hem. Rebel Girl has been especially busy of late, what with the predictable tumult of paper grading that comes, lo, as if a seasonal floodwater. The winter of their discontent has ended, the glacial icepack of student disinterest or ennui has melted after many cold weeks, and so she is drowned, ironically, in her own spring rains. Then there is her relentless inspection of classroom facilities for real flooding and rodents and insect infestation, not to mention the mid-term carpeting adventure, which found her packing and unpacking her office as if auditioning for some strange Olympic event.
—And then there is her ongoing adjustment to her duties as department chair.
Anyone who knows her will affirm Reb’s own careful assessment of her abilities: she has get-up-and-go, you bet; she loves teaching; she possesses a sense of duty imbued from years of Girl Scouting. She looks good in a uniform and distributes cookies. But she often lacks organization and struggles with prioritizing her obligations and responsibilities. Still, more often than not, she comes through, albeit slightly rumpled and grumpy.
This academic year is different though. For the first time in her professional life, she feels failure. She is doing more than ever before, but little of it feels like her best and some of it is clearly beyond her grasp.
Yes,
Le Chaise Rebel Girl—well, she’s looking a bit rickety.
She now oversees a department of 13 full-timers and 33 part-timers.
As you know, a chair is responsible for scheduling (this means communicating with each instructor at least twice but, more often, multiple times in order to set the schedule—and we now, in case you haven’t noticed, run classes pretty much year-round).
A chair is responsible for holding meetings and holding forth, she supposes, on all things departmental. She did fairly well at this last semester but has yet to muster a meeting this semester, relying instead on email exchanges and brief hallway encounters—thus contributing to her growing sense of failure.
A chair is responsible for hiring. Last semester, she reviewed at least 50 applications and, with a committee, interviewed upward of ten and hired five for the spring. Hiring is ongoing as part-timers come and go, especially when offered contract pay. Last semester, two part-time instructors up and left with little notice. This semester one instructor declined assignments due to the specter of contract pay and others have bowed out for fall. (This is the subject of another rant-to-come where Rebel Girl imagines contract pay for administrators who are responsible for enrollment management.)
A chair is responsible for providing guidance, especially for new faculty, and thus far, she has been able to give some, but not as much as she would like.
A chair is responsible for dealing with grade grievances and strife in the classroom. Last semester produced a bumper crop of disturbances and this semester was off to a fine start. (Here Rebel Girl would like to extend thanks to the campus police for their fine assistance—really—they’re terrific! She doesn’t want to think where she’d be without them.)
A chair is responsible for evaluating the part-time faculty on a regular basis—for example, all new hires need to be evaluated during their first semester. After that, part-time faculty are evaluated every couple of years. Last semester, she received a memo advising her that she was behind on evaluations. This semester, since she did none last semester, she is even more behind.
Question: how can a chair evaluate faculty when she is often teaching at the same time as the faculty she needs to evaluate?
In case you forgot, we dwell in the Land of Fiscal Conservatives with Little Foresight, so consider the other factor in all this: Rebel Girl teaches a full load whilst chairing. Yes, that’s right—4 classes (3 preps!), some hours in the Hum Center, five hours of office hours—and all the above and more.
Rebel Girl discovered this scheduling conundrum firsthand when she covered for two faculty members who were out of town during Week One of classes (also one of her chair duties). There she was, giving an assignment in one class, then running across campus to take roll in another. It was a Marx Brothers movie—a cultural reference lost on her students but not, she hopes, on you, her loyal readers.
Of course she is compensated for this work by a stipend—according to her pay stub, for ten hours of labor a month. This stipend covers the salary of the person who now cleans Rebel Girl’s home twice a month (Rebel Girl believes in a living wage)—with a bit left over that is expended toward childcare to cover the additional hours on campus. This means, thinks Rebel Girl to herself, that the housecleaner is indeed, paid more per hour than Reb is for her duties as chair of the department. (Don’t get her started about the summer—for which she is not compensated but still expected to serve.)
This means, she thinks, all things considered, the chair is sort of a wash.
Of course, people offer to pitch in and they do (hers is a generous department), but still—they shouldn’t. They have enough to do. And there she is. Failure. Rebel Girl has never felt more irresponsible in her life, not even during the weeks of her misspent youth.
But Rebel Girl worries too. It’s not all about her. She knows that part-time faculty need evaluations so they can apply for other positions. The institution also needs faculty to be evaluated on a regular basis to insure quality instruction—you know, preserve the integrity of the place.
What’s a girl to do? Cancel classes? (And if she does so—cancel a class or two or three or four in order to supply the needed evaluations—does she also have to use her “personal necessity days” in order to cover her absences? How does that work exactly?
Woo hoo! Union! Need advice!)
She could, of course, evaluate only faculty who teach when she is not teaching—say, generally before 10 am and after 3 pm.
Should she cut back on her own teaching in other ways? She could push that auto-pilot teaching button. You know the one. You’ve seen those folks. Hell, she could show videos to her writing classes and use the time she would have spent in class being a chair.
She could, of course, just stop bitching about it. Except that, by this time in the semester when she is wondering whether or not to grade papers, prep for classes, write memos to new instructors, set up meetings with new instructors, mend the fall schedule, adjust the summer schedule—or, well, chuck it all.
The other night when all this was keeping her up—it does—she had one of those Joycean epiphanies. She suddenly realized that Those That Be don’t really care. They care about appearances, that’s about it.
Of course, she thought, oddly relieved, the administration doesn’t really care if she evaluates faculty or not. They don’t care if she handles grade grievances in a timely and generous manner or not. Or if she is available to assist in all the ways needed or not.
No. The bottom line is bodies in the classroom—one at the podium and those students in their seats. What they care about is how it looks. And, on paper, it may look like everything is working, especially from afar—say wherever that Accreditation Team sits and writes their reports. It looks functional on paper—even if it can’t really work out in the real world without shafting students here or shafting students there, or putting faculty in impossible positions.
Now, Rebel Girl really shouldn’t paint with such a broad brush. It isn’t the administration per se—it’s the policy. (Some administrators have actually expressed sympathy, understanding. Imagine that!)
Yes, the policy puts her in this impossible position. The policy creates stress and tension so she must choose between one obligation and another—or do what she is doing, where she fails at nearly everything a little bit, and barely succeeds at some.
The policy reveals its priorities—meeting student needs with quality instruction isn’t among them.
Rebel Girl isn’t alone—there are other chairs out there, other sofas, davenports and chaises, teaching full loads and receiving their stipends. It could be that they are pleased with the arrangement—the nonexistence of summer pay notwithstanding (now that she thinks about it, Rebel Girl—resisting cynicism—imagines this arrangement was devised before the campus became such a jolly-year-round place to work). Perhaps the other chairs somehow make it work. Sacrifice. Compromise. You know.
Rebel Girl knows too. She works, always has, always will. She is proud that her car is often the last to leave on Thursday nights. Sacrifice? Sure. But how much? And to who? To what end?
Meanwhile, Rebel Girl awaits the seasonal return of the Accreditation Team. She’s got a story for them and she thinks that they might appreciate the themes of her tale: fear, cynicism, hostility, despair.
