Working, Mothering, and Success

Those of you who enjoyed Curious Girl's last observation about what makes a good department chair might be interested in this conversation, which took place in the family bathroom at the pool:

Curious Girl: I don't like this bathroom (gesturing at puddle on floor and various stray pieces of toilet paper, the kind that always appear in pool bathrooms on busy summer days). It's too litter-y.
Me: Well, lots of people are here today, and it's hard to keep a bathroom clean when so many people are using it. (I notice she's done with her business.) Here, dry your hands before you pull down the toilet paper--that way it won't shred in your hands like it did last time.
Curious Girl: Mama, that is such a good idea you had! What a good idea! That is because you are an apartment chair. You are right about everything. You are right all the time, because you are an apartment chair.
Me: Actually, sweetie, I'm not right all the time. I make mistakes. I just try to learn from them and do better next time.
CG: You are the best apartment chair!

So what does make a good department chair? It's certainly not the ability to be right all the time! I've spent some time this summer doing some hard writing--a few documents that had to be written regarding some issues that some of us didn't handle very well (in some cases, that us is me; in other cases, that us is other people; in some cases, the us is a combination of me and other people). The documents I've written are all different (not to mention unbloggable in their specificity), but all attempt to look ahead and imagine ways that similar future situations might be handled with different effects. One reason I am a good chair, I think, is my ability to step back from situations (even those where I'm part of a mess up) and imagine ways they could play out differently. Good chairs need to be able to see administrative and personnel possibilities, thinking about different ways to move groups toward a goal. Good chairs need to advocate for their department and their colleagues--which means sometimes, pushing people, and other times, getting out of the way.

It certainly doesn't mean being right all the time, but I trust it's OK that I'm rather tickled at the impression Curious Girl has developed about my acumen. And it's true, a good apartment chair does have the opportunity to introduce little tweaks to the system that just might keep things from shredding during use. Not such a bad outcome for a day.

Work/Life Balance

I'm at home today, working for an extra hour before we head to Friend Who Doesn't Want a Pseudonym's house for dinner. I found out today that my dad has serious coronary disease, and is going to have quadruple bypass surgery in the morning. This is a big surprise to all of us--Dad has had surprisingly few symptoms for a man whose heart is in the worst shape his surgeon has seen in quite some time--and I'm taking an extra hour before dinner to make progress on a paper that's seriously overdue. I want to get it done, first to just be done with it, and secondly, to allow myself easy travel out east to visit with my parents when my dad is out of the hospital (assuming all goes well tomorrow, knock wood, knock pixels.) Politica and Curious Girl are outside, giving me space to work. But the conversation that just transpired begs to be blogged, and begs to be remembered. So I'll write it here, and then get back to working.

Curious Girl: "Mama, what are you doing?"
Me: "I'm writing a paper."
CG: "What does it say? Who is it for?"
Me: "It's for other English teachers, to give them ideas about how to teach better."
CG: "That's a good idea. That's good, Mama."
CG: "You are the best! You are the best apartment chair."
CG: "Do you know why you're the best apartment chair?"
Me: "Sweetheart, that's really kind of you. Why am I the best apartment chair?"
CG: "Because you're a mother. Some other apartment chairs aren't mothers. But you are, so you're the best."

Maybe Lisa Belkin (against whom I competed in high school debate) should interview CG one of these days. And now, back to writing.

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.

First Lasts

Today feels like the first big last thing here: I chaired my last "apartment meeting," to use Curious Girl's term for it. I suppose teaching my last class here, back in December, was truly the first big last, but at the time, I wasn't so closely tied to the leaving. Now, with our house for sale, I'm beginning to leave.

These are, with slight edits, the remarks I presented to my department today. I'm not sure why I'm putting them up here, but I've got leaving on my mind tonight, and thought I'd start writing some about moving. So here's a piece of getting ready to leave my current position:

Jane Jacobs, in the final chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, notes

Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. They present situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and interacting in subtly interconnected ways (433)

and later,

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance. But vital cities are not helpless to combat even the most difficult of problems. They are not passive victims of chains of circumstances….Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties… Surplus wealth, productivity, the close-grained juxtaposition of talents that permit society to support [technological] advances…are themselves products of our organization into cities, and especially dense cities…dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves (447-448).

Jacobs speaks to me because I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 2 years pondering the size of our department, which we often construe to be a problem: we’re too big to socialize easily, too big to fit on one floor, too big to review each other quickly, too big to keep track of what goes on. Our size can be a problem—but reading Jacobs, I’m challenged to see the size a little differently. What if we considered our size to make us a dense city, in which our size becomes a virtue, in which the juxtaposition of programs and talents creates energy and sustainable life? City neighborhoods, after all, flourish only when there are safe public sidewalks, mixes of business and residences, mixes of day and evening activities, streets providing access to parks and varied schedules permitting good use of neighborhood resources.

I have cities on my mind today, as the Steering Committee’s draft strategic plan suggests that we shape a vision for ourselves of an urban English department, an English department located here, in this city. Whatever comes of the strategic planning process, I hope that we will be able to conceive of our large size as a strength. As I finish the performance review process, I’m struck by the variety of talents housed within our department. Our interests are broad, yet we are drawn together by an interest in how English functions in the world—as a literary pursuit, as a matter of personal expression, professional transactions, cinematic productions, in translation or interpretation. We’ll likely never rename ourselves the City of English, but if we could, it might inspire us to see a lively mixed use neighborhood reviving and connecting with those across its borders as a good metaphor for the work ahead.

Over the past two years, we’ve gotten organized. While I expect that some of our processes will come up for review and perhaps revision over the next year or two, the promotion and tenure processes and the performance review processes are logistically smooth. More importantly, we have good criteria for annual reviews, so our conversations about what we expect of each other have a common basis. There are good P&T matters to report: More associate professors are talking about promotion, and we have more models for promotion in our nontenured full time ranks.

So what’s left, now that things are organized: The Steering Committee has done wonderful work in jumpstarting a strategic planning process. The draft strategic plan before us today is just a beginning, and all of us on the Steering Committee fully expect there to be major changes in this document before it is adopted. A strategic plan that permits us to conceive of ourselves as a healthy, vibrant city, in which many different activities interact to create a vibrant core: that will be a document guiding the transition to the department as an organization that is truly at home with itself. I will be sorry not to be here when that plan is adopted—I would hope in late 2008—but I am pleased to be part of the group that has brought this planning process to this point.

This meeting marks the first of many lasts for me: it’s my last department meeting, although it seems too early in the year for that, and I struggled to decide what to say in my remarks today. While it may be my last department meeting, it’s not even close to my last day as chair, so it’s hardly time to say good bye. But it is time to say thank you: to the clerical staff, whose work enables each of us to connect more easily with the bureaucracies that govern our working lives, and whose willingness to reinvent job responsibilities has stretched our clerical talent and resources in amazing ways; to the Steering Committee, which has persevered through conflicting schedules to produce some very interesting work this year; to everyone who has said yes to my requests for help with one-off requests (scholarship committees, student awards days, just to name a few); to everyone who’s served on a standing committee; to everyone who’s been involved with public events for the department; the area coordinators and full professors, who have been generous with advice and perspectives when I needed help. You’ll notice I’m not naming names here, in part for fear of forgetting anyone, in part to save time. But I do want to thank two people in particular: J and R, who, in their different ways, have helped me be a better chair. They share an ability to look past how things are to see how they might be. J’s work on student affairs and R’s project-based work have helped me keep a focus on getting things done. My failings are my own, but I know I have fewer for having had two such wonderful associate chairs. So thanks to you two.

I’ve joked this year that in leaving unexpectedly early in term as chair, I instantly became the best chair the department would ever have, since surprise about my early resignation might obscure my shortcomings. Institutional memory is short around here—in a department and school that sometimes seems to forget more than it remembers, perhaps the best judge of success is not legacy but life in the moment. Almost every day I’ve come to work, I’ve walked into the building looking forward to the day ahead. Not just because I finally had windows—but because every day, I got to go to work, help someone solve some kind of problem, and have at least one kind of conversation about some dimension of our common mission to change the way people use language. I’m glad to have this job, and I look forward to my remaining months here. Thank you.

Random Update

• I am almost, but not quite, finished with the performance reviews in my department. My colleagues are unevenly invested in performance reviews: some don't seem to take any part of the process seriously (reporting or reviewing), some take it seriously and very personally, while others take it seriously with more distance. Reviewing serves some emotional purposes that I don't think we all fully understand--and certainly haven't articulated, in our very rational review standards and processes. I've been thinking quite a bit about the emotional purposes served by performance reviews, and how different people use them (or resist them) in career development. Although this is my last year doing performance reviews, I'd like to leave the department with a framework for considering how to help this task seem more useful across the board. I hope my practice of meeting with almost everyone individually is a step in that direction, but I want to explore how reviewing might be better targeted, so people feel better understood by the system.
• There's nothing like death and potty training to bring readers out to the comment boxes! Thanks so much for all the support and suggestions. It's been invaluable, and I can't thank you all enough.
  
• A potty update: I went back to reminding Curious Girl to go potty at regular intervals, usually around every 60-90 minutes, and at significant activity shifts (before a playdate, before leaving the house, upon coming home from school, before dinner). She's had only one accident in over a week now (and that was on a playdate at a friend's). She is also more likely to say "I have to go!" when I'm generally setting the structure in place. Things are good again.
• Anyone wondering whether a five or six year old child who is still having lots of accidents is normal should conclude that yes! it's very normal. Between the comments here, the private e-mail, and the comments on a yahoogroup I belong to, I've heard a lot of stories of older children who are still a little uneven on the potty front. Constipation is not always easy to detect, so there may be a medical component, but older kids with potty issues are not uncommon. I feel so relieved to hear that. I encourage--and always have encouraged--Curious Girl to be independent in some respects from a very early age (she started helping to clear her place at the table when she was probably two, for example). The week I spent convinced that The Authorities who think A Five Year Old Should be Indpendent with The Potty were correct was a miserable week. She needs a little reminding, and perhaps other kids do, too. Independence comes by many routes, and sometimes, teamwork with a parent is the best thing. We should talk more about such issues, as most of the mail I got from other parents in this situation expressed a bit of "but I thought my kid was the only one who..." Your kid isn't, and neither is mine. And she's splendid anyway.
• Curious Girl attended a Jane Brown adoption playshop this week. Jane is an amazing speaker--she did a three hour presentation for parents the night before, with no notes, very graceful and eloquent and engaging--and she's also great with kids. The two hour playshop gets adopted children and their siblings playing with each other, talking about adoption. They made little braided bracelets (one thread representing their first family, one representing themselves, one their current families) and learned how braided things are stronger than the threads alone. They did a play about a general adoption story, taking the roles of birth parents, prospective adoptive parents, children, siblings. They talked about how to respond to bullying and teasing and played different responses (and did scenes with puppets, too). They talked about how people are the same and different, about how many things are the same even if, say, skin color or eye folds are different.
• When we were watching a movie later, CG said, "the people in this movie are all the same color." Then she said, "but everyone is special. We all have eyes, and a heart inside." Tonight, she told me that she wished--in the part of the playshop where they made wishes about their birth families--that we knew more about J. and S., her birth parents. She cried a bit, told me we don't even have a picture, we don't know anything about them. "You know a little bit, but I don't know anything," she said. I told her that I would never, never, never have secrets about her first family, and that everything I know, she will know. I also said, "Sounds like you're feeling sad." So we talked about her sadness for a while, and I told her that I'm sad, too, that she doesn't know much about her first family. We ended up talking about the possibility of her having siblings in her first family, and she went to sleep planning to dream about living with her brothers and sisters and birth parents. She told me I could come in the dream, but that I couldn't live with them.
• "Pretend you're J., and you keeped me," she said, right before she fell asleep. This is a tricky situation. Politica and I are very careful never to speak for her birth parents. We have always (in age appropriate ways) tried to show CG the multiple reasons her first parents might not have been able to care for a baby when CG was born, always saying we don't know why. On a few other occasions CG has said "pretend I came from your belly," and I have always said "no, I can't. You grew inside J." but tonight, she said, for the first time, "Pretend you're J." I pretend to be any number of other people or things (in the course of today, I've pretended to be a cat, her big sister, her little sister, her baby, her student, her teacher, her ballet teacher). Can I pretend to be J.? My instinct was no, I can't, but I'm also aware that pretending is how she works things out. I don't want to block her attempts to work out adoption issues, especially now when she is clearly on the cusp of getting her mind around the fact that being adopted means that someone didn't keep her. She's coming to terms with the loss she suffered in a way she never has, despite the fact that she's long known the general facts of her story. Those facts are starting to be interpreted in a new way now.
• So I said, "What would J. say?" and she said, "I love you." I replied, "Go to bed, sweetheart," and she said, "remember, you're J." and I said, "Time for bed" (figuring mothers everywhere say that). She said again, "but you're J. Where's S.?" so I said, "I don't know." I was blurring the line about whether I was actually pretending to be J. or not, but the "I don't know" is factually true, and clearly not participating in what I believe her current J. and S. fantasy entails. She said, one last time, 'Tomorrow, remember, you're J." I'm not sure how this will play out tomorrow. Maybe I'll try to redirect her into play acting with some dolls or animals to play the parts. I really can't speak for J., and it's more important that she figure out what she thinks J. might say or do.
• I know this is important for her to do, and I'm so proud of her for being willing to name her feelings and talk about things. It is also heartbreaking to watch her hurt. I don't entirely know what I think about the primal wound, but I do know that CG has healing going on that wouldn't be needed if she hadn't been surrended by her first family and adopted by us. (She'd have likely had other problems she'd be working out, of course--I'm not idealizing alternate outcomes.) It's heartbreaking.
• Anyone want to buy a house? I should stop blogging and start cleaning. We have our first open house tomorrow, and too much clutter remains. Cross your fingers for buyers in a bad market.
  

What Politica is Missing (besides us, of course)

• 62 performance reviews
• countless pieces of paper scattered on the floor as an illustration of how mad Curious Girl got today. Look how mad I am, Mama! she screeched.
  
• 9 days away from the office (well, I did go in to change my "I'm away for the week" sign to the "I have limited office hours this week" sign. Does that count?)
  
• 7 flight segments for me and Curious Girl within a month
• 3 loaves of bread (one to Mississippi Friend, one to Historian Friend, one for us)
  
• 2 days of no! school! for Curious Girl (great for her teachers, not so great for us working parents)
• 2 major tantrums in! one! day!
  
• 1 wiggly tooth (so we may find out soon whether the Tooth Fairy really does leave baby sisters, as CG maintains she does. I remain skeptically amused.)
  

Germany

So here's what I haven't been blogging about for the past few months: we're moving. New jobs, new house, new part of the country. A couple of my colleagues read this sometimes, so I didn't want to spill the beans here before things went public at work.

We're moving.

I'm still trying to get my head around this, despite the fact that I've known since June that things were likely going to shape up this way. June is a funny time for an academic interview, but for a variety of reasons I can't explain on a (presumably) pseudonymous blog, we ended up with some off-cycle interviews, and amazingly, have managed, again, to end up with a pair of tenure-line job offers. A pair of tenured job offers, in fact.

So, we're moving, and I'm a lame-duck department chair, which is an interesting role. Last year at this time, I was going through my first round of performance reviews with my large (60+) department, and it felt like the first in a long series. I approached the reviews with the sense that I was going to be the chair who'd shepherd the assistant professors through tenure, who'd (hopefully) coach a few associate professors through their second promotion. Now, we all know I"m leaving, so that throws my role into some confusion.

I get reviewed by the other full professors in the department. One of them asked me last week, Why do we review you? If you view performance reviews as supervision, it doesn't make sense. But if you view performance reviews as a way of gauging how individual work helps add up to the department's collective work, it does make sense. This is the most cat-herding part of the year, because some people welcome the performance review, some are constitutionally opposed to them, and some just don't give a fig either way. So I write my reviews partly with an eye on the colleague's attitude toward it all, partly with an eye on their career trajectory. I'll still meet with everyone to talk about their reviews--after all, their career paths don't stop for a year just because the department chair is changing.

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Why Germany in the title of the post? I need to think of a pseudonym for New Hometown, but for today, it's Germany. We visited Germany--the real Germany--last summer, and one of the cities we saw in Germany has a name that, if you are a small child and transpose sounds and then change a few sounds and rhyme them, sounds a little like New Hometown. It took me several months to figure this out, as it explains Curious Girl's questions like "Do they speak English in New Hometown?" "What if I go to school and I can't understand the people?"

********************************

We're downsizing. It's likely we'll end up in a smaller house than the one we have now, and I figure that's only a problem if you try to have stuff that exceeds the function of the smaller house. So I'm sorting through things. I just found library bookmarks from my hometown library that I probably got in 7th grade. I cleaned out a jewelry box and found the gold honors medal I got for graduating 8th grade. Actually, I didn't get it at my 8th grade graduation. I had the top grades in my class, as I recall, and thus qualified for a $300 scholarship for high school. But because I had won a scholarship from another source, the school didn't give me the $300 scholarship. They gave it to the next kid down. I didn't mind that so much, but I did mind that I left graduation without so much as a card or certificate or little medal that went with the award. I stewed about that for months, and finally my parents said, "Well, write to the principal." So I did, and she came to the house after dinner one night, apologized, and gave me this little medal. I didn't throw out the medal, but I think I might. I can't figure out a good decision rule about memorabilia. I don't want to erase my past, but I'm not sure the 8th grade medals need to come to Germany. (That said, another thing I have to decide about is the box of little medals and pins that my favorite uncle--now deceased--did save from his high school and college. I'm not sure what to do about those.)

But I was rather pleased to unearth my "Books, like friends, should be well-chosen" bookmark. I loved my hometown library.

Wish me decluttering strength, please.

Rollercoasters, List Version

The Home Front

• Politica is off on a professional adventure. Yay her.
• Emotions are, um, turbulent. Curious Girl and I are not getting enough sleep, and tempers were fraying last night, starting with an argument about why I am the meanest person ever because I would not let CG stay up until midnight even though Twin Friends (allegedly) got to stay up until midnight one night, ending with over 90 minutes of sobbing and screaming (not all of it CG's, I should mention).
  
• Have I mentioned how much I love CG's teachers? They knew CG was off-kilter the minute we walked in. Short Teacher suggested that CG could draw a picture of what she's mad about, when she gets all mad.
• So today, we're going to make a Feeling Box, with art supplies in it, so that we can draw mad pictures when we need to. Cross your fingers that this works. (It well might. Similar tactics have.)
• I'm going to lunch with CG's class today. I'll have to post about my post-lunch reading series with the girls. They are a great audience.
  

The Office Front

• Performance review season is always here. That stresses people out, and there are a million little questions about what to put where on the form. My university requires everything to be classified as teaching, research, or service, and that leads to a lot of fretting about whether, say, judging the student magical mystery competition is teaching or service or whether writing a short article for publication x is research or teaching. It's not easy to balance reassuring the stress with encouraging people to step back and think about how their report communicates what they did.
• My favorite part about being department chair is helping people--it's so emotionally rewarding to have conversations helping to move toward tenure dossiers, for example. The flip side of that, though, is being a responsible chair even in situations where things are not emotionally rewarding--I'm learning strategies for not taking it personally when colleagues are doing things that don't work so well. It's hard, but important, to keep that boundary up. Thank FSM for the therapy that taught me about boundaries. They rock.
  
• I cleared my desk yesterday! (But my desk at home is now piled with stuff from the bedroom, that's getting painted. Boo.)

I am now going to read and write until lunch, at home. I love Wednesdays.

English Department Playlist

I got my colleagues' attention at the start of our department meeting by playing "Trollope," by Dave's True Story (click here and scroll down for the lyrics). It made people laugh, and it worked.

So I'm thinking of songs to open other meetings. At the risk of ruining the fun for the colleague or two who reads this blog, I'm thinking of these songs to get the attention at the start of our next few meetings:

• "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors" (Moxy Fruvous)
• "Wuthering Heights" (Kate Bush (video link)
• "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" (from Kiss Me Kate)
• "Lets Call the Whole Thing Off" (from Shall We Dance, the "you say tomayto, I say tomah to....one )
  

So what other songs would you suggest for an English department? (or any other department, I suppose--we could suggest songs for different professions/disciplines, I guess.)

Not Quite NaBloPoMo: Jobs and Markets

I don't think I"m up for posting once a day this month, but I'm feeling inspired by the bloggers I read who are doing NaBloPoMo this month.

I have a lot of academic thoughts flying around this week, and I still have some work to do to prepare for the department's first meeting of the year. So I'm going to be lazy-ish and simply list a few things

• I'm wondering what other folks think about mentoring. I was browing posts at Rate Your Students and noticed a fair bit of kvetching/critique by junior faculty regarding unwanted mentoring by senior faculty (the complaint generally being "if we want your advice, we'll ask for it"). I've construed my role as department chair to be largely about advocating for my colleagues and department, so mentoring has been a huge concern of mine. We have officially assigned mentors, but I've made sure to have a series of meetings with new assistant professors (4-5 over the first year, covering general orientation, our review procedures, documenting and assessing teaching, preparing for promotion); I've coordinated workshops on promotion for nontenure track faculty (who are eligible for a promotion in rank, but not tenure); I've been working my way around the associate professors to talk a bit about planning for promotion to professor, sooner or later in various cases. Maybe mentoring isn't quite the right word for all that, but it seems to me that it's a good thing for administrators to actively promote their colleagues. Does that need to be patronizing or intrusive? I've thought about this a lot this year as we have hired several associate professors, who need different kinds of transition assistance than new assistant professors. But still, that's a kind of useful mentoring. I think.
• There have been some wonderful posts about the academic job market this year at Tenured Radical's, Dr. Crazy's, and Citizen of Somewhere Else's. I forwarded TR's post to a friedn on the job market, and she said, a few days later, "oh, that was really helpful. So I shouldn't use letterhead?" Turns out the comments on TR's post took up the issue of letterhead and whether or not to use it quite seriously. I thought this was all rather bizarre, since every search I've served on in English has always seen most applications come in on departmental letterhead, even from graduate students. (Not that this is required: I've also seen graduate students not use departmental letterhead, and I've never seen a search committee discuss this.) I'm on a search committee now for a campus-level administrative position, and none of the applicants--almost all of whom currently have some kind of academic affiliation--used institutional letterhead. So my new advice to job seekers: check out the customs in the field to which you're applying. (other things I have noticed, reading job applications in a field-not-my-own: inspirational quotations don't really add a lot to letterhead; mis-spelling the search committee chair's name is a good way to get a letter some negative attention; the best in-house applicants for a position will write as though they are from off-campus, so their materials have the same general style as an applicant from afar.)
  
• Dr. Crazy got dumped on quite a bit over at RYS, quite unfairly. I find it amazing that so many academics talk about loyalty to departments or campuses, framing issues of academic jobs and searches in the same terms we talk about personal relationships. Academia is about relationships, of course, and I'm a big believer in looking for jobs where there's a good fit between the campus/institution's goals and an individual's own goals. But life is long, and we shouldn't assume that our first job will be our only job. Can't we value a committment to institutional goals while realizing that it's OK for some people to move on to another job after 4 or 5 years? I've advised my newer colleagues to simultaneoulsy imagine that our department might well be their only job--so we can all make it a department to grow in--and that our department might nurture their career for some period of time--so we can all see the work we do in the department as contributing to the discipline, in which people circulate to some extent.
  
  Research, teaching, and service balance out very differently in our own interests and on different campuses. My department has lost some very talented junior faculty in the past few years, and there is likely to be another significant personnel change in senior faculty next year, besides some movement in retirements. I miss my colleagues who have left, but I think it's a healthy thing, actually, that the work done in our department helps move people along. I'm not quite sure how to balance encouraging ambition in my colleagues with encouraging a collective department vision, but somehow (and perhaps self-servingly), I think that good academic administration should help individual faculty to achieve while helping the department as a unit achieve. It's a tricky thing, as the department as a unit is not always tolerant of individuals who seem to be achieving way more than others do. Sometimes, departments are proud of their research stars or mega-award-winning teachers; other times, such colleagues can be criticized for putting their own needs ahead of the department's. I'm not quite sure what I think department chairs have to do with all this, but I am spending a lot of time pondering this individual/collective relationship. (apologies if this bullet doesn't make whole lot of sense--I'm working this set of ideas out here as I type!)
  

For the Introverts

I'm fortunate to be chair of a department in which two of my colleagues are former chairs. The department has grown considerably, and one served for a short term and another for more than a decade, so we have all had rather different experiences as chair, but I'm still quite glad for the chance to talk about being chair of a large department with numerous subfields with people who can picture what it's like. (Side note: I'm discovering that I'm turning into each of my predecessors in different ways--sometimes, I start a task, and think, "oh, this is just like that time when Shorter Term Former Chair asked us to..." or "wait, didn't Longer Term Former Chair once send a very funny memo about this topic?" But that's another post, the ways we internalize leadership styles from others)

I asked my colleagues to meet with me earlier this summer, just to talk about my first year. In the course of the conversation, one of my colleagues said that he is an introvert. I was a little surprised at that, actually; I wouldn't have pegged him for the most extroverted man in the department, but he is so good at organizing groups that I guess I'd always thought of him as reasonably extroverted. My surprise continued when my colleague confessed that as chair he was actually driven crazy by me and a number of our colleagues who never responded to proposals on e-mail, but would rather show up in a meeting and discuss them. "You feed off other people, because you're an extrovert. But for an introvert like me, that was so draining." This brought me up short. Me? feed off other people? I think not. So we sat there, totally surprised to discover we're both pretty intense Is on the myers briggs personality scale. (I think one reason I end up as chair or president of pretty much anything I join is in part because administrative roles give me a job to do, and that makes my shyness manageable. I know what to talk to people about when I'm a leader, and I like that.)

Last year, I posted a bit about my take on department meetings. I am good at running meetings, and I enjoyed how we used them last year as a whole department, but my colleague made me see that I need a more nuanced approach to involving people in decisions. My own approach has been heavily dependent on categorizing colleagues as whiners or not whiners. My goal in structuring a lot of face-to-face conversation was to reduce the impact of whiny colleagues and to create a fair bit of momentum for action so that the non-whiners' approach to work could carry the day (and carry along the whiners, too. Not all my whiny colleagues are slackers--in fact, I can name very few colleagues in my entire college who strike me as consistently slackers. Most do their share, and those less inclined to do a full share can usually be persuaded to rise to the occasion for particular tasks.) My department has a lot of whiners, though, people who like to talk about how busy they are, how overworked they are, how underpaid they are....and while there is often some truth to that, the talking about it does nothing to change it.

What I've been missing, I now see, is a way for introverts in the department to be invited into my processes. There's a certain efficiency to introducting topics in a group, as it lets me see what the issues are on people's minds, and it lets us maximize the power of the group to analyze and divide tasks. But if introverts find those in-the-moment conversations draining, there's got to be a way to work around that. So I think I'll work on the lead-up to meetings more, perhaps distributing documents with issues outlined and some potential options in advance, so that those who wish to formulate thoughts in advance, or write to me privately, can do so. I've always tried to circulate agendas at least a week before, but the department as a whole has gotten sloppy about making draft proposals available early. That needs to change.

September, The First Day of School

I read this poem to my classes today, at the end of our first meeting. Since Friday Poetry blogging started, I've been trying to end a class once a week with a poem of some sort, connected either to the content of the course, or to the mood students seem to be in at that point in the semester. This year, the start of the school year seemed heavy with responsibility and not so full of the delight and wonder I usually associate with September (or August, as is the case in my starts-school-way-too-early-state). This time of year, I usually have vivid sensory memories of the smell of the new leather bookbag I got when I started first grade. It was wonderful, and I felt so grownup, so on edge of big new leaps (and my 45-year-old self looks back in amusement at my 6-year-old self feeling so big!). This year, though, I was feeling a big weighted down with e-mail about sections to cancel, staffing problems, personnel problems, cleaning problems, committee problems, problems, problems, problems. Reading this poem today lifted a lot of those burdens, and reminded me that it was my selective memory of problems, problems, problems that was helping to frame that weight.

So may we all find kindess, in the end, of whatever beginnings this school year bring.

I
My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.

Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible

Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II
A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,

The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form

Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.
Howard Nemerov

The Summer of Blessed Events with My Favorite Micromanager

• Is it cheap to use lists to get back in the game after a blogging silence?
• Maybe so, but what better way to offer teasers for half-written posts that I'd like to think you'd be interested in.
• Before this list gets too long, let me urge anyone with Massachusetts connections to make contact with their state legislators to protect marriage equality in that state. If you live in Massachusetts, urge your legislator to vote against the proposed referendum on marriage; if you know people in Massachusetts, urge them to call. It's not a good idea to put civil liberties up for popular vote. Mass Equality has an easy-to-use site to see whom to contact. Families like ours--children like Curious Girl--deserve the protection of family law. Please call.
  
• I just got back from an academic conference of department chairs. Members of my subfield were pretty regularly characterized in anecdotes as being less scholarly, less flexible, and less understanding that members of subfields more clearly central to the history of the discipline. I'm not sure this is a good way to create a path for the future of our discipline. I wrote a lot about that on the evaluation form.
• But now I better understand what one of my predecessor-chairs told me once (a predecessor from another subfield that is similarly not-so-central to the history of our discipline, at least as how that history is chronicled by those who fancy themselves central to it): a subdisciplinary listserv was awash in congratulations after news of my predecessor's chairship was announced, with other members saying what a wonderful advance it was for the subfield. At the time, I thought "well, aren't things changing? Here in our department we are pretty well integrated." But in the field at large, apparnetly not.
• This is, perhaps, an example of the inflexibility some of the other conferees were noting.
• Curious Girl is, however, nothing if not flexible, in a "let's do that again and again and again" kind of way. She has invented a number of great new car games
1. H@nn@h Matanna. Inspired by the girl-idol of that name (although some googling tonight suggests that CG is confusing HM with H!llary Duff), this game starts off "Who wants to be Hannah?....OK, I"ll be Hannah, you be Matanna." It requires a microscope, er, microphone, for Hannah, which can be easily made from a magazine or other travel literature picked up at a rest stop. Hannah starts, and the call-and-response singing begins. Some times it's real pop singing (Hey everyone, get up and dance...), sometimes it's narrative (We're in the car and I see a cow...) and sometimes it gets all meta (Why are you singing a short song?). Continue until Hannah says the show is over.
   
2. Kid. Who wants to be CG's favorite teacher? Who wants to be her elder daughter? Who wants to be her dog? Let the roleplays begin! This game can take a family of three for miles and miles.
   
3. Teacher. A variant on Kid, and a variant on games of school everywhere, this one has actual characters from CG's class. Guess who gets to be CG's favorite teacher every time?
   


• Curious Girl has been in a pool three times in the past two days, and in none of those pool times did she need to use the bathroom and in none of those times did she cause the pool to be closed for chemical treatment. This is the Blessed Event of the summer, an event I was never sure would come.
  
• CG has been sleeping with the aquarium that used to hang in her crib (something like this) as part of reconnecting with her babyhood since turning five. Last night, she said it was her computer and that she would use it to distract her while I gave her eardrops. "I have to order a book," she said, and typed Stellaluna into the computer. Then she told me I could be the bookstore, and I had to wrap the book with paper, dab it with glue, and wrap it up and send it to her (while she used her computer to transmit more info to me like her name and address). When the book arrived, she said, "Honey! I got you a book," and she read me Stellaluna. "The end," she finally prounounced. "Now you read it for real." And I did. After my "the end," she said, "I want to talk to Stellaluna," and had an adorable conversation about how she read Stellaluna at her new school, and whehter Stellaluna wanted lots of fruit to eat.
• Tonight she watched Star Wars on her computer. She created characters using the various buttons on the aquarium and asked for my help in naming them all. "Who's going to be the green guy? with the ears?" Really, she could be a very happy girl doing nothing but pretending all day long. Why is there nothing about pretending in discussions of kindergarten readiness?
• CG is very in charge of her pretending. Today, she walked me through a long script in which I was the mom, she was a dog, and my imaginary kid wanted a dog at the pet shop. So I put the kitty litter back, and got the white dog. I'll let you all guess what I really bought at the pet shop. I'll also let you all note who has clearly been paying attention to the fact that one of the ways I help CG work through problems is by setting up narrative play space. I guess she figures you can use the same technique on her mama.
• Kindergarten readiness has been well-discussed around the blogosphere lately. I wish it settled my own choices about CG.
• I love the comments on my last post: thanks for sharing our enthusiasm for Panda World. Everytime we got stuck in a traffic jam or slowdown, CG would say, "Oh no! We're stuck in Panda World!" I am very grateful for readers who put up with my erratic rhythms.
  

How to Say No and Other Handy Academic Talents

I have been thinking about how to say no.

My closest colleagues in the department have teased me about how I have learned to say no. When I was first hired into my current department, I had an administrative job that involved handling comments, questions, and complaints from students who didn't want to follow the general requirements for first-year writing matters. Anyone who complained about anything that first semester usually got what they asked for, but gradually, I learned, by watching my colleagues, how to investigate a situation, how to step back, think about what's best for the student and institution, look at the principles involved, and how to be both flexible, fair, and committed to principles.

I have learned to say no on my own account with much more difficulty. When Curious Girl came home, I was on sabbatical. Nine months later, when I went back to my regular assignments, Politica took a semester of family leave. CG had two mornings of daycare, and I took one day a week with her. I have continued that practice ever since (and am having my own version of kindergarten angst: I love my mama days, and I will miss them). One of my colleagues, himself a former chair, told me that it was important to take two half days during the work week to myself. So I figured I'd keep my mama days while department chairing (since the first year sets expectations for my availability).

While I'm willing to tell the internet about Mama Days, and I have certainly told my friends on campus about them, I have been cautious about telling strict colleagues about Mama Days. I never wanted to say to someone convening a meeting of the Mathematical Mushroom Committee that I couldn't come on Tuesday because I was home with my daughter. I would just say, "Tuesday doesn't work for me," and whether people assumed I was researching at home, teaching, or whatnot, I didn't care. I felt that protected my professional credibility. But the thing is, I liked the freedom it gave me. I generally don't schedule meetings after 3:00 (so I can pick up CG), and I keep at least one day a week free for CG. And I like that I've learned to say no. It's made me more able to keep blocks of time unscheduled for my own writing, and to make appointments that are reasonably convenient for me. I'm still quite accessible, but I won't schedule a meeting with a single individual if that's my only campus commitment; I no longer feel obliged to work my own schedule into a pretzel in order to help others do their work.

All of which is to say, I'm a big fan of "No, I can't do that then." And I encourage junior faculty to learn to say no, and to learn to say, "Let me think about that and get back to you," as well. That gives them time to check things with me or another colleague if they're trying to decide whether the cost of "yes" is too high. I think people should manage their own time.

But (you knew there was a but, right?).....I'm getting troubled by the ways in which some people say no, so I'm trying to work out the rhetoric of no. As department chair, I need to ask people to do things quite frequently, and I find big differences among the following (realistic-yet-fictional) sorts of no:

• Sorry, no, I can't do that.
• I'd love to come but we've had X commitment on the calendar for months now and I can't change it.
• No, I can't do that because I'll be at a conference.
• No, because I need to X, Y, Z (where X,Y,Z are things I am also doing, like prepping classes, reading papers, or revising a paper)

That list isn't quite conveying what I want it to, which perhaps means I'm making up this problem. But some people say no in ways that seem reasonable; some people say no in ways that bug me. It bugs me, in particular, when the explanation for no is a chronicle of all the ways in which someone is Very Busy, and those ways are all pretty ordinary. I tend to interpret that--perhaps unfairly--as someone saying "this unimportant thing you are asking me to do is not as important as the Very Important Things I am doing." And that bugs me. Say no, simply, but surely it's not necessary to inadvertently dis the person who's doing the asking. I'm a busy person myself, and I think a lot about managing everyone's work load.

Am I oversensitive? Perhaps. I'm curious what the rhetoric of no looks like in other workplaces. I tend to like the simple no.

This is one of the issues I've been thinking about blogging for a while. Another is leadership, a topic about which Tenured Radical has a fabulously smart post today.

Apologies for the slightly disjointed style of this post: it's end of semester chaos here, and I'm gearing up for five or six promotion and/or tenure cases, so I'm even more chaotic than usual. I have a birthday post half-written, and really, most of anything I"m working on right now feels only half-done. Without the structure of my fours, the posting suffers a bit.

The Twelve Days of Four

April 22 through May 3 are very special days around here, viewed through the eyes of a four-and-three-quarter-year-old, because we match. We all have a four. I am 44, Curious Girl is 4 (and three-quarters), and Politica is 40.

May 4, Curious Girl gets a 5, and we will no longer match. (Although in a few months, I'll match with her, turning 45, and that is a happy-making prospect.) In honor of these very special days, I'm going to use the experience of four-ness as an invention strategy, with a series of posts inspired by four. To open, I'll catch up with three sets of four, and we'll see how the series develops:

Four Things I Like About Being Department Chair
1. Curious Girl says that I am the apartment chair.
2. I get to work closely with our new faculty, who are just so much more accomplished and polished than I was when I left graduate school. That polish doesn't mean that they know their way around the institution or that they know everything there is to know about being successful, and I'm enjoying working with our assistant professors to help them make connections in the discipline and on campus. This is probably the most rewarding part of the job.
3. I get to think about what is not being done. This part will fade, I suppose, when I'm not a new chair anymore, but I like being in a position to think about the structures and systems of the department. I don't want to add a lot of work in the department, but I do want to know that the work we do is important, and that the work we do is the work we want to do. (There are lots of parts of university life that people do because they think They require it, when in fact, They don't.) I hope the department is working a little smarter, not harder, by the time my term as chair is finishing up.
4. I have a view. In my more than a decade at my university, I've never had a window. Now I have tons of them, and when I come back to the office after my night class, the downtown skyline twinkles. It's beautiful.

My Four Favorite Food Markets
1. The Adelaide Central Market
2. The Ann Arbor Farmer's Market (I know, the Madison market is supposed to be better, but I've never been to Madison...)
3. The organic dairy on the north side of the city which makes me forget I live in the midwest on a soft summer evening.
4. The produce stores in New York that have wonderful produce spilling out onto sidewalks.

Four Surprising Things
1. I was quite taken by life in west Texas when we lived there for a while.
2. I had no idea how one's first job was geographically predictive.
3. Imaginary people are really quite entertaining, and I think I will miss our imaginary baby, dog, big sister, and friends when they fade into reality.
4. When I was a child, I decided that I didn't like cherries. What was I thinking?!?! Now I am making up for lost time, and already looking ahead to the arrival of Queen Anne Cherries at our local market. The cherries won't be local, but they will be good.

Wishing all of you fourfold happiness as you contemplate your own fours.....

The Perfect Wine for Department Chairs

Last night we had Herding Cats wine (distributed by a company named for my favorite childhood carton character: Underdog Wine Merchants). You can see their label in this post from a wine blog.

I'm light on content these days, but at least I'm posting again. These light posts are part of my effort to regain my balance by finding the funny amidst the semester's hectic pace. Herding Cats wine made me laugh when I saw it at the grocery, and it tasted pretty good, too.

Random Weary Numbers

Number of days Curious Girl has cried, whined, and claimed it was because of having to stay up late to get me at the airport last Saturday: 3
Number of forms I have submitted to the academic dean's office in the last two weeks: 92
Number of weeks our job searches have gone past our schedule: 6
Percentage of searches that are more complicated than predicted: 100
Number of days Curious Girl has for spring break, not counting the two already past: 12
Number of days Politica and I have off in that period: 0
Number of playdates or babysitters currently planned: 0
Number of classes I will be teaching next spring, now that I know all of the above: 0

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OK, so that's all taking a rather negative view of things--hardly the way to start a post after all this silence. Welcome back, readers, to a view from the dark side. So let's try this again. More numbers:

Number of bloggers I met at Four Seas: 4+1 (Ianqui, Timna (and Almond Joy!), and J., whom I already knew but didn't know she had a blog), and then later, Bill, whom I had met slightly before, and Best Professional Friend, of course.
Number of walks in Central Park: 2
Number of good conversations with Best Professional Friend(s): zillions
Number of people at my panel, on the last morning of the conference: 23 (not bad!)

Best New York moments: just listening to people talk. The snippets of conversation on the street, the New York accents that sound like home, the words and the rhythms. I love them. I love that in New York, no one things I talk or walk too fast. I love the details on the buildings and the pretzels on the corners. I love the way beautiful things just pop up, even on a sort of dirty street--like the mosaic-covered streetlamp post Linda and I passed in the Village on Tuesday afternoon.

The funniest thing I saw were some people coming out of Bergdorf Goodman's, pushing their dog in a stroller. Second only to the party seated across the room from us one night when we stopped into a very fancy hotel's bar for a drink and dessert. A very wealthy couple of a certain age sat across the room, and we had fun trying to figure out who they might be and what they might be doing in the city. (I can't be the only one who makes up stories about strangers I can see but not overhear, right?) There was just something compelling about the combination of slick hair, big, big jewelry, and a sparkly short dress. (Curious Girl would have loved it.) I'm not explaining it well, but it's just not something I see much out here in the midwest.

The best deal: a hello kitty watch in Chinatown. CG was very excited about it. "It ticks all night long," she informed me seriously tonight. Amazing technology, those watches. She is even getting the hang of the hour hand.

I heard a very good panel on academic administration towards the end of the conference. The panelists were talking about academic administration as more than managing hierarchies. One framed the work of department chairs in terms of fostering institutional literacy (helping people understand how institutions work, why they work, and what they make possible). Another framed the work in terms of improvising relationships (especially the need to make quick shifts between being counselor, planner, advisor, teacher etc.). I've been thinking about all this in terms of the 43 folders post on multitasking and its problems. I've been struggling this semester with so many different kinds of tasks, tasks which involve paying attention to almost everyone in my very large department. I'm multitasking too much, and realizing that I need to be better at doing one thing at a time, then moving on (and training people to let me do that--one day before the conference, I was in my office, working in googledocs and a chat program with my co-authors. One of my colleagues came into my office and I had to rather sternly say "I need to finish this now before I can talk to you!" Granted, it probably looked like I was doing e-mail, not something in real time. If my door is open--which it needs to be a good bit of the time--I'm not in full control of my time. I like being in a big department, but it's wearying. Next year, I've arranged my teaching schedule so that I won't teach at all in the spring.

And for this spring, I'm trying to look beyond the bureacracy to remember what it is I like about academic administration, and trying to understand what's at the root of my weariness this semester. Next year, it won't all be new, and that's a comfort.

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It sure was fun to meet Timna and Almond Joy, J., and Ianqui. We got drinks and pastries at a coffee shop near the conference, and talked easily. I'd met Timna last year, and what a treat to meet Almond Joy, too. They'd done a little looking at colleges: I'd be thrilled if she decided to come here, but I don't think a midwestern comprehensive university is on her list of places to consider. Still....Ianqui and Timna do have something in common, which is that while they are both just as smart and funny in person as they are in their blogs, they are both a little shorter than I expected them to be. Who knew that writing styles have height? The blogosphere is very instructive aboiut writing that way. More seriously, it is such a pleasure to meet bloggers in person, not only to hear about some of the stories behind the pseudonyms, but also to get a more complex sense of the blogger. Not that one morning's meeting reveals any of us fully, of course, but the spoken voice is more complex and warm than the written voice. Ianqui and Timna have beautiful voices, and I'm glad I got to talk with them. Thanks especially to Ianqui who shlepped all the way up to our part of town!

Writing Lifebreath

One of my colleagues died on Friday, something that turned out to be both shocking and unsurprising in the end. At 64, he was young, but had been in increasingly fragile health for the past few years, years in which he retained the position of our department chair but was increasingly slow. The department has been worried about his health for a long time now, but I don't think anyone expected this turn of events. He had been suffering so these past few months that it many ways his passing is a relief, but it is profoundly sad. He should have had many more years to enjoy his retirement.

I'm chair now, and my colleagues often turned to me for news of my predecessor. But he and I weren't socially close, and it was an odd thing to negotiate, figuring out how much or what kind of contact he and his family wanted with a department that cared for him so deeply, collectively. The lines between colleague and friend, work and home, are blurry in a time like this. I went to the hospital to see him, just about an hour before he died. His wife showed me photos of him as a boy, and seemed to welcome a small group of visitors from school; her family were coming in and out. Work and home, coming together, watching lifebreath slow, sharing breaths together, holding on, letting go.

For the past few days I've been doing writing I never really expected to do as chair: I composed a short e-mail announcement of his death for our departmental listserv. I wrote a longer remembrance of his career and what he meant to us in the department for our college's listserv. I've been phoning retired colleagues, and I've sent the remembrance to the chair of the department my colleague started his career in. It just occurred to me that I need to contact the head of our campus faculty governance body, since there should be a memorial resolution for him at its next meeting. I worked on a memoriam notice for the department's main door, thinking about the public face we want to present as a department in mourning, yet a department open for business. The department isn't a person, but in some respects, organizations are like people. I'm feeling my way through what the department needs at a time like this.

Writing the remembrance was an interesting experience. As my colleague got sicker in the past couple of months, I've been feeling increasingly guilty about the amount of annoyance, irritation, and occaisonal anger I've felt at some key tasks left in various muddled states. Yet even in my most irritated state, I marveled at how much he was able to do in such terrible health. It's been an emotionally and logistically complicated way to start as chair.

I'd started thinking about writing something about him about a week ago. If he passed away during our break, when I was out of town, I wanted to have something at hand to send around, and I wanted the office staff to know how we might need to handle rearranging our open hours in the event of a daytime funeral. It seemed so ghoulish to be thinking about all this, but I wanted us to be ready, even as I never wanted us to be doing it at all. I started reading back through my colleague's personnel file, which is a rather haphazard file containing things that never should have been filed in the first place and other documents that are cool insights into what it was like to be a professor in the '70s. My colleague got promoted up through the ranks in the department, but for much of his career was working in another unit, so those of us in the main department didn't know much about his earlier career. I read all the letters describing his tenureable and later promotable achievements, learned about grants won, lectures given around the world, testimonials from colleagues on campus. His younger self was productive, focused, devoted to doing good work. His more recent self, no less devoted to the good, only slightly less witty (due to pain), was not so focused. It was good to remember, or learn, about that younger self, the self that really represented his career.

When he died on Friday, I wrote a remembrance celebrating his career, and also celebrating his chairmanship. Particularly in the past two years, he wasn't really very good at running meetings. But he was always devoted to advocating for us, trying to put us--individually and collectively--in the best possible light. And in writing for him, I cast him in the most fair light, light that I hope is wrapping around his spirit loose in the universe, and his family, and my colleagues.

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On the homefront, my colleague's passing has made Curious Girl's questions about death multiply. (Long-time readers will recall her close personal relationship with Politica's mother, who died almost a decade before CG was born; CG also wonders quite a bit about our cats and death and her first parents and death.) She's asked a lot of predictable questions ("Is he still dead?") and is working through whether it's still possible to say you know someone who is dead. "I don't know him," she asserted this morning. "Do you know him?" "Of course we do," I said. "No, he's dead, so we can't know him anymore." The most bizarre thing she wondered, although perfectly sensible once I thought about it: "When it was time for him to be dead, did someone take a gun and shooted him?" "Um, no, honey, he just died quietly." Then I remembered what the sheep tell Wilbur will happen to him: that a farmer will take him and shoot him with a gun, because it's what happens to spring pigs. She was using Charlotte's Web to try to make sense of what happens when someone dies. Wow.

The next morning, I helped Curious Girl make a card for my colleague's wife. First she drew a picture, of his wife looking sad and my colleague laying down because he didn't feel well. Then she wrote, and she told me she wanted to write every letter herself, "I"m worry Colleague died." I told her to write something she liked about him, and she decided to say, "I like that he was very nice to me. Love, CG."

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Although I've not written much about it, this academic year marks a big change in my career: I became chair of my department, moved offices up a few floors to one with windows, and became responsible for working on issues that concern parts of English Studies I've not had much to do with since I was in graduate school. Although I started graduate school with the intention of working in both literature and composition--and in fact chose my graduate school because it appeared to support such a dual focus--I realized as my studies went on that composition studies was really where my heart lies. I like reading fiction as much as anyone, but I'll never be a really good literary critic. So I gradually moved into literacy and composition studies, and that's where most of my work--research and teaching--has been.

Being a department chair involves a whole 'nother way of thinking about my job. My large department offers a broad array of programs, and one of the ways I conceive my job is Advocate-in-Chief for the students, faculty, and staff. I need to help each one of my colleages advance, and in some cases, that means I need to learn about aspects of English I've never thought about for a second. Mostly, this learning is pretty fun, but it's also time-consuming. It's not that I need to spend time reading around, but that I need to be learning priorities. What makes people in subfield A tick? What gets them excited? What gets them motivated? What would make a junior scholar want to come here and work in the field?

I recently found a memo from one of my predecessors, a memo written as the department started the process of looking for a new chair. My predecessor noted that it wasn't so much the time required to be chair that was tiring, but the quality of attention the job requires. And I see what that means, now. I'm making the rounds of my colleagues, talking about where they are headed, what they want from the department and the field. Colleagues are coming to me for help with problems in staffing courses, issues around evaluating part-time faculty, requests for time to teach or research or travel to archives. There are 57 people who report through me. That's a lot of people to keep track of.

So I'm working on trying to get the department to be more efficient at taking care of itself. We meet 4-5 times a year, and I've started conceiving of department meetings like classes: what do I want to accomplish at the end of the meeting, what do people need to know in order to do that task well, and what activities or questions will support them to do that task as well as possible? We've had two meetings so far, and in those meetings I've used a combination of large- and small-group activities to produce brainstorming on a few topics, to encourage wide sharing of views on proposals in process, and to open up some review processes. I was afraid people would think this was too hokey, but I've had pretty good participation. It beats announcements.

We just celebrated the retirement of a friend who taught me a lot about running meetings. Don't call a meeting to make an annoucement, she told me. Use a newsletter or e-mail for that. Call a meeting to make a decision. That made a big impression on me. I also think meetings are good for brainstorming, but the brainstorming needs to be tied to decisions. Organizations need to make progress. They need to get things done. So I run meetings trying to keep the emphasis on what's getting done, or what steps we've accomplished on the way to getting something important done. And I try to make the most of the fact that the department meeting brings together people who don't usually talk with each other. I try to structure activities within the meeting to maximize possibilities for conversation.

My secret plan--not so secret now!--is to use the activities I coordinate over the course of the year to help the department articulate its priorities. If I used the word "strategic plan" in a meeting people would groan, I think. My colleagues just want to get on with their research and teaching. But I think some planning, some strategic planning, will help us get somewhere we want to be. I think we have planning impulses lurking below the surface, and I hope to pull them up in the course of our regular work. We'll see how that goes.

My campus is relatively new and there haven't been very many chairs of my department. We've each had, in hindsights, different kinds of strengths or focuses. The two department chairs who influenced me greatly tended to emphasize vision and/or organization, and that make an impression on me. I have my own style, and the department is a very different place now than it used to be, but I see myself using vision and organization in the interests of advocacy. As a department chair, I want to advocate for my colleagues and our students. And as a department, I want us to advocate for the intelligent uses of and applications of our field. I want us to stand for--and teach towards--literacies that stretch writers and readers, bringing them together, taking them to new understandings, challenging dominant, often sterile, notions of what it means to write and read these days. So this means I'm quietly trying to nudge the department, too. So far, so good. I like the job most days, and most days, people seem to like the job I'm doing. I'm so impressed by how many of my colleages have been willing to listen to me, to pitch in when I've asked, or to turn me down in ways that help me see better what the nature of the task is and who else I can call on to get it done.

So in your worlds, what makes for good meeting and good leadership?