Princeton faculty on the road

Princeton students and Princeton faculty share a few hours of concentrated activity each week, but for the most part we lead lives radically and in some respects mysteriously separate. Despite the fact that I have taken an active interest in undergraduate residential life, serving twice as a college master, I still do not know what students do with most of their time. I do know that during many hours when I am asleep, they are awake, while during many hours that I am awake, they are asleep. It's simply hard cheese on me that some of those latter hours coincide with my lectures.

If most of student life is veiled from the view of professors, most of my professional life is invisible to students. The contemporary professor at a high-octane institution like ours operates according to an unwritten motto I have seen on no bumper: "Think locally, act globally." For each of the past twenty-five years, roughly four or five times a semester, I have trudged off to Newark Airport on a Thursday afternoon to fly off to some more or less remote place to give a lecture, participate in a symposium or otherwise engage at the national or international level in a form of the "life of the mind" that strongly resembles a convention of bond salesmen.

My career has coincided with two related developments in academic life. The first is an incremental professionalization of the professoriate. In my day in graduate school, few students entering a doctoral program had any definite idea of the field of specialization they would eventually embrace. Today our whole admissions process is predicated on a confident identification of early specialization — so many modernists, so many Romanticists, so many theorists — and it is not uncommon to review applications that proclaim the ambition to pursue a precise and clearly defined dissertation topic under the direction of an identified faculty member. There is a concomitant development. Today's professors increasingly invest a primary loyalty not in the institutions at which they teach, but in the discipline, specialization, school or theory they expound. Centrifugal opportunities once restricted to a small elite of jet-setting conference-hoppers, democratized by the Internet, are now open to all.

What are opportunities for "professional development" from one perspective are from another opportunities for spiritual absenteeism from Princeton. Just as I try to wish away in an imaginary harmony the real conflict between the demands of teaching and the demands of research, I talk little about the often distracting forces of professional life that thrust me away from McCosh Hall.

As I write this column I am hearing, as one might hear the pianist in a cocktail bar over intense conversation, an earnest talk on "Gendered Language in the Portrayal of Royal Women during the English Anarchy." Thus even as I am neglecting my Princeton students, I neglect also the cause of the neglect. That's because I am obliged to write my column early, since I'll be out of the country on deadline day.

The "inside/outside" tension in the academic profession is fostered both by institutional and personal impulses. One of the first things the dean and president want to know about a candidate for appointment or promotion is the status of the candidate's "outside" reputation — national, international or (preferably) intergalactic. What books has he written? What international congresses has she wowed? The ability to walk on water is a prerequisite for nomination. Actual appointment requires aquatic rollerskating. Deans and departmental heads invest in our search for "reputation" to the considerable financial benefit of Continental Airlines and Days Inn. This leads to the odd situation that not a few of us are honorless prophets better known as lecturers almost anywhere than at Princeton.

Nevertheless the desire for "professional advancement" needs to be supplemented by less abstract ego-stroking. Few of us would tolerate so many rubber chicken banquets and so many lost valises were there no compensating element of perverse personal gratification.

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind) . . .

Of course the fame that attends a world-class expert on Franciscan hagiography is of a somewhat rarefied sort. There is seldom a mosh pit at the foot of my podium, for example. And even the flattering buzz I used to hear as I walked by little knots of coffee-breakers outside the Marriott ballroom ("Mmmm — Flemingmmmkeynote — mmmPrinceton — mmmdidyaread?mmm) has taken a disconcerting turn. I recently passed by two young scholars in furtive conversation. I didn't catch the declarative statement, but I quite clearly heard the interrogative response: "Really? THAT is Katherine Fleming's father?!"

John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays.