Administrivia

Our dept is working (in violation of our sacred contract that bestows summer vacation free from required committee work) on tasks that I think the chair was supposed to have assigned during the regular school year. My part of the first task took about 15 minutes, which was less time than it took me to read all the emails from my colleagues opining that we shouldn't have to do this task in the first place.

Three of my colleagues have filled out the mandated paperwork incorrectly, which has already been pointed out via email by our most senior colleague. It's a simple fix, but Senior Colleague chose to read their errors as disagreement with his position, which will probably lead to a bit of hurt feelings.

But the analytical fix (Senior Colleague complains of the lack of analytical rigor in our program and I guess some of the faculty suffer the same malady!) is simple: if you are filling out a course matrix for program planning, the number of boxes with the same unique course options has to be equal to the number of unique course options in the box. That is, "Course A or Course B" can only appear in two boxes. If a student takes Course B the first time, and Course A the second time, then what does she take the THIRD time you list "Course A or Course B"?

For the second task, which has to be done by the chair, no one noticed (or commented) that he is conflating a reporting of what WAS done this year (annual report) with our strategic plan for next year (goals we developed during a very painful session called "faculty retreat"). My question is, will the Dean read closely enough to notice? And if she does, will she kick it back to him for R&R? Or is she just collating this admistrivia and passing it up the chain of command?

Back to course planning, which is infinitely more interesting than all this stuff!