TaCboaon,d Faaclel- WMinittcehre 2l0l04 5 In Search of Civility: Higher Education and the Discourse of Disdain Candace Mitchell Oceania is the image of a totally regulated society yet has no regulations. —Orwellian Linguistics, 1979 James Gee defines discourse “as a socially accepted association among ways of using language, other symbolic expressions, and artifacts, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful role” (1996, p. 131). These behaviors, beliefs, and ‘artifacts’ which of course include one’s choice of clothing, shoes, hair style and color, the manner in which one composes a memo, or addresses a colleague, the degree one holds, one’s area of interest, and so forth, mark one either as a member of a discourse community, or as an outsider. In this article I discuss the communicative encounters—oral and written— between members of two discourse communities—human resources and faculty— housed within an urban university in the Northeast. I focus on one individual’s attempts to articulate and impose a component of her community’s implicit rules for behavior upon a member of the faculty. Since what the individual wished to enforce was tacitly accepted as part of the discourse of the community of which she was a member, the rule carried ideological weight (Belsey, 1980; Eagleton, 1984, 1986), if you will, but was, nonetheless, amorphous within the greater community, i.e., the university at large. The effort to enforce a tacit component of a discourse community as if that tacit assumption were shared across separate and differing discourse communities within the institution led in the end to a total breakdown in communi- cation and to a flagrant misuse of bureaucratic power. It is this interplay with the tacit assumptions held within a discourse community, and the concomitant efforts on the part of the community’s representatives to make the tacit seemingly concrete or real, that bear the crux of the will to power and deceit that emerged over the course of one semester of an academic year. It is this will to power shrouded in a cloak of disdain that I seek to uncover. 6 In Search of Civility The Office of Human Resources Human Resources (HR) consists of staff charged with overseeing personnel support services such as payroll, benefits, retirement, medical leaves, and return to work from medical leaves, and so forth, for both faculty and staff. In essence the principle role of HR is to maintain the paperwork necessary to insure that the overall system—in this instance, the university—functions appropriately principly from a monetary and contractual perspective in relation to personnel. The office has no say in such financial matters, for example, related to allocation of resources to depart- ments for faculty hiring or for infrastructure repairs and development, for that matter. Nor does HR have any say in matters related to teaching load, allocation of teaching assistants, or anything remotely connected to the academic domain. As the name of the department implies, HR is to serve as a resource to the community in matters related to those listed above. In fact, not so long ago at the university of which I write the Office of Human Resources was labeled: Personnel Services. Those who work in HR are “members of the staff” and not “members of the faculty” and as such have not gone through the ranks of academic scrutiny or review: one can reach an upper level administrative position in HR with a bachelor’s degree, or with a degree in administration or management, or one comparable, though doctorates are now offered in applied psychology with a concentration in human resources, marking, from my perspective, an uncomfortable blurring of boundaries between staff and faculty. The structure and bureaucratic functioning of HR, in good part, mirrors that of the corporate environment. In fact, a HR department at a bank would look much like the HR department at the university of which I write; it would just serve very different discourse communities, i.e., bankers, financiers, tellers, loan officers, bank mainte- nance staff, and so forth. It would be rare, though not impossible as noted above, to find a Ph.D. working in HR, and if one were to be found, the Ph.D. would not signal behaviors endemic to academia, for if this were the case, the employee would not remain a member of the HR staff for very long. As a member of the staff of HR a Ph.D. would need to display the behaviors appropriate to the discourse of HR, a discourse that is strikingly different from the discourse of the academy. Therefore, despite its location—housed in a university and at the service of faculty and other members of the academic community, as well as members of the staff —HR does not display behaviors congruent with faculty. In fact, human resources at any university shares more in common with other departments of human resources no matter the occupa- tional context in which the department is situated. Sharing space and place does not necessitate shared discourse systems. The Faculty The second discourse community I consider here is that of the faculty, of which Candace Mitchell 7 I am a member. In choosing as I have to study the professional world of which I am a part I am Obliged to confront, in dramatized form as it were, a certain number of fundamental epistemological problems, all related to the question of the difference between practical knowledge and scholarly knowledge, and particularly to the special difficulties involved first in breaking with inside experience and then in reconstitut- ing the knowledge which has been obtained by means of this break. (Bourdieu, 1984, p. xxvii) In this article I seek to do what Bourdieu characterizes above: I will break with the experience involving a series of encounters between HR and myself, my program director, and my dean in an effort to make sense of an experience that made little, if any, sense as it culminated in a climatic communicative encounter and a serious bureaucratic action of potentially momentous consequences. In fact my understand- ing of the encounters that occurred over the course of one semester after I had returned to work from a medical leave did seem to make some sense, or so I thought, until I was confronted with a very different understanding of the communicative intent—Grice’s illocutionary force—on the part of HR at the very beginning of the second semester of my return (Finegan, 2004, p. 297). So what I had at first thought to be a minor miscommunication that was quite quickly settled, turned into a major confrontation, an assault that I was not only totally unprepared for, but had not expected at all. Had I expected the confrontation and consequences, I would have done everything in my power to prevent them from occurring. What I did not recognize at the outset was “that the problem of cultural interaction emerges only at the significatory boundaries of cultures, where meanings and values are (mis)read or signs are misappropriated. Culture only emerges as a problem, or a problematic, at the point where there is a loss of meaning in the contestation and articulation of everyday life, between classes, genders, races, nations” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 34). As a member of the faculty engaged in a communicative encounter with a member of HR regarding my need to comply to a tacit policy for return to work from a medical leave, I had no idea initially of the degree to which our—faculty and HR— assumptions regarding compliance, power, authority, performing one’s job, and basic human decency differed based upon our diverse discourse community’s values and assumptions regarding these issues (Fairclough, 1989, 1995; Gee, 1989, 1996, 1999; Giroux, 1992, 2003; Gumperz, 1982, 2001) . Nor did I understand the degree to which my medical leave of absence served to resituate me within the university such that I now was positioned under the control of HR, as well as faculty. Illness had repositioned me within the institution in such a way that I was denuded unknowingly of my faculty status, while at the same time unable to barely compre- hend, let alone negotiate the discourse of HR. 8 In Search of Civility Bureaucratization of the Academy I argue in this article that the over-bureaucratization that has become so much a part of academia serves to undercut a culture of collegiality—and this is but one of the discourses of the academy—that has, since the Medieval Period, dominated faculty practices (Baradat, 1980). In essence, I present a case study and a series of discourse analyses of oral interactions and written communications between two members of HR and two faculty members. My analysis draws from the framework of critical discourse analysis which defines power in terms of control, and more specifically situates social power within groups or institutions (van Dijk, 2001, p. 354). With this in mind, the struggle to be analyzed must be understood, not as an argument between individuals, but as an ideologically driven, socially-constructed movement on the part of one community within an institution to integrate its tacit laws, rules, habits, norms, and general consensus in such a way that the hegemonic practices represented emerged cloaked in an institutional validity that was seemingly taken-for-granted across the institution (p. 354). At the end of the series of exchanges and written communiqués from a HR staff member, a dean’s actions and her response in writing to the HR staff member are analyzed as well. I argue that the faculty members and the staff of HR engage in a power struggle— clearly controlled by HR—defined by ideological dimensions embedded in discourse recognizing that language use is “imbricated in social relations and processes which systematically determine variation in its properties, including the linguistic forms which appear in texts.” (Fairclough, p. 73). I hypothesize, following Fairclough that “significant connections exist between features of texts, ways in which texts are put together and interpreted, and the nature of the social practice[s] (p. 73) which dictates the production of texts. Essentially the HR staff member, in particular, of whom I write sought to create a discourse not only to “sever the adherence to the world of commonsense by publicly proclaiming a break with the ordinary order,” but also to “integrate within it the previously tacit or repressed practices and experiences of an entire group, investing them with the legitimacy conferred by public expression and collective recognition.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 129). In so doing, she sought to enforce, without directly communicating her intent to do so, a policy that—though unwritten—had been successfully carried out in the context of staff returning from work after a medical leave of absence, but until I returned after an extended leave, no returning faculty had been required to conform to this unwritten policy held within the collective consciousness of HR. What I will uncover in what follows is not only the “power in discourse, but . . . the power behind discourse” and how particular conventions of discourse are policed by power- holders within institutions, and what dire consequences are possible if sanctions are imposed when conventions are not followed (Fairclough, 1989, p. 61). Candace Mitchell 9 Academia From outside the community some see academics as effete elitists, wordy know- it-alls who lack any real world knowledge, knowledge that could be put to good use, for example, like making money, which is something most academics do not do well at all. Nor do those outside the culture understand that academics work, real hard. What outsiders see are individuals who teach what they consider to be very few hours per week, and for the rest of the time live a life of leisure. Nothing could be further from the truth. What outsiders do not understand is the continual stress and pressure academics are under to produce, to remain abreast of their field, to contribute to the development and evaluation of the institutional structure within which they work, and to teach and mentor their students, to name just some of the responsibilities faced by those who have chosen the profession. I chose the profession, and here I choose to study it as well presenting me with the challenge that Pierre Bourdieu articulates clearly in his own study of academics: When faced with the challenge of studying a world to which we are linked by all sorts of specific investments, inextricably intellectual and ‘temporal’, our first automatic thought is to escape’; our concern to escape any suspicion of prejudice leads us to attempt to negate ourselves as ‘biased’ or ‘informed’ subject automatically suspected to abolish the self even as knowing subject, by resorting to the most impersonal and automatic procedures, those, at least in this perspective (which is that of ‘normal science’), which are the least questionable. (1984, p. 6) I accept this challenge with the recognition that I am the subject of the inquiry and analysis, and also present as the object of the discourse of disdain that I analyze in context. First: On Becoming an Object of Disdain In early February 2000 I sustained a fall on the ice outside my home which resulted in a severe wrist break and trauma to my upper body. Incompetent medical interven- tion contributed to the onset of a rare, disabling condition for which I continue to be treated. Had diagnosis occurred when symptoms first emerged my disability would never have reached its level of severity, and in fact I might be today symptom free, but that is not the case, nor is this the story of medical incompetence, though my original physician’s inability to listen to my complaints of pain, and his lack of attention to the symptoms that I pointed out to him communicate a level of arrogance that highlight a lack of civility that is present in his profession, and that I later found present in the HR sector of the university of which I write. It was not until two and one half years after my fall that I was recovered to the degree that my treating physician—not the incompetent one—agreed that I could give fulltime work a chance again. I had tried to return to work eight months after my accident—with great optimism for success as I knew not yet of the power of the 10 In Search of Civility disabling condition I had contracted—but was forced to leave after three weeks realizing I had not yet regained the physical strength necessary to carry out the responsibilities of a faculty member. I needed more than a full year more of intensive physical therapy—which ended when health insurance no longer would cover the treatments. But I continued on my own with the physical regimen, took my medicine and entered the hospital on a regular basis to keep symptoms at bay. I worked harder at getting better than I had ever worked at any job I had ever had, and I am a hard worker. The long medical leave caused extreme financial difficulty, as one can imagine, and the continued medical treatment necessitates insurance coverage best maintained through the university’s health plan. Attempting To Follow Administrative Decree Prior to returning to work Fall Semester 2002, I notified my program director— orally and in writing—in July to clear the return with him and so that I could be scheduled to teach; I notified my college dean at the same time—orally and in writing—so that money would be allocated for my position, which was guaranteed; and I called the vice-chancellor of HR to notify her of my intention to return to work fulltime just so all avenues were covered. The vice chancellor asked that I have my doctor write a letter indicating I was returning to work so the university would have it on record. Now I had called the vice chancellor of my own accord just to assure that all bases were covered, no one had suggested that I do so and no where was it written that I was required to do so. I asked the vice chancellor if providing a doctor’s letter upon return to work from a medical leave was university policy, and if so, was it written down anywhere. I asked as I had not been required to supply the university with a note upon my first return, and wondered why I was being asked to do so at this time. The vice chancellor, who was very polite and understanding, said that no, there was no official policy thus nothing was in writing that she was aware of but she felt it would be a good idea if I were to do so, and even apologized for having to ask me to go to this trouble after having been out so long, and recognizing that I would need to make an appointment with my doctor, get a ride into Boston, and traverse yet another bureaucracy in order to respond to her request. She was very kind. She also suggested that she would look into the issue just to make sure that she was asking me to do what was required, and then get back to me. I never heard from her again. I felt as if I were back in grade school. But I made an appointment, arranged to be driven into Boston—an hour’s drive, and met with my physician to discuss both my overall feelings about my ability to carry out the responsibilities of my position and the wording of the note. My doctor and I settled on at my urging: Candace Mitchell will return to work beginning Fall Semester 2002. Yours truly, (signed by the doctor). Contained within the wording of this very short note is the presumptive notion that the work I will return to is the same work from which I left when I first injured myself. Obviously the note was on official stationary, typed, Candace Mitchell 11 signed, dated, and sent, as I had been directed to do, to my program director, who then forwarded it to HR. I settled on the short note recognizing that no one had the right to details of my medical condition—the records are confidential—and assuming that my doctor’s note indicating that I would return would be sufficient to cover the university’s unstated, inexplicit requirement. I assumed as well that the understand- ing would be that if I did not have the note from my doctor described above, I would therefore not have his permission to return to work. This was all taken care of in August 2002 prior to the onset of the semester. Collegiality I was back, nervous, but back. Two and a half years is a very long time to be away from one’s job, no matter what the position. To return with a disability made the transition from home to work even more difficult. I was fearful—scared to death would be a better description—that despite all my efforts to regain my strength I might experience a setback and find myself in the position of letting my program down if I could not complete the semester. This would put undo pressure on other faculty as it had previously since my courses had to be covered in my absence both when I first fell and then again when I tried to return and had to leave after three weeks. I assumed a second failed attempt to return would, in effect, mark the end of my career as an academic, and even more importantly as a wage earner. This would have left me with no recourse other than to seek public assistance until I was able to obtain another position since the university’s disability insurer had denied my claim for coverage, and though I was appealing this decision, the return to work automatically disqualified me from ever again collecting benefits from this insurer or any other. I was not in a good position. Every faculty member in my program offered without question the support that speaks to what a major component of what collegiality is really about: all took it upon themselves to do everything possible to make my transition back into university life as free from stress as possible. Our faculty partnership, or “colleguim,” provided me time to readjust and to write. At issue as all knew, was the fact that I had not yet been reviewed for tenure and for two and a half years had for the most part not even been able to read as I could not concentrate due to pain, could not drive to a library (or anywhere else for that matter) to do research, nor could I type. If I were ever able to accomplish what I needed to accomplish in terms of publishing I had to be buffered. In addition to my teaching, this was my sole focus: I needed to publish to survive. This support and care, so generously given without the intervention of bureaucratic dictate or filing of forms, marks a major component of the implicit rules of the culture of academe: collegiality suggests that if you are accepted as a member of the community other members will always be there for you, to take over as my colleagues did in the event that the need to do so emerges. It is not as if deans were not aware in some instances that this implicit cultural system had been put in place 12 In Search of Civility as more than likely, they in fact supported the process, knowing that most important was the fact that the university continued to function, and that faculty be protected to the degree possible so that they could return to their positions when whatever trauma had pulled them away was no longer a hindrance to full participation in the community. The culture works. Heretical Discourse I was blindsided when I received a call from my program director the first day of class second semester, 2003. This was the second semester of my return to work. My director was distraught. Agitated. Dumbfounded. (As I was when I heard what he had to say.) He informed me that he had received a call that morning from the dean indicating that I was to be placed on leave of absence without pay because I had failed to comply with university policy regarding procedures for return-to-work after a medical leave. (Understand that a leave of absence without pay would not only have eliminated my income but would have also stopped completely all medical insurance coverage. Without coverage I would not have been able to undergo the treatments necessary to maintain the physical status that had allowed me to return to work in the first place.) My director urged me to go to my doctor immediately and get a new letter, but I had no idea what a “new” letter was to say, nor was I in any position to gain access to my physician at a moment’s notice—compassionate as he is, my physician is not Dr. Kildare. My doctor is internationally renowned and is often out of the country at medical conferences; when in town he is in the operating room; with patients during office visits, attending to his residents, conducting research, and any number of other activities that disallow “immediate access.” And I would never even have considered asking for his intervention for such a matter: this was bureaucratic absurdity and blackmail. I was being charged with not fulfilling a human resources’ requirement yet on 23 September 2002 of the previous semester, three weeks into classes the HR accommodations administrator, Fatima Gorda,1 had written me a letter indicating that I was back at work fulltime, noting in full: Dear Candace, This letter serves to document our conversation of today regarding your return to work without a “Release to Return to Work” from your doctor (name of doctor). Your reinstatement after approximately two years away from (the university) and the appropriate route for your paperwork was not followed. Since you have already returned to teaching, and since the PA [payroll] form has already been processed in the Human Resources Department, you will be permitted to continue to teach. Based on the documentation I have in HR, your return to the classroom does not seem to present any direct “threat” to re-injury or exacerbation of your condition. However, I state that as an HR Administrator not a medical practitioner and without any updates from a medical doctor to suggest otherwise. Candace Mitchell 13 If you are requesting any disability-related accommodations, please complete the attached paperwork and return it to me. Welcome back to the University. Fatima Gorda Accommodations, Benefits and Leave Administrator cc. (to my program director, and the HR assistant vice-chancellor) The conversation—actually there were two—to which the “ADA/504 Compliance Officer,” also known, as noted above, as the “Accommodations, Benefits and Leave Administrator,” and on the website for HR, as “Manager” occurred earlier in the same day the letter was written. Months later my assumption was confirmed that the more titles one has, the more power one has as well. The HR officer had no doubt finally gotten around to reading the letter from my doctor and to reviewing my file thus took it upon herself to call me in my office on September 23 to make it known that my return to work was her job. She was persistent—much like a bulldog with speech abilities— with her concern that I had not fulfilled the university’s return-to-work policy, but when I asked her to specify what the policy was she provided the following examples: first she discussed the case of a clerk who had just returned to work with a letter from her doctor which specified that the woman work for two weeks for just twenty hours a week, and then return to a full forty hours a week. This clerk’s position entailed typing for most of the day. I noted that the example had no relevance to my responsibilities as a faculty member and that I was already back fulltime, and functioning quite well, and that she—the HR officer (Fatima) with whom I was speaking—had in hand a letter from my doctor indicating that I would return to work, and though I did not say this to her I assumed the understanding implicit within the word “work” was “my fulltime position as defined by the university,” which was in fact what I was doing—with the support of my colleagues, though I did not mention this to her either. The officer gave a second example after I asked if she could clarify further: another member of the staff had been out on medical leave and when he returned his doctor specified as to the amount of weight the employee could lift at work. Actually in response to my comment that the amount of weight that I could lift really had no relevance to my ability to carry out my weighty responsibilities as a member of the faculty, the HR officer did laugh and comment that I was right on that account. During this conversation I recall clearly that I even complimented the HR officer on her promotion, and she laughed again, noting that she was not sure that she would characterize it as a promotion. Despite the laughter and the seemingly overt camaraderie, I was beginning to feel as if I had fallen through the rabbit hole, so to speak, but remained calm and polite and tried tact. I asked if the university had a policy statement that I could use to guide my doctor in composing an “appropriate” letter. Her reply was a very direct “no” as to the policy statement, but she was undeterred and suggested, nonetheless, that 14 In Search of Civility my doctor be more specific about my condition—what it entailed, what restrictions I might have, what the symptoms were, and so forth. I did not have any restrictions that I could see at this point, and noted this, indicating that I might at some later date seek accommodations. Here a major point of miscommunication emerged: the HR’s “restrictions” overlapped with “accommodations” both in my interpretation of the term, and in her response to my use of the term. Actually I learned at the end of January 2003, that the two words had entirely different meanings within the context of a return to work, though never did the HR officer clarify this distinction to me. I responded that my understanding was that restrictions were to be dealt with in an accommoda- tion plan, and that I could apply at any time for consideration through a 504 accommodation request, and that I did not have any restrictions that I could think of at the moment. She agreed with my assumption regarding the accommodation plan. So, in effect, she was confirming my understanding of the overlapping meaning between restrictions and accommodations. What I now perceived as an attack was relentless.Though I was winning, or so I thought, this was a battle I had no desire to wage. I wanted to teach, to write, to remain strong, and to make it through the academic year. This added pressure from HR was not helping matters at all. And even though the officer did not have a comeback for any request for clarification that I made, I felt a creeping unease that the situation was spinning out of control. From my perspective there was no logic to the pursuit, as I was functioning and accepted in my community at the university. In a final effort to make some headway I asked if HR had a form that my doctor could fill out and return to the university that would satisfy the unspecified return-to-work policy. Again the answer was no. With that I replied that I felt we had reached an impasse: I did not know what she wanted from me, and I was not going to continue to ask my doctor for letters until by chance he hit upon a formula—unnamed and unspecified—that would satisfy her. The HR officer agreed that the examples she had offered me were irrelevant considering my position at the university, and that she really had no idea what a return-to-work letter in my case should contain, as she had no examples, had no policy statement, or form of an official nature to offer to me to facilitate her, what I considered to be, quite absurd request. Please note that I never overtly characterized her request as absurd, this was a feeling I kept to myself and that I reveal now as part of the analysis of the exchange. I want to make it clear that I was not attempting to be an obstructionist during the conversation. I would have gladly supplied another letter but I honestly did not know—nor did the officer—what the doctor needed to write. And we both agreed that I was already at work fulltime anyway, and my doctor had written a letter indicating I would return to work. The call ended on a cordial note, though I felt violated, as if someone had intruded too far into the personal reaches of my life in a context in which it was totally inappropriate to do so. I also sensed that this HR officer, new to her position, had no idea what she was talking about, but could have cared less because real communication, compassion for my situation and context