The shame of the name game
By Malcolm King | smh.com.au | 26 July
Man does not live by bread alone. He lives on titles. And nowhere are titles more important than when you're working in a university.
Titles are status symbols of who we are in the organisation and where we fit in the big picture. My interest in titles started early. My father used to call me "boy".
The American slaves and the Indians under the Raj thought the term boy demeaning. Pick that cotton, boy! Bring the tea here, boy! It should come as no surprise then that titles particularly interested me when I landed an underpaid and overworked job at a local university in media communications (pass the tautology).
Who got called what defined power relationships. I remember the day my business cards arrived and they said "PR Officer". I was actually a lecturer but I soon found I was teaching PR even though I was a journalist.
They couldn't see the tension between these two professions and it didn't matter. I had my business cards.
By the time I got my correct business cards, my job had changed. I was a lecturer but I was also responsible for student selection and a subject co-ordinator for media law.
This was exciting. Imagine, me a subject co-ordinator. In fact, I was one step up from the poor tutors who did most of the work and who spent Easter and Christmas marking essays and exam papers.
There was some pride in a title. I told my mum I was a subject co-ordinator and she said: "That's nice, dear." She rarely called me Malcolm. She called me "dear". That was better than what she called my older brother's girlfriend. It rhymed with polyp.
When I told my dad about my new title, he said: "You're working with wankers. Get a real job, boy."
Dad's advice turned out to be prophetic but I loved teaching and although I was working with "wankers" totally devoid of original thought, I felt at home. In the early 1990s, the university was allowed to confer professorial titles on its senior staff.
The university executive, heads of schools, acting heads of schools, their mates and their dogs were called professor.
They carried red embossed business cards. Later, these were the people who lost the university $80 million and sacked 400 staff but everyone makes mistakes. Their business cards were works of art.
Indeed, most of the communication and design work of the university was channelled into the production of those cards. In the last six years working at university I gained many titles.
I was an acting course co-ordinator, course co-ordinator, head selection officer, discipline leader, program manager, senior lecturer, program director and acting head of school. It became clear to me fairly early on that titles were more like coloured campaign ribbons that returned soldiers wore on parade.
The more ribbons you collected, the greater the kudos although more often than not, the volume of titles reflected organisational upheaval and confusion.
I left in 2005 and spoke to an old HR chum at a bar. He said the reason the university gave out so many highfalutin titles was as a sop to the poor wages and conditions.
There was no equivalency between a corporate director and a university director. What's in a title? Not very much.
Is there an aspect of office life that makes you laugh, cry or simply drives you crazy? Readers are invited to submit 550-word articles for publication in The Office to theoffice@fairfax.com.au
First published by Smh.com.au on July 26 2009
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