Transference, Countertransference, and Search Committees

My most recent stint serving on a search committee has coincided with teaching a class on Freud. The intersections have been instructive.

There is a strange collision that happens as the fantasies and desires of the search committee members are projected onto each of the candidates in turn and find, or fail to find, some reflection or connection.

Oddly, it seems to me that the candidate plays the role of therapist to the committee rather than vice versa. The successful candidate is the one who best manages the transference of the committee members as well as their own countertransference onto the department and the imagined job. Wishful thinking runs rampant at every turn. This includes the projection of fears which are no less reliant on fantasy than are the projections of hope.

Trifecta

Today began early with a trifecta of back to back to back meetings: a personnel committee meeting, a department meeting, and a search committee meeting. This is not the recommended way to start a day.

I notice a previous post where I managed to find a silver lining even for the drudgery of committee work: "We're all in it together, so we can safely grouse about it to each other. ... We bond over our shared suffering."

Clearly timing matters. This morning the end of the semester rush precluded even the simple pleasure of companionable complaint.

A Theory Which Is Mine

My current theory is that tedious committee work is actually the glue that cements the relationships among the faculty on a campus. A great deal of bonding happens over stacks of file folders and the labyrinths of budget codes. This is very different from the heated exchanges that take place at department meetings. I'm talking about the plain-old, everyday, garden variety committee work that nobody likes, but that everybody has to do.

I've spent the past few days toiling over application files as part of the work for a faculty search committee I'm serving on. I've been sequestered in a cushy administrative conference room alongside a handful of my colleagues reading through stacks of files and busily taking notes. The work isn't hard, and it's often interesting. But, still, there is a lot of it and it can get repetitive. During our confinement, folks talk. One of the first subjects tends to be the shared common ground of the time-consuming committee work itself. We're all in it together, so we can safely grouse about it to each other. Like cafeteria food. Or airport parking. I may not have much in common with my colleagues in the Math Department or from over in the College of Business but, by God, we can all be bored to tears by the same committee assignments and we can commiserate about it together.

It may even be that committee work in academia provides some of the same social function as boot camp in the army, or hazing in a fraternity. We bond over our shared suffering. Committee work is simply the substitute form for middle-aged intellectuals who are ill-suited to more physically demanding forms of collective pain. What's important, though, is that it hurts and that we do it together.