Where Exactly is Your Head These Days?

The department has never been a solid intellectual community. In fact, it's never been much of a community but it is falling apart at an incredibly rapid pace right now. All departments are to some degree dysfunctional because you can't expect a single common interest to bring together than many adults and keep them amiable 24/7. But there is comfortable dysfunction and then there is dysfunction you flee. The department has always hovered between these two types of dysfunction. In the past year, however, the balance has tipped in favour of flee-worthy dysfunction. And those who can flee are doing just that, while the chair just stands in the middle of all this falling rubble, apathy, and flight and glares at the graduate students because, of course, we're to blame for everything.