Dear Colleagues,

North Americans will know the CHE as a useful and
informative weekly magazine that addresses a wide
range of issues in higher education.

If you live outside the United States, you may not
have seen it.

The growing attention to improvements in design
education -- and the growing need for improvements
as design schools take on research programs and
university responsibilities -- make this an important
resource for ideas, information, and news.

If you have not yet read the Chronicle, I recommend
a visit to their Web site at

http://chronicle.com

Many resources are available free.

This journal that will repay the price of a departmental
subscription many times over.

Below, please find Stanley Fish's amusing current
article. It's a funny piece, but it tells a sad story about
design departments all of us have seen.

Best regards,

Ken Friedman


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This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
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   From the issue dated March 22, 2002



   You Probably Think This Song Is About You

   By STANLEY FISH

    All happy departments are alike. All unhappy departments are
   unhappy in their own way. Let me count the ways.

   You know it's an unhappy department if it is fissured by
   quarrels the origins of which no one remembers, in part
   because the original combatants have long since died. In
   departments unhappy in this way, dead people often end up
   having more power (and votes) than the people who claim to be
   alive.

   You know it's an unhappy department if its discussions are
   conducted in code, and procedural questions stand in for the
   substantive issues that are never allowed to surface. Once
   this decorum is established, no one ever gets to say what he
   or she really thinks; and although the ever smaller battles do
   get won and lost, the department always loses because its
   pathologies are never confronted.

   You know it's an unhappy department if a mania for democracy
   has supplanted any sense of what the enterprise is really for.
   Members of this kind of unhappy department think that they are
   in the business of being fair and equitable rather than in the
   business of history or chemistry or economics. Of course there
   is nothing wrong with fairness and equity, but you have to
   have something to be fair and equitable about, and it is easy
   to congratulate yourself for upholding values that crowd out
   the values -- rigor, knowledge, judgment, truth -- that
   constitute academic work.

   You know it's an unhappy department if its bylaws are longer
   and more complicated than many of the articles department
   members write. The general rule is that the longer the bylaws,
   the unhappier the department. This is so because the motive
   for length is to take into account the interests of all
   factions, with the result that every turf battle, imagined
   slight, baseless jealousy, and ungrounded anxiety is accorded
   constitutional status and guaranteed eternal life.

   You know it's an unhappy department if there are two of them;
   if, in the heat of internecine warfare, one side has declared
   itself independent of the other and persuaded a hapless
   administration to set up a separate shop. What you then have
   is a situation in which authority is diluted in the manner of
   the Avignon papacy or of the multiple organizations that
   proclaim three different persons the undisputed heavyweight
   champion of the world. Where you once had a single weak
   department, you now have two, each of which defines itself in
   relation to the (supposed) illegitimacy, rapacity, and
   duplicity of the other. Departments in this fix should, in the
   interest of truth in advertising, display a sign on the office
   door proclaiming, "Damaged Goods, all ye who enter here should
   have your heads examined."

   You know it's an unhappy department if individual members
   delight in hanging out the department's dirty laundry in
   public for any and all to see, running first to deans and then
   to provosts and ultimately to trustees and the tabloid press.
   As despicable as this behavior is, blame should fall not on
   the perpetrators but on the department that cannot conduct its
   own business in-house and commands so little allegiance that
   the category "harmful to the department's interest" has no
   place in the minds of its members, who think of themselves as
   acting out of the purest motives, even as they perform in ways
   that make both themselves and the unit they supposedly
   represent pariahs in the eyes of the very administrators they
   petition. (Nothing marks a department as a bad and unhappy one
   more surely than this particular version of professional
   suicide.)

   You know it's an unhappy department if there is a departmental
   salary committee that works from a "price list" of activities,
   awarding so much for a book, so much for a refereed article,
   so much for an unrefereed article, so much for a footnote, so
   much for an appearance at your daughter's third-grade class.
   There is a perverse economy to this procedure that assures
   that the scorecard of everyone's failures and humiliations --
   along with the successes that spread pain evenly to those who
   haven't had them -- can be publicly displayed and given their
   precise monetary value down to the last penny. (This is the
   financial equivalent of the bylaws that are longer than the
   sum of all the departmental CV's.)

   You know it's an unhappy department if the decision to hire
   turns even partly on the question of whether a potential new
   colleague will be paid more than longtime department members
   at the same or even higher rank. (This is the "fairness bogey"
   once again raising its irrelevant head.) The truth is that if
   this is not the case you're not hiring or trying to hire the
   right people, who, because they are the right people, will be
   commanding top-dollar prices in a market that is very
   different from the market in place when your veterans first
   came aboard. Given the inverse relationship between
   institutional longevity and current market value (the longer
   you stay at a place, the more you will fall behind,
   independently of, and indeed because of, your years of
   service), what is now called "salary compression" is
   inevitable, and cannot be corrected on the spot (although the
   fact of it can lead to a strategy for narrowing the gap
   between the newcomers and the old hands). Salary compression
   can be avoided by the simple expedient of only hiring at
   salaries in line with the salaries already being paid to those
   at the designated rank; but if you do that, you will be
   choosing from the bottom of the barrel (except in those
   once-in-a-while instances where a top-flight person just has
   to live in the area, and that won't last forever), and you
   will lose the chance to add new and invigorating scholars to
   the departmental mix -- a loss actively desired by some
   unhappy members of some unhappy departments.

   You know it's an unhappy department if the department turns
   its administrative and collective eyes away from the
   misdemeanors and possible felonies of a rogue member --
   someone who fails to meetclasses or office hours, someone
   whose instruction bears no relationship to what is stated in
   the course catalog, someone who hasn't been to department
   meetings in years because they are scheduled on days when the
   dog must be taken to therapy, someone who votes (usually
   negatively) on personnel matters without ever having met the
   candidate or read the materials, someone who eats up a
   disproportionate share of department resources (telephone,
   copying, travel, secretarial time) while reserving the benefit
   of grants and research funds jealously for himself, someone
   who involves students in projects for which she is being paid
   by outside agencies, someone who involves students in his or
   her personal quarrels, someone who harasses and makes life
   difficult for people (staff members, students, junior
   colleagues, women, men, anyone), someone who is quite possibly
   a sexual predator, someone who regularly and semi-publicly
   displays contempt for the attributes (religion, ethnicity,
   sexual orientation, political views) of those he hates or
   fears. When such a person is not called to account for his or
   her behavior, the result is not simply that someone has gotten
   away with something (or with many things); the more
   significant result is that a cancer has entered the
   department's bloodstream, infecting all of its activities,
   including those far removed from the behavior that has been
   allowed to continue. Such a department is rotting from within,
   and it will only be a matter of time before there is nothing
   left but ruins and shards and disease.

   You know it's an unhappy department when the person who
   answers the phone (if the phone is answered) does so in
   languid, lugubrious tones and displays energy only when he or
   she is unable to answer your question and takes genuine and
   animated pleasure at being unable to direct you to someone who
   can. This is not a staff failure; it is a failure in training,
   supervision, and ethos. The performance of a staff member is
   an index of the degree to which a department knows its
   business and is concerned that it be done professionally. Bad
   staff performance is a sure sign that Conrad's flabby devil
   has found a home and taken over.

   Obviously this taxonomy is far from complete, and I invite
   readers who do not recognize their own unhappy departments in
   this partial inventory to send in additional items. Meanwhile
   it is perhaps time to speculate on the reasons why so many
   (certainly not all) departments are unhappy. One reason is an
   attachment -- often not recognized by those who feel it -- to
   a bad history that might include a grand fight in a meeting 15
   years ago, a soft-core decision to promote someone who now
   spits out the corrosive venom of a person who knows that he or
   she is here only by virtue of an act of condescension bitterly
   resented (this kind of resentment will outlast plutonium), a
   determination to settle old scores again and again and again,
   the perception of favoritism, the reality of hard times with
   its attendant deprivations and scarcities. What is curious is
   that after a while this structure of discontents is the only
   thing some department members are content with; in fact they
   love it and don't want to give it up. Once on a site visit, I
   asked an assembled department if it wanted to move ahead with
   new projects and renewed vision or if it preferred to go on as
   before and make its pain its treasure. The response was a
   little like Jack Benny's famous answer to the question put to
   him by a thief. "Your money or your life?" Like Benny, they
   wanted to think it over.

   Now I'm not saying that there is no substance to the memories
   and investments that unhappy departments finger and caress.
   Bad things do happen (many inflicted by forces from the
   outside), but a good and healthy organization will face them
   down, regroup, and gather itself for the next chapter in the
   fight for good and glory. But it is unlikely to do so in the
   absence of strong and encouraging leadership, and that is a
   second key reason why unhappy departments tend to persist in
   their unhappiness -- the want of a leader who can break with
   the past and turn negative energies into positive resolve.
   Just how a leader does that and with what resources garnered
   from what coffers is a long story, filled with as many hazards
   as hopes, and it is a story that must wait for another column.

   One more thing, however. Some who read this column will be
   moved to respond by saying (or writing), "You know it's an
   unhappy department if Stanley Fish is its chair." I just
   wanted to say it first, although, of course, it wouldn't be
   true.

   Stanley Fish is dean of the College of Liberal Arts and
   Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He writes a
   monthly column on campus politics and academic careers for The
   Chronicle's Career Network, where this article first appeared.


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  Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education