The big event in my college this past month was a budget presentation before the provost and assorted deans. Preparing for the presentation was a matter of arranging sets of statistics in tables and then drawing conclusions from those tables about the college’s contribution to the university, the value of what we do in relation to the cost of doing it, the need for more space, more faculty members, more money, more everything.
The trouble was that I could hear my explanations, justifications, rationalizations, and petitions in my own head, and they weren’t persuasive even to me: canned phrases, boilerplate bulleted goals, strategies straight out of the administrator’s handy-dandy manual of jargon, all very predictable and all very dull. How, I asked myself, could I liven the whole thing up and still make my key points in a concise and emphatic way?
And then it came to me: Don’t talk it, sing it.
Within a few seconds several song titles suggested themselves to me as tuneful vehicles for the arguments I wanted to make. Rather than rehearsing one more time the story of an ambitious program of recruitment and retention that had succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, but left us in a financial hole, I would capture the spirit of that excellent adventure by singing “Anything Goes.” And then I would present the counterargument (for frugality, prudence, and being thankful for what you’ve got) by warbling “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” after which I would confess that I should have been a little more careful, so you can “Call Me Irresponsible.” I would conclude the mini-concert by acknowledging, ruefully, that the bill for what we had done was coming due and I couldn’t pay it, so (turn and face the provost directly) “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”
I didn’t do it, but in the course of thinking about doing it I realized that almost any situation an administrator might encounter -- especially the ones that follow a script -- can be framed in musical terms, and usefully so.
Someone’s sitting across from you and either wants something, or has something you want, or has done something, or hasn’t done something. It’s awkward for both of you, but a bit of the edge might be taken off if you can depersonalize the moment by deploying song. Let’s say it’s a student who has been caught plagiarizing, failed to persuade the relevant committees of his innocence, and now begs you (as the officer of final appeal) for mercy. He might say things like “Everyone does it” or “I didn’t realize it was plagiarism” or “I promise, I’ll never do it again,” but everyone has heard these excuses before and no one believes them. He might do better (or at least sound better) if he went with that line from the great old Billy Eckstine song, “From the bottom of my heart dear, I apologize,” and then underlined the point by borrowing from the McGuire Sisters hit “Sincerely,” and he might end (in a kind of postmodern way) by distributing the responsibility to everyone via the words of Marvin Gaye’s mega-hit “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”
Now it’s your turn, and you could, to be sure, deliver a stern moral lecture or laboriously explain the distinctions the student failed to grasp. But he wouldn’t get it and certainly wouldn’t be impressed, so why not save time and do something he might even remember and take to heart? First, let him know that you’re not buying by declaring (in song and with due acknowledgment to the Eagles) “You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes” and then seal the deal by taking the unexceptionable moral high ground with the Ink Spots’ “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.” No comeback to that, case closed and it’s only cost you a couple of minutes.
Another scenario. You’re a white heterosexual male dean (as most deans are) and you have to speak to a multicultural audience suspicious of you and your motives and convinced that whatever you are, you’re not one of them. What to do?
Well you could quote a lot of Cornel West and bell hooks and Amy Tan and Joy Harjo and Judith Butler, and you could report (for the 10 millionth time) that the concept of race has no biological basis, and you could go on for a while about the sexed body, the gendered body, and the socially constructed body; but face it, these are discourses you know largely by rote and since they are always being challenged and revised, the odds are that you’re out of date, and that every word you say demonstrates just how far out of date you are.
Why not cut to the chase and sing “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” (takes care of color and sexual preference at once)? And if you have the nerve (and I certainly wouldn’t), you could top that off (and end the evening pursued by a bear) by invoking the memory of Ethel Merman belting out Irving Berlin’s prescient premulticultural anthem “I’m an Indian Too.”
But seriously: Think about the dark and perilous wood of recruiting and the fact that nothing anyone says there acknowledges what is really going on. The candidate who has strung you along for a month or a year or two years tells you that you and your colleagues are wonderful and declares, “I know I will regret not joining you.” You say you understand and harbor only the warmest feelings and will spend many days lamenting the lost Eden of living happily together “Till the End of Time.”
Wouldn’t it make you feel better if you just called the laggard up and sent the musical message “You Made Me Love You,” followed forthrightly (and righteously) by the cold-eyed analysis of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” and then cut off both his protestations and his apologies by announcing (in full voice) “Got along without you before I met you, Gonna get along without you now”?
In the same vein, but in a somewhat different key, suppose you’re dealing with a faculty member who doesn’t teach what the course catalog promises and holds classes (intermittently) at nonscheduled hours in the local Starbucks or at the beach. He comes in sounding off about the life of the mind, academic freedom, the stultifying effects of bureaucratic regulations, and related bits of self-justifying nonsense. You feel obliged to pontificate about responsibility to the community, unfairness to those who obey the rules, and the ever-present danger of outraged state legislators and media watchdogs.
Once again it could all be done so much more economically if he entered singing “Don’t Fence Me In” and you responded, in rapid order, with Kitty Kallen’s immortal “Little Things Mean a Lot,” the pointed admonition of “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” and the reminder that if he doesn’t like the terms of employment he can always “Take This Job and Shove It.”
Once you get the hang of it, this matching of song to situation seems to generate its own steam; more and more matches suggests themselves, and the only brake on the enterprise is the possibility that you may exhaust your repertoire of songs. But never fear, your friends and colleagues will be ready with theirs, and together you can keep the exercise going at least until “The Twelfth of Never.”
My space, however, is limited, and I must content myself with a few hastily sketched-in extensions of the game I cannot stop playing. So here goes.
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How do you respond to the department chair who argues for a promotion you have rejected by pointing out that the candidate has written the books and taught the courses and, in general, done everything the university statutes require? Answer: You sing “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.”
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How do you speak to the faculty member who repeatedly insults and verbally abuses his colleagues and his students and declares to you “I Got to Be Me”? Answer: You sing “It Could Happen to You” and perhaps give him or her a demonstration on the spot.
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What do you say to the scholar who comes bearing an offer which, if met, would skew the salary structure and cause endless resentments? Here you have a choice, depending on how distressed or gratified you would be if he or she were to leave. You could sing “I’ll Be Seeing You” or “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” or “Hit the road Jack, don’t cha come back no more.”
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What do you sing to yourself at the end of one of those days when everything goes wrong and nothing seems right? Answer: “Everything Happens to Me” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
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What do you sing to yourself when your friends and colleagues abandon you to the wolves even as they assure you that “You’ve Got a Friend”? Answer: “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.”
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What do you try when your authority has run out and people don’t do things just because you tell them to? Answer: “Friendly Persuasion.”
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How do you deal with it when the university business office turns back the trip to Tahiti you had claimed as a research expense? Answer: Just tell yourself, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.”
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How, after your best laid plans have foundered on some rock, do you console yourself without surrendering to self-pity? Answer: Just repeat after Fats Domino, “Ain’t That a Shame?”
Well, I have to stop now, but not before returning to the primal scene of the presentation to the provost and the need to figure out a strategy for operating in a time of shrinking budgets. One obvious strategy, easier to name than to implement, is to ratchet up fund raising to make up for what the state no longer provides. Little donations won’t do it; what is required is the start of something big, and it occurred to me that by altering a few letters of the fine old standard “Cottage for Sale,” I could come up with just the slogan -- “College for Sale.”
A hundred million or so should about do it, and if you have it and you’re out there, please call. And if you don’t, “I’m going to sit right down and write myself a letter and make believe it came from you.”
