To profess performance

In 1905, Professor George Lyman Kittredge, Chairman of the English department at Harvard University, dropped a note to his colleague Professor George Pierce Baker. The latter had been concerned that one of Kittredge's new hires might have designs on the teaching of “the drama” and thus designs on Baker's own curricular territory. Kittredge sought to mollify Baker's anxiety. “You may feel quite secure,” he wrote, “as to any cutting into your special field.” The sentence reproduced the content and form of an all-too familiar interaction between empowered chairman and paranoid colleague. And, as is often true of such interactions, it also revealed a hint of intellectual condescension within its gesture of institutional assurance, one that left flexible whether the word “special” had the connotation of the extraordinary, the narrow, or the peripheral.

Similar kinds of anxieties can be found in the archives of other key figures in the early institutionalization of performance in the American academy.