Last Year #2: My Last Faculty Retreat

Today the faculty met at Aspen Hall from 8:30 to 1:30 to eat and talk about such concerns as assessment, promotions and tenure, and negotiations.  No one planned team-building games for this year, which was probably just as well, considering the chill and sprinkles.  (Last year's retreat had some awesome games run by Tim Peterson, our fearless director of the Outdoor Leadership program.)  We are starting very late this year!  (Gruntlement has been dissed among some parties who feel they had no part in the  decision to piggy-back on the September 30 class start of our "partner," OSU.  [It's interesting how we use the word "partner" to describe a soon-to-be competitor.]) 

We also welcomed newcomers, including Charles Abasa-Nyarko, our new Vice-president of Instruction. He in from Ghana and said that in Europe and Africa there are no part-time university teachers and that he thought everyone should be full time.  A very interesting idea.

I talked with two colleagues, Art Benefiel and Margaret Petersen, who arrived at COCC the same year I did.  We chatted a bit about "the old days" of the first retreat we attended.  I also spoke with 32 year veteran Peter Casey about those retreats.  He said that they were special and I agreed.  They were overnight, in the woods, and involved beer and wine.  Some folks played poker and got somewhat cockeyed by the early morning. We roasted corn over fire and sang camp songs.  We rowed on the small Dark Lake or jumped into it at night, with or without the proper attire.  Administrators and faculty got close.  It was a very different time, for both good and ill.

The positive outcomes of this kind of ritual was that it produced a quality of almost filial connection.  The openness of that connection was, of course, problematic in a contemporary professional organization.  It was also very difficult for single parents to be part of this kind of bonding.  Even the gender mix was a bit challenging as there was at least one and perhaps more senior faculty who didn't quite get the customary social rules about not propositioning newcomers even if everyone is a bit squiffy.

When the college presidency shifted in 1990, the new president, Robert Barber, with advice from a variety of folks and facing the impact of successful anti-tax measures, decided that the retreats should no longer be off campus and limited to faculty and administration.  So the retreat became an "all college" event and wound up on campus.  Shortly thereafter, the faculty forum decided that faculty still needed their own event so we went to a half-day get together somewhere off campus.

A few days ago I ran across some ethnographic letters I wrote to friends in my graduate program about my first quarter in my new job.  Here are some notes from the letter sent September 13, 1988, a few days after the retreat.

I went on a hike featuring the "Geology of the Region" and then went running back to camp with Art and his new boss R. (a character long gone from the college).  I quote:  "When we hit the brush at the bottom of the hill, R. warned Art and I not to get too wild at the retreat, even though everyone seemed to be so comfortable because someone had gotten too drunk and it had not gone well for them at promotion time. . . . Later that evening, I met a fellow, X., who admitted to being the character who had had trouble at promotion time because of his staff retreat behavior. . . . "  He made a suggestion about "going into the lake together" in a somewhat suggestive way.  "The next mornng I learned that the behavior he had gotten into trouble for was propositioning 'every female staff member in the place' (that's another female staff member -- and by staff I mean workers who would be at the retreat -- administrative and teaching personnel.)"
 
And, critically conscious as I was in those days, I ended my long analysis of events at that first retreat with this paragraph.

"Sure I see the power relations.  I also interpret, through my own frame, the deep hunger that drives them.  I can look at X. through the socially conscious awareness of his maleness, whiteness, Americanness -- and see him as corrupt in his innocence of his own corruption.  Or I can see in him myself.  Or I can do both.  Which I do."