Collegial Propositions

Because both my colleague and his student are situated in that institution, their interpretive activities are not free, but what constrains them are the understood practices and assumptions of the institution and not the rules and fixed meanings of a language system.

—Stanley Fish¹

Collegiality resembles the text Stanley Fish described in his now famous essay, in part because it is not a concept or, more narrowly, a term with an "infinite plurality of meanings" (307). If it were—if the word's meanings were not already "severely constrained" before it was uttered—it could scarcely be heard in the first place. Like Fish's text, "collegiality" possesses historical and institutional connotations, ones that interpellate subjects unevenly and are almost always understood differently by academics occupying different subject positions within a college or university. That is to say, in its most significant senses the signifier "collegiality" transcends the personal; it is thus not merely the beneficent opposite of what Carlin Romano has derisively termed "colleagueality," the "normal state of affairs" among faculty, complete with "backbiting, envy, irresolvable feuds, hidden agendas, contempt, cowardice" (2000, B6). Neither Romano nor an ever-expanding roster of novelists who delight in depicting academic life in this way—from Richard Russo in Straight Man (1997) to Philip Roth in The Human Stain (2001)—are not so much wrong as they are predictable. All the human weaknesses Romano identifies and gleans from contemporary fiction are, of course, evident in some of our colleagues' behaviors and, at times, our own. To take matters to the opposite extreme of social behavior, "schmoozing" and other faux manifestations of a shallow gentility, no matter how prevalent in academic life and how endlessly parsed in articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, will also be excluded from the definitions of collegiality I hope to develop here. For while I am perfectly willing to believe that young scholars like Pat Phelps, an assistant professor at a liberal arts college, received an annual review admonishing her to "spend more time with her colleagues" (Phelps 2004, C3), success at the larger Research One departments that form the bases of my definitions does not typically require such interaction. Indeed, this advice almost always operates as a rationalization or cover for something else, as I shall delineate.

My understanding of collegiality shares another similarity with Fish's text, one inherent in the situation he narrates which acts as a provenience of his argument. A student on the first day of class asks her professor, "Is there a text in this class?" and the professor construes the question within his experience of other first days and other conventional questions about course requirements, testing, essay writing, and so on. In this context the professor's answer, some might even privilege it as the "common sense" answer, "Yes; it's the The Norton Anthology of Literature" (whatever this is) seems unsurprising. More startling is the precocious undergraduate's response: "No, no . . . I mean in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it really just us?" (305). These two definitions of "text" range from the prosaic to the deconstructive, from the concrete to the indeterminate or undecidable, which are in fact the parameters of the larger critical debate between Meyer Abrams and the "deconstructors" (Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom) that animated Fish's ruminations about texts in the first place. Definitions or common understandings of "collegiality" resonate in similar ways between inadequate "common sense" synonyms— cooperation, generosity, selflessness—and understandings as vague and inchoate as the undergraduate's replacement of text with the formulation "Or is it really just us?" (whatever that is). Both professor and inquiring student, Fish concludes, understand each other not because "their interpretive efforts are constrained by the shape of an independent language," but because as "actors within an institution they automatically fall heir to the institution's way of making sense, its systems of intelligibility" (320).

From this perspective, both in assessing something called "collegiality" and in determining the acceptability or validity of an interpretation, it is neither the (in)action of a colleague nor the text itself that authorizes agreement or determines evaluation...