In Praise of Bureaucratic Details

Life in the academy is filled with documents that can stymie a class, a dissertation, or a career if they're not satisfied in full detail. Indeed, most "introductions to graduate school" describe the arc of an academic career through these bureaucratic documents. This example is taken from my own department's guidebook.

Graduate Program Timeline for MA/PhD Students Who Enter with a BA
Year	Fall Semester	Spring Semester
1	Coursework	Coursework Select advisor and major field of study by end of 1st year
2	Coursework	Coursework Requirements for “Breadth” and “Critical Theory” completed by end of 2nd year Submit materials, including preliminary POS, for Advising Meeting Advising Meeting MA awarded
3	Coursework	Complete coursework Begin work on final POS
4	Submit POS 8903 and foreign-language requirement completed before candidacy exam	Complete candidacy exam
5	Complete prospectus Begin work on dissertation	Apply for additional year of funding Continue work on dissertation Apply for additional fellowships

These timelines and the documents they describe--preliminary POS, POS, prospectus--often put academics into complete despair. They often entail a series of arbitrary-seeming selections, such as, "Which 80 texts must you read for your exam?" or "What is the period of study for your dissertation?" On bureaucratic documents and in locked filing cabinets, the answers to these questions are simply lists or numbers: and so these selections seem completely arbitrary.

But I recommend that academics consider these as academic problems. Joseph M Williams reminds us that PROBLEMS, as academics deal with them, have both conditions for their satisfaction as well as rhetorical audiences. In the case of bureaucratic problems, the conditions come from the bureaucracy, but the academic import comes from the scholarly community.

To make short work of a much larger point, I recommend that academics recognize bureaucratic documents as a chance to state principles for an academic audience. When a PhD student chooses some 80 texts for a POS, she is really choosing her scholarly commitments. Those commitments, in turn, give her some grounding for the challenges to come. In the process of writing a dissertation, she will be buffeted by new facts and new views, and she can effectively reply to new facts, new views if she has selected her ground and her commitments. I say "effectively" not only because an effective reply would communicate to an academics community, but also because an effective reply conserves the ideas developed from earlier generations of inquiry. This tradition, community, and ground expresses itself through the small ways that academics respond to seemingly trivial questions; most of all, that standby conversation-piece of conferences: "What's your dissertation about?"