Peter, Where Are Your Principles?

When I was about to be interviewed for a teaching position at a university, I was warned to watch out, because the dean was a science man and had little use for people in the humanities.  He and I had a nice chat, during which I challenged him with the fact that people in the natural sciences have an often fatal tendency to quantify everything.  Finally he challenged me by saying, “If you join the faculty here, you’ll be paid a certain amount.  Ten years later you’ll be teaching the same courses and will probably be paid twice as much.  How do you justify that?”

I answered, “You’re quantifying again.  If I’m not teaching those courses twice as well in ten years I hope you fire me, because I will have lost all my self-respect.”  He hired me.  I hope that ten years later I really was teaching those courses twice as well, having learned what worked and what didn’t, having been to numerous conferences, to Spain twice and Latin America many times, as well as having my published work criticized by my peers worldwide.

But what happens when someone simply dies on the vine during those ten years?  How often have we heard about people’s being “kicked upstairs” because of their incompetence at a lower level?  The Lord knows how many institutions, in both academia and the worlds of business and politics, have been harmed, or even destroyed, by such promotions.  One thinks of the conclusions by Ross Perot, I think it was, after examining the way General Motors was being run, recommending that their top executives be fired.

Accordingly, when I was being interviewed by the dean of another institution later on, he asked me, “Would you be interested in eventually becoming an administrator?”

“No.”

He waited, expecting me to say more, so eventually I continued, “I intended that as a one-syllable answer.  I have no aptitude for or desire to go into administration.  I assure you that if I’m ever appointed to an administrative position, within a month you people over me, the people under me, and I will all be suicidal.”

That was my attempt to avoid being a victim of the Peter Principle, that in a bureaucracy people tend to rise to the level of their own incompetence.  Oh, and we also elect people to high office who have nothing but their own visibility to recommend them.  Recently I watched a video of an interview being conducted by a member of Congress who was mind-bogglingly ignorant and almost completely inarticulate.  I wondered what he had done to get elected.  Did he pass out ice cream to the voters?  And the worst of it is that the benefits these representatives receive after only one term in Congress last for a lifetime and serve as one more drain on our already dangerously stretched budget.

Sometimes I wonder why nine percent of the people polled still think the Congress is doing a good job.  Let’s wake up, people.  This country became great on the basis of being a competitive meritocracy, and we’re allowing some dreadfully incompetent people to run it right now.