It’s Time for College. But Are You Feeling Collegial?

This periodical, from Hanoi, published a reference to “collegiality” in 1887.”

The word looks harmless enough. Who doesn’t want to be collegial? To be perceived as collegial? Sometimes, though,  it can seem as if there’s no more elusive, and maybe treacherous, term in academe than collegiality.

Alas, collegiality has developed a reputation as the wild card in professional evaluations. It is the quality one lacks, not the quality one possesses, that can worm its way into a professional evaluation. “Bob’s skills are unquestionable, but his lack of collegiality has required us to give him an office on another floor.”

In academe, being perceived as lacking collegiality can have serious negative consequences.

The American Association of University Professors thinks that’s a problem. In a 1999 report, updated in 2016, the AAUP cautioned against the application of this vague term as a factor in hiring and promotion, warning that collegiality has a history of contributing to the maintenance of “homogenous” faculties.

A 2002 New York Times article by Tamar Lewin pointed to the emergence of “collegiality” as a vague but potent means of disabling nonstandard candidates from achieving tenured positions. Women were the immediate subject of the article.

What do the dictionaries have to say?  Merriam-Webster defines collegiality as “the cooperative relationship of colleagues,” and then anchors the term with a reference to the Vatican. The work of  bishops, in collaboration with the Pope, is tautologically collegial. Remember that there’s a College of Cardinals, though that’s not the kind of college you’ll be returning to in a matter of days.

The Oxford English Dictionary also points the reader to the Vatican, but its earliest historical citations for collegiality are from late 19th-century issues of the Pall Mall Gazette, about which more in a moment.

One of the things I most enjoy about the OED is tracking down its sources. Reasonably enough, the OED’s examples are edited to the bare minimum necessary to make sense. Almost always, however, the source from which the example has been plucked has much more to say, and it’s fun to hunt.

The OED first takes note of collegiality in March 1887. The Pall Mall Gazette pointed out the 50-year editorship of a different journal by one Caroline Popp, whose milestone was being acknowledged out of  “collegiality” — it appears with the safeguard of quotation marks, as if to warn the reader of a strange, but not incomprehensible, word.

A month later the same publication provides another example, which the editors of the OED reduce to lexicographic pith:  “Requesting … him out of collegiality, to present two numbers to the museum.”

The citation’s backstory, however, reaches from the Rhineland to Indochine.

In 1887, a newspaper museum in Aachen sought out two copies of the French-language journal L’Avenir du Tonkin, a publication founded in Hanoi after the French had taken control of the region. Would it be possible to secure examples of the journal for the collection? The editor of L’Avenir was indeed asked, “out of collegiality, to present two numbers to the museum.” An English translation of the reply appeared in the Gazette’s columns:

“To the Manager of the Zeitungs-Museum, in Aix-la-Chapelle — I thank you for giving me an opportunity of making myself disagreeable to the Germans, and inform you that I refuse to send you the two numbers of L’Avenir du Tonkin which you wish to possess. Receive the assurance of my implacable hatred to the German race. —J. COUSIN.”

Monsieur Cousin wasn’t having any of this collegiality, even in the interest of museum-building. And don’t miss the gazinga replacement of Aachen with Aix-la-Chapelle. 

Much has happened to collegiality since 1887,  but even at its first appearances in English, the word arrived shadowed by its opposite.

Late August, however, is no time for self-doubt, much less for implacable hatred, on campus. It’s the start of a new school year — new challenges, new faces, old resentments — so do try to be collegial.

Whatever that is, exactly.