My chair sends me e-mail

To: twice@smallliberalartscollege.edu

From: chair@smallliberalartscollege.edu

T,

Interviews are all scheduled for Tues 5/4, Tues 5/11 and Th 5/13.  
Everyone is scheduled into a slot to talk with candidates, except you.

Could you meet on each of these dates at 10?

Chair

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From the tone, one would assume that I had been asked once (or perhaps repeatedly) to sign up for a time to meet the candidates. That assumption would not be correct.

Too many committees

This year I was elected to the large college committee that deals with curriculum and other academic issues. This is a committee with a heavy workload, but it has largely been interesting. The makeup of the committee is diverse, but there are no true curmudgeons and there are no aggressively negative people.

I also recently joined a committee that is making revisions to a controversial program. As I mentioned in my last post, the chairperson of the committee seems to lack leadership ability. He gets defensive and is incapable of seeing obvious ways to advocate for the program. For example, if you have announced at the beginning of a feedback session that you will be doing a faculty survey on the program in the next few weeks, and then about 25 more people arrive at the session and one of them asks why you aren't doing a survey, I would think it would be a good idea to repeat the previous announcement about the survey. Or, I suppose, you could sit there and not say anything.

One of my colleagues from another STEM department is relatively senior, extremely reasonable and a good friend. He and I are on this program committee and have been trying to guide the chair to be more of an advocate for the program. This is very painful at times. So much so, I recently confessed to Friend Colleague that I had considered quitting the committee, but I didn't think it would be fair to him. Friend Colleague admitted he had thought of leaving too, but that he didn't because he didn't think it would be fair to me. We concluded that the next time we have reservations about joining a committee, we should check with one another before doing so.

The program committee recently finished revisions and sent them to the large college committee. The chair of the large college committee called me to ask if the chair of the program committee (who is not on the large college committee) should be asked to come to the large college committee meeting. I responded, "I really don't see how that would be helpful." He responded, "That's what I thought."