Joe Amato

Department of English
University of Colorado at Boulder
joe.amato@colorado.edu

I.

 

Imagine: Once upon a time, I left the corporate world to join the academic world, thinking the lofty latter would tower above the corruption of corporate complicity.

 

Yup. I really thought that. Imagine.

 

Picture this: you’re seated at a table with nine other faculty, all strangers. Five such clusters of ten fill the carpeted room–off-white walls, acoustical ceiling tiles, fluorescent lighting–and everyone boasts a terminal degree in science, engineering, architecture, law, psychology, or design. Everyone except you, that is–you hold a doctorate in English.

 

Before you, on the table, glares a ream of white, 20 lb., 8.5″ x 11″ paper. A beaming but otherwise nondescript man looming at the front of the room announces, “You have one half-hour in which to devise a high-quality paper airplane. The team whose airplane hangs aloft for the longest stretch of time will be judged a true success–a leader in quality.” Everyone in the room chuckles. “Let’s see who the winner will be,” the nondescript man teases. And with that he props a large digital timer on the table before him, and slaps the start button.

 

All but five of the fifty strangers in the room are men. Most are white, eight speak an inflected English that indicates an Asian upbringing. Most of the men are middle-aged, some are older, nearing retirement. Most of the middle-aged men wear trousers, oxfords, ties, rolled shirtsleeves. Most of the older men relax in three-piece suits. Most of the men sport beards. Four of the five women in the room are all business–navy or black suits, skirts just above the knee, heels, lipstick, eye liner, nail polish. The four younger men and one younger woman are, like others of your generation, dressed casually–new jeans, polo shirts, sweaters.

 

As the timer begins its countdown, most people begin chatting, noisily, to others in their group. About their families, about the weather. One of the engineers seated at your table immediately takes command. He urges that the team proceed, first, by taking note of specific aerodynamic principles–lift, for example. He lectures the team on such principles. A few of the engineers in the group get antsy, grab a few sheets of paper from the ream, experiment by folding their sheets this way and that. The self-elected leader seems annoyed, barks a few orders. A few people in the group, intent on making progress, are willing to cooperate.

 

But you, you’re someplace else, because you’ve been here before.

 

II.

 

You may have heard recently of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. The school has been splashed across the news in the past year. IIT’s College of Architecture has a worldwide reputation for housing the program that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe directed during his post-Bauhaus years. IIT: the campus Mies built, the campus that boasts Crown Hall, the campus whose buildings announce in bold the Miesian orthogonal imprint, the less-is-more flatland structures of steel and glass and high HVAC bills.

 

And thanks to one of the largest (matching) gifts ever made to a postsecondary educational institution–120 million dollars, courtesy of two wealthy members of IIT’s Board of Trustees–a new student center is being built on campus, with leftover dollars funding much-needed building and equipment upgrades, and endowing engineering-only full-tuition scholarships (IIT’s tuition is currently $17,000 a year). The international design competition for the student center attracted all sorts of media attention, with the commission awarded finally to renowned Dutch architect and architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas. Completion of the actual structure is scheduled for sometime next year, a convenient cornerstone in IIT’s ongoing effort to reset its collegial clock.

 

I won’t be around to see the center open. I’m happy for the students, though it remains unclear to me whether the surrounding community will reap any actual material benefits from the hoopla. IIT sits on the northernmost edge of the largest public housing project in the US–the Robert Taylor Homes-Stateway Gardens complex, which houses nearly 40,000 African-American residents, most of whom receive welfare, as I once did. Directly to the north of IIT are more projects, beyond which is the frenzy of development and gentrification that marks Mayor Daley’s and the City’s efforts to move the South Loop frontier further south. As you might imagine, IIT has had a tough time responding to its location over the years. So perhaps the attention given to the new student center, and to a revitalization effort currently underway along 35th Street–the historic “Bronzeville” area, part of which has been tagged a federal “empowerment zone”–will help to invigorate neighborhoods suffering from decades of neglect, of racial and economic segregation. Hence perhaps I should be spending my time, and yours, talking about the sorts of social, political, and cultural conditions that have permitted the situation on Chicago’s south side to decline to such a degree. But I’m not a sociologist– I’m an English prof who happens to be a poet. And to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, part of my work as a poet is to help people live their lives–an ambitious agenda, to be sure, whether in poetry or in prose.

 

My tenure with the Department of Humanities at IIT began in August of 1992. Like my former employer, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), IIT hired me primarily because my undergrad math scholarship and seven years of plant engineering experience, followed by a doctorate in English, seemed automatically to qualify me to teach technical and professional writing. As an aspiring poet and a single white heterosexual male of 37, I was happy to be afforded the opportunity to live in a more “happening” environs–and in any case, I had no choice. My two-year “visiting” stint at UIUC had expired, and IIT was offering me a tenure-track position with a “3/3” teaching load–3 courses per semester. Not something one in my notoriously job-depleted profession, with my credit card debt, turns down.

 

When I arrived at my new school, demolition of the old Comiskey Park, just the other side of the Dan Ryan expressway from IIT, was nearly complete. The new Sox stadium, standing alongside the old, gleamed across the Ryan at the projects, daring south-side African-Americans to make the trek into Bridgeport, where racial tensions have always run high, and would explode most notably of late upon the person of young Lennard Clark. On campus, things weren’t quite what I’d expected. There were rumors that budget deficits were reaching a crisis state. And IIT exuded a certain corporate ambience–reflected both in the language of my senior colleague in English (a person prone to going on about how her technical communication program is “technology-driven”), as well as in the market “savvy” of our upper-level administrators (who were just then learning to mouth the now-ubiquitous student-as-consumer rhetoric). The corporate lip-service disturbed me, not least because I thought I had left behind such thinking eight years prior, when I left my second Fortune 500 job as an engineer.

 

III.

 

Picture this: you’re seated at a table with five other people, all strangers. Five such clusters of five fill the carpeted room–off-white walls, acoustical ceiling tiles, fluorescent lighting–and everyone holds an undergraduate degree in engineering or business. All but two of the twenty-five strangers in the room are men. Most are younger, a few are middle-aged, two are black. Most wear shirts and ties, a few lounge in their sports jackets. The two women in the room have opted for solid-color blouses, and skirts well below the knee.

 

You’re handed a three-ring binder, inside of which are sequenced instructions that describe a series of role-playing exercises (red, orange, yellow, green, blue tabs). Each exercise will require a high level of cooperation among members of your group. “I think we should start out by trying to–.” “Wait a minute,” the only woman in the group interrupts you, smiling but firm, “who put you in charge?” “Well, nobody,” you respond, “but someone has to be in charge, no?” You look around at the other faces in your group. Two look vaguely uncomfortable, one seems to want to follow your lead.

 

By the end of that first day, the group has–simply by doing what you suggest–informally chosen you as its leader. At least one person in the group is not a happy camper. And after four days of working together, arguing together, and sweating together, everyone is asked to evaluate–not, as expected, the work accomplished–but one another.

 

A four-quadrant blackboard grid is used to map personal qualities, warm/cold on the abscissa, dominant/submissive on the ordinate. Everyone has their day in the sun–or, as the case may be, gloom. Participants take turns shouting out adjectives that describe each monkey-in-the-middle, with a time-clock to make it seem either a pressing exercise, or a game show. Each adjective is chalked into a given quadrant. If you’re lucky, you might learn that you’re primarily a dominant/warm personality–excellent leadership material. If not, you might leave that intense final session, as some have been known to, in tears.

 

IV.

 

“Dimensional Management Training” is what they called it–part of the corporate training package I’d received while employed at Miller Brewing Company in Fulton, New York. My job with the Philip-Morris-owned brewing giant was my first after graduation, and Miller would send me to corporate headquarters in Milwaukee for a week at a crack. Days were spent in seminar rooms; evenings, gulping down mugs of beer. Most of this training was geared ultimately toward helping trainees account for theirs and others’ motivations, with the mutual goals of enhancing organizational cooperation and enlightening employees as to their latent or manifest leadership qualities. I often returned from the training seminars eager to test on-the-job my newly acquired interpersonal skills, as they called them. In this sense, such training cultivated in me the desire to lead. I guess I was lucky. In some it may well have cultivated the resignation to follow.

 

But leadership training or no, there seemed to be little I could do to shake my new-guy status at Miller. At 26, I’d found myself stuck after four years, unable to advance beyond my entry-level engineering position with the nation’s second largest brewer. So I’d gone on the market intent, as only a former welfare recipient can be, on landing a job with Aramco. By my calculations, a mere two years in Saudi Arabia and I’d have enough cash saved to handle my father’s expenses until long after he was eligible to receive his whopping $500-per-month social security check, and his $80-per-month pension check from General Electric–the latter so absurdly low because of his decision to withdraw his severance pay after the company had laid him off, with hundreds like him, in 1969. That was the year after my folks’ divorce, the year after my old man started hitting the bottle. The way I’d figured it, me and my adolescent dreams of fortune and power, I’d have enough cash saved to live like a working-class hero.

 

But after six months of applying, and waiting, and inquiring, the previously optimistic job placement agent wound up with a frown on his face. “They want only seasoned veterans now,” the headhunter informed me, “guys with ten or more years experience.”

 

And so, with failed postcolonial aspirations, I applied for a senior project engineering position with the local pharmaceutical plant, Bristol-Myers Co. This plant’s claim to industrial fame was that it had at one time manufactured half of all the penicillin produced in the US. The interview went well. The person I’d be working for directly was a former West Point cadet who had that annoying habit of inserting “sir” into every other sentence. The cadet’s boss, the plant engineering manager, was a strictly-by-the-book, suit-and-tie man, very old school, with a master’s in engineering-based, Taylorized management.

 

After exchanging industrial horror stories with the cadet–bonding–I was ushered into the engineering manager’s office by the office manager (they still used a secretarial pool there). “Please take a seat,” she instructed, nodding vigorously at the chairs across the desk from the engineering manager, who was momentarily preoccupied perusing what looked to be a budget report of some sort, all rows and columns. “Just a moment, Joe,” he said, without looking up through his bifocals. Just then I noticed that my chair sank low, so low in fact that this older man, perhaps an inch shorter than me standing, loomed several inches above me. An old trick, I thought, and gazing around the office I spotted a portrait depicting a Canadian Mountie against an alpine backdrop above the caption, “One Canadian Stands Alone.”

 

My interview with the engineering manager was a tight-lipped affair, and I’d learned by then when to be tight-lipped myself. I even started mouthing a few “Yes sirs,” which were snapped up approvingly. But there was one final hoop-jump to go–an interview with the plant manager. The cadet was commanded to hand-deliver me.

 

He marched me through what seemed an ancient maze of seeping and odoriferous production areas, laced with piping and crowded with chemical processing equipment, in the midst of which were constructed makeshift white-collar habitats. It was nearing lunch, and I caught a glimpse of several salary employees seated at their desks, chomping down their brown-bag lunches. When we reached the plant manager’s office, he greeted us at his office door. My escort abruptly relinquished his duties with an enthusiastic “Thank you sir,” and the plant manager whisked me past his high-heeled young secretary. I did my best not to stare at her black fishnet stockings.

 

At first this manager seemed less officious than my prior interviewers. A not-unhandsome man of perhaps fifty, his clothes were elegantly, if conservatively, tailored: navy double-pleated trousers, white-on-white oxford, red-and-blue-checkered silk tie, silk navy jacket. He seated himself behind a large wooden desk in a lush, paneled office that, in my view, reflected his rank without pretension. I sat in a leather-cushioned chair, almost at ease. The blinds were shut, the desk lamp lighting the room with a warm, subdued glow. The plant manager was clearly taking his time. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked. “No thank you, sir,” I replied. He cupped his impeccably manicured hands, and finally began, casually.

 

“What do you think of change?” he asked, smiling.

 

Bastard. He was toying with me, and he knew I knew it. I bit my tongue, hard, struggled for composure. “Depends what kind of change you mean,” I replied, surprising even myself with my reciprocally casual tone, “organizational change, or evolutionary change, or social change, or–”

 

He cut me off, impatient but still smiling. “Well, let me put it differently. Suppose,” he began, “–suppose you were asked by one of the production managers to retrofit a production process in such and such a way in order to increase output.” “Uh-huh,” I nodded, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “Now suppose,” he continued, “–suppose this manager, a man with some twenty-five years of experience, feels that the modifications required are thus and so. As the senior engineer, what do you feel your response should be? Do you think you should yourself investigate the process to determine the nature of the modifications, or do you think you should instead follow the production manager’s lead?”

 

Trick question, of course. Why of course no self-respecting engineer simply does what someone else tells him to do when it comes to design. And of course this asshole wouldn’t even be asking me this question unless he wanted to test my compliance.

 

I thought about my situation at the brewery. I thought about how the Return On Investment for capital upgrades had dropped from five years to two years in the course of my short industrial life–this was change, to be sure, but it didn’t bode well for the US worker, blue or white collar. I thought about my father’s eligibility for social security, still three years off. More change, a life change that in some sense I couldn’t help but look forward to. I thought about telling this plant manager fucker to go take a good shit for himself, him and that $500 jacket and that shit-eating grin of his.

 

“Well,” I said, “I figure that if the production manager has twenty-five years of experience, he knows what’s going on. So I’d be inclined to do things his way.” The plant manager nodded. I nodded. Everybody nodded. The job placement agent was elated. The offer came in at $34,500 per year.

 

And when I left that job in 1984–or it left me–I was making nearly $40,000 a year. This was in Syracuse, New York. To help put this in perspective: earlier this year, in Chicago, as a full-time, tenure-track professor of English with the Department of Humanities at IIT–and with bachelor of science degrees in mathematics and mechanical engineering, my Professional Engineer’s license, and a masters and doctorate in English–my annual salary was $36,800.

 

V.

 

It didn’t take a clairvoyant to see that, from the start, my days with Bristol-Myers Co. were numbered. For one, ever since my first day on the job with Miller Brewing Co., I’d somehow gotten it into my head that I wanted to be a poet. I still don’t know where this impulse came from, but in my sixth year with Bristol-Myers I started looking into graduate schools. I figured that I’d get a doctorate, teach college students to support my writing. I didn’t know then what I know now about the teaching profession: it’s not only a job-and-a-half in itself, it’s also vital social work.

 

At any rate, I’d found myself, after nearly three years at the pharmaceutical factory, wanting out of the engineering profession. I’d grown plain sick and tired of the industrial-organizational life-support system. The brownnosing chain-of-command, along with the daily shit-shower-shave routine, conspired to create a chain of veritable being, my one-and-only life strapped to the often capricious imperatives of plant production and the global marketplace. True, a few of my bosses saw me–despite or perhaps because of my outspoken nature–as management stock, attempting to lure me into the supervisory world with more money and power. But once I’d made it clear to them that I wanted to hone my technical talents only, they behaved as though I’d turned my back on the company. I found it increasingly difficult to keep my mouth shut, and they found it increasingly difficult to tolerate my open mouth. The warning memo–red-stamped “confidential”– threatened me with “termination” if I didn’t just do it.

 

But my mouth would not close, and I was called into the engineering conference room on a bright Monday morning in April. I seated myself across the table from the engineering manager. Next to him was my new supervisor, Stan, put in charge after the cadet was canned–for incompetence brought about by excessive ass-kissing (so ass-kissing doesn’t really work after all). “Stan has something to tell you,” the engineering manager commanded. And he turned to Stan, who choked out, nervously, “We’ve decided that… we have to… let you go.” I was immediately escorted out of the plant, and told to return at four o’clock for my exit interview.

 

Later that day, I walked through the factory distributing copies of my four-page long exit statement to anybody and everybody. Therein I explained, with quotes from Montaigne and Emerson, how I thought the company could be more fairly managed. You see, I’d seen my termination coming, and I’d planned accordingly. And like they say on the job: you plan the work, and you work the plan.

 

VI.

 

The second most powerful member of IIT’s Board of Trustees is former Motorola CEO, Bob Galvin. Galvin’s father, Paul Galvin, founded Motorola, the company that produces, among so many other communications-based products, the 68030 microprocessor chip that powers (as they say) the aging Macintosh on which I’m composing this essay. IIT’s Board of Trustees is in fact run by two Bobs, Galvin and his (even richer) billionaire buddy Bob Pritzker, who together are responsible for that 120 million dollar gift. For years these two have reached deep down into their endless wool-blend pockets to bail IIT’s ailing, tuition-driven campus out of the red and into black–to the tune, I believe it is, of something like ten million a year. Only thing is, in accordance with the First Law of Thermodynamics, you don’t get something for nothing. (Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out that a variation of the Second Law—you can’t even break even—appears in the Rolling Stones soundtrack heard in Motorola’s new mobile pager commercials: “You can’t always get what you want.”)

 

Sending IIT faculty to QCEL training at Motorola on a Saturday was part of the payback. At the time, IIT administrators were hoping Galvin might kick some additional millions their way. So they’d agreed to bus all IIT faculty out to what is known casually as Motorola’s Schaumburg “campus”–the Galvin Center of Motorola University (no shit), the company’s corporate training ground. And on a bright fall Saturday there we all were, sipping coffee, bitching under our collective breath, and ready to be indoctrinated in the company’s much-vaunted QCEL managerial philosophy–Quality, Creativity, Ethics and Leadership.

 

It was quite an event. Several hundred phuds, most in the engineering and science fields and some with international reputations, marched through “creativity” sessions in which a trainer with a master’s degree in creativity (no shit) inculcated them in the beauty of “convergent and divergent thinking.” Or in which they were asked to work in teams to create that “best” paper airplane (i.e., Quality through teamwork, teamwork through Leadership). Or in which they were instructed in the importance of sound (business) ethics–without being asked to consider (e.g.) the ethical impact of divorcing ethics from more bracing issues of morality or politics.

 

But the IIT-Motorola coup de grâce was the wrap-up session, in which the powers-that-be hit upon the tactic of using outstanding student leaders at IIT to impress upon faculty the inevitable necessity of QCEL training. “We students sincerely hope you faculty take QCEL seriously,” advised one especially emphatic, rosy-faced, head-shaved, undergrad ROTC engineer, “because we believe that IIT needs this sort of thinking in order to become a technical leader in the 21st century.” The ensuing faculty response was punctuated by several outbursts from senior faculty members who found the entire enterprise an insult to their professional integrity and expertise. “I have an international reputation in my field,” one distinguished research engineer rose to exclaim during the wrap-up session, “and I find it utterly humiliating that you have brought me to this place, to be lectured at by those who could very well be my students. I regard this as a distressing, if not ludicrous, development.”

 

And if I couldn’t help but sympathize with the gent, I thought at the same time that he probably could stand to learn a thing or two about political action. I understood at that QCEL session what I’d learned the hard way years prior: to get through to the corporate mindset requires something a bit more vulgar, or of the “common people,” than solitary expressions of distress–something a bit more collective. As in collective bargaining, for one, anathema to so many academics because they think of themselves, with some (historical) justification, as necessarily independent thinkers and researchers, as free-agent intellectuals–as anything but common-cause workers. IIT is a private postsecondary institution, and it’s been only in the past year or so that the National Labor Relations Board has given some indication that it might eventually permit faculty at private institutions to unionize. Of course, union or no, it’s unlikely that intellectual freedom–and an institutional commitment to do some good in the world–will emerge from top-down enforcement of an ever-more-severe bottom line.

 

Needless to say, QCEL fever hit IIT hard, and lickety-split we were all being asked to devise a QCEL component for each of our courses, and to attend mandatory brown-bag lunches with the purpose of brainstorming innovative applications of QCEL thinking. Some faculty took up the QCEL banner, but many of us just plain refused, calling the administration’s bluff. Most of us readily understood that QCEL, though perhaps appropriate to a workplace bound by short-term constraints of efficiency and end product, hardly suited the long-term goals of informed personal awareness, discovery, and self-critique that true education demands.

 

And I mean, what were they going to do, fire us?

 

It was especially difficult for those of us in the Department of Humanities, which at IIT is comprised of history, philosophy, and English. In the minds of corporate-leaning administrators, the humanities are understood as revolving around communication, and this narrow conception of what we do empowers those of us in English studies only to the extent that we’re willing to teach students how to structure effective memos, accurate lab reports, and so forth. Further, according to Motorola’s QCEL logic, communication practices–most conspicuously writing–fall under the L category, L for Leadership. Where else? We all know that the primary purpose of words is to help you gain control over others, right?

 

In any case, IIT’s ongoing public relations effort seems to suggest that, in order to produce the finest technical leaders for the next millennium, faculty must maintain close ties with the corporation. As stated in IIT’s Undergraduate Bulletin, one of the things that distinguishes IIT is its “unique Introduction to the Professions program”:

 

Throughout the curricula, the IIT interprofessional projects provide a learning environment in which interdisciplinary teams of students apply theoretical knowledge gained in the classroom and laboratory to real-world projects sponsored by industry and government. (7)

 

Interprofessional projects, or IPROs, have now displaced QCEL as the newest curricular fad at IIT. The clause “sponsored by industry and government” has given many of us conniptions, and has been met with substantial faculty resistance. Some are now trying to redefine the IPRO initiative to better align it with more liberal-educational impulses. For years now, engineering education has been the subject of modest reform efforts–from expanding the curriculum to require a full five years of study, to removing undergraduate area designations (mechanical, electrical, civil, chemical, etc.) in favor of a general engineering degree. From my point of view, none of these reforms satisfactorily addresses the dearth of historical, social, and cultural thinking that characterizes most engineering curricula, curricula which have begun to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to vocational ed. But the IPROs represent a truly pernicious kind of “reform.” To insist that industry and government sponsor IPROs, to permit these latter consolidations to drive an educational mission “focused,” as it says elsewhere in IIT promotional literature, “by the rigor of the real world”: is this the best way to usher in the next millennium?

 

VII.

 

Picture this: it’s the spring of 1995, and Galvin and Pritzker have threatened to shut down undergraduate education at IIT unless the IIT administration and faculty manage to produce a convincing plan to increase undergrad enrollment. Thus, endless talk of IPRO’s. And to cut costs: buy-outs of tenured faculty; appointment of a new V-P without faculty input; and removal of the provost position. Of course, the provost, as the chief academic (faculty) officer, is a key player in granting faculty tenure and promotion; any problems with tenure are typically addressed to this office. When the President, with the backing of the wool-blend Board, removes the provost position from the organizational flow chart, he delegates tenure and promotion duties to himself–a non-faculty administrator. Meantime, key faculty cooperate with the development of a professional, preprofessional, and interprofessional educational package. You know–professional master degree programs (with, for instance, reduced math requirements), three-course certificate programs, and the like, programs designed primarily to credential employees while attracting tuition dollars from their employers, and marketed accordingly.

 

It’s important to understand these institutional changes from the point of view of the bottom-feeders. At IIT, as at many universities, “bottom feeders” equals “humanities profs.” Consider: the highest paid, non-administrative faculty line in my department–which now reports to the Armour College of Engineering as a result of the 1995 disbanding of the Lewis College of Liberal Arts–is approximately $45,000 per year. Which is to say, a full (tenured) professor of history, philosophy or English, with twenty years or more experience, earns approximately $5000 less than the average starting assistant professor at IIT. Chalk up these salary disparities to those large government contracts and grants that form the staple of scientific and technological research in today’s major and minor research institutions. Wage-wise, IIT is ranked near the bottom of the nation’s twenty or so tech campuses, so even engineering faculty aren’t exactly brimming with joy. Still, a thirty-ish engineering prof drives home in his new Chevy sedan, while I drive home in my 1986 Escort (148,000 miles, and counting).

 

This is IIT, folks–a school that had its beginnings in the Armour Institute of Technology, established in 1890. Yes, that’s Armour of meat-packing fame–think hog butcher for the world, everything but the squeal. But it’s also the IIT where Marvin Camras, “Father of Magnetic Recording,” conducted the research that led to his more than 500 patents. It’s the IIT that once boasted a linguistics program with the likes of S. I. Hayakawa on its faculty. And it’s the IIT where László Moholy-Nagy, another of Bauhaus fame, founded the Institute of Design. So whatever you make of it, it’s a school with a legacy, with a place in the postsecondary sun.

 

Picture this: the week after our trip to Motorola U, a book appears in all faculty mailboxes. It’s entitled The Idea of Ideas, by one Robert W. Galvin, “Special Limited Edition” published in April 1991 by Motorola University Press.

 

VIII.

 

Motorola University Press? All right, Bob & Co.–hereafter simply Bob–I get your point. You’re a do-it-yourselfer, and your book is for the billionaire or would-be billionaire who has (of course), or wants to have (of course), everything. Like any good communications engineer, Bob begins at his beginning: he engineers communication of his ideas by fabricating a pseudo-academic press to poke fun at (academic) book-learnin’ even as it affords its wannabe author the privilege to spin his worldview in certified academic trappings.

 

It’s a beautifully crafted book, believe me, at least insofar as its design goes. Let’s start with a few design notes, as provided by the publisher on the copyright page:

 

Typeset in Perpetua
by Paul Baker Typography Inc., Evanston, Illinois.
Five thousand copies printed
by Congress Printing Company, Chicago, Illinois.
Soft cover is Mohawk Artemis, Navy Blue; cloth cover
is Arrestox B, B48650. End sheets are French
Speckletone,
Briquette; text stock is Mohawk Superfine, Soft White.
Binding by Zonne Book Binders, Inc., Chicago, Illinois.

 

Design by Hayward Blake & Company, Evanston, Illinois.
Illustration [of Paul V. and Robert W. Galvin]
on page 6 by Noli Novak.
Quotation on cover by Robert W. Galvin.

 

Bob, like any civic leader who thinks global and acts local, chose wisely to patronize Chicagoland firms. Most small-press poets would be thrilled to publish a book with a spine, or a book with a print run of even a thousand copies, let alone a book of such silky smooth, hefty pages (214 of them). And the book comes with its own bookmark, folded Hallmark-card-like.

 

That “quotation on cover” by Bob: “We can and should apply consciously, confidently, purposely and frequently, the simpler, satisfying, appropriate steps to create more and then better ideas.” Four adverbs followed by three adjectives–Bob lays it on thick. Key words for the discussion that follows (please allow for cognates): apply, confidently, purposely, frequently, simpler, appropriate and of course ideas.

 

Reading over that cover sentence in fact brings to mind the old white-collar acronym, KISS–“Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Bob wants you to know that he’s a down-to-earth, WYSIWYG kinda guy. On the bookmark we find a checklist of his handy ideas, such gems as “Set the idea target,” “Go for quantity,” “Question. Question!” and “Ignore quality. Don’t judge it ’til last.” But bromides aside, and to riff on Adrienne Rich, Bob has access to machinery that could cost you your job.

 

Bob’s book has eight chapters: an Introduction followed by “The Idea Process: Its Role,” “Leadership,” “Purposeful Differences,” “The Customer Idea,” “Global Strategies,” “Some Outside Ideas,” and “Special Ideas.” As I’ve indicated, English studies has been understood increasingly by university administrators as writing, with writing at IIT itself subsumed under the QCEL rubric, Leadership. Hence I’ve chosen to restrict my remarks to Bob’s “Leadership” chapter–to its first subsection, entitled “The Paradox of Leadership.”

 

“Leadership” begins with two quotes, one from Bob himself: “At times we must engage an act of faith that key things are doable that are not provable” (24). Spoken, I might say, like a true engineer. And I should know. Engineering is not about theory per se, but about how to apply theoretical principles to produce results. And this does in fact constitute, as Bob indicates, an act of faith–a faith in doing in the absence of explanation. But this emphasis on doing somewhat sidesteps the sticky matter of what “key things” get done, and who is to decide what “key things” get done, and why such “key things” need getting done–why in fact they are deemed “key.”

 

“The Paradox of Leadership” strikes me at first glance as oddly literary, which is another reason why I’ve chosen to respond to it. Paradox is, after all, a staple of poetry, and of literary writing. Paradox is generally understood as an assertion in which apparently contradictory words, or ideas, reveal upon close examination a truth of sorts.

 

So what exactly is the paradox of leadership? Well, Bob begins by saying that this idea “finds its expression in a series of paradoxes” (25). To put it another way, the “idea of leadership” (25) as a paradox is realized in actuality as a series of paradoxes. Here as elsewhere, the “idea of” is Bob’s modest way of formulating the idea not as abstract, but as evidenced in the particular, “real-world” example. But this constant harping on the idea of what is ultimately the whole wide real world–presumably including the idea of ideas in such a world–reveals that Bob’s commonsensical, pragmatic appeal is predicated on an idea of order.

 

“It is neither necessary to impress on you an elaborate definition of leadership,” Bob asserts, “nor is this an appropriate time to characterize its many styles” (25). Suffice to say that leaders must have “creative and judgmental intelligence, courage, heart, spirit, integrity and vision applied to the accomplishment of a purposeful result.” “When one is vested with the role of leader,” Bob grudgingly concedes, “he inherits more freedom” (26). Yet the leader is at the same time subject to “responsibilities that impose upon” this freedom (26). Hence the first paradox of leadership: that the apparent “independence” of leaders may in fact be offset, if not checked and balanced, by the “dependence of others” on the leader (26). Powerful leaders like Bob are evidently accountable to their followers.

 

“For one to lead implies that others follow” (26). Uh-huh. “But is the leader a breed apart,” Bob asks, rhetorically, “or is she rather the better follower?” The answer is as expected–the latter–which yields our second paradox: “to lead well presumes the ability to follow smartly” (27). So smart leaders are not entirely free, because they are responsible to others and must, as leaders, learn how to follow wisely. By this odd if obvious bit of logic, the workplace is divided into leaders and followers, but everyone is in essence a follower. Hence, paradoxically, leaders are in fact merely better followers. And thus leaders have attained their role as leaders not through politicking, or manipulation, or (gosh!) inheritance–like Bob, who “inherits” only “more freedom” (as above). Nope. Instead, a leader becomes a leader because she “learns more quickly and surely from the past, selects the correct advice and trends, chooses the simpler work patterns and combines the best of other leaders.”

 

“Because a leader is human and fallible,” Bob over-theorizes, “his and her leadership is in one sense finite–constrained by mortality and human imperfection” (27). Yet “[i]n another sense, the leader’s influence is almost limitless,” for the leader “can spread hope, lend courage, kindle confidence, impart knowledge, etcetera etcetera etcetera” (27). In fact, the “frequency with which one can perform these leadership functions seems without measure” (27). “Again we see the paradox of the leader,” Bob concludes, “a finite person with an apparent infinite influence” (28).

 

This third paradox reveals Bob at his most–elegiac? Leaders labor under an Olympian strain, forced to apply such infinite “influence” (power?) so frequently, and to such magnanimous ends, capable of doing so much good for others, yet ultimately frustrated by their inevitable, all-too-human demise. One wonders whether Bob–the physical Bob–harbors notions of biostasis, cloning, perhaps even network consciousness á la Max Headroom, in order to provide a personalized hereafter for his elderly, leaderly, thereby reengineered self.

 

“A leader is decisive, is called on to make many critical choices,” and may therefore “thrive on the power and the attention” (28). And yet–here emerges our fourth and final paradox–“the leader of leaders moves progressively away from that role” (28). In fact, according to Bob, a chief responsibility of leaders is to delegate to others the “privilege” of “decision making” (28), of leading, within an institution that, through such leadership, “generates… an ever-increasing number of critical choices” (29).

 

A key to leadership, then, is the ability gradually to convert followers into would-be leaders, spreading the upwardly mobile aspiration throughout the management and worker-bee ranks (think, e.g., of those hourly workers who make the often difficult move into supervisory positions). And this conversion process is necessary in order to cope with the decision-making demands of a larger and larger institution. So though we were given to understand in a prior paradox that all leaders are in essence followers, we are now given to understand that followers are themselves potential leaders, and that cultivating these acorns of leadership, paradoxically, is one of the chief responsibilities of true leaders. With U.S. universities graduating 90,000 or so MBAs each year, we’re talking a whole lotta acorns, folks.

 

For both followers and leaders, this game of follow-the-leader, like all games, requires a willingness to play by the rules–requires cooperation. And cooperation is hardly the benign process entities like Bob make it out to be. Much has been written about the emergence of cooperation as a chief organizational variable, from Chester I. Barnard’s classic business treatise, The Functions of the Executive (1938)–in which authority becomes “another name for the willingness and capacity of individuals to submit to the necessities of cooperative systems” (184)–to Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation (1984), in which cooperation evolves strategically and in accordance with game-theory logic, making it applicable even to trench warfare. But I’ve never found discussions of cooperation as such to square with my experience in the trenches: information-age push-pull come to shove, your boss is likely to demand of you that you just do it.

 

Bob wraps up his thoughts on the paradox of leadership with vague mention of “others which, if not paradoxes, at least are incongruities” (29). He states that “[e]ach one of us is at once part leader and part follower as we play our roles in life” (29). Bob concludes with the following quote from Walter Lippman: “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind in other men the conviction and will to carry on” (29).

 

I couldn’t help but think here of Bob’s desire for a legacy–of Bob’s son Chris, in fact, himself the current CEO of Motorola, whose compensation in 1997, while a sizable two million dollars, is itself small potatoes on the national CEO scale. Paul, Bob, Chris: that’s three generations, folks–I guess it’s in the blood.

 

In the face of which we have four paradoxes that, contrary to–conventional wisdom? popular opinion?–work successively to reinforce the logic of benign corporate leadership: (1) leaders are dependent on followers; (2) leaders are followers; (3) leaders are all-powerful but human; and (4) leaders convert their followers into leaders.

 

In 1970 it was, for some very good reasons, Everybody is a Star. Today, for some not-so-good reasons, it’s Everybody is a CEO.

 

That so?

 

IX.

 

Bob–the corporate entity Bob–is much like his book: judged by his career, his cover as multizillion-dollar corporate concern, he seems to reek of good intentions combined with cutting-edge quality objectives–good things brought to life. But when you get into his book, into his narrative of corporate expansion, you find a life-form that insists on being judged by its own criteria. As the aspiring global leader of communication leaders, Bob would be the measure of all company men and women. To lift from Eliot: in (the aging) Bob’s corporeal end is his and your beginning. Or, Be Like Bob. Yet Bob, dear readers, amounts only to the message of his medium.

 

Now medium may itself be understood as material form, so a few words about form here: People who spend an inordinate amount of time studying texts are used to distinguishing between content and form. It’s a nice shorthand, but then too there is what Hayden White famously referred to as the content of the form, which should give some idea of the vexed nature of any form/content dichotomy. Even poets and those who study poetry often come to believe that a specific form–whether deemed “organic” or rigorously metrical–must necessarily signal, however indirectly, a specific social context, even agenda. This is because, historically speaking, one can identify formal attributes that mark the work of poets who seek, by their own account, specific social or aesthetic ends (poets, too, being political creatures). Yet formal content does not intrinsically dictate, for example, ideological content, any more than ideological content stipulates, of necessity, a given form. And the same may be said of formal material, or medium, whether black typeface on white page, or multicolored pixels flickering across your computer screen. Advertising firms today regularly appropriate artistic techniques deriving from former avant-garde practices (and, I must add, reap vast amounts of revenue in the process, unlike many of their artist-precursors).

 

However occasionally contorted the syntax, however unpoetic the sentences and single-sentence paragraphs, Bob’s book as a book takes its lead and in some sense its imprimatur from this common public and professional confusion regarding form. Even literate readers are likely to be duped by his presentation, his appearance–at the very least, sold on the idea that he represents something of import. Yet except for the content of Bob’s material form–the soft cover, stock, typesetting, even proofreading (to the extent that I could locate no typos) that serve ostensibly as testament to Bob’s monied success–he really has nothing to say.

 

If you read Bob carefully, his pages might as well be blank, for his is a bureaucratic tale, full of cautiously modulated sound and utterly devoid of fury, signifying that what words mean is of little importance save for the degree to which they reinforce and amplify the platitude, a good manager can manage anything–can manage even words, without really knowing how they work. In this mad pursuit of formal appearances, what signals success is the simple yet profound capacity to manufacture faith in appearances. Arranged on the page with little rhyme and all sorts of reason–or is it vice versa?–words are enlisted in the effort to ensure that even the alphabet as a communications technology will lead future leaders/readers toward the mega-objectives of corporate domination and expansion–the way things are meant to be. It’s what you do that counts, and finessing words is what those who can’t do, do. What Bob does (do) is generate billions of dollars of profit worldwide, the bulk of which ends up in decidedly few pockets.

 

Hence corporate identity as Identity Inc.: the clothes make the man or woman, and with nice teeth, Doc Martens, discreet piercing, and unlimited credit, you too can and will attain success success SUCCESS. Content (is) for dummies, and as for you English phuds, you/had better/toe/the line/here.

 

Hey, but this can be immensely seductive stuff, especially to an 18-year old who’s looking for a way out of financial strife, and who’s found an acceptable social slot, Professional Engineer, that appears to guarantee her a job–if she’s lucky, at Motorola. This helps to explain why so many of my engineering majors envision themselves as engineers for three or four years, with a quick move out and up and into management. Not only does this serve to redirect professional (engineering) loyalties and technical passions toward management objectives, but it satisfies Bob’s desire to see everyone as a reduced version of the CEO, committed to and dependent upon the corporate being. This is what Bob’s idea of ideas amounts to, finally, and the only paradox in sight is that this immaterial realm of ideas can be so clearly predicated on material entitlement, that a self-professed leader like Bob–the physical Bob–can reveal himself to be such a wishful and irresponsible thinker.

 

X.

 

In my seventh and final year at IIT, my tenure denial of the prior spring was official–I’d been fired, again, but this time with a final year under contract (the industry standard). And this time I’d been fired along with a colleague in Humanities who was also up for tenure–a specialist in African-American lit. But that’s his story to tell. The reasons why I’d been denied tenure remained unclear–to some.

 

Even my poker-faced Chair had been caught off-guard. This typically punctual man kept me waiting twenty minutes, and when he walked into his office his expression was one of deep concern. “The news is not good,” he began. And after he handed me the President’s letter, in an envelope red-stamped “confidential,” he choked out, “It’s a shocker.” He cleared his throat, tried to be supportive.

 

I was not shocked. I’d been here before.

 

When I pressed him on options, he was at a loss save for making vague reference to the faculty handbook, and recommending that I make an appointment to discuss my situation with our (outgoing) V-P. (Discuss my “situation” with the man who devised IPROs?) He also indicated that I might reapply for tenure in the fall. (When the denial had come from the highest level of administration? Or beyond?) He was clearly unprepared for the news himself, uncertain who to turn to in order to establish the correct, let alone expedient, course of resistance. We left it at him getting back to me, and I asked him to inform the department of my denial (using an online discussion list I founded and ran for my colleagues). In fact most everyone in my department was either “shocked” or “stunned.”

 

My Chair never did get back to me, and had little to say to me in my demoralizing final year. In accordance with faculty handbook standards and procedures, and AAUP recommended policies, I’d asked the President of my university for clarification–in writing–of the reasons he denied me tenure; and in the same memo I appealed his decision, whatever the reasons forthcoming. The President’s response was as expected: he conceded the “quality” of my scholarship and teaching but reiterated his decision to deny me tenure, admitting “concerns” his deans had regarding my being insufficiently “aligned with the new vision of IIT”–“specifically” with those “contributions needed” to interprofessional projects, writing across the curriculum, and technical writing programs. Naturally he concluded on an ostensibly upbeat note, wishing me “success in finding a position more closely aligned with [my] talents.”

 

The tenure process was a closed-door affair. But I had it on good authority that I’d received the highest recommendation for promotion and tenure from all faculty committees, and that the sole opposition within my department was from my technology-driven colleague. I had it on good authority, but I’d never have it in writing–unless I sued. My mentors often advised me that my situation made for the perfect lawsuit–out of the question given my finances. But the administration clearly knew nothing of my finances, and feared legal exposure; repeated requests for the return of my tenure file were subsequently refused. When in doubt, surrender no paper.

 

In the wake of the denials, members of my department and several committees busied themselves distributing memos of their own to the administration, memos filled with polite expressions of distress and dismay. So much writing, so many words words words–collegial sentences of moderate tone configured, no doubt, in compliance with the organizational logic underwriting IIT’s newest instructional mission. But I remained confident that, my decorous letters included, this was all a strictly pro forma gesture: if you read between the lines you would likely have concluded, with me, that my days at IIT were numbered. Academe, like industry, is all about institutional survival, and survive or no, one learns over time to read the writing on the wall. A final meeting the week of Thanksgiving between the President and all faculty committee chairs merely confirmed the administration’s adamance.

 

XI.

 

In the same month that I was fired, Bob Pritzker announced to a faculty delegacy that he would pull his funding from IIT if the faculty acted to remove our top administrator from his post. If you haven’t already guessed, IIT is anything but a happy campus. In a faculty survey conducted fall of 1997, no less than 60% of the respondents disagreed with the statement that the President “[i]s truthful and honest.” But if power is relational, both IIT’s President and my technology-driven colleague, albeit each in their own ways instrumental in my professional demise, were empowered by their adherence to bottom-line thinking. And my hunch is that, as it proliferates throughout academe, such thinking will continue to profit from the public’s poor grasp of ivory-tower policies and procedures, which policies and procedures are complicated further by backroom corporate incursion. Given the arcana and general mystification associated with such practices, I can hardly blame the public. So I suppose (pardon the exhortation) that it’s up to profs like yours truly to help the uninitiated to understand that tenure, whatever its inefficacies, is about academic freedom–a much maligned and commonly misunderstood term. Simply put: we faculty need such freedom if the classroom is to remain a place where even the mighty machinations of corporate Earth come under critical scrutiny.

 

So here I am, distributing another exit statement, making my departure from yet another institution a matter of public record–my life as the eX-Files. As things stand–with my bread and butter on the line, and with students who need to be challenged to develop alternative ways to think and act both as professionals and as responsible social beings–I’ve had little choice but to continue to struggle with these urgent and conflicting realities.

 

In the meantime, the Department of Humanities has elected its first new chair in fifteen years, and is embarking on a new undergrad major in “Professional and Technical Communication”; and the campus has hired a new “vice-president and chief academic officer”–this time with faculty input. (And I’m not quite sure what to make of the fact that, during my final semester on campus, Michael Moore used IIT’s Hermann Hall auditorium to film episodes of his new show, The Awful Truth.) But from where I’m sitting, it’s IIT business as usual, and it’s spreading elsewhere. These days there is little talk of QCEL, and “communication” seems to have become the Humanities buzzword–yet the writing-to-lead/succeed drift prevails. Even the customary teaching-research-service triad is currently under assault, with a proposal on the boards earlier this year to add an additional tenure category, “impact.” Faculty would be granted 15 points for supervising an IPRO–and 8-12 points (depending on the press) for publication of a book. (I am happy to report that some Humanities faculty are balking at this.)

 

As part of the Introduction to the Professions program, Bob–the physical, Motorola Bob–has made occasional appearances at IIT, lecturing students about tactics and traits applicable to success (or failure) on corporate Earth. I’ve never met the guy, and I sometimes imagine that Bob and I might have something to talk about, given that, as Bob notes in his book, he served at one time on Nixon’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. (Bob and Nixon, together–the mind reels.) For that matter, I’ve never met the other Bob (Pritzker), either–he chairs our Board of Trustees, is an IIT alumnus, and–as President and Chief Executive Officer of The Marmon Group, Inc.–is reputedly worth a couple of the Motorola Bobs.

 

But I can’t talk with these guys unless they’re willing to unclip their word pagers, deactivate their cell phones, and do some real listening–and I have my doubts. One of my former students, a computer science major, attended a Motorola Bob lecture a few years ago, and was courageous enough to challenge Bob directly as to what seemed at the time ominous threats to the humanities effort at IIT. “I’m an English minor,” the student declared, “and you’ve eliminated the major in English, in History, in Philosophy.” Bob observed–quite accurately, if in apparent disregard for how catalyzing agents often come in small proportions–that those disciplines had never managed more than a handful of majors, anyway. And besides, Bob quipped, he’d managed himself to get a whole lot more reading done once he’d gotten himself a chauffeur.

 

XII.

 

Picture this: On the thirtieth anniversary of his father losing a twenty-year union job with General Electric, university professor with a decade of teaching and seven years of industrial experience files Chapter 7–and shortly thereafter, as incredible luck would have it in this job-depleted profession, finds gainful employment on academic Earth.

Imagine.

 

But wait. Academic Earth? Or corporate-academic Earth?

 

Picture cloudy.

 

Works Cited

 

• Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
• Barnard, Chester Irving. The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1938.
• Galvin, Robert W. The Idea of Ideas. Schaumburg, IL: Motorola UP, 1991.
• IIT Undergraduate Bulletin 1998-1999. Issued April 1998.
• White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.