Reply #32: Our dept. chair was deeply into only seeing the good.

[Igel]

When a faculty member threw a chair at a grad student, he couldn't believe it was true--and since she didn't report it personally, got away without calling her a liar.

When the graduate advisor made an oral promise to swap out an immigrant student's full-year fellowship for a comparable package because he didn't see the letter from the INS guaranteeing her green card after the start of the new fiscal year, it wasn't a problem. Of course, the "comparable package" was a 1/4 time TAship for one quarter. But mistakes happen.

When a meeting between faculty and grad students over support--the faculty routinely decided the following year's financial support a few weeks before the end of school in late May when dept. regulations required acceptance by the end of April--it was a good thing. Granted, all that happened is that faculty told grad students they were wrong and, well, if the dept. could get better grad students it would surely find money to support them, and we found out nothing at all about how aid was awarded, why it took so long, etc. But the dept. chair was proud that the "air had been cleared."

Then the outside review came. The outside reviewers said there was a "spiritual malaise" in the dept. The outside reviewers said two faculty members should be retired or forced to see anger management or other psychological counselling. The outside reviewers said that the the attrition and graduate rate was horrendous--over 50% of every entering cohort was out of the program within 6 years, but the average time to degree was more than 9 years. The outside reviewers strongly recommended suspending admissions and making the dean responsible for all day-to-day decisions--including things like deciding how the photocopier allocation was determined.

The sunny, cheery pollyana in the dept. chair's office was aghast.

And his first response? How to make sure that the governing body saw the *truth* about the dept. How best to make sure that admissions were suspended and decanal influence abated.

Fixing the problems? That would require *admitting* the problems. That, sadly, he never really did.

Yet one of the problem professors did retire under a bit of duress--the dean saw to it, because the dean, with no love for the dept., saw the problems realistically. The other teacher was prohibited from teaching grad classes and was put in a large, supervised undergrad class. The funding decision process was writ in stone and imposed on the dept., much to the delight of many of the more decent professors.

When the suspension was lifted, the response of the dept. chair was that the truth finally won out. Fortunately, the dean also decided that they needed a new dept. chair.

The word "pollyana" should make a bit of a come back, I think.