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Dean Napoleon
Today I had a meeting with the Dean Napoleon. He's about 5 feet tall and looks like Rick Moranis. The pretext of the meeting was to discuss budget issues with college senior staff, but the real reason was to call me in to bully me into raising the class sizes. I should have seen it coming, Napoleon is known for this type of thing.
Score 1 for Dean Napoleon.
I retreat to plot my revenge.
Should you act or not? This video is about global warming, but it makes sense when making difficult decisions, something a chair does every day.
Dicks and Dogs
When I ran for department chair I was excited to lead-to make changes that my colleagues and I thought were necessarily and in many cases, long over due.
Then I became chair. I also became acquainted with the people in the dean's office, those I refer to as dicks and dogs.
They're the (mostly) men who control the money, telling you one thing ("Yes, you are free to run your department as you choose"), simultaneously stripping me of the resources I need to make changes.
Yesterday the associate dean called to ask me to add more sections of freshman composition. "The waitlists for summer are already long," he said. "We don't want t a backlog coming into the fall."
Fair enough. I don't want students on waitlists either. But there's a problem, and it's called my contingent faculty budget.
Each year, the college gives departments like my own a pot of money to pay for classes taught by continent (adjunct) faculty. It's based in part on the number of people who are on sabbatical or have a study leave paid for by a granting agency. From there we add sections of freshman composition (two semesters required of all students) as needed, and the dean's office will pay for those sections.
But there's a catch.
If our other classes in Shakespeare and Colonial American Literature don't fill, the dean's office will not pay for the extra composition courses. Even when they've asked us to add them.
I've pointed this fact out to the Dicks and Dogs the fact that this is unfair--why not pay for classes that you've specifically asked me to add? Why should my department have to cut back on essentials like printer paper and photocopying to pay for classes that they dean's office wanted offered?
The answer is found in the complex labyrinth of college budgeting. My English department, like many across the country, are vast revenue producers. Our faculty teach EVERY STUDENT in the university. Our classes are required. When enrollments across the college are low, the deans don't go to the departments that can't meet their enrollments. They come to me. They ask me to add more classes, then they ask me to add more students.
It's a vicious cycle, and regardless of what I do, I'm likely to be screwed by the folks in university hall.
So here's how it worked last year. We made our enrollment targets, 110% in fact. We added more classes, and we added more students to every class. Then we get our spring budget adjustment and voila! We're nearly $10,000 below budget?
Why?
No one would answer the question. No one would provide a formula to tell me why. It just was.
So what's the lesson? Never trust the dean's office. Usually it's not the big dean, the one with the nice office, lots of windows. That's usually an okay guy or gal. It's the associate dean, the bad cop to the big dean's good cop, the muscle behind the dean who acts as the enforcer. And maybe someone in the budget office. But that's a story for another day.
WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?
Tuscany
The Life of a Chair
I became chair of a large English department a few months ago.
Our former chair ran off to administration, as so many do, leaving the post open. I always thought I would eventually become chair, but this was not the time. Still, I took the job.
I thought I was ready, and in most respects, I am. I have ideas, energy, and a plan. And now I have this blog to share it all.