Faculty Meeting (pt 1)

As I mentioned on Friday, I went to my first faculty meeting last week. Actually, it was double header - I went to both a dept faculty meeting and a university committee meeting, back to back. So, 4 hrs of "meeting", with a location change in between. I'll limit myself to the dept. faculty meeting for today.

I'm the secretary this year. Apparently, the new professor is always the secretary. I checked; this isn't some evil joke. I really, really hope they hire someone else this year (there is an active search), so I can stop taking notes next year. I have never been good at taking notes. I like listening too much.

Also, when I was an undergrad, I always used to think that profs would hang out after work and talk about us. When I became a grad student/post-doc, I realized that profs were way too busy to hang out and talk about us. I now realize that it was a little of both. They don't hang out and talk about us after work, they do it during faculty meetings! Maybe not specific students, more general - like, "what do you think happened to the sophomore class? I gave them the same test as I gave to the juniors last year, and they all failed it." As I'm not teaching, I can't really join in, but I was kind of taken aback.

The majority of the meeting was actually spent going over the plans for the semester (seminars, hiring etc), with one small exception when we talked about the tenure/review process. A lot of people would like to see it standardized (numerically), and many people are quite happy with the personal touch (namely, the ones with friends in high places). As I'm new, and have neither friends in admin nor any idea what the proposed numeric system is, I asked for information but didn't really say much. But, this did lead to the discussion of the general review process - namely, how we (profs) get reviewed every year, and students get reviewed every semester, but who reviews the staff?

Apparently, our chair! And he feels they are doing a great job! (Doesn't everyone? he asked). Um, no. So, we all asked to be included or asked for input when the next round of reviews were due. I have a feeling that this years reviews are going to be significantly different than the last decade of reviews.

And maybe our chair will finally realize he gets preferential treatment...