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[polly_mer]

Hegemony, I do think you have an important point about institutional initiatives that rely on unpaid faculty labor--but agree that the person trying to draft you is not the right audience. How about writing up your original post as a op-ed for the CHE?

This. 

When it is published, start sending it to the people who insist on trying to draft you with the N requests.

A list of your activities is going to get nowhere fast, but a pre-made "here's what I think on the topic" could shut people up.  Anyone who wants to then try to draft you has to explain why their ultra-ueber-important initiative doesn't fall into that category.  Insist on a five-page-minimum rebuttal before you will even consider thinking about joining the initiative.  Anyone who has the kind of time to draft a rebuttal then had the freakin' time to do the initiative alone.

[larryc]

There really does seem to be a trend, as we move to the all-administrator university, that the remaining TT faculty get stretched thinner and thinner with service responsibilities. Not just for the traditional committee work, but every new, administrator-driven initiative has a big old chunk of faculty flesh in the recipe.

[hegemony]

Larry, I think you should write the editorial.

Seriously.

Meanwhile I'll be out at the Faculty Student Engagement Initiative.

[itried]

Yeah. I look at our current Strategic Planning committee and see that the President appointed all 40-ish mid-career faculty, all at the same career phase, who are busting their a$$es in new departmental leadership roles like Chair. They all hate and resent that soul-sucking committee.

[history_grrrl]

There really does seem to be a trend, as we move to the all-administrator university, that the remaining TT faculty get stretched thinner and thinner with service responsibilities. Not just for the traditional committee work, but every new, administrator-driven initiative has a big old chunk of faculty flesh in the recipe.

This. We just received a chart from our dean with all sorts of shiny new initiatives on it. It's like a pie-in-the-sky wishlist (oh, and one column in the table tries to say what costs will be involved -- none of those involved compensation for faculty time, if I recall). I can't give details for fear of outing my institution, but imagine something like "increase the Humanities presence in the community" and then come up with another 30 things along those lines.

If it weren't for the Fora, I probably would have read the thing super-carefully, gotten all kerfuffle-ish, and planned to go to some meeting with a big ol' chip on my shoulder and plans to challenge The Power That Be. (Well, probably not, but I would have spent a good chunk of time fuming about it.)

Thanks to the Fora, I skimmed the thing, laughed hysterically, and closed the message. Then I realized the meeting where we were supposed to discuss this had already happened earlier that day (we got, I think, three days notice, or maybe it was two), and then I laughed some more. And went back to work.

[tenured_feminist]

There really does seem to be a trend, as we move to the all-administrator university, that the remaining TT faculty get stretched thinner and thinner with service responsibilities. Not just for the traditional committee work, but every new, administrator-driven initiative has a big old chunk of faculty flesh in the recipe.

You know, it's become pervasive enough that I wonder if it is one of those things making the rounds at administrators' conferences. I suspect it's being framed as "building faculty engagement" and "giving faculty more of a stake in the university," but the real purpose is to water down legitimate forms of faculty governance like senates and the like (which never seem to be the source of these types of s***e) and to distract the faculty from the long-term and devastating effects of budget cuts.

Here, "we" just put about two years and countless hours of faculty time into creating a new strategic plan. There are now about 10 committees sucking the lives out of approximately 15 faculty each developing plans to implement the strategic plan. At the same time, each college is to report their plans to implement the strategic plan, and each department is to report to each college its plans to implement the strategic plan. So, if you're following me, that's three layers of implementation planning, all duplicative.

You must be wondering what kind of plan requires this much work to implement. In a nutshell, we are supposed to produce more research, publish it in better places, win more external grants, teach more students on the undergraduate and graduate levels, teach those students better, improve our means of assessing our own productivity and our educational outcomes at undergrad and grad levels, and add a community service and outreach component to our university's profile in which "community" is defined as everything from what's right outside our windows to East Asia. And we are supposed to do this having incurred permanent cuts over the last five years from the state legislature amounting to about a quarter of our budget.

Whenever I confront my obligations under this mandate, I am alternatively tempted to poke my eyeballs out with hot needles or go on the market. Fortunately for my university, my house is too messy and chaotic for me to be able to find any needles, and it's too late in the season for me to go on the market.
 

[pathogen]

You must be wondering what kind of plan requires this much work to implement. In a nutshell, we are supposed to produce more research, publish it in better places, win more external grants, teach more students on the undergraduate and graduate levels, teach those students better, improve our means of assessing our own productivity and our educational outcomes at undergrad and grad levels, and add a community service and outreach component to our university's profile in which "community" is defined as everything from what's right outside our windows to East Asia. And we are supposed to do this having incurred permanent cuts over the last five years from the state legislature amounting to about a quarter of our budget.

Whenever I confront my obligations under this mandate, I am alternatively tempted to poke my eyeballs out with hot needles or go on the market. Fortunately for my university, my house is too messy and chaotic for me to be able to find any needles, and it's too late in the season for me to go on the market.
 

Bwahahahaha. This is my institution. Only it seems I need to accomplish these things to get tenure.

[rowan1]

Often I don't know if I should be frightened that we all seem to work at the same university or comforted by that fact.

We have been told straight out that service really doesn't count for much in terms of T and P;meanwhile the service load has increased, the research load has increased, the teaching load has increased, the number of students has incresed, class sizes have increased, and RPGs must increase.

But there have been important areas where decreases have been implemented - faculty take home pay, benefits, temporary faculty lines to cover all those extra students.

Its all good.

Larry, you really should write that editorial, or hedgemony, you should.

[oldfullprof]

OP, never reply to emails like those.  Skinner and others referred to this as "putting the behavior on extinction."

[hegemony]

Actually it's a principle of mine to reply to e-mail, and even more particularly when it's directed to me specifically from someone I know.  Our former chair prided himself publicly on never replying to e-mail he didn't want to deal with.  His self-righteous ignoring of other people's concerned caused all kinds of foul-ups and frustration down the line.  To my mind not replying to questions is like applying to a job and never getting the "No thanks" note.  And I have absolutely no doubt that the person would have kept e-mailing me about the initiative, only with increasing ire rather than apologies.  My stance is that all these manipulative initiatives are deplorable, but it's also lamentable if we stop being civil generally.  And I'm just as annoyed by people who don't answer my e-mail and cause me extra trouble that way as by people who try to volunteer me for things.

[oldfullprof]

I  know what you mean.  But passive-aggression is a good way to deal with this type of aggression.  I might have responded to the first one and said "no," then ignored the others.