Last semester, I quit my job. I had been head of the English department, and I
ALSO SEE:
I’m Not a Chairman, I’m a Professor
stepped down three years before my five-year term ended.
Quitting before one’s allotted term is up is hard: Americans hate a defeatist. We’ve all been brought up to believe that stick-to-itiveness and persistence save the day (see The Little Engine That Could, Mighty Mouse, and The Power of Positive Thinking). Team sports and other collective endeavors foster the ideology that winners never quit and quitters never win (see Chariots of Fire, the World Series, and World Wars I and II). As a nation, we recall with pain and humiliation America’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s pithy exit line after his resignation: “I’m no quitter.”
Even in academe, where postmodernity gives us free rein to gallop away from tired old truisms, backing off from commitments doesn’t seem to qualify as an act of subversive transgression. Although literary critics can interpret Bartleby the Scrivener’s “I prefer not to” as a radically transgressive act of refusal, a colleague who prefers not to is hardly given the same theoretical slack.
Yet, I’m here to say that quitting my position is one of the best things I’ve ever done. (Accepting the position was one of the best things I’d done up to that point.) Of course, caveats are in order. I know that I’m in a privileged position as a tenured professor, that adjuncts and part-timers have no such luck or opportunity, and that now someone else will have to pull my heavy oar. But the gospel that I bring is not just that I quit and bravo for me. My message is that it is important to listen to the still, quiet, cowardly voice within.
Two years ago, I came to the University of Illinois at Chicago as a professor, who, at the 23rd hour, was asked to be head of the English department. The first choice had backed out at the 22nd hour. I had never been at the helm of a department, and I was eager to find out what that would be like. I had just turned 50, and I was feeling the sluggish weight of middle age in my daily work habits. I decided that advising younger faculty members and helping develop programs might be an exciting way out of my career doldrums. I had been a graduate director; the position of department head seemed to be just a notch up, with a few more challenges (as they like to say in administration), more perks, and the chance to accomplish positive changes.
The fact that my dean was Stanley Fish and my associate dean Gerald Graff, and that the College of Arts and Sciences was undergoing a newsworthy transformation, only made the position more intriguing. I had visions of myself helping to create “community,” bringing an underappreciated faculty into the promised land of academic superabundance.
My initial year as head was heady indeed. I found myself swept up in a complex set of hires; learned to manage a $5-million budget and 55 faculty members and 120 teaching assistants and lecturers; reorganized the office staff; and spiffed up the department’s office space -- all while trying to what is generally called “move the department forward.” The number of e-mail messages I received each day leapt from unmanageable to impossible. I was having late-night meetings with my dean while fielding calls from the local news media. A crisis a day was routine. Enough adrenaline was coursing through my body to jolt five humans. My main sensation was that I had consumed several urns of coffee topped off with a few handfuls of No-Doz. The truth is, given my addictive personality, I began to crave the rush associated with walking into the office each day.
But, caught up in the sound and fury, I realized that I wasn’t spending much time doing the altruistic and valuable things I had hoped to do. As a department head, one tends to spend more time mending fences than building bridges. And one tends to see the darker side of one’s colleagues. People who appeared genially adult in the hallways entered my office, closed the door, and brought out their hurt and angry inner children.
Worse, my academic work began to suffer. I had to put my projects not just on the back burner but in the deep freezer. I kept having to reschedule commitments I’d made to publishers and colleagues to later and later dates, sometimes years away. When it dawned on me that the relatively simple task of assembling a book of my essays had taken two years, I began to wonder if I was in the right job.
And a crisis a day tends not to keep the doctor away. I started to develop medical problems -- first and foremost an irregular heartbeat. My heart was beginning to intuit what my intellect only suspected. Then there were the middle-of-the-night awakenings, when I would lie in bed and worry about the latest crisis. I began to ask the big question: What was my real job? Was I an administrator, or a teacher and writer?
That question hit hard. After all, what is our job description as professors? It seemed fairly clear when I started out: I knew that my daily labors included teaching, reading, and writing. No one becomes a professor because he or she wants to do administration. But now, the reasons that had led me to my profession -- wanting to teach, read, and write -- were becoming superfluous. Of course, there are some who manage to combine academics with administration. But that double consciousness does not come easily, and for most of us, teaching and writing require more time for reflection than administrative duties allow.
It is unsettling when our inner quitter begins to speak loudly enough for us to hear it. In our culture, we are trained to develop a whip-ourselves-into-shape mentality that is supposed to respond to our inner quitter by slapping it to its senses. But evolution didn’t add the flight response to the fight response for nothing. The ability to flee is protective and useful, even though it gets bad press when compared with its macho sibling. Abused spouses, drug addicts, and some department heads have languished in their positions because of failure to heed the voices of their inner quitters.
My big fear is that, like chocolate and coffee, quitting will become habit-forming. I won’t be able to get through the day without walking away from yet another challenge. Maybe I’ll stop writing that tenure-review letter on the other screen of my computer. From there it’s just a short hop to missing the next faculty meeting, skipping office hours, and, finally, becoming that most despised of colleagues, the freeloading slacker who fits all the negative stereotypes of the university professor. That’s the person who comes to class late, rambles without preparation, blows off departmental and university obligations, and continues to collect a comfortable paycheck.
But there is good quitting and bad quitting. The wise quitter knows that he or she will return to fight another day. I’ve learned that lesson in a predictable crucible of character -- sports. Last year I ran my 11th marathon. I have finished eight of them. When I’ve quit a marathon, as I did last year, it’s because an inner voice tells me that it’s better to drop out and remain in good health than to push and finish with injuries. Relatively injury-free from my administrative job, I now have time to write this essay, read a book, and prepare my classes. Not bad for a college professor.
Lennard J. Davis used to be head of the English department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Now he’s only a professor there. He is the author, most recently, of Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York University Press, 2002).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 14, Page B11
