REVEALED PREFERENCES. An anonymous professor at an ambitious Southern flagship university raises a familiar gripe.

Lost in the shadows of the administration's grandiose vision are the basic necessities of professional life. The real work of the university takes place on the ground -- in the classroom, the library, and the faculty office. And those of us on the ground doing the work should be equipped with the shovels and boots our dusty work requires.

Sometimes the working conditions are no better elsewhere. Everything this columnist notes is also daily reality in at least one enrollment-impacted department in a mid-major.

And there you have it, the list of vague values that propel this institution forward, punctuated with the ubiquitous exclamation point that is the hallmark of [Big Southern's] proclamations: Diversity, Excellence, Rankings.

What do any of those labels really measure? And what do they really mean? How do they translate into the material conditions of my professional existence? The buzzwords stubbornly resist embodiment in mundane -- yet crucial -- items like adequate supplies of departmental letterhead, functional furniture, clean corridors, reliable e-mail systems, and, yes, soap in the bathrooms.

When my classes are at full enrollment, there are so many students and so many desks that my instructional space at the front of the room is reduced to a rectangle -- no more than a foot in width and 3 feet in length -- in which I pace like a caged animal back and forth before my students. I could gain another foot of space by moving the overhead projector, but that easy solution evades me as the projector is literally chained to the front wall.

But who wouldn't want to achieve greatness, or the illusion thereof, on the cheap?

The biggest obstacle -- not only for myself but for the realization of the university's ambitions -- is the great disparity between its abstract mission statement and the material requirements of the teachers and scholars for whom the mission is a mandate.

The administration wants BSU to become one of the "top" institutions in the country, and to achieve that goal with facilities that are outdated, overcrowded, and ill-maintained, and with technologies that are unreliable, obsolete, and often unavailable.

I note this column in light of the Northern Illinois strategic plan, of which more perhaps next week.