Talk-Talking the Talk-Talk
by S.M. Street
A faculty lounge conversation led to a year’s full-time appointment, then another two at a state-university branch where I’d taught as adjunct for several years. When the department underwent a chain of command change, the new Chair was a Joyce scholar. I’d seen him in the halls, but we’d never met. I introduced myself on a day I was teaching The Dead. In class, I’d shown parts of the John Huston film.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t really come off,” said Dr. Squirrel, as I’ll call him because he liked to eat nuts, which he brought in small plastic bags and kept in the refrigerator. “I have serious problems with the casting—Gabriel should be older—though the cinematography is downright brilliant in spots.”
I was drawn up a bit by his language and tone, which seemed to owe more to “Sneak Previews” than to the critical traditions of an English Department, but I told him how much I loved the story itself. Sharing that love with undergraduates—instilling it, if possible—was our job, I thought.
“Yeah, but all that romance,” said Dr. Squirrel, popping a nut from his fist into his mouth. His upper teeth were shorter on one side than on the other, somehow, giving him a smile like a guillotine. “I mean the rain, the fog, the tubercular teenage lover—come on. It’s almost funny, isn’t it?”
“Oh, hahahahahaha!” I said, and the next conversation we had was a phone call at the end of that summer, when discretionary funding had come through for him to hire full-time fixed-term lecturers, to be deployed however he saw fit.
We had another conversation at a departmental function that spring, when I sat at a linen-draped table with him and his wife.
“Larry,” he said at dinner’s end, leaning forward to pitch his napkin on his plate (Larry Lecturer, not my real name), “did I ever tell you about the time we hired a Chair over a chest of drawers?”
The appearance of his teeth clued me in on the deliberateness of his diction de meubles and sudden confidence. The story was that he and several others in the department used to collect antique furniture, and during a previous search (back when Ernest Emeritus had served as Acting Chair, if I remembered Ernest, not this last time he served but his first time, another interesting anecdote the good doctor promised to share with me some time) they’d all gone out to an estate sale in the country, where by chance they discovered that the auctioneer had a Ph.D.
“‘Can you teach Chaucer?’” we asked him, because we needed a Chairman who could teach Chaucer, too. “‘Yep,’” he said, and that was it: I had Sara [Sara Secretary, administrative assistant still] draw up the papers and send them on over. Plus a beautiful cherry wood three-drawer bureau with a matching commode for fifty dollars, I got.”
Dr. Squirrel leaned toward me to draw a pipe from a side pocket of his jacket, though no building on campus allowed smoking, and with his thumb in the bowl lowered his voice so his wife couldn’t hear.
“Of course that was before Affirmative Action.”
“Oh, hahahahahaha!” I said again for my second year’s contract.
By my third year Dr. Squirrel had caught on, so it was a more difficult year for both of us and my last on a full-time contract, but what I’m getting at has less to do with my own particulars than the particular way in which Tip O’Neill’s remark about politics being local applies in academia—even in a department that purports to preserve language in its noblest forms. If you’re in such a department, you need to watch your own language carefully, because the nature of the job dictates that language must be used in different ways, high-minded and low, at different times. Using one when the other is called for can result in a painful torque.
Naturally, members of every profession, like any group, speak differently to each other than to outsiders. Plumbers use a different vocabulary with other plumbers than with their customers, as do doctors and insurance salespeople. But education is not insurance (particularly in the humanities), and teachers must also address a third group: students. Despite economic imperatives that can make schools seem otherwise, students are not just customers, and they’re not complete outsiders, either, so they tend to know when they’re being sold a bill of goods. Therefore they need to be spoken to in the language of truth, curiosity, compassion, and possibility (if schools do offer a commodity, that last is it, isn’t it?). And that’s as it should be.
Unlike students, however, colleagues—especially superiors, and especially during these times of retrenchments and lawsuits—don’t need to be delighted, surprised, or amazed. What they need is reassurance that everything’s going, if not fine, at least relatively smoothly, just like in what’s called the real world. On a local public-television special during a recent economic crisis, a prominent businesswoman was asked for jobseeking advice. She finished up a list of common-sense tips with one that seemed to have just struck her, offering it in the hushed language and voice of a good teacher, earnest and bottom-line honest: “And don’t worry so much about competition. Don’t try so hard to be the best. People want someone they can work with, someone they’re comfortable with, not necessarily the best person for the . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Not necessarily the way things should be, but the way they often are. For the same reason these phrases, drawn from faculty meetings, hold meaning for people who’ve successfully risen through the ranks of institutions of higher learning to positions of personnel decision-making:
“Just didn’t fit in with our . . . just . . . I don’t know, just didn’t fit. You know?”
“‘We want you to become our colleague.’ That’s what a job offer means!” “The Union serves pretty good chili, but watch out for their tacos.”
Students will forgive and even appreciate the occasional lapse into the practical language of the difficult world, but the opposite lapse—addressing professional colleagues with imagination and delight, for example—can spell trouble.
“Flaky flapdoodle.”
“Who hired that guy?”
“Get with the program.”
But your Chairperson also wants to know your students will sign up for more of your department’s offerings, so you need to be able to move back and forth between the two kinds of language. A useful bridge can be dry wit—but not too dry, and not too witty. The safest course is caution: restrain your language, even in the classroom. Don’t make it too sharp, even if it’s sharp language you’ve been hired to teach.
Has a novel turned out to be more challenging than it seemed when you put it on the syllabus, its ideas too weird, its images too unpleasant, its prose too difficult? A convenient phrase can be “I think by now we’ve gotten the idea of what Salman Rushdie [or Arundhati Roy or James Baldwin or Isaac Babel or Guy de Maupassant] is trying to say,” as if writers are really some sort of pathetic stutterers, as students and many faculty suspect anyway. The most useful phrase of all might be “The less said the better.” Tenure-track colleagues many years my junior, people far smarter than I with specialties from Emerson to Asian literature to Hollywood musicals—men and women, Jew and gentile, white and non, people of various temperaments—have seemed to share one trait as they settle in toward review: an increasing tendency toward platitudes, if not silence. Some of them have families, wives or husbands or long-term partners, households, young kids in school. You can’t entirely blame them.
“Just fine. Very well, thank you. And how are you? So good to see you!” One needs to say something. So if silence is unavoidable, stick with the tried, if not the true.
I used to wonder how the tenured talked. They seemed either secretive and remote or hearty and fleeting, but finally I got a chance to observe one in an unguarded moment, a sort of natural habitat: conversing in an office doorway with a colleague whose tenure hadn’t come through yet. I approached cautiously, feigning absorption in a memo, impressed and a little awed by their stolid postures and grave tones. Then I made out their actual words.
“That’s exactly what we got, too,” said the older colleague. “We looked at the two-door, but I just didn’t think there was going to be enough room.”
“The mileage looks great—on the sticker, at least. Do those estimates hold up?”
“As I recall we got thirty-two on the highway, the last time we kept track. That was when it was new, mind you. What color did you get?”
Of course, nothing indicated that any tenure, retention, or promotion decisions being made here. But, hey—as you couldn’t go two steps in the real world without seeing or hearing in some form or other a few years ago—it happens.
