I went out early this morning. The sun had not yet come up. It was humid and toasty. You could hear the approaching South Georgia dogs of August howling in the distance. Anyway, about half way through my walk, I found a phrase popping into my head. “Not your job, not your job, not your job,” it repeated over and over in cadence with my steps.
As I was about to make my last turn, I saw a man crossing the street. He was carrying a ladder. Even in the dawn you could tell he was not a happy camper.
I greeted him with a “Good morning.”
“What’s so good about it,” he replied. I stopped. He went on. “It’s Sunday. It’s still dark. I should be in bed next to the wife instead of doing this stupid thing with the traffic light. It was my luck to be on call.”
“Good luck, I say. Nothing stupid about it. If you didn’t fix the lights, someone would have a better chance of getting hurt or killed. It’s important stuff you’re doing, especially since it’s Sunday. And I thank you for it.”
“He smiled. Puffed up a bit. Held the ladder a bit tighter. “Guess you’re right. And a good morning to you. Thanks back to you.”
And off we both went. That happenstance conversation sharpened what had stirred that phrase in my head. It came during a conversation I had had last week during one of my very rare summer appearance on campus. I bumped into a colleague. We stopped and talked about what we had done this summer and the upcoming semester. In the course of our conversation, I told him I was itching to get back into the classroom and that I even had volunteered to help students move into the dorms in a couple of weeks as a sort of jump start. He looked at me as if I was nuts.
“That’s not our job,” he said with more than a bit of disdain. “We’re professors! Don’t you think that’s below you? I wouldn’t do it. I’ve got better things to do with my time. Why don’t you let whoever takes care of those things do it? That’s what they get paid for. They always want us to do a lot of things around here that we don’t get paid for.”
That little bit of our conversation, especially the “that’s not your job,” suddenly took me back to an experience I had a few months ago. It was at the beginning of last May, just before I was off to China. I was doing an end-of-spring-semester cleaning of the classroom closets. I had to get rid of poster size books the students made for the “Dr Seuss Project,” paintings from the “Salvador Dali Project,” and a similar number of odd shaped sculptures of the “Rodin Project” made by the sixty communities in four classes. I was stuffing all this stuff into fairly large plastic garbage bags and hauling them out into the hallway for pickup. As I was lugging one fairly heavy bag out from the classroom, positioning myself to heave it on top of a pile of six or seven bags, a young professor whom I knew only by face passed by. He asked what I was doing. I told him that I was making it as easy as I can for the cleaning people to carry way this mass of project mess.
“Why are you bothering?” He asked with a smirk on his face as if I was a patsy. “They’re only cleaning people. That’s not your job. It’s theirs. That’s what they get paid for. Why don’t you let them do it?”
I looked at him. That haughty diminishing word “only” got to me. “I’ll tell you what,” I simply replied, with a calm voice and smile on my face, “why don’t we tell those ‘only cleaning people’ not to clean our offices and the bathrooms or not empty our trash baskets for a semester and see just how ‘only’ they really are?”
I think when he turned and walked off without saying another word he was in something of a huff.
You know he and my colleague just had revealed what the real tragedy in academia is. We so focus on those proverbial “critical thinking” skills that we often neglect the people skills. We don’t pay as much attention as we should to those “human moments.” That is, a sense of otherness, an awareness of and sensitivity toward other people, and a respect for what others do is weak or totally lacking. The real tragedy in academia is the balkanization on our campuses. It’s the absence of respect. It’s the virtual non-existence of community. It’s the fracture and fissure among people. We just don’t display much of that “social intelligence” Daniel Goleman has recently written about. It’s as if so many of us are interpersonally challenged. We are so often so self-absorbed. So many of us seem just not to get it right with others in other segments on our campuses. We so often come across as cold, distant, abrasive, arrogant, self-inflating, disdainful, self-centered, self-conscious, self-denigrating, and even dismissive. We categorize and stereotype and disconnect and isolate people as if they were distinct and separate species into the stereotyped lumps of administrators, professors, staff, and students. We even do that among schools and colleges, as well as among departments within schools and colleges.
All these people know so little about all these other people; they know so little of the critical role each plays to keep the campus viable; they don’t realize that without each the campus would be little more than a bunch of ghostly, empty buildings; they know so little of the inter-play between and inter-dependence they have on each other; they see little commonality among each other; and so, they all become at best cellophane people to each other. We have no rapport with them; we have no rapport with them because we have no empathy, we don’t sense their feeling; we have no empathy because we don’t know them.
But, I tell you, we are all part of each other’s resources. The grounds keepers are important; the carpenters are important; the garbage collectors are important; the electricians are important; the information technology people are important; the plumbers are important; the security police are important; the secretaries are important; the clerks are important; the cleaning crews are important; the maintenance crews are important; the advisers are important; the faculty are important; the cooks are important; the administrators are important, the students are important. Even if some universities are grading importance of some degrees by charging students extra tuition, the Arts are important; English is important; Business Administration is important; sciences are important; humanities are important. And, on it goes. As Goleman would say, just think, the more strongly connected we are with someone emotionally, the more we know them, the more we appreciate them, the more we care about them, the more we respect them, the greater the mutual force. That’s the power of campus community. It’s not rocket science. It’s common sense. United we stand stronger, divided we stoop weaker. After all, we all with do among people we know and trust what we won’t among strangers. The most powerful relationships occur with those people whom we know, with whom we spend a lot of time together, and, most important, with people we care about the most.
You know what I’ve noticed? It’s how we each bubble inside in reaction to a smile and stew at an angry face; we feel uplifted when someone makes eye contact with us and feel ignored and down when someone gazes past us. When students drive by in their cars, honk the horns, lean out, wave at me, and give me a “Hi, Dr. Schmier,” it makes me feel good. That’s all it takes. It doesn’t take much take notice other people, to look at them, to offer a simple “hi” or “hello,” to stop for a casual and quick chat, to smile. I also know it makes me feel happy when I act in ways that are beneficial to others, when I make them feel happier, when I acknowledge them. When we are in community with others, when we have a sense of sociability, everyone feels happier and more energized; they’re more inclined to whistle while they work; and, more inclined to do their work well. It’s a ballet which we dance with other as partners. Community, when we have a warmth and positive regard for ourselves and others, when we have an inclination to be understanding and compassionate, when we respect, when we have those human moments, acts like invigorating vitamins. We get a nurturing buzz. And, it becomes an antidote to the poison of separation, isolation, and disrespect.
Make it a good day.
–Louis–