Collegiality: First Among Whom? Community of What?

Nearly half a century of service in academe, which both my retirement counselor and my mirror assure me is true, does not guarantee any wisdom, I discover, especially about something as elusive and mysterious as collegiality. Such longevity qualifies me either as a vessel of living history or a fossil transfixed in somebody's shale, or, probably and lamentably, both. Such disclaimers notwith-standing, as they usually are, the issue of collegiality, of what it was if it was, or what it is if it is, and what it ought to be, which may be more to the point, past and present, has cropped up now and again during this half century of service. However, since this is a subjective, anecdotal essay, it's safe to conjecture, and say that it appears to crop up less frequently now. This is as much a function of where and when as of what, and that the subject of collegiality seems infrequently raised may be a consequence of where I spent most of that half century: a large, state university with a regressive, top-down management structure and a serious flirtation in the past decade or more with a version of what is loosely known as the corporate model.

In this context, in fact, the word, collegiality, has now almost an archaic ring, or, at the very least, quaint. Wasn't this a condition, say, Abelard, in his halcyon student days might have known? A tough minded, good-natured intellectual interchange and interdependence? Bibulous, riotous, but companionable? We may know a bit about the structure of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, but what was the daily culture like? According to the (mostly nineteenth century European) novelists and certainly librettists who have found their subject in the student (and other) culture of the middle ages, it was—of course—bibulous, riotous and companionable. And although the nineteenth century novelists may not have invented nostalgia, they did turn it into an art form. This means that they, too, thought the student culture of the fourteenth century at the very least quaint, but, for some reason, worth resurrecting or, like Voltaire's God, worth inventing.

Being nostalgic for a phantasm may mean that it has a certain persistent integrity, one that does not depend on the Gothic architecture of the genuinely old or genuinely expensive universities. Starting with a nineteenth century aestheticized version of a fourteenth century university culture that may or may not have existed seems as good a place to start here as any, since people continue to buy extraordinarily expensive tickets for Faust and Tales of Hoffmann, those sturdy favorites of the lost medieval student culture, not to mention Victor Hugo, much addicted to it himself, in pop redaction, who could by now have bought the isle of Jersey several times over. In effect, the persistence of this phantasm suggests a nostalgia as resilient now as it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Since this resilient nostalgia bloomed a hundred and fifty years ago in response largely to a world in which everything seemed to have been put up for sale, it appears to be a hardy growth in a jungle still familiar to us, nature, or the nature of the quotidian, red in tooth and claw.

But mining the medieval, real and imagined, has a well earned bad reputation over the past century, smacking as it does of everything from pathological intellectual bankruptcy to incipient fascism. Hijacking bits of the past has certainly been with us since the Roman Empire, and what is most interesting is who did the hijacking, when and why. To the nineteenth century European hijackers of the medieval, it seemed an answer, culturally, economically, socially, to the grit of their modernizing, urbanizing, democratizing world, which says a bit about the when and the why.

Work, for instance, its nature, its social organization, caught the attention of some of these nineteenth century searchers after a truth, nor did they have far to look when seeking out better alternatives to the ongoing violence of infant industrial capitalism and an outraged, newly created urban proletariat. The...