In reality, the Tom Sawyers of my department had gotten me to paint the fence. They secured their own free time while I did the hard work of attending those dreadful meetings, suckered by flattery and false glamour. Faculty senate could never get anyone to run for secretary, as writing the minutes was a real chore. The secretary had to make sure that she recorded every single administrative slam without giving away any top secret, off-the-record discussion. Since I taught "composition" and was too green to know better, the senate president asked me to act as an interim secretary. I then got to listen to the senate members grumble because I had reduced [on purpose] a three-hour bitchfest and paranoia eruption to a single, single-spaced page, neglecting to record and properly credit the "clever" trumpeting of the most vociferous peacocks in the room.I gave up my afternoon freedom and own personal writing time to sit in those frustrating meetings [or worse, in front of a computer trying to capture them] in the same way that boys in the Mark Twain novel give up an apple core, a piece of blue bottle-glass, a key that won't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, all for the "glamour" of whitewashing a fence while Tom supervises their work, smirking all the while.
My old fart colleagues weren't the only Tom Sawyers on campus; the administration knew how to hand off a paint brush as well. One day at a brainstorming session for a college-wide initiative, I made a well-received presentation on a solution for a problem. The next day, one of the VPs asked me to chair a large group responsible for producing documents that thousands of future students would use. The glamour of a phone conversation with a big-wig and the flattery that only I could pull off this project got me to give up more personal time for the equivalent of fence-painting labor. The glamour quickly evaporated as I drove all over the city, coordinating work with folks whose real interest was the stipend, not the product, and having to rewrite—or just plain write—their sorry contributions.
I'd been Tom Sawyered a second time.
There's that saying, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." I explain the second fooling this way: I was hoping for an encounter with Mr. Miyagi, of Karate Kid fame, not Tom Sawyer. I was hoping that if I was fence painting once again, that this time it was training to make me a better employee. After the arduous work, I wanted my Mr. Miyagi to boom, "Show me paint-the-fence!" and then, as I demonstrated the skill, he would make the connection between the chore and some greater good. But in academia [perhaps everywhere], few managers are really mentors. Higher ups—either the long-tenured or the administration—are just looking for 1) to get out of work that they don't want to do or 2) to have work done that makes them look good.I produced excellent documents for the administrators. They are still used ten years after I supervised and edited their writing. But that work is just a pretty fence, not an opportunity for me to grow as a person or an employee. That project wasn't meant to teach me anything, although it did: I learned not to be stupid enough to give up my time—as precious to me as an apple core is to a young boy in a Mark Twain novel—to agree to another paint job.
During lunch on work days, I read a number of blogs from academics, most of whom are younger than I. Sometimes a newly-tenured faculty member, puffed up with an appointment to an "important" committee or assigned an "important" task, brags about becoming a true member of the college community. Maybe these folks have gotten lucky, and Mr. Miyagi is handing them the brush. Maybe it's Tom Sawyer whitewashing them, which they'll discover soon enough. I don't bother posting a comment to warn them. Teaching is the really hard job, and maybe fence painting—more aggravation but less difficult—gets someone out of the classroom for a bit, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
