Incidents in an Educational Life: A Memoir (of Sorts)

Six: Twenty and More Years in the American Midwest (and Elsewhere)

six Twenty and More Years in the American Midwest (and Elsewhere) 68 Hard landings I arrived in Ann Arbor just a day or two before the end of 1984, in time to take up my dual appointment in the English Language Institute and the Department of Linguistics, and in time for the beginning of what is accurately described at the University of Michigan as the “Winter Term.” The term had hardly begun when the chair of Linguistics called an extraordinary meeting of the department’s faculty. The Department was being asked by the powerful Dean of Literature, Science and Arts, Peter Steiner (of whom more later), to, in effect, vote itself out of existence , so that a new Interdisciplinary Program could be instituted as a replacement. (I was soon made aware of the fact that one of the few ways that tenured faculty at Michigan could be removed from their posts was through the “discontinuance” of the unit in which they served; others, I think, were “extreme financial exigency” and “moral turpitude.”) As might be expected, discussion was both extensive and heated, and one important senior professor kept on importuning the chair with “Mr. Chairman, can we put a cap on this discussion?” Even161 tually, a vote was taken—I didn’t cast a vote as a newcomer and a visiting professor—and, by a narrow margin, the Linguistics Department decided to disband itself. “Ye Gods,” I thought, “What have I let myself in for now?” Shades of the Scottish Parliament dissolving itself in 1706? Shortly afterward, I was put on the Steering Committee for the new linguistics program and we all met one evening at the new director’s house to discuss whom we should invite to join the program and whom we would not. Individual CVs, after short discussions, were placed in either “yes” or “no” piles. The whole thing struck me, a green outsider, as an exercise in unexpected judgmentalism. So this was the way a major research university worked! As it transpired, the reorganization was only partly successful. One major figure left for another university after a year or two and another, Pete Becker, had decided to take early retirement when he was not selected to lead the new program. On the other hand, a couple of people, perhaps unfairly described as “dead wood,” were persuaded to leave, while one or two others were forced to retreat to some other part of the university where they also had a fractional appointment . I had kept up my membership of the Linguistic Society of America during my Aston days, and I attended the LSA annual conference in New York at the first opportunity. Perhaps it was the effect of a very crowded hotel, or perhaps it was the effect of the big and notoriously adversarial city, but I found the conference an ugly affair. The time allotted to papers was some 10-12 minutes, and everybody spoke very fast on highly complex topics. The short discussion periods were singularly short of opening complimentary remarks, such as, “I enjoyed your paper, but . . . , ” and the questions seemed mostly designed to score points off the speakers. Meanwhile, job interviews were taking place, and there were milling crowds of young hopefuls looking for assistant professor positions, while the more senior members stood around in small groups exchanging knowing remarks with each other and totally ignoring the aspirants. The atmosphere was very different from the applied linguistics and ESL conferences I had been attending and, to this day, I have never attended another LSA Annual Meeting. Another shock came when I learned that at the University of Michi162 gan, chairs and directors of units were expected to set the annual salary raises of their faculty and staff, perhaps aided by a small unit salary sub-committee, and always subject to the final approval of the requisite dean’s office. And here readers should remember that in Africa salaries were set, often on fixed scales, by the senior administrations, while in England, salaries were collectively and nationally negotiated by the Association of University Teachers, our union. So, this was totally new, as were the instructions from Peter Steiner that salaries would be based entirely on “merit,” and not at all on “cost of living” considerations, and that any chair or director who foolishly and wimpishly opted for the latter would be in danger of having her or his unit’s whole salary...