Thank You

I rant a lot about the administration. I therefore have an equal obligation to report on positives. Here’s one.

A bit more than a month ago, Department Chair Weinman and I met with President Kington and Dean Latham to discuss staffing and other related issues in the department. Toward the end of the meeting, President Kington said something like

We can’t give you any more tenure-line positions right now, but we do understand that you need support. Let us know what you think would help, and we’ll see if we can make it happen.

If I recall correctly, we suggested long-term goals (add more tenure-line faculty to CS without affecting the broader curriculum), medium-term goals (make sure we can hire as many term faculty as we need to support our students), and short-term goals (help us handle Rebelsky’s inability to write a budget, some other issues related to medium- and long-term goals).

Raynard and Mike suggested that they expect to work with us on ways to find good long-term solutions (e.g., endowed chairs, some kind of endowed teaching post-doc) and seemed amenable to the notion that we will need term faculty. But they asked us to focus on short-term issues for the time being.

Of course, nothing happens at Grinnell without some paperwork [1]. So Jerod needed to put together a new budget and explain our other requests.

I am happy to report that we heard yesterday that all our requests were met.

Thanks Mike and Raynard! You’ve made our job a bit easier.

(And sorry, Jerod, for putting us in the place that we had to make the revised budget request.)

[1] That’s not true. Many positive things happen without paperwork, even some things that involve administrators.

Version 1.0 of 2017-08-18.