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From Denied to Dean

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Somebody from the MLA emailed me to see if I wanted to keep this blog, noting that I haven’t posted in a year. Well, it’s been less than a year since I last posted, but not by much.

Within that period, a lot has changed. I have just finished up my first year as an Associate Dean. That’s right: I had not even been tenured a whole year before becoming a Dean. That’s right: it’s ridiculous. That’s right: whether my university is denying me or rewarding me, it’s finding a way to ensure I will never finish my book. (I did compete for and take this position voluntarily, with a promise I could devote some time to my research, so I am going to have to figure out how much responsibility to take here…I’m not yet sure.)

I can’t write a tell-all about the move into administration. Mostly this is because I’m a mid-level Dean in an Honors College and don’t really have any insider info. My position is not like a “real” deanship in that I spend MORE time with students than I used to, not less. I do less research and more emailing and advising. I work all Summer, including 8 weeks of New Student Orientation, and I attend nearly every admissions event. I actually know students’ parents now. It’s weird. But these differences aren’t the same as those other administrators face when they move into a Dean position.

I don’t have any power over faculty tenure cases, or any power over faculty, period. I do oversee proposals that get submitted to do honors work with students, and I get to oversee the payment of stipends for those proposals, so that’s my primary contact with them. And I also work with other faculty because I continue to teach a class each semester for the Honors College and it’s a team-taught class. So I end up teaching a lot of things that aren’t in my actual area. It’s great for learning new things. It’s not great for finishing a book. Did I mention I feel like I’ll never finish the book? But the class is interesting and I learn a lot each semester. This Fall I’m lecturing on Sufi women and documents related to Joan of Arc’s trial. My research now includes figuring out that stuff and how to teach it for 1 or 2 days at most. Then it’s on to something else, and making sure students are doing the reading. In that regard, it’s basically just like it always was.

Anyway.

To commence the symphony of the world’s smallest violin, I must confess that the hardest adjustment is wearing real clothes 5 days a week. I find this challenging and also terrible. Similarly challenging (and related to said clothes) is that I commute about 3 hours each day 5 days a week and that sucks; I also have to work on weekends and even holidays sometimes, and commuting on those days is even longer. On the other hand, the 29-minute leg of my train ride is sometimes the only time I get to work on my book.

If you read my post from a year ago, you’ll wonder if my move out of English impacts my  department. It does. And I’m worried about it, frankly. Last night I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about the way our intro courses and Shakespeare are taught now without me and several others who have left for other reasons. It’s not great. One of the only virtues is that I don’t worry too much about my one junior colleague who will go up for tenure in 3 or 4 years. There’s little chance the enrollment problems that plagued my tenure case will affect hers, since they calculate these things based on the number of student semester hours and the number of faculty in the department. And so I’m happy to have helped her in that regard. I’m not happy to think we maybe have 12 Full-time people in English now, down from 39 when I started in 2006, but I am guessing that makes other administrators at my school feel better, not worse.

I do like my position; one year in, there are a great many things to be grateful for, especially the people I work with in this office and the students I get to meet that I wouldn’t see otherwise. But never fear…I’m still exhausted, and still watching things with a side-eye & lots of triggers.


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