Academic Services as Theatre Productions

“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.” 

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

(creating the category “conjecture” for this kind of thing where I’ve spent about an hour thinking about it and also please know that the last and only theatre production I was in happened in grade 11 in 1998 and I played a caveman who grunted once as I dragged another caveman off stage)

A weird way to think about building academic services: we’re creating a play not a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies have policies, procedures, outcomes, metrics, staffing plans, strategic plans, budgets, hierarchies. Plays have a protagonist, characters, a story, acts, a narrative arc, meaning. They have scripts, settings, actors, writers, stage hands, technicians.

Thinking about academic services as theatre productions makes me ask:

• Who is the protagonist? Is it me? Is it the student? Is it other staff?
• Is there an antagonist? If it’s too easy to answer “yes” to that question you better think carefully about why that is. Is it me? Is it other staff or faculty? Is this intentional? Justifiable?
• What happens at the end of this story? What is the purpose?
• Or wait, more important! What happens in the beginning and middle of the story? What does the protagonist have to go through and how does it change them?
• Are the beginning and middle linked with the end of the story? Were they required and did they contain all the elements necessary? Is the story you are telling (through the experiences of the protagonists) coherent or does it feel like there’s just a bunch of MacGuffin to make the whole thing work?
• Who else is needed to make this production work? What are their roles? What stories are we telling them to ourselves, our students, and to them? Are these good stories? Would we want them told about or to us?

One thing I like about this: stories seem to me to have nested life-cycles. The protagonist and characters have a life-cycle as they go through the story. Each night/showing has a life cycle and there are good and bad days. The whole production also has a life-cycle as even the longest running productions usually eventually end. How do you respect and integrate the ways individuals change during each showing or season and during the entire production? As cast and crew change and come and go, as students and culture change? Eventually, maybe the whole production ends? Maybe 20 years later someone revives it.