For the last not-quite-seven years at Bates College. The following text was composed and delivered as an address at a farewell party organized on my behalf, somewhat against my will. I ended up surprised and pleased by what I wrote, and so I share it.I decided to prepare remarks because while, as you all know, I have no trouble with improvised public speaking, sometimes others have trouble with what I end up saying when there’s no script to guide me. I would have preferred to individually thank and praise each person in this room, and some who are not here but apologetically warned me of their inability to make it, but since I wasn’t exactly sure who would be here, that would have entailed improvisation, dangerous improvisation, in which what I intend as thanks and praise to one might be construed as cutting satire of another.
Earlier today, one of you sent me a quote from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King that I believe perfectly encapsulates this strange job of mine, whatever one chooses to call it, whether “grants officer,” “sponsored programs professional,” “research administrator,” what have you. I’m not a fan of Wallace’s style, which I find bloated, so on the page, I’ve put ellipses where I think there should be cuts, over which I will elide in reading it out.
“I learned that the world … as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth … the ignorance of which causes great suffering…. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities…. The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom…. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable…. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
To become immune to boredom requires the disposition (thank you, Lauren Ashwell, for that word) to find the fascinating, the novel, the thing you did not understand before about nature, history, or the given ensemble of social relationships, within the absurd origami of statute, regulation, policy, and procedure. Most academics despise bureaucracy and yet every academic organization, as far as I can tell--and I have worked in and with a good few--is one. Provided with powers and responsibilities of self-governance that are the envy of most American workers, you build infernal machines of your own devising. Then, realizing that you need more resources, you go to foundations, corporations, and yes, especially, government agencies, bureaucracies of greater refinement and power which impose further elaborations on your own native convolutions, with gestures, and paperwork, mirroring their own. You hate bureaucracy, but you need bureaucrats, and here I am, at your service.
Usually at these sorts of events, we are celebrating someone venturing forth to something that, within the careerist and meritocratic system of values common to bureaucratic organizations of all types, can be regarded as “something better.” As it stands, though, I am the proverbial “trailing spouse,” for while my wife is pursuing an opportunity at Marist College to be and, perhaps more importantly, be recognized as, one of the best damned cataloging librarians on the North American continent, no sane mind sets out with the ambition to be and be recognized as a master bureaucrat. Things are not yet settled, but the most probable outcome is that, within a month or so, I will be doing a very similar job at a very similar institution. In other words, I will be called upon, in the next few years, to do much the same sorts of things that I have accomplished at Bates over the last seven: To establish policies and procedures, identify strengths, opportunities, threats, and weaknesses, align institutional priorities and faculty expertise with sponsor missions and guidelines, design budgets ranging from four figures to seven, and to have the arrogance necessary to polish the prose of certified geniuses.
(I did imply earlier that I’ve improved David Foster Wallace’s prose, so why not yours as well?)
Don’t pity me, though, because if things work out that way, I will love it every bit as much as I have loved it here, and if I succeed, it will be as a result of all I have learned from working with--or in some cases, around and through--each of you. And if it doesn’t work out quite like that, well, there are plans B and C. Because the bureaucratic mind always has at least two backup plans.
Since the announcement went out about my departure, a number of people have said variations on, “What will Bates do without you?” And my response has always been, “Bates will be just fine.” And that is not only because Theresa is excellent at what she does and will grow into new responsibilities, or that Malcolm will put together a great job description and a search committee that will select an excellent replacement. They will. But a bureaucrat’s greatest virtue, unlisted by Wallace and which derives from the key disposition of unborability, is to be replaceable. Here I’ll quote more fully, from someone whose style and insight I like better than Wallace’s, the sociologist Max Weber, for whom “bureaucratic leadership” created a tendency toward “formalistic impersonality: … without hatred or suffering, and therefore without love or enthusiasm … ‘without regard for personality,’ formally the same for ‘everyone,’ and therefore in the same practical manner despite various given interests, the ideal [bureaucrat] carries out their duty.” (Yes, that is my own translation from the German, so it may vary a bit from what the sociologists in this room recall from their graduate seminars.) The Weber seems to be in contradiction to the Wallace, just as it may seem to contradict how I have carried out my duties at Bates. Here is my synthesis:
The ideal bureaucrat creates the conditions necessary for impersonality, for the work to be carried on one way or the other, with or without love or enthusiasm. The love or enthusiasm described by Wallace describes merely the conditions for the survivability of bureaucracy by any one individual human organism. For example, the ability to discover a neat trick for streamlining the issuance of subawards, and for one’s response to that discovery to be life-affirming excitement rather than grinding ennui. Bureaucracy as such is indifferent to whether the individual bureaucrat experiences excitement rather than boredom. What matters is that the subawards are issued, in conformity with the Uniform Guidance, on a timeline that can be defined as timely, not whether or not the individual bureaucrat enjoys or even appreciates the process; with the utterance of that statement I have divided the sheep from the goats, the bureaucrats from those who merely live through bureaucracy, based on whether or not you rolled your eyes.
So if you miss me, what you may miss will be my love or enthusiasm, whether it is for the research or teaching that animates your spirit, or for the behind-the-scenes processes that attempt, not always successfully, to minimize your administrative burdens. But if I have succeeded in what I set out to accomplish, that love and enthusiasm, whether it is replicated in a new Director of Sponsored Programs or not, will become progressively less important, as the processes take on lives of their own, shaping the office in the image of the formal, instrumental rationality that is the necessary and sufficient condition for its existence.
And so, with amore ac studio, I hope to have undone the necessity over the long term for both. And that is why I say, Bates will be just fine. Thank you all for your help over the years in making it so.
