Advice for Young Faculty (Part III)

I had plans, people–big, crazy plans.  But then I got two notes from readers that prompted me to scrap them.  One is in the midst of prepping her annual report, a task I’m in the middle of myself, and another inquired about the approach to renewing the job search on the sly from a new position.  I won’t have the wherewithal to tackle both today (assuming I can address even one of those queries semi-responsibly), but rest assured that the latter concern is rattling around my brainpan.  I’ll canvas my peeps and see if I can come up with any useful ideas.

To touch on the first, however, a few recommendations I’d offer based on my own experience as a prodigious pusher of professional paper.

1.  Save everything…everything.  Most year-end dossiers that I’m aware of consist of two parts:  covering material (sometimes a narrative, sometimes no more than a table of contents) that explains what you’ve done to earn your keep, and some form of proof that you are not totally fabricating the claims in your covering material.   The narrative can be beastly, depending on how much shameless self-promotion you’re required to perform, but the proving portion of the program is none too terrifying so long as you’ve done some preliminary piling.  Have you signed a major lately?  Save the form.  Did you sit in on a committee meeting?  Ask for a copy of the minutes and set it aside.  Did you speak to a student group about Muskrat Imagery in Proust?  Save a flyer from the talk and/or ask the president of the group to write you a note.  Creating a paper trail will feel a little grubby at times, but the easier you make life on your department’s personnel peeps, the happier they’ll be.

When my head is straight (and let’s face it, that’s a hit or miss proposition) I try to make my own life easy:  any time I pay a visit to the copy room I make a three-hole punched version of whatever it is I’m copying–departmental forms, syllabi, exams, publications, minutes, etc.  I always wind up with a few stray bits and bobs to print up at semester’s end, but for the most part I’m able to sort and stack with alacrity.  The same holds true for e-mail, by the bye; I’m a little on the obsessive side, but I sock everything away in case I need it later.  I have a pretty roomy folder set aside for things I’ll probably print out over the summer, but even a none-too-sharp partition that separates professional stuff from student queries, circulars, and the like spares me from sifting through a few hundred messages to find the one that proves I did what I said I did.

2.  Conform and obey.  You know me–I’m an adorable autocrat.  Happily, most administrators are too (or for a few short stretches each semester, they have to be).  Remember back in the day, when I suggested that you ought to learn the rules that govern the terms of your work through and through?  Paperwork piling o’clock is a fine time to break them out.  The requisite measure of formality varies, but in general I think it’s wise to give readers what they’ve come to expect when they crack open the dossier.  Get an exemplar if you can and mimic the formatting shamelessly; if you’re lucky enough to have several colleagues kind enough to offer you specimens, as I was, do your best to approximate the order that’s implied, even if approaches are various.

Departmental readers can be fairly forgiving, since they will probably have some sense of the complexion of your work and understand what goes where.  To deans, provosts, presidents, and trustees, however, what you do may well be a mystery.  Depending on how your university is set up, your college’s dean might be an English critter like yourself, but she might also be an artist, a counselor, or a political scientist, as Humanities divisions tend to sprawl.  She will need a little bit of guidance to assess what you’re up to.

When I put my dossier together for the first time, I had the advantage of several examples as well as an ersatz check-down list.  When I talk teaching, for instance, I need only refer to pages 19 and 20 of our departmental bylaws to get an itemized, A-Q sequence of what my readers will expect to see.  Once your paperwork flies beyond the safety of your department, your readers will probably be appraising your work with exactly that kind of checklist on hand or in mind.  Even if you’re prone to fulminations and flourishes, it’s not a bad idea to make sure that the crescendos build as they’ve built before.

3.  Anticipate legalese.  Although I understand the protective rationale that governs the pushing of paper and the adjudication thereof, I freely confess to all the usual frustrations:  I would rather know than guess, but the process of necessity is designed to keep you guessing.  This may not be true in smaller, more intimate departments, but in all the places I’ve been (including grad school) the folks in the know were barred from forthrightly communicating their knowledge about the relative quality of an application–whether or not it was likely to get the job done.

Our chair in the English department at CMU is the bee’s knees and/or cat’s pyjamas of chairkind, but even she is bound by the rules that bar most folks with juridical roles from using the kind of language that lets candidates know where they actually stand.  In the write-up that accompanies reappointment decisions here, all the Powers That Be can offer is a simple scheme:  the report is divvied up into teaching, scholarship, and service, and we are informed if our work is substandard, standard, or better than standard in each area.   That’s it.

Accordingly, no matter how mighty your pile of paper, don’t be surprised if chairfolk and personnel peeps can only give you a typically-tiered response.  Unless they have absolute decision-making power, they are only hedging against the prospect of variant interpretations of the text that is your dossier.  It’s not much fun feeling uncertain about your professional future, but I reckon it’s a bit more debilitating to imagine you’ve got reappointment, tenure, or promotion sewn up based on some credible colleague’s account, only to have someone further along the food chain cut the cord.

That being said, be sure to avail yourself of the advice and perspective of local veterans of personnel committees past.  While current members must be chary about describing their sense of your situation, folks who no longer serve on such committees can speak much more freely.  Also keep in mind that most folks in the know can comment on your dossier informally; they’ll probably skirt around the edges of the skinny, but they can most certainly tell you if you’ve put the package together properly or if you’ve missed something that a savvy candidate would normally include.  At CMU there’s a formal submission window, but before it closes it’s common for candidates to get as much perspective as they can.  In a department like mine, that means I get to tap into the viewpoints of a couple dozen kindly eyes if there’s world enough and time.

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That’ll have to do for now.  As always, feel free to pose questions you’ve got.  There’s no guarantee that I can answer them, but I can often make educated guesses or find folks that can.