Posting from home

I did go to campus today, even though I canceled class--largely to submit my revised sabbatical application, but also to review the promotion applications before tomorrow's P&B meeting. I'm glad I reviewed my two mentees when I had plenty of time to look at them. One has an application that is probably overly detailed (and she is, apparently, the queen of embedded clauses: look out Faulkner!)--and the other has an application that is frighteningly underdeveloped: frightening because he's up for tenure, and if he doesn't get it, there is no second chance at NCC: he'd have to go to another school. And he's a brilliant teacher, so we simply can't lose him. I tried once to impress upon him that he needs to give detail about what he's done, but apparently it didn't take. I need to let him know he might not get tenure: that should wake him up. The maddening thing is that he probably does have enough service to do fine in the tenure deliberations; he simply hasn't said anything significant about what he's done, so it ends up looking like nothing worthwhile.

The Putz is also up for promotion to full professor--and his application is a mess. He's got tons of stuff to include: he is the king of self-serving self-promotion, but the thing is riddled with idiotic typos (has he never heard of spell check?) and overstatements and comments in bold just in case we don't get how hard he's been working. We know how much is bullshit, but it looks good--and we don't sandbag our own. But if he gets full, and he may very well, that devalues the position significantly in my estimation. He also has a Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, case in point for why I don't take mine as meaning much of anything. But then, I get the asterisk: *actually merited.

If I do say so myself.

Another colleague is up for promotion to associate, and her application is also a mess, but for different reasons. She has no logical sense of how things work, so she's asking idiotic questions--in the text of the application itself (and it will serve her fucking right if she forgets to delete something and it goes to P&T with the dimwitted question embedded). She also wants to include taking people out to lunch and talking to her church groups. At least the Putz has stuff that actually looks real to puff up. I don't think taking a visiting author out for a meal counts as service to the college or professional development.

In any event, all that took longer than I'd hoped--long enough that I was still working on some of it when I'd normally have been heading over to teach Fiction Writing. When I finished, I sat down to see if I could maybe grade a few more papers, so I could have a fighting chance of getting them done before tomorrow's class--without having to bail on my committee meeting. Nope. My brains and body were very clearly telling me it was time to leave.

So here I am home. I didn't teach Thursday and I didn't teach today--and even that small hiatus is going to make it challenging to go back to it tomorrow, even if I didn't still feel wrung out from this wretched cold. (I was profoundly annoyed to actually be sick on a planned sick day. How is that fair?) Don't know how much energy I'll have tomorrow, or when I'll be able to get in to campus, or what I'll be able to accomplish, but it sure will be interesting to see.