After 41 years, Polhemus accepts a call to duty as new chair of Faculty Senate
English Department chair hopes for 'exciting and boring' meetings; encourages senators to engage each other in debate
Polhemus said he is proud of the way the university has changed over his four decades, even as that progress has led to the demise of the small-town feel the university had when he arrived in 1963. "There’s always a danger that people forget they’re working for a university and not a corporation," he cautioned.
BY RAY DELGADO
New chair Robert Polhemus wasted little time offering his colleagues a glimpse into his mindset for leading the 37th Senate of the Academic Council at its first meeting last week.
He wants the proceedings of the university's most important faculty governing body to be fun, entertaining, lively and sometimes controversial and, to that end, he quipped about the need for reading memorial resolutions recognizing deceased academics at the beginning of each meeting.
"The reason for this practice is to remember the accomplishments of distinguished faculty citizens of this university, to pay tribute to their lives," Polhemus said. "And it reminds us that we are part of a university and that no matter how busy we are or how important we think we have become, we're going to die."
It took a second for the joke to register, but then a raucous laughter filled the room as senators looked at each other with a bemused look of "I can't believe he said that" on their faces.
But there was more to come from Polhemus, who warned his colleagues that he was about to engage in a bit of "geezerdom" in laying out his goals for the senate.
The Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities and current chair of the English Department, Polhemus recently began his 41st year at Stanford and said he accepted his election to chair the senate out of a sense of obligation to his university. He considers universities among the most noble institutions and implored his colleagues on the senate to attend the meetings as part of their obligation to their peers who elected them to a body that is both "the reality and the symbol of faculty governance."
Although senate meetings often can be routine and devoid of debate, Polhemus said a lack of discourse could be the sign of a "happy nation." But he also said he would do his best to create a sense of excitement for the senate by taking on topical issues. "I was going to try to figure out a way to promise you excitement. But the only sure way to do that is to have crisis and conflict, which is bad, right? So here's a mixed message, a contradiction: We want our meetings to be exciting and boring."
One of the more exciting topics that the senate will tackle will be a revised conflict-of-interest policy, which was considered by last year's senate but kicked back to the Committee on Research after some faculty members expressed concern that the threshold for disclosure of financial interests was set too low. Polhemus said that the university and its faculty do a good job of making sure that rules governing financial gains from research are adhered to, but he said the issue as a whole is fraught with potential problems.
"It is incumbent on the faculty members to preserve and celebrate the university and their respective disciplines as areas of free inquiry and the transmission of knowledge," Polhemus told his colleagues. "And the opportunity for profit, the raising of funds, is not the same thing as knowledge."
Polhemus also said he hopes that the senate will have lively discussions about graduate student issues, university growth and even the conflict in Iraq. He encouraged senators to take advantage of the open forum portion of the meeting to raise issues they want the senate to consider or to ask the president or provost questions. The senate also will begin the practice of ending meetings a little sooner for a short executive session to encourage more off-the-record discussions.
Although it might appear that Polhemus is trying to shake up the senate proceedings in favor of more open debate and discussions, he says he's not seeking to spark controversy.
"I'm not looking forward to a highly controversial year," Polhemus said. "As long as the faculty has confidence in its administration, things work pretty well. And the faculty has a lot of confidence in this administration."
Polhemus shares that respect for the current administration and previous ones, which he says have done a good job of keeping the university's focus on academics sharp even as the university operates more like a corporation. The university has changed and grown tremendously over the four decades that Polhemus has been here. And even though he said he appreciates the strides the university has made in becoming a world-class institution, he misses the small-town feel it had when he started working here.
"It has become one of the great universities and it's great in all fields," he said. "But it's also become a big place, much more of a corporate place, much more impersonal. There's always a danger that people forget they're working for a university and not a corporation. The aims of a university are different than the aims of a corporation or a business. When we lose sight of that, something important is lost."
Polhemus' path to Stanford was largely steered by an ex-girlfriend. He was born in the Bay Area and raised in various East Bay cities. He intended to become a lawyer. His brother pursued medical education and later became a doctor.
Polhemus enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley as a political science major but soon switched to English because his girlfriend at the time was studying it.
"I lost the girlfriend but didn't ever lose the passion for English," he said. After graduating with a degree in English, Polhemus "bummed around" in Paris for a year and mulled his intended path toward law or continuing his English studies. He opted for the latter and enrolled again at Berkeley in a master's program in English, still thinking he might pursue law afterward. The master's degree then paved the way to a doctoral degree in English at Berkeley, and Polhemus' career as an academic began a short time later with a job offer from Stanford.
Polhemus has been a full member of the English Department ever since. He has spent much of his career studying 19th-century British literature, 20th-century British fiction, cultural studies and the visual arts, including film. He has written on such authors as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce.
Two of his children, now in their 40s, graduated from Stanford. He handed both of them their diplomas. Two other children graduated from the University of California-Santa Cruz. He now lives with his wife, Carol Loeb Shloss, at the nearby Peter Coutts faculty housing complex.
Polhemus spent much of the past summer at his wife's summer home in Maine completing the preface for and proofreading his latest book, Lot's Daughters, which explores the relationship of fathers and daughters and of older men and younger females in history, life, art and culture. The book is scheduled to be published by the end of the year, and Polhemus said he will balance his duties leading the senate and the English Department with a bit of self-promotion for his labor of love.
When the year is over, a one-year sabbatical is in order, he said, so he can get back to doing what he loves best: loafing around the house and reading. But he'll return to Stanford, he said, and he won't even mention the dreaded "R" word.
"Never retirement," he said. "The way it is now, a professor should never retire. I believe in one's duty to the university to serve it."
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