WHY I'M TIRED. (I'm catching up on some items I saved as links to be pursued later.) An administrator addresses perceived breakdowns of collegiality, stumbles on truth.

I think that this mounting interest in collegiality stems from the intensification of the forces arrayed against it:

• A star system that widens inequities between the haves and have-nots and equates academic success with a reduction in teaching loads, service commitments, and other work on behalf of the institution.
• Greater reliance on adjuncts and part-time faculty with little connection to the departments that hire them.
• Tension between administrators and faculty exacerbated by top-down methods of management and increased demands for narrowly defined measures of accountability.
• A poor job market that places individuals at institutions where they may not want to be, thereby fostering feelings of estrangement, disdain for colleagues, and single-minded efforts to leave via one’s research.
• Heightened specialization subdividing already splintered departments.
• Recourse to e-mail as a substitute for face-to-face collaborative decision-making. Its impersonality unintentionally licenses individuals to fight and distrust one another even more (as Sutton explains, “apparently this happens because people don’t get the complete picture that comes with ‘being there,’ as e-mail and phones provide little information about the demands that people face and the physical setting they work in, and can’t convey things like the facial expressions, verbal intonations, posture, and ‘group mood’ ”); and, finally,
• Inadequate salaries and benefits at many universities, deepening resentment, stoking competition for increasingly scarce material rewards, and adding new urgency to often longstanding rivalries and feuds.

Add to these forces department chairs who are inadequately prepared for dealing with conflict, and an already fragile community begins to pull apart, giving antisocial behavior even freer rein.

The disintegration of community takes a special toll on academic workplaces.

The essay is by an administrator, who (not surprisingly?) takes the occasion to call for new codes of conduct and new layers of management, rather than doing something to improve the working conditions.