Just a Secretary

Having worked as an academic administrator in several capacities and now as a professor, I have consistently been struck by the ways that socially progressive even politically radical professors treat administrators—by disregarding their time, intellect, and emotions, and taking for granted the power hierarchy drawn between professors and administrators. It is no coincidence that these typically lower paid administrators are overwhelmingly female. Why is it that scholars who are committed to fighting social injustice perpetuate it in their own departments and daily lives? Why do the values that so many professors espouse—justice, equality, democracy—arouse more passion and commitment in the abstract rather than in practice, at the ground level? If we want to fight the social devaluation of what is often seen as women’s work, we must begin at home, so to speak, and pay much closer attention to the ways we too are complicit in it. It is the work of administrators that enables academic departments (and many professors) to function on a daily basis, yet administrators are often treated—both by professors and institutions of higher education as a whole—as disposable if not invisible. While the devaluation of academic administrators’ work is obviously long-lived, structurally enforced, and difficult to change, in this talk I hope to spark a discussion about what we might do to challenge this power differential.