July 21, 2005

Picnic at Bull Run

By Margaret Gutman Klosko

If you are a full-time member of the faculty, a serious scholar, immersed in your research, focused on your students, mildly contemptuous of the administrative types you encounter when something goes wrong, you may be unaware of the existence of jobs in the administration with clerical-sounding titles that often pay more money than your job does, and in some cases, more than it ever will.

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Persons who land these positions, while considered by some to be more lucky than smart, are very important to important persons — presidents, provosts, vice presidents, chief operating officers, etc. Academic executive officers tend to be so busy, so overwhelmed with administrative detail, that they need help completing duties that do not require the exercise of meaningful authority: writing speeches and letters, organizing conferences, counting disbursements and revenues, and turning down requests of persons who feel keenly their own importance. They get such assistance from employees called “assistants” — as in “assistant to the provost,” “assistant to the vice president for student affairs,” “assistant to the president” and so on — to perform the less enchanting, perhaps the more tedious and irritating, bits of their own jobs.

For these jobs there are both explicit and tacit job requirements. Always required are a liberal education, and excellent communication and organizational skills. Often necessary is “an ability to get on well with others,” meaning, I think, the ability to fit into the broader culture of the particular university and the narrower culture of the particular office. For instance, in the South you ought to know the rhetoric of indirection; in the North, you ought to be well practiced in appearing to be straightforward. In the office of an autocrat, you need to be overtly submissive, and in the office of a democrat, cagily so. Never explicitly required, but written between the lines of job descriptions are an ability to hobnob with politicians, philanthropists, and coaches, and also a working knowledge of upper middle class mores. Everywhere and always required is an appreciation of the importance of fund raising to the institution.

As I write, I am one week into my retirement from six years as assistant to the president of a Research I university. In many ways, this was a great job. To gain a perch on the heights of academic responsibility while being responsible for very little; to learn the ropes without having to pull strings; to meet persons with political power or money or both and not have to seek favors from them — might be imaginable ambitions of a (cautious) young person interested in academic administration.

Like Washingtonians picnicking at the battle of Bull Run, to be satisfied as an assistant-to you need to prefer to be a spectator in battle, comfortable away from real action, prepared to retreat when threatened with harm. There are some not constitutionally suited to these jobs. Those who have problems with authority will find having no say-so to be frustrating. Writers may be among those unsuited to long term service as assistants to great persons.

I, for one, was hired to help the president with his writing — letters, reports, speeches, essays et alia. When I was first hired, I spent a lot of time composing letters — letters of thanks — for gifts to the university and trinkets, books, newspaper clippings; T-shirts given to the president; letters of explanation, e.g., why the university was building a garage across the street from private residences; letters appealing for financial support for the university; letters of encouragement — to Boy Scouts, students, faculty members, the bereaved, the ill; letters of support and recommendation; open letters to the community about social issues of local moment, and so on.

I went on to write reports, essays in the alumni magazine and in higher education publications. And always there were speeches. With the president in great demand on podia on the campus; in the state capital; in local organizations; at funerals; at graduations; at inaugurations; at conferences here and abroad; and at alumni events, he was always speaking and his assistants, always banging out talking points. A gifted extemporary speaker, the president rarely asked for speech texts to be read verbatim, but if he did, I would get the job.

Like all writers, my days were spent in front of a computer. Occasionally I escaped the office to sit in on meetings. Sometimes I got to speak to callers to the president’s office, all of whom have issues to discuss. Most of these calls concern callers’ children, most of whom were enrolled in the university as undergraduates, all of whom, according to their parents, deserved more consideration — from members of the faculty, financial aid office, the registrar, and the university police. But most of the time, I sat in a very quiet office; heard life going on around me; and often felt like the buried alive Fortunato from “The Cask of Amontillado.”

My job was to write. Other president’s assistants serve as his representatives in various vice presidential areas — development, provostial; student affairs; etc. His chief of staff serves as his gatekeeper and keeper of the calendar.

As a writer my situation was different from that of the other assistants. Well, yes, writers like to see themselves as different from others, one of their many annoying expressions of self-importance. But we are different. We are authors, who, to do our work, need authority. Many of us are show-offs. So, I guess I am not the best exemplar of the sort of person who becomes an “assistant to.” Still, like others, I was a person who learned a lot from being in the position. Like others, although a gained a lot from it, I was not able to make a profession of the job.

Who am I and how did I get myself into a situation that would both whet my appetite for influence and also deny me categorically any possibility of having anyone ever listen to me?

Here is the bio. In college, I majored in English (like all the other unfocused undergraduates); after graduation from college, I worked in New York law firm after to see whether I liked the law. I did not. Then I married. We lived abroad while he finished his dissertation and I wrote a novel and read all of Russian literature in translation. We returned to New York, and I got a job as an editor and copywriter for a vendor of house plans. I soon tired of that. Luckily, I was able to quit that one when we left New York for a Midwestern university where my husband gained a job teaching. We had a baby, and I enrolled in graduate school. I realized that I did not like the Midwest, nor did I like graduate school and I persuaded husband to take an academic job on the East Coast to justify dropping out. We had two more babies.

With the babies, I knew that I could not do it all, nor was I was sure that I could do anything. So I went back to graduate school for the money from the teaching assistantship, money we needed to pay our mortgage. After finishing the master’s, I taught as an adjunct in the failing department in which I had taken my degree. When the university closed the department, I wrote a book with my husband. During its editing, serendipitously, I was offered a job as director of religious education at the local synagogue. And even though I was a thorough-going religious skeptic, I took it. (N.B. One does not have to be a believer to be a Jewish professional, so that was OK really.) Four years later, my skepticism confirmed by my experience in the synagogue, I quit the religious school job, introduced myself to the director of university relations at the same time the president of the university had lost his writer....

In the end, the boss was too smart and too good a writer to inflate my self esteem to the necessary gaseous degree. So, here I am. In business for myself, hoping that Mark Twain’s comment about lawyers lawyering for themselves does not apply to writers.

This is all to say, Members of the Faculty, that there is no reason to be resentful of the well remunerated and invisible assistants-to. For they have a combination of traits and competencies that you probably do not have, and, if you think about it, would not want to have. Most of you are masters of your work and your time. You would probably not want a job that required you to put in 50-hour work weeks in an office overseen by a person far more important than yourself. You would not like the command performances at football games and the ten zillion receptions at which your boss is the host(ess). Assistants-to work hard and long and without much recognition. Their jobs are really not meant for those of us who, perhaps skeptics about a Creator, nevertheless believe that we personally are endowed (by something) with inalienable rights to freedom, happiness, and personal authority.

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