Composing a Life

not from the macho hours demanded by ambition but from the challenge to provide direct and sustained caring in two different places.
    When I was first thinking about going into administration, a male acquaintance commented on the pastoral role of a dean. One becomes an advisor, a keeper of confidences, and an advocate. The issues people would raise with me were personal as often as they were professional, and I became fascinated with the challenge of improvising solutions to problems, as well as trying to elicit the performance needed for the institution. This mixture of public and private is especially common in academic settings, where the majority of the faculty are like members of an extended family, condemned willy-nilly to see the same faces across the table for life. Caring for the faculty is vital to promoting their continuing growth, which in turn supports the growth and development of students. Still, there is very great variation in the way different administrators interpret their roles in caring for others. Ironically, although I spent a great deal of my time on caretaking, I was criticized for being “not consistently nurturant,” although I have watched men in the same kind of role who are not even remotely nurturant. The appropriate degree of caretaking in such roles as dean can only be accessible to professional and conscientious men and women if it is freed from cliches and practiced with judgment: the best caretaker offers a combination of challenge and support, yet adults dealing with women administrators are sometimes as fretful as infants denied the breast. To be nurturant is not always to concur and comfort, to stroke and flatter and appease; often, it requires offering a caring version of the truth, grounded in reality. Self-care should include the cold shower as well as the scented tub. Real caring requires setting priorities and limits. Even the hard choices of triage have their own tenderness. Again and again in myths and folklore, kindness to strangers or animals is enjoined and heroes are rewarded for pausing on their journeys to care for those in need. But psychologist Jean Houston points out an episode in the myth of Psyche and Eros that provides a useful balance. When Psyche is in search of Eros, she is enjoined to resist the cries and pleas of others. If she is to find her beloved, she must harden herself against inappropriate impulses to help and nurture.
    When I went to Amherst, I valued my pastoral role as dean as part of a complex web of responsibilities to faculty, students, and the long-term integrity of the institution. I had not foreseen that the stereotype of nurturance would be used as a weapon. It is a double-sided blade that is turned only against women: my colleagues were equally ready to condemn faculty women for being too nurturant, and for not being nurturant enough. I also had not anticipated the extra burdens that went with meeting the expectation of nurturance. The president, for instance, had a wife, several secretaries, and a personal assistant, yet he still demanded a disproportionate amount of caretaking. Although he wouldn’t ask me to bring him cups of coffee or perform personal errands, he would ask me to support his morale, cover for him when he was unprepared, prevent his impulsive actions, and listen to him let off steam or think out loud for hours at a time. These were tasks he automatically expected of women, but he also demanded them, to a lesser degree, from the men around him. Yet he appeared to have no sense that he had some caretaking responsibility for his staff, who used to end up in my office, expecting me to nurse them back to self-respect. It took a lot of us to care for the president and keep him in good running order, at the cost of neglecting other responsibilities. Some of his need was a legitimate balance to the strains of his position; some of it was a habit of being indulged that made me wish parents could rear their children without such a core of neediness and without the expectation that others could be used to fill it.
    Almost any activity can be interpreted at least in part as caretaking. One of the most striking aspects of the Eriksonian version of the life cycle is that the basic strength that characterizes the long adult years is the virtue of care. The achievements of maturity are described, for both men and women, in analogy with parental responsibility, including the willingness to relinquish control gradually and welcome