Department heads start out as professors: trained researchers and experienced teachers. As a professor, I was prepared in very general ways for running a department: I'd already set goals, solved problems, dealt with people, dug up information, and crafted reports.
What my experience didn't prepare me for was the office routine that distinguishes administrative life from research and teaching. As a professor I think nothing of spending a day trying to get a paragraph right. I sit staring out into space, waiting for ideas. I read a lot. I pace about and reflect. Administration doesn't work like that. I quickly found myself skimming executive summaries, not picking apart monographs. I lost track of professional journals. I hammered out unrevised prose just good enough to do its job.
Professors thrive on unstructured time, but offices open and close at fixed hours. I like to work at odd times, at all hours, pursuing a task wherever it leads, stretching deadlines to fill in all the blanks. When I became a department chairman, my day took on a trimmer shape. I still worked all hours, but my life got sorted into blocks of time: 30 minutes to meet with a faculty member; an hour for a visitor to campus; two hours for a committee meeting; five minutes for a phone call; 20 to hear a complaint.
My administrative day was calendar-driven. I'd barely get started on one thing when my computer would beep to tell me to change activities. If I ignored the beep, my secretary would come in and gently tell me where to go. I bought a Palm Pilot to direct me when I was away from the office. I never seemed to finish anything. I mentally stamped each file, "To be continued." I signed sheaves of papers I didn't have time to read just because the little flag said, "Sign here." My mantra for ending conversations became, "I gotta go."
Then it came to me: This was what the working world was like, the world where people went to meetings, played phone tag, moved paper from the in box to the out box. What made the university tick was exactly what drove the gray-flannel rat race that I thought I had escaped.
I quickly learned that this was not a bad thing. Universities can't do what they need to do without some paper getting pushed. And office routine turns out to be a lot like the arc of research: high points, low points, with lots of space in between where nothing seems to change.
To illustrate what it's like to be on the clock in academe from morning till night, I checked my calendar for a day that wasn't full of crises but also wasn't an empty day, the kind I'd use for catching up on paperwork. March 15, 2002, seemed typical: lots of activity to report, but not much happened.
It wasn't in the "captain's log," but I'm pretty sure that Stardate 3-15-02 started about 5:30 a.m., an hour before the alarm, when my eyes snapped open. Unlike professoring, administration doesn't leave much time for reflection. So my time for staring into space got pushed back to the quiet, predawn hours when, lying utterly still, I went over the good things that were likely to unfold that day (there were always good things); I reviewed the problems that I would face (there were always problems); and I wondered what else might turn up. "What else" -- the unexpected things that complicate department life -- tended to fill up the empty slots on my schedule. That bonus hour of sleeplessness also gave me a chance to worry about what I should be doing differently and what I'd already screwed up beyond all recognition.
According to my records, on the morning of March 15 I arrived at the office -- no doubt with a steaming mug of coffee in hand -- at my usual time, 8:10 a.m. My first appointment was not till 10 a.m. That gave me almost two hours to sip the coffee and reduce the stack of paperwork accumulating on my desk. I'd also have to prepare my class. There were no crises, but one thing led to another, the coffee cooled, and I never made a dent in the paperwork.
8:10 a.m.: The day began with an unscheduled event. The department's business manager came into my office to report that a graduate student had been overpaid and would have to return the extra money. The business manager blamed the new computer system, though human error likely played a role.
Finding a culprit either on the department staff or in the payroll division wouldn't help the student, who was legitimately angry at the error. Living close to the edge, he had already spent his paycheck. I asked what would happen if he simply refused to repay the money. The business manager assured me that payroll would just deduct the whole amount from his next check. We agreed to ask the university for a six-month repayment schedule, something the student had reluctantly agreed he could live with.
8:30 a.m.: Sipping cold coffee, I read and replied to e-mail, a task that generally took at least an hour. After deleting spam, this was left:
- A survey. I usually tossed surveys, but this one concerned faculty salaries at a peer institution. I spent five minutes locating relevant spread sheets on my computer (I could never remember what I'd named them), then pasted in figures. That messed up the survey formatting, and I spent a few minutes unsuccessfully trying to fix that.
- A request to help pay for a campus visitor (I committed $25; did I remember to copy my business manager on that?).
- "Presmail" from the university president (skimmed and deleted).
- Stuff. That included lecture announcements (forwarded one to the faculty and students; entered another on my calendar); three messages from the associate head (noted and filed); one from a student unable to get into a class (forwarded to adviser); a dozen from a professional discussion list (filed unread); a conference announcement from a professional association (forwarded to the faculty); and a request from an international student for graduate program information (forwarded to graduate director).
I also composed four e-mails of my own: to prospective members of a committee I was trying to set up; to a faculty member asking him to stop by to discuss a student; to the dean informing him of a prize a faculty member had won; another to the dean asking about a situation I had asked him about the week before.
10 a.m.: I met with the department's media center committee. On the agenda: deciding what to do about our obsolete projection TV and discussing a proposal to move the center because of staff reductions. We decided to repair the TV since there was no money to replace it, and that further study was needed before moving the center. Discussion to be continued.
11 a.m.: Next up was a meeting with a visiting job candidate from another department. While I welcomed her offer to teach an occasional English course "for free," I put off commiting to a joint appointment until I could talk to the relevant department specialists and the chair of department that was hiring her.
11:50 a.m.: My secretary brought in the mail and told the job candidate that her escort was ready to take her to lunch.
Noon: Time to do some triage on the mail while munching my own lunch of snack-machine chips and diet cola (leading a department involves ingesting a lot of empty calories):
-
Tossed yet-to-be read journal onto book shelf.
-
Moved most of the snail mail directly from in box to out box, initialing where necessary.
-
Recycled all but two remaining letters.
-
Answered one by e-mail; put the other in the center of the to-do pile. Urgent things went on top of the pile (the goal was to handle them immediately, or by the close of business; at worst, by end of week). On the bottom I put those items likely to take care of themselves before I got to them.
-
Reduced top of pile by one item: wrote memo to associate dean requesting money for a faculty member traveling to an international conference.
-
Realized at 12:50 that I hadn't yet prepared to teach my 2 p.m. class.
1 p.m.: Now it was time to return phone calls from message slips that had accumulated during the morning: a faculty member concerned about the status of the film program; a query from a member of the public about proper punctuation. I left messages for two people, and started to prepare for class but was interrupted by several phone calls: a professor calling from home to express his concern and outrage over some slight (tried to be supportive); a cold call from a broker pretending to know me so he could get past my secretary (hung up on him).
1:30 p.m.: Panicking about my class, I instructed my secretary, "Please, no calls or interruptions." I went over my class notes, typed up a handout, and tried not to be distracted by a new e-mail message popping up on screen.
1:50 p.m.: My secretary interrupted: A student from my class was anxious about an assignment. My secretary was right, of course: I needed to see this student. I gave my secretary the handout to copy for class, and turned my attention to calming down the student.
2-3:15 p.m.: Taught class, a literal and welcome change of pace after sitting at my desk all day. This was the kind of activity that made the paperwork worthwhile. Though I wasn't as well-prepared as I would have liked, the class went fine. Might not be so lucky next time.
3:15-3:45 p.m.: Chatted with students while walking back to the office. I had office hours scheduled until 4:15, but most students, uncomfortable trying to get past the secretary, preferred to talk in the hallway.
3:45 p.m.: Ran out for coffee. Met colleague on my way out who asked if I was leaving early. Right. Met colleague from another department at the coffee shop, talked about a conference coming up.
4 p.m.: Walked to the education college for a meeting with local school teachers as part of a grant. General gripe session about how the high school won't let us do what we need to do; how the computers don't work. Planned for annual spring meeting in May. No decisions made.
5:15 p.m.: I got back to the office (which closed at 5 p.m.) just in time to catch a call from the dean. While I had him on the phone, I went over a list of things that had come up since our last talk. Naturally I forgot to ask him about the e-mails I had sent earlier in the day.
5:30 p.m.: Arranged message slips on my desk for morning callbacks. Checked my e-mail. Synchronized Palm Pilot and rechecked the next day's schedule. On the way out, a colleague stopped to ask if I was leaving early. Right.
Out of the office, but still on the clock, I took my son to piano, using his lesson time to make another call and skim the Times. After grabbing a snack at home, I returned to the campus to attend a lecture, arriving late. I tried to listen to the speaker, but suddenly remembered a deadline that was about to slip by for a campus proposal. After post-lecture schmoozing, I went home to work on the proposal, finally awarding it "to be continued" status so I could spend some time with my family. Around midnight I rechecked my Palm Pilot for the next day's schedule, made sure there was nothing dire in my e-mail, and powered down first the computer, then myself.
Actually there was one exciting event on March 15 (two, if you count what happened to Julius Caesar that day). I spent part of my lunch hour filling out another survey, this one one from U.S. News & World Report. The year before I had proudly informed the university that my department had made the magazine's top-20 list. But that day, as I pondered questions like, "What are the top five programs in colonial American literature?" I wondered whether other department heads were devoting as little time to this task as I was. Plus, how could the magazine continue remembering us favorably in its ratings when the editors' Palm Pilots or secretaries kept telling them it was time to move on?
