Anecdote 1

My father was a well-established psychiatrist and general medical practitioner. Living in very small towns, on asylum campuses, people would inquire about his profession. His frequent answer was: “I am a psychopath,” to which most often he received very enthusiastic responses, with a nod, a slap on the shoulder, and a cheerful endorsement: “Wow, that sounds like a wonderful job.”

Anecdote 2

For a relatively short time, I was director of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign.

It seemed as if the surrounding communities had very little respect for the academic campus activities, but liked athletics. It behooved one not to claim to be part of the university, especially not as a professor, to avoid all kinds of unfortunate clashes “avec un fleuret.” During that time, I came across a book titled How to Bury a Circus. The author, an exact namesake of mine—the spelling of his name replicated mine—wrote lovingly about the trials and tribulations of a circus, smothered by red tape and bureaucracy, which in translation reminded me very much of my experience at this flagship university. Instead of How to Bury a University my title was How to Dig out Many Years of Corruption at a University.

The circus director, coming also from an academic family, as I, enjoyed getting involved in pedagogy, and from childhood days on, he enjoyed the magic of the circus, as I did. He was so drawn to the circus that he decided to take the plunge and manage the State Circus of the East German Republic. The book reminded me of many parallels in my life, like the struggle for intellectual survival in a liquidating and retrenching machine bureaucracy, which made you forget life in a democracy. The author’s love for the circus remained in spite of everything, same as my love for art and design education and all creative studio activities.

So when people in Champaign or Urbana, especially some Hell’s Angles or other roughnecks, would ask me about my vocation, for safety reasons, I claimed, like any good imposter, to be Dietmar Winkler, the circus director. Frequently, I would buy and give the book away to firm up the illusion. Even though, I never was able to make up my mind about choosing between director of an art and design school, managing an insane asylum or directing a circus. It seemed to encompass pretty much the same tasks.

However, that choice was made clear by the antics of the college dean: It is traditional Lakota tribal chief’s wisdom, as a brave, that when one discovers that one is riding a dead horse, the wisest strategy is to dismount.

However in higher education, especially higher education at flagship institutions, other strategies are tried:

The dean, a very straightforward and dedicated believer in a university culture of riding dead horses, having had ample experience at other flagship schools in observing and maybe admiring successful riders of dead horses—even if they did not cross the finish line—made all her directors aware of the fact that there were too many riders riding dead horses. It turned out that her problem was not that they were riding dead horses. Her real reasons were that their rides or mounts had become too costly.

At flagship schools, deans are more like rear admirals. They live in crows’ nest, high and above the fracas. They survey, look around through spyglasses, always aware of their own position, as they are scanning for better and closer positions to join the admiralty, here or anywhere, and all the way up to retirement. Some may even have integrity.

But they are never part of the cavalry or ever even in the trenches. They are not used to the rigor of training, complexities, and tempos of full-and-out horse races. In their minds, the problems are much more esoteric, namely secret and highly confidential. After all, it is not quite clear which remedy to choose for the institutional conditions: propping up old horses or killing them off and rendering them; procure new horses or new riders for dead horses; new diets for the faltering beasts or newer performing enhancing whips and carrots?

Belonging to her cast of anointed, there was little dignity in talking to her directors or trusting their accumulated experience and knowledge. For her, directors were just like ring masters, announcing the coming attractions, dictated by her or her superiors. Even more real, directors were like stable boys, cleaning up after all kinds of elephants, loose in the china shop. They were the ones that were required to translate former administrative failures into pragmatic rationales for present-day survival, and public relation successes.

For her, it was so much better and also easier to listen to any voice in secrecy, right or wrong, without verification and without proof. So she listened very carefully to those of the dedicated ranks of riders of dead horses, holding to their great promise to make all dead horses rise again; not just stagger, but run, gallop, and hopefully win in the silly race of make-believe between the phantom of the competing famous “10” universities. Funny, the “top ten list” did not include Harvard University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Yale University, Imperial College of London, Princeton University, California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, University College of London or Massachusetts Institute of Technology, because I missed that most of them never had great football teams.

Then the dean consulted the provost about appointing an exterior task force to investigate riders of dead horses but could not pin tails on any of the chosen volunteers. She had no funds to pay for the trusted advice of consultants, those experts who see everything clearly for a moment, and then leave, and with them vanish their responsibilities for implementation. Members of the upper administration started to look bad to readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the magazine for job decision makers, and began to shore up their job opportunities by creating training programs to increase the institutional riding ability of riders of dead horses. Finally, all began to worry that the story may leak out to the local and regional media because in comparison with live horses, these dead horses were procured with state-allocated funds. Therefore, the final rationale was that, at this point, the time had come to use better, faster, and cheaper horses, even if history points to the fact that a good artist has always been a dead artist. So why should it be different with artists or designers teaching in the art/design school of the university?

Having placed an amazing array of blinders on faculty, keeping them busy with the trivia of a seemingly urgent and endless paper tsunami, the dean promised stronger and longer whips to administrators, and sweeter apples and fresher carrots to all faculty members. But in the end, she did not follow through with any of her promised incentives. Instead, she supported unproductive “university scholars,” true believers in the institutional riding style ideal for dead horses. She actually gilded the lily of very unproductive “scholars” with merit awards. Now, instead of having authored a second or third book for tenure, faculty can be proud of the fact that they only have to prove having at least read one book. (A decree comes down, the Grimm’s story of the Empress’s New Clothes is banned from the university tenure and promotion list but it is a lost cause.)

Tenured faculty, not even decades close to their own early retirement, hurriedly examined the dead horses they had come to love and were so fond of riding, and began to enjoy posturing the speed and ability of their program steeds. They quickly came to conclusion that their horses were not dead at all. According to them, they were just in suspended animation, and that an influx of moneys would quickly return them to a lively, beautiful, and powerful state of thoroughbred-racers. It became clear that senior faculty had learned that if one wanted to continue riding dead horses successfully, one should not contemplate or wonder about riding dead horses in the first place, because that could be interpreted as a sign of individual weakness, and as a treacherous and disloyal institutional and collegiate accusation. After all, this was the way dead horses had been ridden for a long time, especially at this institution, and a change in gate, from stand to walk, or even trot to full gallop, could easily wait until their own retirement. Finally, the dean points out that her circus director does not understand the institutional culture.

The Executive Committee accepted the dean’s challenge to increase standards for riding dead horses, and faculty members visited competitive schools to see how others rode dead horses. Not surprisingly, their recommendations were to stick to proven methods, as they were able to affirm their ability to post higher and above all other riders of dead horses at other institutions. (Usually, after their reports were followed by a hearty applause and “hear, hear!”)

Young faculty, clear in their love to let dead horses just lie, flea bites and all, and would rather grab the mane of a magnificent griffin—keen like an eagle, bold like a lion, animals full of energy—they had observed at some other institutions, while marveling at their ability to jump over discarded dead horses, just out of grad school (as beginning faculty salaries are low so that senior faculty can occupy the other end of the compensation spectrum), bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on appointment, were impressed with the university’s performance criteria for riding “live horses,” but sooner or later were assigned to ride the deadest or deadliest of dead horses. They were assured that success was in the institutional posture not in academic reality. They learned quickly that the closer one was to the power-center, the better the rationales were for riding dead horses, which seem to be appreciated by colleagues and tenure committees.

Faculty contacted their colleagues in philosophy and sociology departments to compare the state of dead horses to the problems of a fast-changing society, especially in light of the emerging technology’s effect on dead horses, while the director was asked to harness several dead horses together in the hope of increasing their speed and cost efficiency. In the meantime, ambitious program faculty brought in visiting lecturers, many clearly without any riding experience, but eager to show how they would ride dead horses if they were asked to do so.

The admissions office was running bugle calls for the deaf, using national surveys to find uses for dead horses while explaining to applicants how wonderful the dead horses were when they were really alive, many, many decades ago. Unfortunately, the smarter applicants and students were beginning to smell the corpses. Alumni were asked to prop up images of dead horses. One heard mutterings under the institution’s breath about the good, old, nostalgic days, when the horses were too nice to spur on when alive, and now too dead to beat.

In a gesture of unselfish dedication to the institution, the dean searched her conscience, took the advice of ancient Lakota wisdom, dismounted, and retreated finally to her own safety and security. All of us who worked with her and for her, knew her as a Shakespearian drama queen who had few of her own lines, but like Elizabeth I loved to send people to the Tower.

A post mortum

The problem of riding dead horses has been thoroughly addressed. The arena is the same. Some players have changed. Some riders of dead horses have left, mostly through attrition. The many performance rings have been consolidated into fewer. The tent shows its age. There are new ringmasters with new top hats, tuxedos, and whips. Some look exhausted. Now riding dead horses is relegated to a controlled pace . . . just in a wider circle.