Although sometimes I pine for the days of my youth, the one year of my life that I try to forget is my first year as a new faculty member. Whatever joy and satisfaction I felt at earning the rare plum of a tenure-track position—around 10 years ago—were more than outweighed by the exhausting number of hours I spent just trying to make it through the year.
That may seem like a strange sentiment coming from me, since I did write a memoir about my first year on the tenure track. But rest assured, once I exorcized that long year from my psyche by writing about it, I haven’t looked back at it much. I still occasionally get e-mail messages from readers of that memoir, and they always take me by surprise, especially when they comment upon specific incidents or feelings I described. Oh, I think—I wrote about that?
Since then I have rested happily in the assurance that the trials of that first year—the late nights and long weekends of grading and course preparation, the uncertainty and anxiety about whether I was doing my job well, the new set of faces and responsibilities to prepare for each day—were only a painful memory, and that I would never have to experience anything like them again.
And then, like an idiot, I decided to apply for an administrative post at my college.
Welcome back, Year From Hell.
By the time you read this, I will have just about finished the academic year, so I am taking a break from this column’s normal focus on teaching and learning to note a few of the highs and lows of my first months on the administrative track. Right now it looks to me like a U-shaped track, one that will lead me back to the faculty after a three-year term. But perhaps I will feel differently at the end of next year.
My administrative position is part-time, which may have made my year worse or better than it could have been; I’m not sure which. I accepted a three-course release (from our typical teaching load of seven courses a year) in order to serve as director of the College Honors Program.
Still relatively new, the program this year graduated its first class of students to have completed all four years of honors work. We do not require an immense amount of honors course work. The students take two linked courses as freshmen and a community-service learning course and two electives as sophomores. Then they do a research seminar in their junior year to propose a thesis project, and an independent study in their senior year to write the thesis.
In addition to the course work, we have a dedicated lounge and classroom space, an administrative assistant, and lots of co-curricular academic and social events. About 80 students are in the program, but we expect a large incoming class and hope eventually to maintain a full program of 100 to 150 students. The college is extremely supportive of the honors program, so I have a generous budget and plenty of room for creativity and new initiatives.
That two-paragraph description of our program makes it sounds so settled and organized. But that was not how it felt this year. The newness of the program meant I was responsible for devising policies and writing memos from scratch on certain issues, with no models handed down from a predecessor. Just about every week, I was confronted with a problem that not only did I not know how to solve but did not even know existed.
Sometimes multiple problems arose in the same week. For example, the registrar sent me a message last summer, before the semester started, asking me which course I wanted students to register for when they wrote their senior theses, and whether I wanted them to use a special form in registering.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”
“It’s up to you,” he said.
The following week, I found myself sitting down with the registrar as he walked me through the options for creating a new form, and the registration procedures we would have to use. The rest of the day, I worked with an assistant in the honors program on creating the form and getting it off to the print shop—not exactly the kind of work I thought I’d be doing during all of those late nights I spent writing a dissertation on the uses of history in postwar British fiction.
Still, in retrospect, that was nothing. By the time December rolled around, I was longing for a lazy summer morning in the registrar’s office.
The senior theses plagued me with new problems all year long. Late in the fall I began to get messages from nervous faculty mentors, all of whom danced around the same question: “What if the student doesn’t finish the thesis by the end of the semester?” Case-by-case negotiations led to some students’ powering through and finishing, others getting graded on the work they had completed and finishing over break, and still others taking an incomplete and finishing by the next semester. Every one of those cases ate hours from my life.
In the spring I began to get messages from departments that wanted to meet with me to make suggestions about how the thesis-writing process could work more smoothly for their majors. Every one of those meetings proved helpful, leading me to tweak the process—and every one of them took more hours from my life.
Indeed, the most time-consuming part of the job has been that I have become so popular. Everyone wants to have a meeting with me or wants me to attend a meeting: the Academic Council, Faculty Senate, Honors Faculty Council, Student Honors Council, Residential Life, the provost, the associate provost, deans, the Undergraduate Research Committee, faculty members teaching in the program, department chairs and departmental committees ... .
All year long, I traipsed around the campus, always on the move, carrying folders full of notes that I brought back to the office and filed away, hoping (futilely, no doubt) that good notes would reduce the number of meetings next year. I drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of dining-hall cookies.
The easiest and most pleasant part of the job, to my surprise, was dealing with the students. I had had low expectations, because my first experience with an honors student had felt like a bad omen.
The associate provost sent a student to me who was dropping out of the program and wanted to convey what he saw as some problems with how it was structured. And boy, did he have a lot to convey. First in a meeting, and then in a three-page, single-spaced letter, he articulated everything he thought we were doing wrong. He was bright, pleasant, and made some legitimate points. I assured him that I would work on them in the coming year. But what I really thought was: Did I just agree to manage and advise 75 students who are going to demand this much of my time and energy?
Fortunately, that turned out not to be the case. Teaching the program’s freshman course in the fall became one of the best experiences of my life. We read great books and talked about the meaning of life. The students were motivated and bright. Their papers were pleasant to read, and I felt that I learned more from students that year than I ever had. It rejuvenated my teaching and made me remember why I became an academic.
And although I have never been the kind of person who has students visiting me during office hours to talk about their lives, I have especially enjoyed having the honors lounge adjacent to my office. Students use the space to study, hang out, and chat—more of the latter than the former—and I have to pass through the lounge to get in or out of my office. As the year went by, I found myself stopping more and more often to talk with students about their courses, their academic plans, their lives.
So it has not been all bad. My wife might tell you differently—she experienced none of the joys of my classroom epiphanies or closer relationships with my students. She got to see only the many afternoons and evenings I spent at meetings, dinners, and banquets, and the late nights and weekends I spent grading or preparing for class, since I had spent all of my office hours handling administrative responsibilities.
But I have survived. In the final weeks of this semester, I began to feel a weight lifting from my shoulders, even though I still had the final end-of-semester crunch ahead. At least now I know what to expect next year, and I have already completed many of the tasks that had to be done the first time. Other chores I hadn’t finished could at least be spaced out over the summer. It looked to me like next year was going to be much more predictable, and pleasant.
And then, in mid-April, I received an e-mail message from our information-technology czar. The administration was thinking about giving iPads to all of the honors students next year, she said, if we could come up with a proposal for how we might incorporate them into honors courses.
I stared at the message and thought about everything that would entail: meetings with faculty members to brainstorm the possibilities; meetings with IT to learn about the device and its apps; lots of e-mail correspondence with various groups; dealing with the logistics of getting iPads usefully into the hands of 75 students; handling the inevitable problems that would arise when they were dropped or stolen; and solving all sorts of other problems that I don’t even know exist right now.
And yet how could I say no? My job is to advocate for, and serve, the students in our program. The iPad initiative would create opportunities for the honors faculty members to think in fresh ways about our courses. It would give the students another tool to use in their studies, and it would provide me with a great marketing tool.
I sighed, and sent a reply: “YES! That sounds great to me. Let’s set up a meeting to talk about it ... .”
Here we go again.
