On Collegiality, Collectivity and Gender

Is collegiality to collectivity as friendship is to love, blander but safer, steadier but less intense, more likely to endure but less likely to innovate and transform? I picture collegiality as the more masculine of the two, dressed in tweed, chatting in leather chairs, even drinking sherry. In contrast, collectivity connotes for me women in jeans, sitting on the floor vigorously discussing ideas, with a pot of chili bubbling on a stove nearby.

My image of male camaraderie may have less to do with the Harvard teaching assistants I knew as an undergraduate, who sometimes did indeed serve sherry to women students who ventured to their office hours, than with my vicarious acquaintance with Virginia Woolf and with her admirable picture in A Room of One's Own (1929)of the congeniality of well-buttered collegiality at the Oxbridge high table. There her narrator revels in sole and partridge and a good deal of wine, with male servitors presenting the luscious pudding, all the accoutrements that, she claims, produce

the more profound, subtle, and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We're all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company—in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.

(11)

Even at a considerable distance from this idyllic symposium, however, we may note that the grudges and grievances are still being felt, even if temporarily in abeyance, and that a defining point of this congeniality is that "the society of one's kind" is a high society, protected and privileged by social class and institutional backing as well as by predominantly male gender. When Woolf's persona ventures across town to the women's colleges, the food is notably less ample, redolent of the "rumps of cattle in a muddy market," the wine nonexistent, and every one eats in haste, the students "banging and singing" in the corridors, with neither students nor faculty chatting among themselves (17, 18). Even a private tete-a-tete with a female scholar yields only gossipy chat about who has married, who has improved or not, and what various people think.

Decades later and in an American context, both collegiality and collectivity now seem primarily academic virtues, practices nurtured in the constraints and opportunities of teaching and undergoing new pressures with the transformations of our institutions. Laurence Veysey (1982), a historian of the American university, decries the myth of "a holistic past that never was, at least in intellectual terms. In fact the American university, whether around 1900 or 1940, was characterized by immense internal chasms. . . ."The golden academic past that conservatives invoke, Veysey, claimed, arose "not from the reality of a shared academic perspective, but rather from the social atmosphere of the gentleman's faculty club" in a period during "which Jews could not easily get tenure and in which women could fulfill professional careers mainly in segregated annexes."

The American Association of University Professors defines collegiality as "collaboration and constructive cooperation" in curriculum development, teaching evaluation, and peer review as well as in research and committee service. It agrees that an academic institution justly expects its faculty to perform reasonably well in these areas. However, in 1999 it feared that "collegiality" would again become, as it had been in the past, "associated with ensuring homogeneity, and hence with practices that exclude persons on the basis of their difference from a perceived norm." Even more dangerously, it judged that "(t)he invocation of 'collegiality' may also threaten academic freedom" through expectations for faculty to display overt enthusiasm for their institution or "display an excessive deference to administrative or faculty decisions where these may require reasoned discussion" rather than allowing free speech and the "faculty member's right to dissent from the judgments of colleagues and administrators." The AAUP fears that the criterion of "collegiality" will "cast a...