[tags]Tenure, engineering, scholarship, academia, higher ed[/tags]
It’s been a busy last couple of days in the non-teaching-responsibility-taking front:
- As I suspected I would be, I was elected to the Promotion and Tenure Committee on Tuesday. This is simultaneously an honor (see the link to the previous post) and a huge addition to my workload. Colleagues have been coming up to me and saying “Congratulations… I think.” Whatever else it may be, it’s interesting for someone to go from untenured to being on the committee that evaluates people for tenure, all in the same year. I think at least I’ll have some fresh insights on the process, because frankly a lot of it just doesn’t make any sense, despite the relative clarity and simplicity of the way we do it. I’ll be blogging about my experiences, not of specific people’s tenure materials of course but rather the concept and process of tenure itself as I learn (sort of on the job) how to evaluate it. I’ve read this book twice but it’s going back on the queue for this summer again.
- I’ve also been given the “position”, such as it is, of being the point-person for a new “3+2″ engineering program we are trying to set up with a local university. Right now I don’t know the full extent of what that means, other than I’m coordinating the curriculum development side of this program, taking the lead in advertising and recruiting for it, and if somebody (e.g. from the other university) needs to talk about it to a person then that person is me. Now this is one responsibility that I am really psyched about; I’ve been looking for ways to improve the “geek factor” at my school and this seems like a cool way to do it. More on that — especially what I’ve been thinking about engineering/science and the liberal arts — later too.
But now my responsibility is to shoot my over-energized 2-year old with a tranquilizer dart get my daughter ready for bed. First things first.
Filed under: Education, Geekhood, Higher ed, Life in academia, Personal, Tenure
Congratulations … I think.
Actually, I was also elected to our department TPR committee (and our Annual Faculty Evaluation committee) the year I got tenure (last year). It was an eye-opening experience, and not always a pleasant one.
Let’s just say the status quo can be difficult to overcome.
And in spite of opening my mouth (electronically) about my unorthodox views of scholarship, I was also elected to our College’s TPR committe. Go figure!
From what I understand about your views of scholarship, what you consider “unorthodox” would actually be standard practice here. We’re pretty broad with that sort of thing.
And thankfully, as I’ve blogged before, the system we have for tenure here is really quite good. So at least whatever difficulties arise aren’t going to be from good profs caught in a bad system.
[...] I was finally spurred into action by stumbling across the concept/philosophy/pseudo-religion of personal organization known as Getting Things Done (GTD). I first read about GTD at the blog lifehack.org, got very interested in the idea, and last week read through David Allen’s book which introduced GTD. I usually automatically skip any book that is about business practice or has the author’s picture on the front. However, after reading and mulling over the book I’m convinced that GTD can help me get my stuff in order going into a semester that is really, really full of stuff. So I’m getting myself set up to use it over the next couple of days. I’ll probably blog the results if anybody cares. [...]
[...] The Promotion and Tenure committee I am now part of has met twice so far. We meet for 90 minutes per week. What I’ve learned so far is (1) most of our meetings are spent trying to plug holes, fix mistakes, or deal with unforeseen consequences from past P&T committee actions/inactions; (2) evidently there is a great deal of time spent by the committee to create language in our promotion/tenure recommendations specifically to minimize offending the delicate sensibilities of faculty, for example making sure we don’t say someone’s a "fine teacher" when the faculty in question resents the use of the word "fine" and would prefer "excellent" instead*; (3) evidently there is also a lot of time spent soothing the offended faculty where the language doesn’t work; and (4) it seems a main purpose of having a system for tenure is to allow the college to covers its own rear-end in case somebody sues us. [...]