King For A Day: Tips From the Kid Crashing the Chair's Meeting

Today I got to be department chair for a bit, attending the (presumably) regular meeting of the various department chairs in my division. I had some spare time, and I'm in need from some University goodwill, so why not go, right?

As it turns out, there are a lot of reasons you might not want to go to a Chair's meeting and a lot of finely tuned etiquette involved in these moments, and so I offer you some tips to consider should this offer ever come your way.

Tip #1: When someone asks you if you can do this sort of thing, make sure to ask what's the on the agenda before you agree.

As it turns out, if the meeting I attended had a "$10,000 Pyramid" title, it could have been any of the following: "Things That Are Pissing People Off," "Things That Cookies Cannot Salvage," or even "Things That Will Cause the Chair Of History to Cite University Historical Precedent for Twenty Minutes Without Drawing a Breath."

(Seriously, history chairs, what the hell? If we stop the jokes about your discipline being irrelevant, will you go easy on the soliloquies?)

We talked about technology, we talked about a failed university PR event, and we talked about scheduling meeting times. Department chairs have a lot to say about these things. All of it angry. Even a cursory examination of the agenda would have revealed this, allowing a suitable excuse to be formulated to help avoid the meeting.

Now, this is actually the second - maybe the third time - I've done this. Today's was the most amusing because there were special guests (more special than me!). And if you think being a tree-shaking, untenured faculty member makes you unwelcome at one of these things, try attending as the person who is in charge of the technology that's been dropped from on-high (and a little haphazardly) onto the university community.

Tip #2: If you're the guy in charge of the technology that's recently been dropped from on-high (and a little haphazardly) onto the university community, when the leader of the meeting asks something like "So, does anyone have anything they want to ask about the new technology?" you must flee the room.

This is a blood in the water moment. The person running the meeting has just dumped chum in the metaphorical waters. If you don't get out, you've only yourself (and years of bureaucracy-induced madness) to blame.

I'm not sure, but I think the reason for this may be that department chairs have moved just far enough up the ladder that they rarely get to complain. They hear lots of complaints, but they rarely get a chance to cut lose themselves. And that's a shame, really, because they're pros. Ever seen someone who doesn't like Blackboard but uses it anyway because they think they must talk about why they wish they weren't using it? Kick them in the shins then ask, and you've got what this meeting was like.

Tip #3: If you're the tree-shaking, untenured faculty member at the Chair's meeting when the chum's in the water, think carefully when and how you open your mouth.

There are acceptable reasons to open your mouth: taking a bite of a cookie is a good reason. Trying to cut past the overly-specific complaints to a general suggestion in order to move on to the next bullet point on the agenda is not. This makes the natives angry. They've earned their venting time by helping to prevent things from falling on you when you last shook a tree. Let them have their fun.

Also, suggesting things leads to committee work. Always. Instead, ask for more cookies. Cookies never lead to committee work.

Tip #4: Many other things lead to committee work.

Among the things that increase the likelihood of a committee being formed with you implicated in its membership are the following: taking notes, nodding, any vocalization which sounds remotely positive (Ex: "Yes!", "Mm-hm.", "You go, girl!"), vocalizations which sound remotely negative (Ex: "No.", "Uh-uh.", snoring), direct eye contact, showing up late, leaving early, allowing someone else to speak, interrupting the wrong person speaking.

If you get sucked onto a committee, my advice is to try your best to become the person in charge of it. The reasons for this are three-fold. First, the person in charge of a committee determines how often and when the committee works. And in most cases, their schedule will be the exact opposite of yours. Second, being in charge of the committee means you get to set the agenda, and that means you can try your best to force a quick, non-bureaucratic solution. Third, the person in charge gets to order the cookies.

Tip #5: Any meeting you can walk away from was probably just seconds shy of being so long you lost the feeling in your lower extremities.

Plan accordingly.

So glad this isn't the positive thinking week

So I'm proposing a course for my department.

This has become one of the big advancement objectives of late, and the school is all about objectives. Maybe this is happening everywhere. On my syllabi now, I not only have to list my objectives for the course (a good thing), but also the department's overall objectives (a questionable thing), and the university's general education guidelines (much more questionable). My syllabus, on average, has gained a page and a half due to various objects and explanations of objectives and explanations of how thing X satisfies objective C. I remember this from the business world, and I recall from my days managing there that it didn't do much to create the "excellent customer service opportunities" it was meant to because really, who wants to listen to ten minutes of that crap just so you can check your balance.

A syllabus works the same way, kids. I remember in grad school being given a 42 page syllabus from a professor who was teaching a course that I desperately wanted to take. The syllabus though was Exhibit A - in 10 point font and excruciating detail - of this professor's mania. Somewhere around page 13 of our in-depth reading of it, I found myself so disinterested in the course and the topic that I politely excused myself, went to drop the class, and began to rethink whether this was the thing for me to study or not.

Maybe this was the professor's point. And actually I don't have a problem with them designing a syllabus that way if it was their goal. I'm fine with the quick reading I got of the prof and all their issues, faults, and quirks. A good syllabus should probably do exactly that. But I do have a problem with being forced to represent someone else's manias in my syllabus. If I'm going to look crazy, it should at least be an honest representation.

All of which leads me to the course I'm designing for the department. There's been a lot of pressure lately for our department to participate in an interdisciplinary Master's program being toyed with here. Calls have been made, edicts passed down, discomfort has been registered. But I like designing courses, and I want the chance to work with graduate students again, so in I jumped. Thinking that the first course we should have would need to be flexible, I put together a pretty flexible special topics course that would allow whichever of the limited departmental faculty who could find time to teach a course a way to either tie to an existing course (and thus manage an extra prep somewhat more easily) or to do something related to their current research and interests.

As part of the exercise, I had to design a syllabus for this course which isn't on the books (and help me out here, that is the point of this right? To get a course on the books so that someday it might be offered?). And I received the committee's comments and requirements for making the syllabus for this imaginary course. Among the easy to fix but utterly silly gems was a demand for office hours to be listed. Okay, it's silly and nit-picky, but alright. I can make up fake office hours for a course that hasn't been approved in an as-yet undetermined term.

The amusement goes on. One comment says they can't make sense of how grades are tabulated. I work on a points system. All the work in any course is always worth a total number of points (let's say 500). Each assignment has an assigned point value (let's say there are six assignments, two early ones worth 50 points, and the other four 100 points each). Confused yet?

I guess math is hard, Barbie.

But more irritating was the continuing attendance policy question. Out of the eight changes that were requested, three of them have to do with attendance policies. Random people from random departments will call me at least twice a term to ask how Student X's attendance has been. They never ask how their work has been. No one has yet called to ask me how a student was doing with the actual business of a course; they only ask if they've been spotted in a chair in recent memory.

My university loves attendance policies. It seems to have a passion for attendance policies that I can only compare with my love for my bed on a Sunday morning.

To be clear, attendance policies irritate the hell out of me. As I tell my students - in my syllabus and in the opening day lecture - attendance is assumed. You'd be stupid not to come to every class, mine included, at every available opportunity. You're paying enough for it, after all - and that's what you're paying for: not a grade, not a good grade, not for me to listen to your problems and solve them, not for me to give you warm and fuzzy feedback, not for me to agree with your views or to hide my own. You're paying an entrance fee to be exposed to ideas, to have me help you evaluate and use those ideas, and to have me use those ideas in the evaluation of your work.

Let me repeat (as I do in that opening lecture): I'm not here to be your mommy. I don't care if you attend. In fact, if you can't show up interested and prepared, I'd rather you didn't so that the students who were smart enough to take advantage of what they're paying for don't have to suffer your disruptions.

How do I grade on attendance? I grade your assignments. If you're not attending, it will absolutely affect your grade. I'm not going to give you points for your ability to sit in a chair. And I'm not going to waste my time taking points off if you come in late or leave early. My time is worth more than that, honestly, and deserves to be better spent. It will come out on its own, thee I do assure.

What could be clearer than that?