February 2009 Archives

I've certainly learned this year that it's never a dull moment when you're chair. Next week Ward Churchill and Cary Nelson are coming to IUP to talk about Academic Freedom after 9/11. Churchill has been attacked a lot by conservatives across the country. He was especially targeted by Bill O'Reilly who seemed to mentioned Churchill over 40 times on his T.V. show. That's a lot of T.V. coverage for a professor!

I should point out that I disagree with Churchill's use of the phrase "little Eichmanns" in his controversial essay. I'm very sympathetic with his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. The Bush administration did a terrible job, in particular, with foreign policy, making us more hated than ever around the world. But we weren't blameless before. Still, if I had been Churchill's editor, I would have told him to take out the "little Eichmanns" comment. I don't think you should ever blame a victim of a horrific crime. And even if American big business has hurt the rest of the world, as it has, some guy trying to make a living as a stock broker is just that, a guy trying to make a living. No one person can change American business practices. At least, not one little person. Eichmann, bad as he was, was in a position of influence and power, not just doing a job.

But whether or not I agree with Ward Churchill, I will say this: the man has a right to express his views. In fact, I am glad to have the opportunity to hear him talk about his views. It seems very clear to me, particularly after reading an article by Eric Cheyfitz on "Framing Ward Churchill: The Political Construction of Research Misconduct" in vols. 26/27 of Works and Days (2008-2009) that Churchill got mistreated by his university. It seems to me that whatever pretense to academic principles was made, Churchill was really being fired because he had made unpopular statements. What was worse, the statements were not even objected to until some conservative commentators started complaining. You can't start a whole process of inquiry after a huge news story breaks and then somehow pretend you are being objective. That is dishonesty at its worst. Churchill's academic work only was investigated because he'd been attacked by conservative voices like O'Reilly's.

And that brings me to Churchill's talk at IUP. A small group of people have called/emailed to object to Ward Churchill's coming to campus. That's their right. I'm happy to let people complain. Many have also contact us to think the event is great. Some people, though, call to say, "are you using state tax dollars to pay for the event?" I wasn't aware that individuals can redirect tax dollars. I have a lot of tax spending I am not crazy about: the war in Iraq, the auto bailbout money, etc. But I can't call the President and say, "hey, I want my money spent on education." I wish I could. What I can do is support people's right to speak, no matter what they say. At universities, that's called academic freedom. And if we aren't careful, that's a freedom people will take away. You have to fight for freedom. You have to fight so people like Ward Churchill can say what they want. If we don't fight, then we won't be living in America any more. We'll be living in a country that's not free..

With the schedules out of the way, for the moment, I can now turn my mind to the many department events we have going on. Tomorrow we have our annual English Undergraduate Conference. I love this event as it gives me a chance to interact with our majors. Since I rarely teach courses for majors, I don't get a lot of chance to meet the majors. My technical writing class is pretty split as far as majors and non-majors which makes for a good learning environment. But I like the conference for the chance it gives me to meet the majors.

For several years I helped run the conference which gave me a lot of interaction. I even became close friends with some of those students. But running a conference is so much work you just can't do it for too long. So I had to give it up and got busy with other things. As chair I'm hoping I can tear myself away from all the other stuff to make a good day of the conference.

I even talked the dean into coming. True, I had to bribe him with a free pizza lunch. But what the heck. I've become a shameless promoter of the English Department!

Well, I managed to get the fall and summer schedules done, somehow. Not an easy task, that's for sure. And of course both are due on the same day. But since I was slow figuring out the schedule, I didn't give the secretaries nearly enough time to get the schedule into the computer system.

I think one thing that might help me would be a computerized scheduling program. Although with all the changes that get made during the process, who knows if that would really help. At least it would make my notes clearer for the secretaries!

I had not realized how many people make comments about other people's schedules. That's something I had never done myself. I just always hoped to get a schedule that gave me classes I like to teach and some writing time. But people seem to love to make comments about what other people are teaching. It's one of the issues you have as chair. Not everyone works the way I work. And everyone likes to give the chair their comments,

I've found its better to ignore these emails than to respond to them. Responding never clarifies issues. Email just muddies things up. So I have to remind myself to limit the email debates at the very least. Just one  more part of the joys of being chair.

Well this week I was finally able to complete the Fall 2009 schedule for our department. Mostly...I figured out class schedules for the tenure track faculty first off. I tried as much as possible to keep the temporary faculty and teaching associate schedules unchanged from the previous fall. Though that's not totally possible to do. We try to give everyone a schedule that gives them maximum control over their time. So most people in the department teach a MWF or TR schedule, unless they prefer 5 days per week. I stuck to that basic principle in figuring out the schedule.

I also did my best to give people the courses they wanted. That was a lot trickier. Because we have a large department, we offer a lot of majors courses. So I was able to give most people a majors course and their choice for liberal studies courses. Liberal studies are our 3 required English courses for all IUP students. We have 2 composition courses which are required: English 101-College Writing and English 202-Research Writing. We also require students to take English 121-Humanities Literature. All of these courses give the chair lots of room to match liberal studies classes with majors courses and other responsibilities (graduate courses, release time, and directorships) to create schedules that provide time for faculty to handle their scholarly and service responsiblitiies.

But that's a lot to juggle when you have 58 tenure track faculty and about 300 classes to line up. And that leaves out the concern over particular classroom spaces which I left to the secretary, bless her heart, to figure out.

I did notice that as I worked on the schedule, I gained a better sense of our curriculum as a whole. As a faculty member, I would think about the classes I had to teach and how they related a bit to other classes. But I was pretty independent. As chair, I had to think about the linkages. So I had to try not to put writing courses at the same time as other writing courses for fear this would cut out interested students for one of the two classes. I am a composition scholar, so I also had to beef up on my knowledge of the literature side of our house. I got help on this from our Bachelor of Arts Program Director, but I also had to myself see what courses might compliment each other, what to pick when only one literature course could run from a group, and what times of day might attract the most students to less popular courses. So the global curriculum part of the process was quite interesting to me, but also one more thing to learn.