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IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged-or ought to bethat if Rodney King had tried his famous "Can't we all just get along?" plea at a faculty meeting, he'd have been rebuked much more severely than he was by the L.A.P.D.-at least in the minds of his colleagues.
Such a preposterous appeal, in tight of the traditional customs of Bourdieu's "Homo academicus," would have been a far greater crime than the reported behavior of John Lammers (The Chronicle, May 5), the "growling professor" fired two years ago from his tenured job by the University of Central Arkansas because, according to administrators, he regularly raised "petty dislikes more than important issues," and proved to be "overbearing, rude, offensive, intimidating, and even threatening."
That is, the kind of person often found around the department, or lingering over lunch at the faculty club. The university's dismissal memo accused Lammers, an English professor, of creating "an atmosphere of discomfort" with "unprofessional behavior" that caused "disharmony." Lammers replied that the university had violated his academic freedom "to oppose a tyrannical administration and make the university a better place." (Lammers and the university recently reached a settlement of his legal claims.)
Call it the difference between "collegiality," a common word found around the house (as well as in the boilerplate of faculty handbooks), and "colleagueality," a Sniglet (defined by its creator, Rich Hall, as a "word that ought to exist, but doesn't") that would better describe how faculty peers actually behave toward one another.
"Collegiality," the Webster's New World Dictionary tells us, is "the sharing of authority among colleagues," as in the principle that the pope and his bishops share authority in the Roman Catholic Church. Leaving aside whether that principle is sufficiently extant to emulate, the common word has evolved to connote a live-and-let-live mentality among colleagues and coworkers, an atmosphere of reasonable bonhomie that keeps professional differences from escalating to personal animosity and crisis. Most colleges and universities require a faculty member to meet some criterion of collegiality if the person is to be reappointed, let alone granted tenure.
"Colleagueality," by...