Blizzard

The strongest blizzards inevitably arrive in May.

But it’s not snow that whitens my world, but reams of paper. These are the days where quasi-administrators like myself are busiest (a fact no doubt made far worse by my otterish tendencies).

On the student side, life is very busy. It is the end of the Spring semester and every faculty member must begin the process of reading term papers, advising students, and preparing final grades. Some students request recommendations. Others come by to tearfully discuss their grades. It is also the end of the academic year, so we must gear up for Spring graduation. Along with graduation are the attendant initiation ceremonies (into various honor fraternities) that a department chair is expected to attend.

In addition, there are departmental responsibilities. This is the end of the fiscal year with all of its attendant last minute spending. (If we don’t spend it this year, then we might not get it next year.) Absurdly, purchasing requires us to get our requests in by April 5 so that they can get the item purchased by June 30, the last day of the fiscal year. So I have to decide in late February if the department will have enough paper the last week of June. The first year of my predecessor’s tenure as chair, he had $2,000 left to roll over into the next fiscal year. He then found out that he could not roll over state money and so it was given to another department that was 2K short. The message was clear, spend it all!

We also fill out our productivity reports where we gain points for various activities (presentations, classes taught, students advised, articles published, etc). If we get enough points we get to yell Yahtzee! may or may not be rewarded with a raise. I will sit down with each of our faculty members and discuss their year in review and then plan for their next year to come. I then have to complete our departmental 06-07 annual plans and submit the new ones for 07-08.

Each of these items, like the four paper-pushers of the apocalypse, descend on department chairs every Spring.

But the item on my plate at the moment is the Affirmative Action Profile. After every job hire, we are required to fill out a sheet that details the number of ethnic and gender minorities who applied for the position.

I understand the necessity of accountability in this area. For all its supposed progressive viewpoints, the Academy has lagged behind much of society in its hiring practices. Particularly in a Southern state, we need to have confidence that the search is conducted in a meritocratic process. It is a small penance to pay for decades of institutional racism.

But the end result is that I have to check little boxes that will identify the gender and ethnic make-up of all our candidates. I must ask myself if the woman I interviewed in New York, best fits the category of White, Black, or Other? Usually it is apparent, but not always.

What about the candidates we didn’t interview? How can I determine the ethnic make-up or even the gender of people I’ve never met? Names don't always tell. What to do with the Chien(s) and Lu(s) of the world?

The irony of the entire process, is that I’ve been extremely focused on the racial/gender make-up of the candidates; something I’ve been encouraged from birth not to do. (Although some colleagues and HR would no doubt tell me that I think of folks in racial and gender terms all the time, this process just makes that explicit. That does nothing to assuage my discomfort). The very process designed to help has the effect of categorizing individual profiles.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but we need to keep looking.

(For those counting at home, in the end we replaced a white male with a white female…)