"One chops the wood, the other does the grunting." That's an old Yiddish proverb. The guy who thought it up was almost certainly the one doing the chopping.

My retirement from the world of paid employment lies not too far in the future. I've been a minion all of my life, and my dad was a minion before me. His dad, too. I come from a long line of minions. We were minions as far back as I can trace, so it may not be surprising that, as I near retirement, I remain as puzzled as when I started as to just what bosses do.

I once was ushered into a college president's office for the final interview in the process of getting myself hired. It was mostly a formality; I had the enthusiastic and unanimous recommendation of the hiring committee and, short of peeling off my shirt and tie and doing a fertility dance on the president's desk, the job was mine. That left us with little to do but schmooze uncomfortably for 15 minutes. In an attempt at small talk, the president pointed at a plaque behind him.

"That's my perfect attendance plaque," he said. "Each year of perfect attendance is recognized by an additional bronze star." "Very good," I said, and I counted seven stars dangling on a little chain below the plaque.

I was hired, and I worked for that college long enough to see the president's chain of stars increase by seven, making 14 years of unbroken devotion to his desk and his duties. By that time I knew him well enough to know that the plaque was a complete fiction. The man was an alcoholic, and when he was nursing a hangover and unable to make it to his office, he simply said that he was working at home.

It was self-deception more than anything else. His staff knew the truth, but the president didn't. His attendance was a matter of fierce pride to him and, at his retirement dinner, he held the plaque above his head in triumph and received a round of applause.

That's bosses, for you. They set the rules, and it is amazing how well they can play by them.

I've taught in the California Community College system for a long time, in four of its 108 colleges. I've served on nearly every kind of academic committee ever devised, written faculty newsletters, served as the only community college representative on a National Endowment for the Humanities study and published dozens of articles about teaching. I've also been a faculty senate president, and a division chairperson. I've spoken at graduation exercises, written grants, memos, protestations and major sections of accreditation reports.

Over all of those years, I have received exemplary evaluations from my academic overseers, and even better ones from my students. More to the point, I've read about a gazillion words of bad student writing in the interest of improving their skills with a language that, though it is often their native tongue, seems quite foreign to many of them.

Reciting those facts is bound to seem self-serving and immodest. That is not my intention. In fact, as I look back over my long career, I mostly feel I could have done better. For those who take it seriously, teaching is a lot like parenting, a task no one can feel sanguine about, a job with unlimited performance objectives.

A few weeks ago, I read the news that the current chancellor of the entire state community college system is retiring next January. At that time, he will be 55, an age when his retirement benefits will increase. According to the story chronicling his decision to quit, he is quoted as saying: "...in January, it will be time to consider a new adventure. That timing, I believe, is good for both the system and for me." I don't know this particular chancellor. I've never known any of them, in fact, nor can I point to any way in which their leadership has figured in the work I do.

I have known enough about retiring administrators, however, to suspect that the "new adventure" he refers to just might involve consulting, which is the art of selling one's connections back to the state or to individual districts within the state at rather high prices, double-dipping into the state treasury by being retired and not retired at the same time.

This retiring chancellor and I have both served in this system for about the same number of years, but his salary is triple mine, and his retirement package will surely make my retirement package look fairly paltry. Among other things, he is assured of full health coverage for the remainder of his life. I am not.

No surprise in any of that, of course. The way the world works, the farther you are from the actual work of an enterprise, the more money you make. In community colleges, we have no actual product, no tangible widget or appliance or consumable goods whizzing down an assembly line. What we do produce is F.T.E.s (or Full Time Equivalent students, a body count that determines how many dollars we are allocated). Only teachers produce F.T.E.s, so it stands to reason they make less money than the people who don't.

Despite the fact that we manufacture nothing at all, I have yet to meet an academic administrator who did not look to the business world to find the model upon which they patterned their self definition. I never met an administrator who was not fond of the tired slogans handed down from corporate boardrooms, all that talk about "excellence," and "management styles," and the myriad clichès spun around their work to make it seem as though something is actually happening. I once worked for a district that had the slogan "A Commitment to Excellence" emblazoned on all its vehicles. Problem was, the word "commitment" was misspelled.

I've worked under four or five state chancellors, and truth be told, I've yet to figure out just what they do. I've written to a couple of them, but I never received a reply. I know that they spend a good deal of time doing public relations, but I've yet to notice any uptick in the respect or funding for community colleges. I know they go to a great many meetings, just as I have done. The one thing I always noticed about meetings was, unlike classes, they never require any prep time, especially if you're the one leading the meeting.

The chancellor serves at the pleasure of the Community College Board of Governors, one of those nearly invisible state agencies that seem to exist so that political aspirants will have a place to start careers (Oakland Mayor and former Gov. Jerry Brown got started on the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, for instance). The state community college board has an annual budget of some $12 million, of which the chancellor's office consumes 1/12th.

One thing I'm fairly certain this agency does not do is coordinate efforts between community colleges. Faculty cannot transfer within this system, for instance, and if one does apply for and get a job from one community college to another, it is almost certain that the successful job applicant will suffer a reduction in pay. The system virtually mandates that teachers stay put once hired by refusing to recognize more than five years of service for placement on the salary schedule when they move from one district to another. The state board also does nothing to maintain quality control in the system. All hiring is local.

But I use my own work experience only to open the speculation about what bosses do. On the campus where I currently teach, I have worked under four presidents. I can count on my fingers the number of times I've actually seen them. I worked under the first president here for four years, and when he retired, I had NEVER laid eyes on him. Whatever it is that bosses do, it tends to be done where few can see them doing it.

My wife tells a story about one of her co-workers, one of those faceless minions who work for the state, making things run. Her co-worker identified a problem deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy. It was an expensive and a potentially serious problem, so my wife's co-worker researched it, dreamt up solutions and corrections, wrote them up and submitted her plan. It was a labor of several months -- all self-initiated and done while maintaining her other, more routine functions.

For a long time, she heard nothing. Then, one day she was called into her boss's office. The boss wanted to show her a certificate of recognition and a plaque the boss had received in recognition of her invaluable services in submitting the report. No mention was made of the employee who had, exclusively, done the work. Apparently, the boss felt that by sharing the accolades she had received, the employee was getting her due reward.

That's kind of how it works for us minions. Bosses will tell you that though they may get credit for some of the good things we minions do, they also take the heat when we screw up. That's why they get the big bucks, risking all that liability for our occasional ineptitude. It would be nice if that were so, but it doesn't play out that way too often. Read the papers for very long and the pattern is clear -- scapegoats take the fall, and they're always minions.

So, I near the end of my salaried work life still unclear on just what it is that bosses do. That's OK; most of my bosses never knew what I did, either. They just grunted after I was done doing it.