HALLOWEEN

More pictures to come, but for starters, here is my cross dressing son!

update from the admin trenches

Here's a gem from my inbox today:
"I have received a letter from a gentleman in prison who would like to learn Serbo-Croatian. Do you have any suggestions for texts that he might use at the beginning level?"
Hmmmm.

Another favorite moment - ran into a faculty member for whom I had just written an RPT letter, Said colleague had received the necessary copy and remarked gushingly: "Thanks for the letter, I had no idea you could write so well!"



On a more personal note, I've decided that I might be allergic to red wine, which as you will all recognize, constitutes a bad revelation in my world. I've decided to eliminate it and see whether the symptoms disappear. Of course they may be replaced by extreme crankiness and then we'll have to reassess.

dinner party

Saturday night we had people round for dinner, which is the only way we know to finish any sort of house improvement project. We finally put up all the Ikea panels in the family room - behold:



Then we set a beautiful table:






Then we danced! Ignore the red eye!

Road Trip

Today we went down to BYU to meet with some of the language program people. I must confess that in the eight years I have been here, I had not yet set foot on their campus. I did go to Provo last weekend for one of Sam's soccer games, but today was the first visit to that other campus. I was really impressed. First off the campus is beautiful and second, the people we met were really terrific. It was like so many meetings I have had since becoming an administrator - all overwhelming with the sense of possibilities. Of course, then we get in the car to drive back and contemplate who among our disenchanted or already incredibly overextended faculty we could enlist for a new initiative and reality sets in a little.
Letter season is grinding along. It is actually quite rewarding to delve into people's projects and try to understand them in a way that makes it possible to write a good letter. I'll learn a lot at least.

flying solo

uh oh. My other half in the land of chairdom has to fly home to a family emergeny in Spain so I will be ON MY OWN for the next six days. I have to run a faculty meeting on Thursday and, more horribly, spew out the first couple of our several letters of support for faculty sabbatical/grant/leave applications. This latter I was planning to take the lead on anyway, but it just feels a tad daunting knowing that editorial support will be in SPAIN on a significant time difference. Perhaps this is why I am well on my way through a bottle of red...or maybe I am just well on my way through a bottle of red.

ironies

So, last week we had to meet with an instructor whose last set of course evaluations were woefully poor. The meeting included such highlights as explaining that answering your cell phone during class on a regular enough basis to have it much noted in the evals, was just not on. There were also the usual laments about digresssions, homework never returned, and my personal favorite, the recomendation to get drunk before tests. Imagine my surprise when today I got through campus mail a notification of this instructor's nomination for a distinguished teaching award. I had to ring the person in charge and say I couldn't really see writing a glowing letter since I had just finished writing a summation of our little chat from last week and it was anything but a glowing endorsement of the person's teaching.

Administrative Update

The Co-Chairs have made it through the beginning of the semester, but not without some moments worth blogging about. Where to begin? Well, we appear to be a perfect team. We had been feeling this when we got through our first unpleasant meeting with a faculty member at which we played off each other and although faculty member left disgruntled, s/he was still on speaking terms with one of us (it wasn't yours truly as you will understand in what follows). This was highlighted in a meeting last week with a handful of the full professors. We have them meet as an advisory committee since each of them has more institutional memory than the two of us combined. It can be helpful, but also really grim. After this particular meeting, F said, "I thought that went pretty well." To which I replied, "What? Well? They called you "too sensitive" and me "Mussolini"... exactly how did that go "well"?" Well, I guess it did underscore our yin/yang-ness. (I think my siblings might empathasize with the Mussolini characterization.) Perhaps I should say what motivated the comparison. F and I subscribe to the wacky view that faculty members should attend departmental meetings and the yearly retreat. We realize this is 'out there'. After all, people are drawing a full-time salary and there is one meeting a month... but, hey, we think participation is in fact part of our jobs. So, after the retreat, we sent letters to all the absentee faculty noting their absence and hoping to see their full participation in the future. This did not go down well. I was reminded of my equally heinous record-keeping last spring when I kept track of who came to the job talks by our external chair candidates. One of the senior folks was heard to say that he wanted to "do something about the letter". Now, I'm wondering, perhaps he should go to our Dean to complain that we pointed out that he isn't doing his job and he is upset about this.
Other fun items.
Learned that one or our senior faculty members encourages a donation of a bottle of wine in return for writing a letter of recommendation....this came to my attention when the Mormon receptionist appeared holding a bottle at arm's length saying "what should I do with this?"
We see more clearly the ramifications of having no written by-laws or procedures. We cannot in fact vote on anything because we literally do not know how. What is a quorum? Do we vote by ballot or show of hands? Can people vote by proxy? By email?
Our working slogan is: Inventing the wheel, one spoke at a time!