Murderous English Departments

I’m stealing someone else’s observation today. Pretty sure this is from Gail Bowen’s Sleuth, her guide to writing mysteries, but I can’t check right this moment: No one who teaches in an English department has ever considered murdering a colleague in order to ascend to the august office of English Department Chair.

It must be Bowen, because she did her time as chair during her many years at what became First Nations University of Canada, but was previously an Indigenous college affiliated with the University of Regina.

I had the great pleasure of taking a mystery-writing course with her some years back, and we used her book as our text. Bowen provided copious feedback and much encouragement to everyone, which was characteristically generous. When she came to Victoria for a book talk, she was the only author I’ve ever seen who emerged a half hour early, to greet each audience member in a packed house personally and thank us for making the effort to attend. And book tours are tough for Bowen because of her fear of flying. She takes the train everywhere, when she can.

But her point holds. In my experience of six English departments, I have met cut-throat ambitious people and I have met many department chairs. They are rarely the same individuals. Being chair, if you do it as well as most of mine have, is a service role. You are advocating for resources for your department; supporting the needs of your staff, faculty, and students, which are sometimes at odds; and completing endless paperwork. Including the production of a bewildering array of institution-mandated reports, on everything from specific enrolment numbers to graduating majors’ satisfaction. There are statistics. There are musical-chair deans to please.

And there are provosts who occasionally remember the existence of the English department, and how troublesome its members can be. Like when an outraged parent sends a letter that disrupts their beach vacation, demanding to know why dozens of English literature courses on arcane topics are half full, while none of the mandatory first-year writing courses have a single spot open for the hundreds of students languishing on wait-lists. True story, sigh. That provoked prompt provostial action which, for a time, gave me a new job with absurd responsibilities as the unpaid and unacknowledged assistant of a writing program director, who hadn’t taught writing in twenty years but had Big Ideas.

I count among my friends a number of chairs, past and present, and I must say thank you. Thank you for all of your work, which is selfless and often thankless. I know you didn’t murder someone to get the job, because you were pushed into it by your own convictions and commitments, and by the determination of your peers to offer you up as the sacrifice to the gods.

But academic mysteries are a weird parallel universe where becoming chair is a coveted honour, a sinecure with endless power and few responsibilities.

Is it, perhaps, a cultural difference? A former chair told me that English department heads in the UK have significantly more influence. He felt that even American chairs, especially at the higher-ranked institutions, had a pull that he did not at our regional comprehensive uni. A good corrective to this, of course, is the wonderfully funny Straight Man by Richard Russo, about a hapless chair shoved into a position he certainly didn’t covet. He threatens to start murdering one of the beloved campus geese each day that he does not get, if my memory serves me here, the budget allocation he needs to keep paper in the copier and poorly paid adjuncts in the classroom.

So why do English department members kill, if not for the power of toppling the chair?

Well, they don’t. I can’t think of a single murderous English college or university professor in real life, and my admittedly slipshod and casual research has not turned up any. Yet in fiction, they abound. Murder victims and murderers alike.

In academic mystery novels/campus novels, English departments are the site of much mayhem. Amanda Cross (AKA Carolyn Heilbrun), Joanne Dobson, and Valerie Miner have written exceptional examples. In Canada, as I noted previously, our fictional campus murders are distributed democratically across multiple departments. But in the U.S. and the UK, campus novels–even those sadly lacking homicide–tend to be located in quarrelsome English departments. There are David Lodge’s books, for instance; I recommend Nice Work, as the others haven’t aged especially well. Writers wander through the humanities somewhat wantonly, such as the hapless historian in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, but English departments dominate.

In this one regard. Why is that?

My dissertation advisor, Jill Matus, once told me that every English professor has drafted a first novel, and most of us have the good sense to keep it tucked in a drawer. Could the proliferation of English department campus mysteries merely point to literary indiscretion, on the part of the profs who insist on sharing their work?

I do have another, more nebulous theory.

English departments are large, often the biggest on campus. But they are not comparable to, say, the School of Economics at UBC, which is housed in a breathtaking gothic building of stone and glass that befits its status. No, English departments tend to be crammed into crummy, asbestos-filled, decaying structures that in my part of the world would collapse in moments if an earthquake occurred. (See Suzette Mayr’s Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall.) Rather worrying.

New construction on campus, from what I’ve observed, is never because a donor has decided to lift a glass to the Faculty of Humanities and reward us with a gorgeous new facility. Though an exception I must note is the Jackman Humanities Institute at U of T, a wondrous place. They give you excellent free coffee and lunches and let you do your work in beautiful spaces. Nirvana.

As we watch Faculties of Engineering and Computer Science attract both students and donor dollars, we compare. We envy. We plot and scheme. (Maybe that’s just me.) The absence of investment by our own institutions and by the community makes us feel like unwanted stepchildren, tasked with teaching grammar to recalcitrant and reluctant eighteen-year-olds, who yawn through our 8:00 AM classes on crafting The Research Essay.

Not all English departments are unhappy places, where colleagues’ thoughts wander in macabre directions during protracted and fractious meetings. I teach in a warm and collegial department and look forward to our gatherings, professional and social, with pleasure.

But I have attended meetings with shouting, threats, and personal insults that would not be tolerated in the House of Commons. And they should not be tolerated in English departments. I have reported harassment of colleagues, including racist remarks and sexualized bullying, no fewer than six times. This is absurd. Don’t get me started on the failures of faculty association processes, mandatory mediation sessions, and attempted remediation of toxic work environments where the bad apples are tenured full professors.

If you’re in a place like that, get out. Because one is not permitted to dispense with colleagues, even if it’s for the greater good. But do turn to mystery fiction about English departments as consolation.