First Person

Me and My Big Ideas

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By James M. Lang

As the adviser of my college's student literary magazine, I face the challenge each year of identifying a responsible student to serve as the magazine's editor in chief. That person has to pull together a staff, advertise for submissions, coordinate the selections, and then lay out the magazine.

I manage the magazine's finances, but I try to let the student editor make all of the editorial decisions. This past year the editor I selected had ambitious plans for the magazine, including adding a fall issue to our usual spring publication. I thought her ideas were great and vowed to help her how ever I could.

But when we returned in the fall, I faced an entirely new set of drains on my time: My wife gave birth to twins; the proofs for my new book arrived; I had four classes to teach, with three preps; I had accepted invitations to speak at events in New York and Iowa in October. As you might imagine, the student editor had difficulty tracking me down through most of that semester.

She managed to get out a fall issue, though, and to put most of her new initiatives in place. I was impressed and pleased with her hard work, but I was even more pleased that she did it all on her own and asked very little of me. On one or two occasions she did express frustration with the lack of help she was receiving from her editorial staff -- and she may have been obliquely chiding me as well.

"Everyone says they will help," she sighed one afternoon in my office, "but when I send out the e-mails asking for volunteers for something, nobody responds."

I was sympathetic, since I was experiencing the exact same problem in my own efforts to revise the college's evaluation forms that students fill out to rate their courses and professors. I had proposed three times that the forms be reworked -- in my third, fourth, and now fifth year on the tenure track.

Before I joined the faculty, I had worked in an administrative office at a large research university. That office had compiled extensive research on how to construct a valid teaching-evaluation form, and had redesigned the university's forms just before I landed my tenure-track job at the college.

Based on that research and experience, I could see problems with the evaluation form in use at my new college during my first semester. It asked a variety of questions that seemed excessively nitpicky -- "Did the instructor start and end class on time?" -- but it did not contain a single question asking whether the students had learned anything in the course.

So I started asking around, seeing what others thought of the form. Nobody liked it. I asked about the prospects for revising it. Everyone supported that. All the while, I kept expecting to find myself in conversation with the senior faculty member who had designed the form. I still have no idea who developed it. Either the person was long gone, or didn't want to admit it.

A few senior colleagues seemed especially interested in seeing the form revised. They set up a committee to revise the forms and gave it official status through the Faculty Senate.

I saw no point in reinventing the wheel, so at the committee's first meeting, I distributed the forms that had been used at my previous university, along with the research that supported them.

It didn't take much effort for us to adapt that form to our college. We then solicited the advice of colleagues from education and the social sciences who know more than any of us did about creating valid survey instruments. (They don't cover that kind of thing in graduate seminars on literary theory.) We made the changes they recommended. We then proposed our new form to the Faculty Senate. It also recommended some changes, which we made, and then I resubmitted it.

The senate approved the new form. I felt satisfied. I was not the official chairman of our committee, but I had played a key role. I had made a difference, and I could sit back and enjoy seeing my work come to fruition.

The following semester, I waited for word to come -- from whom I wasn't sure -- on when the new forms would start to be used. Eventually it became apparent that there was no time frame. Nothing yet had been done with the forms.

I spoke with the colleagues who had helped establish the committee. They gently explained that the ball remained in my court. I needed to continue shepherding the new forms into life. If I didn't do it, no one else would.

So, probably feeling much as my student editor did as she prepared to put together the spring issue of the magazine, I got back to work. I proposed to the dean that we test the form in 20 classes this spring. Each class would use both the old and new forms. Then we could compare the information we received, make adjustments, and be ready to implement the new forms next fall.

I sent e-mail messages to the faculty looking for volunteers; I had photocopies of the new forms made and distributed to the volunteers; I arranged for their return and safekeeping; I watched them come into a box in my departmental office; I sent the box over to the dean's office.

And that's where things stand at the moment. We still haven't determined exactly how the comparisons will be made between the two sets of information we received, especially since we want that information to remain confidential, which means I can't review it myself.

But I'm sure, somehow, I'll remain involved.

I know that because at the conclusion of every step in this process, I have figuratively wiped my hand against my sweaty brow, breathed a sigh of relief, and waited for someone else -- an administrative office, the Faculty Senate, a team of secretaries, work-study students, the Creator -- to step in and finish the process for me.

I'm still waiting.

Almost everyone on the faculty wanted the forms revised, and everyone has been encouraging and supportive. But everyone also seems quite relieved that I'm the moron who took the initiative to make the change, and that therefore the main responsibility for pushing through the revision remains with me.

I will be very pleased when the new forms are finally in use, and I can take pride in the role I played. But for now, I still feel like I'm thrashing around in the water, trying to swim through waves pushing me in different directions.

Even after the form was approved by the senate, colleagues have approached or called me with suggestions and concerns, and I'm not sure how to react since I don't have tenure. I don't know whose suggestions it would be impolitic for me to ignore, and whose complaints I can safely dismiss. So I just keep asking for advice, taking care of one thing at a time, responding to the most pressing issues.

The process has made me more enthusiastic about my ability to make a difference at a small college like mine. But it has also left me more cautious about commiting myself to other such ventures in the future, because I know now how much work they can be.

I have another initiative in mind, one that I have been slowly turning over in my mind for a couple of years now. But next year's my tenure year, and I don't want to take on anything new during that arduous time. If I get tenure, the following year I'll be on sabbatical. After that, I'll need another year to transition back in.

The 2008-09 academic year. That seems like the right time for my next big idea.