Book Excerpt: Solitudes of the Workplace

Today, March 8th is International Women’s Day. The pledge this year is “Pledge For Parity” (#PledgeForParity). Last week, one of our new titles, “Solitudes of the Workplace: Women in Universities” by Elvi Whittaker was featured on University Affairs’ website. I thought today was the perfect day to share the excerpt as it touches on the issues of parity in the workplace.

The following excerpt from Isabella Losinger’s piece The unheralded administrative assistant is taken from Chapter 8 of Solitudes of the Workplace.

The university as workplace has been imaginatively described by many observers of higher education: at any one university we might find Sanskrit scholars, accountants, glass blowers, philosophers and curators of pregnant hamsters (Henry Wriston, Academic Procession: Reflections of a College President, 1959). However, the quaintness of these occupations (barring the accountants) belies the full reality of the working university in that it fails to include all members of the campus community.

This exclusion of staff is endemic to the literature of higher education. Whether handbook, memoir, history or self-reflective volume, writing in higher education has largely ignored the presence of the many different campus workers who do everything but teach. University staff is often an afterthought, or more practically speaking, a non-thought. Indeed, the term “non-non,” surely the most cryptic of terms found in the American literature of higher education to describe university staff, reveals the university’s fixation on defining a large percentage of its workforce by what it does not do: non-academic, non-faculty, non-teaching, non-professional and non-classified.

Indeed, there is a lack of sincerity (or perceived value) in gaining any measurable appreciation of the university employee’s daily working environment. This reluctance could result from a distinct queasiness at the possible answers. While the university prides itself on its stance of political neutrality, freedom of speech and unconditional inclusivity, the internal working realities reveal that stratification – in multiple forms – is the campus norm.

Given the implacability of the faculty ranking structure, the tensions between academic and fiscal mandates, and the intense competition for internal and external resources, it is hardly surprising that the university remains a feudal enterprise. Within that enterprise, the staff predictably is placed in a “non” position as it compares with the rights (and, admittedly, the obligations) that accrue to the other members of the university. Department heads, deans and other senior academic leaders are accorded a status akin to barons (rarely baronesses) and kings: these individuals are “held aloft by the drudgery of many common folk” (James Houck, “The Feudal Society in Today’s University,” 1990). Read the full excerpt >

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