life goes on. . . .

Something is changing and my point of view is like looking through a kaleidescope.   It has been about a year since I have posted anything here, but the inspiration is coming back.  I am feeling a need to write and not about anything in particular but of random occurences that need someplace to go. During the spring I was stretched to my human limits with a challenging group of students while teaching a class I have always loved to teach---intercultural communication.  I don't know if it is the influence of current tea party politics and family origins, but it was difficult to inspire any empathy for fellow human lives out of this group.  I ended up one evening defending Lil Wayne because I think he has something to say and asking them when "like" became a regular component of the king's english.  I think that is when things went south and I didn't do much to fix it except to survive the remaining several weeks. I failed the students in some ways and in others, was too stretched to notice that I had lost them.

At the risk of justifying this less than seamless semester, I was engaged in writing a proposal for a new graduate  program that I had worked on with a committee for several months.  I was having trouble meeting the goal deadline, so by mutual agreement, I turned it over to the dean only to have him meet with the committee, who made miniscule changes and called it done. I also wrote the proposal to go to the provost for our completely revised curriculum while doing the implementation on our registration and records system.  In the end, everything got approved and faculty are teaching the new curriculum. I made it out of the sausage grinder, but not without looking a little ugly too.

Those projects were nothing compared to the parade of facutly angrily marching into my office about their fall 2011 schedules after the provost had issued a strong armed request to use every part of the time grid after faculty teaching assignments were already in place.  We had to manipulate times and classes to create that perfect rubic's cube while instructors had ordered up teaching slots in  the past like they were requesting ingredients on a pizza. This "we" involves an administrative assistant who sends e-mails and then marches into my office with long explanations for the 140 typeset characters she had just sent me. Nobody likes anchovies and I was dishing them out left and right. I experienced my first hard interrogation from two titans of Chicago news who had created the first city bureau, and Jack engaged every technique on me about their class we had adjusted to ensure enrollments.  You see, this could-be-retired teaching team for whom I have a certain reverence simultaneously scares students away with their expectations for time commitment and excellence in hard beat reporting while trying to get their enrollments over four brave student souls. I was trying to save their class because of its irreplaceable value to our students, but tried to explain to "the boys"--our affectionate term for these hard-nosed government corruption story breakers that paralyzing students with fear and recruiting them are in a bit of conflict with each other. 

These things are happening while I am finishing up final edits from my book copy, its indices and working with the publisher's marketing team to recall and share every plausible global point of disciplinary interest so that people other than family members might think it is relevant enough to buy. The irony is that my family members are most drawn to the idea of the publication itself and my dedications to them while not being particularly inclined to delve into the (admittedly dense) academese it contains. 

An other irony is that in my role as supporter of all faculty endeavors to advance their own professional lives, I had organized two third year reviews for tenure track faculty members, one of whom balked at every well intentioned piece of advice and written (well-deserved) glowing peer teaching reviews for each.  The balking one had managed twice to show up at two significant invited situations I had looked forward to--one, a dinner with syndicated columnist E.J. Dionne and the distinguished faculty member who had secured his presence as our commencement speaker, and another time at a meeting with a distinguished social justice advocate from the provost's office wanting to secure our school's support for teaching classes on faith and justice. On both occasions her presence had not been solicited by me, and on the latter, she showed up at my office at the time of the meeting. And apparently true to the form I am now becoming familiar with, she proceeded on both occasions to engage the distinguished guests how things should be done. If I could have hooded her and taken her to Guantanamo for water-boarding, I would have except that I am against enhanced interrogation techniques. 

Two other junior faculty  had received 6,000. smackers to carry out summer research projects that I had enthusiastically supported with a precious bounty of time helping edit and shape their successful proposals.  Don't get me wrong; they had done the work and deserve all manner of credit for their success.  I don't expect bows and curtsies, but one was having a difficult time with loads of work being dumped on her by senior faculty who were receiving compensatory time or funding for not doing much of anything. I heard about it with every chance hallway passing.

This leads to my next challenge--to help the junior faculty member dump the extra work while knowing it would land in my lap because of the senior guy's long history of finding every reason not to move anything forward, using up any bit of compensatory time to write long e-mails as to the reasons for such inaction. I called a meeting to clear the air and thought it was a done deal.  How wrong I can be.  Whether it had been the anchovies, transitional challenges that masked themselves as perceived  incompetence coming out of my office or all-out distractions caused by the tri-hourly visits from my panicking co-conspirator in making schedule changes, I began to be a little wrung out. I was hanging on a closeline without having been shaken out so that the wrinkles wouldn't dry into the fabric of my being and best efforts.

No job is ever done, so my next meeting occured when a long time colleague and funny friend went through every sophisticated machination to bypass me and meet with the boss about her schedule.  I was willing to have it either way, but the boss kicked the ball back to me.  My friend wouldn't have it, so I joined the two of them to discuss why she could not hand-select her campus, teaching time and room by circumventing all protocol.  I asked her what she thought would happen if every faculty member across the university did what she was trying to do, and her response, which by the way did not seem incredulous to her when she said it was that the schedule "would probably turn out better".  She didn't add "for me".  In the end, I said no, possibly louder than I might have intended and kicked the ball back to the boss.  I saw her yesterday and she, who lost the battle in the end gave me a beginning of the fall semester hug.  Go figure.

My life in administration is funny.  It is funny to me in the first place that I am a dean, but I could not have imagined that I would need to hold meetings with faculty members to say, "please don't ever offer your students extra credit points for going to see your band play while charging them admission", or "please don't sell copies of your unpublished book to your students at a publisher's price rather than for the cost of making the copies; you WILL be expected to reimburse them", or "please do not circle the administrative staff work area talking out loud to yourself and passing wind; it interferes with their ability to help the students; you have an office--please work in there." Or to students--"you received a lower grade in participation points because I had no idea who you were when you gave your presentation at the end of the semester despite my ability to name every other student in the class and where they sat." I did not expect to have to call security on a screaming mother who insisted that her son be allowed into a class that was full when he was only a sophomore and would have his pick of the litter sometime during his next seven semesters at the university. 

The grand finale of the semester happened at a meeting I had arranged to have the tenure track faculty talk about their summer research plans. When I entered the conference room, the air was as thick as  a high index heat factor day in Chicago summer. I had ordered a tray of cookies for refreshment and as if in an act of all-out defiance, all but one person in the room and me refused to enjoy the gesture or flavor of homestyle chocolate chip morsels. I had also brought my biggest mistake.  The day before I had received some great practical tips from the provost's office about promotion files, and in my enthusiasm for this good information, began the meeting by sharing some of the tips. I cannot say I had in any way imagined or understood the response, but I learned later that apparently some of the people in the room considered it to be a change of agenda and additional pressure to an already pressure-cooker situation. I was met with a series of aggressive questions from two of the faculty, which I fielded with answers as clear as I could conceive.  I made recommendations to one person to write several small pieces instead of banking on only getting a book contract, and she countered with "I'm going to write the book". 

Realizing that I was being met with nothing but obstinance from a group of over-tired, over-stressed faculty trying to get final grades in, I made a choice I'm still not sure I would have every made except that I felt like I was not getting through to anyone except the other person who ate a cookie.  I checked to see if the dean had time to come and sit with us to field questions, and when he entered the room, they morphed into church mice in the face of my six foot four boss who has the demeanor of Yogi Bear or Fred Flinstone and the intelligence of Einstein.  They asked all the same questions and he gave all the same answers I had just recited.  With each interchange, I grew a little and then a lot angry.  I have a very long professional fuse and a pretty good sense of humor because it all goes with the job.  But on this particular day at this particular meeting I found their behavior outrageous and a bit indecent since this meeting had been my brainchild as a way to help them all keep moving toward a successful tenure application.  After the dean left, I expressed my incredulity at what had just happened and qualified my forthcoming rant with "this is coming on the back end of six weeks of people coming at me like tigers over course scheduling". 

I did rant. About the outrageousness of what had just happened--how they had accepted the dean's answers without question, how I had arranged the meeting to support their efforts, and that they all have Ph.D's, they're all smart people and it's a bit like applying for a job--they all do different things, so no one can tell them how to explain their research programs; at some point they're just going to have to figure it out. At that point they had succeded in increasing my heat index to the level of their own.  In retrospect, I think I led with the sexist nature of prior events. I also made sure they knew that after the meeting I would go into the dean's office and explain to him exactly what I had said.  I did.  I would have handled the situation differently if I had it to do over again, but I didn't.  I received a summer research plan from each of them as well as the ones who (I think fortunately) missed the excitement.  Later that week I saw them all gathered for a beer at Pippin's pub and went the other way so as not to pass their (I imagined) unflattering debriefing.   

It is the beginning of a new school year.  My book was published in April. Our new curriculum is rolling out as I write this.  All the conversion in course numbers and descriptions have been entered into our course catalogs with the help of my steady Assistant Dean.  My administrative assistant has constrained her long explanations to a couple of office visits and anomalous shouts of details as I pass by her desk to use the ladies room or when I am near the elevator--either to arrive for the day or leave the building.  Faculty are starting to teach their classes and I am putting together my file for promotion to full professor.  I think I have earned it. I have a meeting with the dean next week about a big new assessment project and launching the implementation of our graduate program. The book seems to be selling and life goes on.  More later because as Dylan would say, "the times, they are a changing. . . ":)