Recently in challenges Category

Well if I've learned anything about being a chair, it's that there are a lot of things which suck away your time. It seems like practically every day holds its own crisis which prevents me from doing any of the other things I hoped to get to. Hence I'm just now returning to this work on the blog, having also made a New Year's resolution to spend more time on the blog so that it moves out of the idea phase and into the actual real blog phase.

So this week's main crisis was that our promised new secretary was not being transferred from her old department. Our long standing graduate programs secretary retired at the end of the fall semester. Knowing that was coming, the graduate program directors and I began working hard to get her replaced starting way back in May of 2008. Work related to that secretary position probably even goes further back than that as we had hoped to get the position reclassified to make it better represent all the work the graduate secretary has to do. But reclassifying would mean paying the secretary more money. So, though the earnest work began in May, it sat stalled in someone's office for months as they debated whether or not to make this change. Then, in late November, surprise surprise, the decision was made NOT to reclassify. This at least saved the university money. But it meant that at the end of the semester we were finally given permission to hire the replacement secretary.

By the time we found our new secretary, it was the middle of December. This meant the department our new secretary was leaving would end up with no secretary for the start of the semester. They weren't happy about that, something I certainly can sympathize with. After some work by 2 different deans, we finally got our secretary to start the semester and the other department got a temporary person.

Meantime, that crisis sucked away a full day of my time as I was calling back and forth between my dean and one of my graduate program directors and writing various emails trying to resolve the situation. At least it worked out in the end, but that was just typical for my work as chair. While I worked on that crisis, I got little else done. So it goes. At least it gave me a new item for posting in the blog!

One of the things I've been thinking about as chair is how the role impacts your modes of thought. In the past, I always thought of people as colleagues and fellow teachers and, in select cases, friends. But being chair shifts the relationship you have with people. I find now that when I see people, my first thought is that there is an issue to be solved with this person as opposed to thinking, "oh, there's someone to say hello to." So to an extent, people change into problems. Now this is an exaggeration, to an extent, of course. Nothing really changes. But, I think this gives evidence to the manager role of the chair. As chair, I seem to have to track everyone in the department in a variety of ways. I'm always thinking about this or that concern each person has and this or that issue that I have to take up with them. So it seems, for me at least, that being chair has put me into a manager role that I mostly was able to work apart from as a regular faculty member.