I first
applied for the job as Chair in 1982. At the time I was Chair of the
Department of Theatre and Dance at Oakland University, a regional state
university in Michigan. It had begun life as a branch of Michigan State, and
when I arrived in 1977 it had no academic theatre program. Interestingly,
though, it was the home of an LORT-C theatre (a small but fully professional
theatre) unassociated with the academic side of the institution; a supposed
professional actor training program that was a complete failure foisted on the university by the first
Artistic Director of the professional company; and
what amounted to a community theatre for the students which received no
funding but was allowed to call an old barn on the property home. I was
brought in specifically to teach an Intro to Theatre course previously taught
by the head of the actor training program that had been canceled as well as to
develop other theatre courses. While there I published several academic
articles and my first book; won several grants; and got approval for an
academic theatre major. I was rewarded by being promoted, tenured, and named
as Chair of the new Department of Theatre and Dance.
SIUC was
searching for a new Chair for its Department of Theatre in 1982 because its
incumbent Chair, a nationally known scenic designer and only the second Chair
in the history of the Department, abruptly retired and found a new job in
another state. I was not a finalist in the search, but a new Chair was hired
and reported on campus on July 1, 1983. By July 7 he had resigned. So they
began a new search. I applied while on sabbatical, which meant I was
contractually obligated to return to Oakland University for one year following
completion. I met with the Dean of the College and the senior professor in the
Department (a nationally known playwriting teacher and the Acting Chair during
the first search) at the American Theatre Association annual convention in
August. I became a finalist this time, had a campus interview, and was offered
the job by the Dean in due course. He wanted me to start in January, but I
explained that I would be just returning from a sabbatical and could not leave
that soon. He had a discussion with my Dean at Oakland, and they agreed that I
would start the new job on July 1, 1984.
There
were things afoot at SIUC that I had no idea about. The Dean had hired another
finalist for the position, whom the faculty had rejected, as a Visiting
Professor. He took my place during the Spring semester in 1984, and I
inherited him when I arrived. It turns out that he had been fired from his
last job because of sexual harassment, and unknown to me had continued his
advances to young men in the Department and in the Summer Playhouse company. I
also discovered that the Department’s only directing instructor had taken a
leave of absence to try and get her MFA. Without an advanced degree she was
facing certain denial of tenure. So the Dean figured he could get both
finalists for the price of one, and hired the other guy to teach directing for
1984-85. What a mess.
And that
wasn’t the only mess. The Department had conducted a search to replace the
scene designer who retired, and had recommended a candidate to the Dean. This
candidate was already a member of the Department, replacing the lighting
designer who was on sabbatical. They knew him and trusted him, and wanted to
hire him on the tenure track. Instead, the Dean hired another candidate, with
similar credentials. He had been trained in what was then Czechoslovakia and
emigrated with his family to the United States. His candidacy had some support
in the Department, but the internal candidate had more. The Czech began in
January 1984, and I inherited him and the Department’s resentment at his
appointment when I arrived in July.
The rest
of the Department was even more of a mess. The playwriting program was in good
shape, but rest of the Department was on shaky ground. The costume designer
had not designed a costume in years. There was a raging alcoholic running the
costume shop. There was a Latvian scholar with a world-wide reputation who had
neither directed nor designed in years. The entire acting and directing programs
were staffed by temporary Instructors. The acting/voice teacher resigned before I
arrived and the Department conducted a quickie search resulting in me making
an offer to a very well-qualified woman from California. When she insisted she
would only come on the tenure track I convinced the Dean to make it so. She
arrived in July, moved to Carbondale with her young son in August, and
immediately resigned. The reason she gave was that her son could not adapt. I
suspected other reasons but of course accepted her resignation.
So there
I was: two weeks until classes started, and missing an acting and speech instructor. There were four classes, two undergraduate and two
graduate, that I needed covered. There were no local people who could help. So
with the Dean’s permission I opened an emergency search and got on the phone.
I called all the qualified candidates from the original search (there weren’t
many), and came up with two who were still available and somewhat interested.
I invited one of them to come to campus the next week, and those of us who
were around interviewed her. I was unimpressed, as were my colleagues, but she
could do it. Another call to our only other candidate revealed that he had
accepted another position, so we were stuck. I called our candidate in
California and offered her the job. We agreed she would start after Labor Day,
so I still had to cover four classes for two weeks. Fortunately between myself
and the remaining acting faculty we were able to do so.
This
young woman stayed with us for two years, mostly because none of us could
stomach the thought of another acting and voice search. She directed two
productions for us, and acted in the Summer Playhouse company the summer in
between, although I did not hire her to direct in the summer. I think on
balance our students were cheated, but it was the best I could do.
Early in
my first year the Dean asked me what my priorities for the Department were. I
told him that we needed a production-oriented costume designer who could
resurrect our moribund MFA in costume design program, and that we needed to
regularize our acting/directing faculty by hiring on the tenure track. These
were things I needed his help with; the other things I wanted to do we could
do internally. So I set to work on a plan to get things done.
First up
was the costume designer. The incumbent was the lowest-paid full professor in
the university; I was absolutely shocked at how little she was being paid.
She was moderately old (early sixties) and very tired. The problem was, she
was paid so little she couldn’t afford to retire. So I (with the help of the
Dean) presented her with an incentive package.
Retirement at SIUC was through SURS—the
State University Retirement System. The amount of a professor’s retirement pay
was 2.2% times years of service times the average of the professor’s four
highest paying years. For example, a professor who served 25 years would get
55% of the average of the four highest paying years. After 36 years of service
that amount topped out at 80%. If that average was $30,000, then the professor
would get $16,500 in retirement pay. That amount would then go up a guaranteed
3% per year. But if in the last year of employment the professor taught three
additional summer courses, at that average rate of $3,333 per course, the
total would go up $10,000; the average would go up $2,500; and the retirement
pay would go up $1,375 per year, or almost 10%. That would be a deal too good
to pass up, and that was the deal we offered her: one time only, take it or
leave it. She took it with alacrity. The Dean provided her with two sections
of interpersonal communications (she was also a trained counselor) and it was
up to me to provide the third month. I decided I could not in good conscience
assign her to design costumes for the Summer Playhouse season; that would have
been a disaster. I had no money for summer courses except for the playwriting
program, which was needed for the MFA and PhD programs. So I decided she could
do the least harm as a director, and assigned her the first production of
Summer Playhouse to direct. The play was a classic twentieth-century murder
mystery, which any competent director could do in his or her sleep. For better
or worse it was over in two weeks, and our summer productions usually sold out
to season ticket holders. When I saw the production I was mildly disappointed,
but not overly concerned. She had missed a fundamental part of the play, but
unless you knew it you wouldn’t know. The audience made no complaints and the
reviews were acceptable if not up to our usual level. It was only later that
the students in the cast came to me with complaints, and I assured them that
they would find the other Summer Playhouse directors better to work with. And
they certainly did—the other three directors that summer were me, the
temporary but very capable acting/directing professor, and the temporary but
very capable movement/acting instructor. The productions were excellent (if I
do say so myself) but audiences were down because southern Illinois was simply
not ready for a season which included
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I date the decline and ultimate
death of Summer Playhouse to the choice of that play.
In any case, we were allowed to hire a
production costume designer to fill the outgoing costume designer’s faculty
line. She arrived on campus in the Fall of 1985 full of great ideas and with a
free rein to run the program, and for that matter the entire Design BA and
MFA programs, because our Czech scene designer was not an administrator and
had no idea how to shape a curriculum. His designs were striking, but his
teaching was not yet up to snuff. That was a problem I could postpone to a
later day, so I did so.
The
other Design area faculty member was our Lighting Designer/Technical Director.
Those two positions each required a full-time person, but we only had one
slot. When I enquired about the history of that anomaly I discovered that the
original Chair of the Department prided himself on his frugality and while the
other major state universities (University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana
and in Chicago; Illinois State University; Northern Illinois University; even
Western Illinois University) were expanding almost without limit during the
sixties, he purposefully kept the size of the faculty and the program at SIUC
small. When in the eighties we really needed half again as many faculty
members we could not get them. So we were stuck with one LD/TD when we needed
two.
And the
circumstances of that one man were very strange. According to the Dean this
faculty member had been denied tenure and the Dean did not think he should
have been. So he exercised his prerogative and changed the position from a
faculty position to a support staff position. The man had the same duties as
before but was on a 12 month contract instead of a 9 month contract like all
the other faculty except for me because I was the Chair. This was the
situation I found when I came in. I didn’t like it, and the LD/TD didn’t like
it, but we were stuck with it. Unbeknownst to me he was leisurely looking for
a new job, and he eventually found one and resigned. I was once again stuck
with a national search in a very short period of time, and I once again hired
a temp who was qualified but barely acceptable. He stayed with us for a year
and a more leisurely search turned up a much better candidate. He stayed with
us for three years but ultimately could not stomach being support staff rather
than faculty. By that time faculty and staff searches were no longer my
responsibility, but the Department searched diligently and hired the best we
could find. The Dean, by the way, continued to turn down the Department’s
requests to change the support staff position back into a faculty position.
That problem was not solved until some years after the Dean left to become
Chancellor at one of the University of Wisconsin campuses. That jump from Dean
to Chancellor, incidentally, was most unusual and most likely the payment of a
political debt by the system President.
The next
priority was regularizing the acting/directing faculty. All were on temporary
appointments and the Department had no security. As I may have explained
earlier we had three positions: acting and voice; acting and movement; and
acting and directing. I could also teach acting and directing (and I later
taught both) but I was limited to one course per semester while I served as
Chair. Initially I taught a large-lecture Intro to Theatre course with three
grad assistants, but I soon changed that arrangement. Each of the grad
assistants had at least an MA if not an MFA, so I simply gave each of them
full course responsibility for two sections and supervised them as they
completed their graduate assistantship duties.
In any
case I was determined to replace the acting/directing teacher. I had begun to
receive complaints from students about sexual harassment and very little
research revealed his shameful history. He was nationally known and highly
respected but he had resigned from two tenured positions under threat of being
fired after an inquiry. Further he had been the other final candidate for the
position I held, and having him in the Department was destabilizing. I wanted
him gone, and finally got him gone. I was able to use money as an excuse; he
was very highly paid, and as a temporary faculty member we could no longer
afford him. He landed on his feet, taking a position at Cal State Northridge.
His death from AIDS some years later was as regrettable as all such deaths were, even if entirely predictable. In his place we hired a Russian director
with excellent production experience but little teaching experience. He was
also a temp, and I let him go after two years. We then hired another temp, a
professional TV and stage director who had done a workshop for us some years
before. His productions were exquisite but I again got complaints about sexual
harassment and did not rehire him.
The
acting/voice position was a much better story. After I declined to rehire the
temp I had brought in from California I was able to hire another temp, from
the University of Arizona. He stayed with us for two years and then moved on.
I fought to keep him but was unable to do so. He recently retired as Chair of
the department at the University of Kansas, so obviously somebody saw things
in him that we did not. The good news was that I persuaded the Dean to let me
hire on the tenure track. We conducted a national search and were able to hire
a wonderful young woman. She only stayed with us for two years as she found a
much better position, but she stabilized things for us for a while. From then
on acting/voice was no longer a problem.
Nor was
acting/movement a problem for long. I was able to persuade the Dean to let us
hire on the tenure track. We conducted a national search and after a little
finagling I was able to hire the man who had held the position as a temp for
years. He was woefully underpaid but a tremendous asset to the Department. He
was a highly skilled choreographer and an inventive and skilled director.
Without him Summer Playhouse would have been a disaster. Despite his abilities
I think I was the only one in the Department who fully recognized his value. I
encountered a good deal of opposition when I announced that I wanted to hire
him, probably because his MFA was from SIUC and some of the faculty still
thought of him as a student. In any event I was delighted to get him on the
tenure track. Unfortunately he was a little too good for us; the next year he
accepted a tenure track position at Indiana University with a substantial
increase in salary. I was crushed. He recently retired as head of their
musical theatre program as a full professor with a well-deserved national
reputation. With the position firmly on the tenure track, though, I was able
to conduct a national search and filled the acting/movement position with a
young woman from the University of Arizona. She was a fresh MFA but she
fulfilled all our hopes. In due course she was tenured and promoted, but
shortly thereafter she left the Department to become Director of the
University Honors Program, a position from which she retired recently. She had
a worrisome bout with breast cancer but has come out of it fine and is doing
well. Her daughter is a musical theatre performer who has had tremendous
success in her early career.
So in
the Fall of 1986 all was going well. We had a production costume designer on
the tenure track. We had the acting/voice and acting/movement positions on the
tenure track. We still had a temp in the acting/directing position, but at
least the problem hire in that position was history. And then the roof fell
in. The Dean not only refused to authorize a tenure track position in
acting/directing, he also refused to authorize another temporary position. The
results were catastrophic. We immediately eliminated the MFA programs in
acting and directing, and we rearranged the undergraduate curriculum to more
clearly represent a BA program rather than a BFA program, which our previous
major resembled. But we still had students in the pipeline who needed to
complete the MFA programs. So I did the only thing I could do and taught two
directing courses per semester as an overload. The rest of my work as Chair
suffered immensely, but to me it was the lesser of two evils. The MFA students
finished their degrees, and the undergraduates got all the courses they needed
to complete their degrees. And I hatched a plan to create a new faculty
position out of whole cloth. With no more MFA programs in acting and
directing, we had four graduate assistantships available. I took the money
from those plus a little more from reducing the PhD assistantships from half
time to 3/8 time and suddenly had enough to hire a new faculty member. And
much to my amazement the Dean authorized us to hire on the tenure track! So we
conducted a national search and began interviewing candidates. We had over 50
applications and interviewed seven candidates, but they all had the same
reaction: the salary we were offering was ridiculously low. The eighth-ranked
candidate was one of our own students, and he was so happy to get any kind of
a job that he accepted my offer. I freely admit I took tremendous advantage of
him, but finally all the acting and directing positions were filled with
people on the tenure track.
Incidentally, it turns out that the
only reason we had an MFA in directing in the first place was that the
playwriting program needed directors for the original plays that were produced
each year. There was both an MFA program in playwriting and a playwriting
track to the PhD program, which never made any sense to me. If one was
appropriate then the other one wasn’t, almost by definition. I had it in the
back of my mind to work towards eliminating one of these two, but not until I
was promoted and more secure in my position. I would have had to go up against
the senior member of the Department, who wielded enormous influence within the
university community, and I simply wasn’t ready to do that yet.
But
1986-87 was a a significant year for another reason. I had been appointed
Chair for a three-year term, and that year I was reappointed for another. I
began an inquiry into what it would take for me to be promoted to full
professor and was told that it exclusively hinged on my publication record.
That was rather disappointing since I had no time for research. I decided I
needed to jump-start my research program, and I proceeded on two fronts.
First, I worked at completing a book on fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien for
which Carol and I had a contract; and second, I secured a National Endowment
for the Humanities Summer Seminar fellowship to spend eight weeks at
Northwestern University studying the staging of Shakespeare with John Styan,
an internationally known scholar in the field. This seminar would require me
to spend eight weeks off campus, and I did not have that much vacation time
accrued. So the Dean made me a deal. I used four weeks of vacation, and he
assigned me four weeks of an off-campus assignment to recruit faculty and
students and to conduct research. It meant I had to be off-campus for most of
Summer Playhouse, but it was a compromise I was willing to make. The Dean
appointed one of the tenured faculty members as Acting Chair; I directed the
first production of the summer; and I went off to Northwestern with a spring
in my step and a song in my heart. I should have known better; something was
just waiting to rise up and smack me in the face.
1986-87
was also the year I solved the Department’s scene design problem. When I did
the Czech designer’s annual evaluation I gave him a year’s notice of
non-reappointment; in other words, I fired him. Untenured faculty can be fired
with a year’s notice during the first four years of employment; after that it
takes good cause to fire or deny tenure. I expected him to stay another year,
which would have given me time to conduct a national search. Unfortunately he
resigned at the end of the academic year. We conducted an emergency local
search to replace him and we hired one of our PhD students. This student had
an MFA in design and had many years of college teaching experience. When the
next year we conducted a national search on the tenure track we ended up
hiring him again, although he was still a student in our PhD program. He was
eventually tenured and promoted all the way to full professor, retiring after
many years in the program. He may not have been as flashy a designer as the
Czech, but he was just what we needed for our program.
That
something that rose up and smacked me in the face was the budget. While I was
away Sumner Playhouse ran a huge deficit for the first time. It happened on my
watch and was my responsibility. There was a combination of overspending on
productions and overestimating box office income, which resulted in a deficit
in our cash accounts. We had two kinds of accounts: state allocations and
cash. In theory we would spend all of our state allocations and make up the
difference with our cash accounts. The first problem I encountered when I came
in 1984 was a significant cut in our state allocations. Each year we received
less and less. This was the Dean’s decision. We had at that time a significant
balance in our cash account, which we could carry over from year to year. As
we could not significantly decrease production expenses while maintaining
production quality (which I had from the university’s President and Provost
was a goal we could not miss), we spent more and more from our cash account.
The two crossed in the summer of 1987. The second main problem was that we
were just not getting the audiences we used to get. Fewer and fewer members of
the community wanted to pay ever-increasing ticket prices. And ticket prices
had to go up just so we could stay even.
The
Department’s budget situation was quite unusual. We had a business manager (an
academic professional position) who with a couple of grad assistants from the
playwriting program took care of the box office and who managed both the
production budgets and the academic budgets. This was quite unusual; almost
all the time in other institutions the Chair takes care of these areas. When I
inquired as to why this was the case I was told that the previous Chairs
either didn’t want to or didn’t know how to manage a budget. I was content to
leave things as they were. But then I discovered that things that the academic
budget was supposed to cover—faculty travel, equipment, telephone, etc.—had
for many years been sacrificed to the production budgets. I instituted reforms
to this system, for which the faculty was grateful. This also had the effect
of making the production budgets more transparent. While year after year the
academic year production budget was reported as balanced or making a small
profit, the fact of the matter was that it had been losing money for years.
Most surprisingly the same was true of the Summer Playhouse budget. I reported
to the Dean in the Fall of 1984 what our business manager reported to me: that
Summer Playhouse had made a profit of $5,000. The Dean, incidentally,
proceeded to cut my state allocation budget by $5,000. The reality was, as I
discovered later, that Summer Playhouse had run a deficit of more than
$12,000. I did my best to balance things out, but the numbers were what they
were and eventually it was going to fall apart. In the summer of 1987 it
did.
The
first thing that happens when there is a deficit in a cash account is that the
state auditors come in. They descended on the Department like locusts hungry
after a seventeen-year hibernation. For more than a week they reviewed every
invoice, every purchase order, every expenditure, and every deposit. They
checked deposits against ticket stubs. They interviewed everybody involved,
including some students. They were looking for signs of embezzlement, and it
turned out that I was their primary target. That made sense, because I was the
administrator in charge of the accounts. By the time they were done they knew
more about our budgets than I did. The Dean told me privately that they found
no culpability on my part, and apparently they were disappointed. Usually in
these situations they nail the administrator for some bad act or other. Here
it turned out that way too much was spent on Mame and everybody hugely
overestimated how many community members would be willing to fork over $10.00
to see it. It is a situation many theatres find themselves in every year, but
it was our first time. In response to this proof that our summer productions
were woefully underfunded by the university, the Dean decided to cut our
budgets yet again. I pointed out that the President and the Provost wanted the
program to continue as before, and he responded by taking all budget authority
away from me and giving it to an Associate Dean with no theatrical experience.
I decided not to argue further; it clearly would get me nowhere.
I had
managed to get a few things done between 1984 and 1987. I pushed through a
change in all MFA programs from two years to three years, to bring us up to
national standards. At the same time I used my supervisory authority to change
the form of the MFA thesis, over the highly vocal objections of our Director of Graduate Studies. Previously students had been forced to use a
quasi-scientific format, pretending that their creative project was some sort
of experiment. This made no sense, and in fact was downright laughable. I
changed the format so that the students wrote about the project before the
fact (which included a detailed analysis); during the fact (including a
rehearsal or development journal); and after the fact (including evaluations
of the project). The students were unanimous in their praise for this change,
and many more finished their theses than before. I also spearheaded a one-year
MFA program for those with an MA who wanted to upgrade to an MFA, or for
working professionals with sufficient experience who wanted or needed one.
This new program brought us quite a few excellent students, in both acting and
design, who would never have been in the Department otherwise.
I finished and published my second
book, this one in collaboration with my wife. I thought it would give me the
credentials for promotion to full professor, but I underestimated how disliked
I was by the two tenured full professors in the Department. They essentially blocked my application.
I
completely overhauled the Department’s undergraduate advisement program. When
I arrived a graduate assistant in the playwriting program was advising all
undergraduates. Unfortunately he had no training or experience as an advisor.
During my first year one of our best undergraduate women found out she would
not graduate because she was never advised she needed to take the basic
costume and makeup class. I arranged for her to take it as an independent
study, and resolved to fix the advisement situation. It would never work with
a random MFA student, and the entire faculty was stretched to the breaking
point already. So seeing no alternative I took on the task. I had served as
the undergraduate advisor for ten years at two institutions before coming to
SIUC, and it took a lot of time once a semester, but it was manageable. Some
departments had a staff advisor, but we were just too small. Eventually this
problem was solved by the Dean hiring an advisor to serve both us and Speech
Communication. The new advisor knew little about theatre but had an MA in
Speech Pathology, and she eventually took my graduate Theatre Management course and did
extremely well. There were no more problems caused by poor advisement.
The
inequities in faculty pay were profound. The Dean would simply allocate a
certain amount of money each year to the Chair, who would then distribute it
as he or she saw fit. The previous Chairs saw this as a prize to be won, and
gave it all to whomever, in the Chair’s opinion, had the best year. The other
faculty got no raise that year. The problem with this is obvious. The raise is
rolled into base salary and continues year after year. Pay inequities
increased every year. I guess I was the only one who saw this. I changed it
immediately, instituting a system wherein everyone shared in the raise money,
as a percentage of base salary. A faculty member might get a higher or a lower
percentage, but inequities were reduced. I went up the line and got
supplemental raises for our Latvian full professor who was so poorly paid; one
year I got him an 18% raise. He never did thank me, but I knew what I had
done.
Some of
the work of which I was most proud was with our graduate students and their
theses and dissertations. During my years at SIUC I mentored more than twenty
MFA students and about a dozen PhD students, many of whom would not have
completed their degrees otherwise. This work continued well after I resigned
as Chair, and in fact continued during my last summer while I was cleaning out
my office in preparation for my leave of absence.
On the
other hand, I was less successful in some things I tried to change. When I
came in 1984 the Department had a new secretary and a new business manager.
Neither knew anything about theatre, and the secretary in particular was
unacceptable. She came to work late, could not type very well or very quickly,
and could not operate what little outdated machinery we had (a ditto machine,
for example). She left after
my second negative review to plague some other department. I was able to hire
a secretary of my choice, and she did more than satisfactory work. She stayed
until I resigned as Chair, and then went to a larger and more prestigious
department. The business manager was quite competent, and she caught on to our
needs quickly. She was close to retirement, though, and after the state
auditors stopped sniffing around she chose that way to leave. I pushed a new
job description all the way through Springfield, and hired an Arts
Administrator (that was the title of the new job I created) with an MFA. She
could not handle our budgets, though, and left after only two years. By then I
was no longer Chair, and the Department went back to the well and hired
another business manager who knew nothing about theatre. I tried to fire the costume shop supervisor but ran into union protections and was unable to do so. I discovered I was the third Chair who had tried this, and all of us failed. He stayed until he retired, some years after I had left. Interestingly, he designed costumes for two of my summer productions and did an excellent job. Go figure.
The straw that probably broke the
camel’s back was my own union activity. Many of the state universities had
faculty unions. SIUC did not, and in my opinion one was pretty desperately
needed. I became the Vice President of the IEA/NEA (Illinois Education
Association/National Education Association) faculty union organizing
committee. This really pissed off the Dean, who thought of Department Chairs as administrators. We Chairs, on the other hand, thought that we were
members of the faculty. Obviously this disconnect in the perception of our
places in the order of things caused problems. The committee gathered faculty
signatures and eventually forced an election. The union lost this first
election but there were so many problems exposed that they eventually forced a
second election which they won. From that time on SIUC faculty were
represented by a union, and they remain so. Although unionization happened after I
left, I believe I had a hand in it.
The last
year I was Chair, 1987-88, was rather eventful. This was the year we lost our
acting/directing professor and I taught overloads. This was the year our Czech
scene designer left rather than return as a lame duck and I hired our own
student as a temp. This was the year I hired a new acting/movement professor
because another university offered our long-time professor more than he could
refuse. This was the year we overhauled both the undergraduate and graduate
curriculums. This was the year I took all the revenue from production ticket
sales to repay the deficit from the previous summer. And this was the year I
resigned, although my reappointment would have kept me in place for two more
years. The Dean once again cut our budget, and I recall my words to him
exactly: “I did not come here to preside over the demise of a once-proud
department.” Not terribly original, perhaps (it plays off of words uttered by
Ronald Reagan in 1981 and Winston Churchill in 1942), but it accurately
incapsulated my feelings. The Dean accepted my resignation with alacrity; I’m
pretty sure it was what he was angling for all along. I sent the Department a
notice, and the Dean conducted an internal search for a new Chair. Besides me
there were only three tenured members of the Department eligible, and the Dean
appointed the playwriting professor, whom the Department had rejected at least
twice before. I would remain as Chair until the end of Summer Playhouse 1988,
and then I would, as they say, return to the faculty.
I was scheduled to direct
The Sound of Music in Summer Playhouse but I was not excited about it.
Our excellent acting/voice professor and our departing acting/movement
professor got together and made me an offer I could not refuse. She would
direct The Sound of Music and I would direct the non-musical play of my
choice. I settled on Children of a Lesser God, knowing it would be the
last production I would direct for quite a while. There was payback coming
from the new Chair, and I was prepared for it. Fortunately the production gave
me sustenance.
After I
stepped down as Chair I taught three courses per semester and supervised the
PhD students teaching Intro to Theatre. I came to campus as infrequently as I
could, basically only for classes, office hours, and meetings. I went into
counseling, to help me decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was 41
years old and had just failed at something for the first time in my life. I
did not want to live in a separate city from my wife until I retired. I could
not get a decent job where she was and she could not get a decent job where I
was. I needed to make myself portable; to find a job I could do from anywhere.
So after a year of soul searching I decided to go to law school. I took the
LSAT and was admitted to SIU’s law school. I enrolled as a part-time student
in the Fall of 1989.
Law
school did not come entirely out of the blue. In high school I always said I
wanted to an attorney, and when I graduated from college I had to make a
choice. I could go to law school, or I could go to graduate school and work
towards a PhD in theatre. I made the latter choice and never regretted it, but
I always wondered what would have happened if I had gone the other way. I had
that very rare chance to find out.
For the
next four years I continued to teach full time and I went to law school part
time. One of the few benefits available to faculty members was free tuition,
and I took advantage of it. Along the way I took a paid sabbatical leave for
one semester and attended law school full time. I became a writer and then an
editor for the law review, and I joined a moot court team, winning national
honors for two years in a row. My last year I served as National Student
Director of the program, an unusual opportunity available only because I was
on the four-year plan instead of leaving law school after three years as
almost all law students do. I concentrated on criminal procedure and
plaintiffs’ personal injury law, assuming rightly that these would be my areas
of practice once I graduated. In short I had the full law school experience
despite the part-time nature of my studies, and I graduated with high honors
with no debt.
Part of
the payback from the new Chair that I was expecting came in the form of his
objecting to my taking more than two classes as a time. I normally took three
or four classes, but I remained part-time and always scheduled around the
classes I taught. He said that the College had a policy of only allowing
professors to take two courses at a time, but I was not taking courses in the
College; I was in the law school. He had no leg to stand on, and I refused to
comply. He took it to the Dean, but I won.
The
other payback came in the form of scheduling and denial of directing
opportunities. He refused to assign me a directing slot either in the regular
school year or in Summer Playhouse, despite my experience and seniority. He
assigned me to teach the basic acting class despite there being other classes
available I was more suited for. He refused to assign me to graduate classes,
despite my experience and seniority. In short, he was trying to drive me out
of the Department, and eventually he succeeded. Of course that had been my
plan from the beginning, but I wasn’t about to take away his
satisfaction.
While
having reverted to “just a faculty member”, I continued to serve the
Department. When our senior history and criticism scholar finally retired I chaired the search
committee and we hired a young woman with excellent credentials as an
Associate Professor. She soon became Assistant Chair to handle the budgets
that the Chair could not, and after she was tenured and I was gone she became
Chair. I chaired the search committee that hired our temporary scene designer
on the tenure track. I also chaired the search committees that hired two
successive acting/voice professors, and the promotions and tenure committee
that considered the second of these when he requested early promotion and
tenure. His request was denied. The tenured costume designer (who was also
leaving the Department for personal reasons) and I considered that our parting
gift to the Department. It was simply too soon to know if he would serve the
Department’s needs for the long haul. When he came up for tenure at the
regular time three years later he was denied not by the Department but by the
College committee. The position was later filled by one of our own graduates
(whose thesis committee I had chaired) who went on to a distinguished career.
He recently retired from Western Illinois University, where he served as head
of their acting and directing programs for many years.
When it
came time for me to graduate from law school I accepted a two-year temporary
appointment as a judicial clerk in the Illinois Appellate Court in Chicago. I
requested a two-year leave of absence from the Department and it was granted
despite objections from the Chair. After all, I had hired all but one of them,
and they felt they owed me this courtesy. I did not intend to return, but I
did not tell them that; I wanted to keep my options open in case I couldn’t
find a job as an attorney closer to my wife. The Chair reluctantly signed the
form and sent it to the Dean. The Dean sent it back; he would only approve one
year of leave at a time. If I wanted a second year I could make a new request
in a year. I knew what was going to happen, but I accepted the decision. Sure
enough, the next year while I was in Chicago happily doing my job in the
Appellate Court I got a letter from the Chair telling me I needed to agree to
return in August or resign. After some back-and-forth with the Dean I did in
fact resign. I was confident of my ability to get a job.
The
reason for this was that my first job out of law school paid better than the
salary I had earned at SIUC after 20 years of post-PhD teaching. And that job
was designed for a 26-year-old fresh out of law school with no experience. If
worse came to worst I could continue with the Appellate Court, or become an
Assistant State’s Attorney, which paid even better. If I was willing to stay
in Chicago I could have joined a law firm at over $100k per year, but I
preferred to live in Charleston. As it happened I had a bunch of interviews
within an hour of Charleston, and I ended up joining a plaintiffs’ personal
injury law firm exactly twenty minutes away. I spent the next fourteen years
happily suing insurance companies, conducting trials, and doing state and
federal appeals. I retired at 62, and spent another four years writing wills,
trusts, and deeds for friends who needed legal services and trusted me to draft these important documents.
In
retrospect I never should have gone to SIUC. The warning signs were all there,
if I had only had the good sense to look for them. I was blinded by the
supposed glamor of being Chair of a PhD-granting department, and by the
professionalism of Summer Playhouse. I was also drawn by the prospect of being significantly closer to Charleston. I had turned down teaching jobs in the Quad Cities and in northern Indiana, and I had lost a job I wanted badly at Washington University in St. Louis. Being three hours away instead of nine hours away from Charleston and my wife looked pretty good. I loved the students (for the most part),
and I was able to do a lot of good. I truly enjoyed directing, during the
academic year and especially in the summer. Some of my colleagues, though,
were unbearable, and the Dean was a huge disappointment. On balance I did
better than could have been expected, and if I hadn’t gone there I would never
have become an attorney. So it’s all for the good.
If
you’re interested in more information about me and my training and experience,
as well as my career as an attorney, you can find it in my memoir,
The Little Yiddish I Know I Learned From My Grandmother, and my legal
memoir, For Three Weeks I Owned the University of Illinois. Both are
available from Amazon.com.
