As of mid-day this past Wednesday, I am once again the guy who receives and responds to emails sent to the chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College. Technically, according to the appointment letter I signed that morning, I don’t start my term as chair until August 1, but practically, I’m already it.
This is one of the items that most clearly separates academics from non-academics, because if you tell somebody who’s not faculty “I’m taking over as department chair,” they’ll say “Congratulations!” If you say that to a professor, they’ll wince sympathetically and offer condolences. These positions are not generally coveted, particularly at smaller schools, because they come with a lot of headaches. It was fairly accurately described by a past chair of our department as “A position with responsibility, but no authority.” That is, it’s the chair’s job to make sure that certain things happen, but they have very limited power to compel anyone else to do anything. So lots of drudgery and paperwork falls directly on the chair.
This will be my second term as chair, something I was resigned to having happen, though I was expecting it to be a couple more years. The previous occupant has stepped down for unimpeachable reasons, though, so I agreed to do it slightly ahead of schedule. This is in stark contrast to the previous stint, where if I’m being honest, I’m still kind of pissed about how I ended up in the job, and how things went at the end. I’m not going to tell that story here, though; buy me a beer and ask in person sometime.
This does have some implications for my blogging activity. Not so much in terms of content— I’ve been in quasi-administrative roles almost continuously for the last several years, so I never really stopped being careful about what I say since the first time I stepped into the job. It’s more a matter of time management— as noted above, there’s a lot of stupid paperwork associated with being chair, and a lot of meetings, and I’m going to need to fit all that in around teaching classes (which I haven’t been doing this past year, as I was on a much-needed sabbatical leave after four years of running the undergraduate research program). I’m also trying to get a new writing project and some other side hustles off the ground, and those will need to take priority over writing random stuff on Substack.
I’m sort of interested to see what comes from this change, actually, since my last stint as chair is what really confirmed my change to being a Morning Person, and solidified my Starbucks habit. I needed to block out time for uninterrupted work on my own projects, and SteelyKid started kindergarten around that time with a 7:30am bus pick-up. So I started going to the local Starbucks with my laptop and doing my writing between 7 and 9 am. The discipline of having a really constrained window in which my work had to be done ended up being really good for my productivity.
They’ve re-arranged that store so my comfortable writing spot isn’t available any more, but over the last couple of weeks I’ve been establishing a new morning writing location, with reasonable success. We’ll see how this holds up as the actual academic year approaches, and what schedule shifts need to be made once I’m teaching and the kids are in school. The impending change has been good for forcing me to actually buckle down a bit more on some of my projects, though, which is maybe a not-terrible sign. I hope?
Anyway, this is a Thing that’s been weighing on my mind of late, and that I’ve alluded to obliquely a few times in posts here. And it’s now hit the threshold of official enough to post openly about the start of Round Two…
If you would like a front-row seat for whatever dissolution of my sanity this brings about, here’s a button you can click:
If you’d like to offer expressions of sympathy in this difficult time, the comments will be open:
Surely the wood-paneled Chairs' Lounge and its bespoke craft-beer service make up for the indignities