Getting Used to Leaving

My department surprised me last week: at our student honors ceremony, I got flowers, and four of my colleagues--an associate chair, my two predecessors as chair, and one of the writing program administrators--made amazingly beautiful remarks. "It's better than retiring," one of my colleagues noted later. "When you retire, no one who preceded you is around to speak." It was interesting--and so moving--to hear what people said. My predecessors, Long Serving Chair (who hired me), said that I'm really organized, not simply because I need to be or like to be, but because I can see into the future of situations and I use organization to present that vision to others. Shorter Serving Chair (the chair when I got tenure) also spoke about my organization, and about his memories of the dinner we had during my campus interview. He said he was proud of the work he'd done helping to hire Politica and me back from Big Sky State U, and that while he knew at the time that we were meant to be at current U, he was now forced to see that New U is the right place for us (and Curious Girl). My writing program colleague joked that she'd taught me to say no, and I'd taught her to delegate, so we were a great team. She'll miss me as a colleague in writing but also as a friend, and talked about how special it is that she plays a wonderful role in CG's life (CG calls her Tante Colleague, and she's really like another grandparent to CG). Our associate chair said that I'm a good chair because I work hard, dream big, and support other people in achieving their dreams.

I was pretty speechless--we're having a department party after the semester ends, and I had planned to have something to say there, and I had remarks ready for our last department meeting. But after all that, mostly, all I could say was "you're welcome" in response to that big departmental "thank you."

Politica laughed when I came home and told her about it, laughing mostly about the being organized part. "I am organized! I just use those powers at school more than home," I insisted. The fact that I have somehow lost my parking permit twice this year is no reflection on my organization.

I was touched that so many of my colleagues mentioned CG in their remarks. My department has been a very family-friendly workplace, and I'll miss having colleagues who've been so interested in my kid. I'm going to miss having colleagues who have known me so long. I know I'll build good new relationships at New U, but I'm realizing just how much I'm going to miss, moving from the place where most of my career has taken place.

I feel a little freer now, though. This surprise helped me move into leaving, really leaving. I'm having secret transition meetings with my yet-unannounced successor. Earlier in the semester I was feeling a little badly that a few key projects aren't finished yet, but today I realized that it's OK. It's not the chair's job to finish everything. These projects--like a promotion and tenure criteria document--belong to the department, not to any single chair, and in the life cycle of a department, some things need to move from spring to fall. I'm leaving various projects in various stages, and that's OK. It's a sign of a healthy department (or so I tell myself), that we have ongoing business. The department is going to be fine. And I'm feeling fine now, too, fine to be leaving. It's been hard this year, knowing all year that I was going to be leaving. I had a verbal job offer from New U in June 2007. That's an unusually long time for an academic position to be open and waiting. I've been making plans for the new job while doing the current job. Things are tipping now, slowly, towards the new job. Somehow, the ceremonial surprise helped free me up for that. And that may be the most moving thing of all about it.

Given all the emphasis on my organization, I tidied up my bookshelves and cleared the top of my desk off. I know my colleagues weren't speaking about organization only in terms of office tidiness (in fact, I doubt they were thinking of that at all, given I have had a slew of Politica's things in my office this year and a growing collection of empty boxes making a grand mess). Still, it seemed like my office should reflect the department's description of me. I wonder what my new office style will communicate to my new colleagues. But that's a post for another day...

Just Say No (Thanks), But Say It Well

I don't know how many academic jobs I've applied for over the years. I had two big years of job searching, one right as I was finishing my doctorate, in which I applied for jobs all over the US and Canada and tried to work out whether I wanted to be a literature-and-writing researcher or a composition and literarcy researcher, one in which I thought I wanted to be a literature specialist, and then a few more scattered applications here and there for positions that seemed interesting. That's a lot of letters, and, of course, a lot of rejection letters sent my way. I still remember two of them: one, from Big State University, a short rejection letter in the fall, after they'd asked to see a writing sample, with a handwritten note from someone on the committee at the bottom. She used an ocean metaphor I can't quite recall to say that she was glad to have come across my scholarship in the search, and that while this wasn't a good fit, she looked forward to seeing more of my work, more of me in the future. The other, a full-page letter sent from Regional State University, went to all applicants who'd applied for a position whose funding had been yanked after the position had been posted. The department chair's letter explained the situation, and talked about how he had loved reading all the applications, describing in general terms the kinds of research and teaching interests he had seen reflected in the applications, and how much he wished he had the chance to meet more of us, and how he wished us well.

Those letters were written by people who were imagining readers on the other side. They were written by people who were self-conscious about the rhetorical situation. They made me feel good about my work, because both letters showed me that real people were out there reading them.

Tenured Radical recently posted on the art of rejection letters. Her tips, as always, are sound, and search committees would do well to heed them:

1. Do not send rejections by email.
2. Do not send rejections by post card.
3. When writing a letter to candidates, if you actually met them, or solicited the candidacy, take two seconds to write a personal note. This means not having your departmental secretary sign them, of course.
4. Send rejections in a timely way: at least when the search is over, if not before. In fact, although wisdom has it that you reject no one until the chosen candidate has signed on the dotted line, truth be told, a large part of the pool is out of the running after the first cut. Why not tell the people who didn't make the semi-final cut -- say, in January, rather than April? [just to be clear: these 4 tips are the Radical's words, not mine]

I'd add a bit to TR's excellent list (framed in the way that English searches happen, which is to say, with deadlines in the fall, interviews at or around the time of the MLA convention in late December, and campus visits anywhere from January through March):

1. Do not send rejections by voice mail on people's home phones.
   
2. Send rejections in ways that acknowledge interactions with the candidates (at least the formal stages of the search): a letter to someone you interviewed at the convention should be a bit different from someone who didn't make that cut. It should be clear to the candidate that you remember meeting them, and that you remember something about their work. It is easy to personalize letters given the wonders of mail merge.
3. Send rejections. Does the fact that the campuses who never wrote to me back in 1990 when I applied mean that I'm still in the running? Probably not, and in any event, I've not found the job I want for the next phase of my careers.
   
4. Send rejections in waves. When you advertise for a position in Magical Forestry, and specialists in Green Peas who took a single course in Magical Forestry apply, it's pretty clear that you wouldn't hire a Green Pea specialist for the position even if everyone else in the applicant pool fell away. There are probably other candidates who are clearly not going to make the final cut. So send those rejections promptly (I wait until the affirmative action review of the interview list is settled). There's no reason to wait until after the search has concluded, which in English can sometimes be 6-8 months after applications are first received.
   
5. When you interview candidates at MLA, and a few of those candidates are clearly not a good fit, send those rejections right away, too.
6. When you invite your top candidates to campus, but think that the next few people on your convention interview list might be fine to invite if some of your top candidates withdraw, let the other candidates know. Yes, this will let them know that they are not your top choice, but they're likely to figure that out when it's mid February and you still haven't called. This gives you a chance to say, "We've invited some other candidates to campus. We had strong applicants and we're impressed with you and your work. We'll keep you posted." This kind of honesty lets candidates know where they stand. OK, this isn't exactly about rejections, but it's related.
   
7. When people come to campus, and they don't get the job, write them a personal note that acknowledges the ways in which they interacted with you. Yes, it is difficult to write such a letter, especially when the reasons for ranking candidates sometimes turns on things candidates can't control (like whose secondary interests overlap or don't with other members of the department), and when candidates 2 and 3 may be really quite good. A short, general "We're reviewing applications and unfortunately your application will not proceed any farther in the search" kind of letter is fine for an early refection, but rejections later in the search should acknowledge the nature of the contact with the candidate.

In some of the departments I've worked in, search committees have used very brief letters of rejection out of fear of creating extended interactions with rejected candidates. But from the writing side, and the receiving side, I'm more comfortable with letters that reveal the humanity in the process. (I'll pause for some snickers. yes, there is much to be cynical about in academic job searches, but the search committees I've participated on or supervised as chair have generally done a fine job working through a crazy process.) There are people on both sides of the search, and search committees hold almost all the power through most of the search. Our correspondence should be gracious, clear, honest, and timely. Searching creates networks, and we never know how candidates will move along in their careers. Writing well on a search creates a good impression of a department, and it helps job seekers.

And yes, I do like to read Ms. Manners, in case anyone was wondering.

Comments and Comment Settings

I wasn't organized enough to participate in Robin's most excellent carnival on blog reader appreciation, but it's never too late to tell people you appreciate their presence and their words. So thank you, readers. I love my readers and commenters (and those of you who read and every now and again delurk). When I check my site meter, I'm even grateful for people I can see are reading and not commenting. You don't mind when I post less often, or more often, and you read through my various blogging moods: more academic for a while, more adoption for a while, more meme-y for a while. Thank you for reading. I read and write much of most days at work, but I enjoy having this space to write in a different voice, about different topics, with people who follow my random strands of consciousness over time.

With all that appreciation in mind, let me ask a question about comment setting on blogger. Aetako notes in the comments on punctuation that my comment settings are changed to prevent anonymous comments: I recently changed the comment settings from "anyone can comment" to "registered users--includes OpenID." I made that change because for the past 20 posts or so, every post I make generates four anonymous Chinese spam comments (at least, I assume it's spam b/c I can't read Chinese!). I got tired of deleting it. Although, come to think of it, the last post generated Chinese spam from a registered-with-blogger user with the userid "you," and I had to delete that, too. I don't know why my little blog attracts these 4-spam Chinese spambots, and I don't know why it bugs me that someone wants to attach spam to some older posts. So maybe I should just go back to letting anyone comment.

Anyone have strong feelings about this? I don't want to discourage people who want to comment here!

She's a Comma, I'm a Comma, are you a comma too?

Rev. Dr. Mom is a comma. So am I. What about you?

You Are a Comma

You are open minded and extremely optimistic. You enjoy almost all facets of life. You can find the good in almost anything. You keep yourself busy with tons of friends, activities, and interests. You find it hard to turn down an opportunity, even if you are pressed for time. Your friends find you fascinating, charming, and easy to talk to. (But with so many competing interests, you friends do feel like you hardly have time for them.) You excel in: Inspiring people You get along best with: The Question Mark

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

Haiku is more fun than Houses

House indecision reigns (buy now, or wait a bit and risk losing what we kind of like now? buy a smaller house where we could ski/snowshoe from the back door and walk to the center of Cute Little Town?) , so what better than haiku? (via pilgrim/heretic, and you can get your own)

went to sleep planning
to dream about living with
her and i love the

series with the girls
they are not uncommon i
feel closer to joyce

i love cg's teachers
they knew cg was born always
saying we don't

next can't you see
shouted piglet haven't
you got eyes look at

what to do that is
truly at home and somehow
i think the movie

German Houses

Curious Girl continues to confuse Germany (the real thing) with Germany (the place we're moving, where we are right now, looking for houses and me doing some preliminary set up for next year). "Can we go to the Hello Kitty street?" she asked last night as we drove home from dinner. The Hello Kitty street is in Berlin, near the Hackesche Markt: there's a Hello Kitty store near by, with a sign on a lamppost close to the train station. We used that sign to guide us down the street to the apartment we rented for a week last summer.

We are also house hunting. We know what neighborhood we want to live in, but there aren't any houses for sale there. Well, there are two for sale, but one is on a majorly busy street and the other just doesn't have the kind of layout we want. So we can't decide whether to wait and see whether more houses come on the market in this neighborhood, or whether to set our sights on another neighborhood.

So we've been looking in other neighborhoods, trying to decide whether we should live someplace more suburban (where the housing is much cheaper), whether we should live in a cute small town 15-20 minutes away from the campus we'll be working at (and whether we should live in the suburban part of said cute town, or in the center, in a smaller house that's walking distance to the center of small cute town). Or would it be better to be closer to the area's Distinguishing Geographic Characteristic? Or to have a view of that Characteristic?

Germany isn't the most diverse spot in the US, but the cute small town is less diverse than the not-so-diverse-and-way-more-expensive city. Tough choices.

Maybe this means we've just not yet found the right house. And we're definitely overthinking this all. I hope some clarity will emerge when we sleep on it.

Princess Sita

Curious Girl came up with the title, and she wishes this post could be written in cursive. So use your imaginations on that score. This post is inspired by Librarian Mom and her princess-loving daughter, who got it from Alkelda the Gleeful, whose blog I've never read but will now start because how could anyone not love a name like Alkelda the Gleeful?

We're off to househunt (and me to do some consulting) in Germany! So wish us good househunting vibes, and here's a quick guest blog by Curious Girl herself, with help from Mama.

What do you like about princesses?

They're girls. They're my favorite thing in the whole wide world, because they are all my favorite princesses.

What do princesses do?

Dance.

When you pretend to be a princess, what do you like to do?

Dance. I was Ariel last night and I was swimming with Snow White's baby sister, and she was scared. I said, "It's OK, do you want your sister to come with us?" and she said "goo goo, yes." And then she changed her mind and so Ariel and Baby Sister went swimming alone, and then we did a pattern, and I got so tired swimming I almost fell right down when I was swimming I was so tired. But I didn't! And Phew! That's good.

When I'm Belle, Belle and Cinderella both live in a cottage together. We saw ABC things all over the place. We, Belle and Cinderella, thought the people who do the ABCs a lot, this would be their cottage, so we would take a little walk and went out for a walk in the woods, and we saw candies everywhere! And that was the track. So we picked them up and followed the candy track, and always picked them and picked them and picked them, and when we got home, there was the ABC girl. And we were like "Is that you, ABC Girl? Can we go to your house?" And her hair was all fancy just like ours. She was going back home and she didn't see much candy because we hid it all in her house so she got lost. And that was the track to her house. She was lost almost forever, but not forever, finally. She didn't get home in time for supper but after everyone was asleep and all the wolves and scary things were out, she was home.

What do princesses do that is good?

They kill bad guys with their magic powers. They are kind, isn't that good? They don't be scary, and that is so good.

What are some princess stories that you like?

Cinderella and Belle and Sleeping Beauty, Mulan. Editor's note: we don't actually read a lot of princess stories around here--you can get a good sense of Curious Girl's princess play ideas from her answers so far. But I'm looking forward to her being old enough for Patricia Wrede's Dealing with Dragons and its sequels. Cimorene, Wrede's heroine, is a kindred spirit to Elizabeth, The Paperbag Princess, with a much longer plot and series. And Lauren Child's Princess and the Pea is beautiful, although the humor is a bit over CG's head at the moment.

Anything else you want to say about princesses?

Once upon a time, we were in Disneyland, and when we were in Disneyland, we saw princesses. We went to Belle's area, and there were some princesses I haven't met yet (ed. note: Jasmine and Mulan) and I was so excited to see them. We met each other, and we met each other again at lunch. I liked talking to Belle, and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella told us stories.

I lost two teeth. I wish I could draw the tooth on the computer. (ed. question: when will Blogger add the KidPix tool?)