Friday, August 11, 2006

How to Swim: Tenure-Track Edition

Bardiac has some sane advice for new tenure-track folks, and a welcome. The highlights:
  • Don't panic...don't be paranoid
  • Save stuff for your portfolio
  • Get to know your administrative and other staff members
  • Just by being a faculty member, you've pretty much started near the top....When you want to complain about your office or something, remember that the adjunct standing in line behind you would likely be grateful for your position and your office.
  • Learn to say "no"
  • If you're paid on a nine month schedule, budget for summer
  • Save your school's catalogs
  • Get to know the majors and minors in your department and related departments
  • make sure you're familiar with your school's mission statement and goals
  • Most schools these days have some sort of program that faculty can use as an on-line component for your class. It may be Blackboard, WebCT, or whatever. Get to know yours.
One thing, though:
  • I'm pretty sure every university and department has a faculty handbook of some sort.
Hm. The University's has been in revision (though after 3+ years on my watch alone, I wonder what the administration and full-time lawyer think "revision" means) forever. Post-Katrina, I heard rumors of "old" handbooks being cited to justify 5/6/7-class workloads. I may be a pest this coming year and try to "get one."

3 Comments:

Blogger Professor Zero said...

I have normally worked at public institutions, where faculty handbooks had to be complete and compliant with state law. When I have looked at faculty handbooks for private schools, usually to help friends figure out how to handle things like tenure problems, the lack of content and the general vagueness of the rules has been quite remarkable.

Fri Aug 11, 12:22:00 AM  
Blogger Bardiac said...

Hey, thanks for the nod :)

I really should have learned about handbooks way earlier than I did.

My sense is that chairs or personel committee chairs need to mentor new profs and adjuncts more than mine did. But there's a learning curve to both those positions, and I think a lot of them don't realize.

Sat Aug 12, 10:03:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've seen a couple handbooks lying around the school. They have a neat cover really. A lot of gloss was used, and the word font is 14. There's a lot to be said about the covers of these books.

Sun Aug 13, 06:59:00 AM  

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