Committee Work, Politics, and the Future

For the last couple of weeks, I've been quietly bitching about all the stuff I need to do that's only tangentially related to teaching. I'm chair of a fairly active committee that's had several subcommittee meetings, and a whole flurry of e-mail exchanges, mostly about a proposal for a professional development seminar in the fall that was due this week. I'm on another committee that had to hear some appeals about its recommendations, which turned out to be basically gripe fests. I'm doing some word processing and formatting for the chair of a statewide professional organizations. This chair is a nice guy, but seems to be technologically and organizationally challenged. Anyway, between one thing and another, I haven't been able to concentrate on my students as much as I should.

So, yesterday, my friend Dr. Furriner took me aside and asked me to consider running for department chair next year.

Some background: Demographics in my field are changing, in terms of the number of foreign-born Ph.D.'s who are taking teaching jobs at my level. Every single tenured member of our department is a native-born U.S. citizen. Dr. F was voted tenure by the department this year, and, barring any unforseen snags at the administrative level, will become the first foreign-born tenured faculty member. However, half of the junior faculty are foreign-born, and we've just been on a hiring spree which will tip the balance to over half.

Dr. F thinks that the department has a double standard with regards to foreign-born faculty. She feels that the foreign-born faculty are held to a higher standard in the classroom, given worse teaching assignments, and otherwise just treated as, well, second-class citizens.

Our department chair will be stepping down after next year, having reached the end of her second three-year term. (I'm not sure whether the two-term limit is actually written down anywhere, but at the very least it's a deep seated tradition.) There's a natural candidate to step in next, whom I will call Dr. Dauphin. I think everyone expects Dr. D to be chair and to do a good job of it. However, Dr. Furriner thinks that Dr. D is one of the people who perpetuates the double standard, and that it will get worse with her as chair. Dr. F thinks that I, on the other hand, will work to make things better.

So, I'm thinking about it.

On the one hand, I really don't want to do it. Our chair gets release time from teaching, meaning that I get to give up the fun part of my job for extra meetings and extra paperwork.

On the other hand, I recognize the validity of Dr. F's concerns about Dr. D. Whether or not Dr. D has anything against foreign faculty, the fact is that she lacks some people skills. Her office is near mine, and I don't really like the way that she treats her students sometimes. She tends to assume that she knows a lot about them, and that the reason that they aren't doing well in her class is because they aren't working exactly up to her standards. If she treats junior faculty that way, it could be a source of some friction.

On the other hand, I might deal well with junior faculty, but I probably won't deal well with administration. There are times when the department chair has to stand up to the Dean or to the Provost and say, "This is what's best for our department and our students." Our current chair is good at that, and Dr. D would be good, too. I'm too conciliatory. That's also going to hurt me if, heaven forfend, I have to deal with junior faculty who really aren't working up to standards. It will be hard for me to go to a junior faculty member and say, "Shape up, or ship out."

On the other hand, Dr. F is also concerned about our department tending toward the traditional. We don't do much to encourage new and innovative teaching methods. We are certainly well behind other departments in things like technology in the classroom or hybrid courses. Dr. D is pretty traditional, and would probably continue that trend. I'm a lot more open-minded, and I'd probably encourage new faculty to try innovative ideas.

On the other hand, I'm organizationally challenged, and I would probably go crazy trying to attend to the minute details of scheduling, budgeting, and all the other day-to-day crap that the chair has to do.

On the other hand, I'm running out of hands.

So, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Dr. F made a point of talking to me early, because she didn't want me to feel like I was rushed into things at the last minute. But that means it's close to a year before I need to seriously decide what to do. So, I'll do what I usually do with hard decisions. I'll turn it over and over in my mind until I can make sense of it. A very good time to do that is when I'm out on the road. I ran more than an hour this morning, and believe me, a good deal of that time was spent thinking about this.

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