Sphinx

I’ve been contemplating possible historical analogies for the role of Head of Department (or Head of Subject or Subject Lead, the titles now in use in my own faculty) in a context where all the control of financial matters, and a lot of control of everything else, resides at a higher level of the organisation. The position is temporary, a matter of a couple of years (even fewer, if I can provoke my colleagues into launching a coup), rather than permanent; it is supposedly meritocratic, but more likely depends on a mixture of seniority, status and vulnerability to moral pressure (there may be people who really want this sort of job, but mostly it appears to get assigned to those who accept that they have some sort of duty and/or haven’t come up with a good enough excuse to avoid it). More or less no power that I’ve been able to identify, but not purely ceremonial; on the contrary, a fair amount of responsibility: to represent the department to higher authority, to defend it against wacky schemes and exciting initiatives, and at the same time to try to cajole colleagues into obeying the dictats that can’t simply be ignored, sometimes trying to translate them into a language that’s more acceptable or accessible to academics…

Not any sort of monarch, then (though I did briefly consider the ‘temporary kings’ described by J.G. Frazer as a comparison); more like a Roman consul or magistrate in an Italian city state, except for the lack of actual power over anything. The answer, as ever in UK higher education, is to be found in the Later Roman Empire: the beleaguered curiales described by Libanius and others, a role that was a social obligation for certain members of the city that had once brought honour and prestige and even power but was now basically a burden, caught between the imperial system and the local population. Obviously I’m not literally responsible for collecting taxes from the department and making up any shortfall myself – but maybe if we think in terms of a tribute to the higher echelons of energy and time…

The heads of department are depressed and depleted; they are not just poor, they are beggared… Nobody would let their wife or husband become a head of department; they don’t loathe them as much as that… (Libanius Or.2.35, adapted).

I now need to work out how to do one of those smiley emoticon things, to emphasise that this is not entirely serious…