Because this is how the last week has gone

I think I should get an entire wardrobe as well as posters and stickers I can hand out that all have this on them:

In which my colleagues amuse me

I am at a university that is small enough to have a campus listerv on which faculty can have discussions. This has its benefits and its drawbacks. Since my somewhat off-balance colleague left a few years ago, the listserv has been largely used for one-way communication (e.g., hey, come to this lecture). But, today an old-timer decided to use the listserv to vent about a topic. And, ze got called on the hypocrisy of that vent. That message was really nicely done. But said faculty person couldn't just let it go and decided to get snarky. Now, the conversation is getting fun - you know, because snark attracts snark. Sometimes I love being at a tiny college!

Ch-ch-changes

My university is going through some changes - hard ones and exciting ones. Through these changes, I am on the front lines for some of the biggies. I am learning a lot. Here are some highlights:

• Revisionist history begins the moment a resignation is made public.
• Being a leader should mean both making the hard decisions and being a decent human being about their implementation. 
• Related: just because someone is good at the decision making, there is no reason to believe that person will also be good at treating the people involved decently.
• Delegating only works if the people to whom you delegate have any freakin' idea of what you just asked them to do.
• If they don't, it's likely that many, many people will be angry with you for the lousy delegation.
• If you say that student credit hour production is only one metric by which a unit is judged, but it's the only metric you name, the message is that student credit hour production is the only metric people will know to use.
• The focus on student credit hour production may be in direct conflict with the stated goals of the university but that matters not at all when one is only concerned with cells in a spreadsheet.
• Hard decisions should really include any sense at all of an implementation plan. If there is no implementation plan, it is likely not the right time to make the hard decision.
• Keeping all of the balls in the air may not be the best strategy. Sometimes, you're better off letting a few land on the floor.
• It's very easy to slip into "using" language and to forget that there are humans attached to that leveraging and using who probably would find that distasteful -- no one wants to be used.

I'm sure there are others, but these are some that are weighing on my mind at the moment.

The Lit Review

I am currently serving on a dissertation committee that has raised a number of questions for me about what role the literature review should play in a dissertation. This has come up because the student has been overly-thorough. Rather than describing the literature underlying the ideas of the dissertation by drawing from a few key sources and, perhaps, alluding to and citing others, this student is trying to fully flesh out every single argument and all of the ideas that argument entails. This leads to an intro + lit review that is more than 150 pages long. This is not typical in my field. At all.

So, this raises questions. What is the purpose of the literature review? What is the proper approach to providing feedback when the review is too thorough (as in, I keep losing the line of argument and have long ago forgotten the research questions)? Do we encourage this because it shows a high level of rigor and careful analysis of the existing literature or do we discourage it because it is in no way authentic to the work of a scholar in the field? I am torn about how to make sense of this...

Goats!!

Goats yelling like humans
http://gawker.com/5984348/two-minutes-of-nothing-but-goats-yelling-like-humans

I LOVE GOATS!

Strategic Thinking in a Large-Scale Setting

I'm very good at brainstorming ideas for addressing problems and thinking through the implications of those ideas within my small world. But, I'm not good at dealing with issues in which politically-astute strategic thinking is necessary. This is, in part, because I don't understand the politics and it's also because I just don't like to deal with politics. I find political stuff to just be a time and energy sink that I would rather avoid. I know people who thrive on it - that's not me.

That said, I recently attended a meeting in which a major recommendation was made about restructuring our school. Even after an after-meeting debrief with people who (a) I trust and (b) who understand the politics, I still have no idea what to think. We were asked to provide options and alternatives. I have none (though, I do understand the parameters for the challenge we were handed and that might be useful as it doesn't seem like other people can read those between the lines as well). Mostly, I am just shocked and feeling kind of stupid. I think this is because I know I am good at creative problem solving, but those skills are not enough to even be helpful here.

This highlights for me why I don't want to be in administration. I don't want to have to deal with highly political things in ways that require my strategic thinking because if I make a bad call, my group (program/dept/college/whoever) ends up paying for that. But, I recognize that, in this case, I somehow need to pull myself together enough to be able to evaluate the recommendations that are being drawn up by my colleagues. Maybe when I see the proposal my colleagues create, something will click and the problem-solving part of my brain will just take over?

Evolution

So, often as I work, I will take a break and look for something random to entertain me on the Internet. This may mean watching a YouTube video, going to cuteoverload or watching a bit of the Daily Show or Colbert Report. Yesterday I was introduced to what may be the best randomly entertaining thing I've found in a long time WTF Evolution -- go ahead, you know you want to click it!