The Committee Has Spoken

The Mess has entered the final phase - hopefully. The P&T Committee sent me a copy of their recommendation to the dean, that I be retained as a professor. They noted that the portfolio was light on evidence as it covered only two years rather than the normal 6. Actually, that tells me that they didn't really read the narrative portion, which explained that it actually only covered a single year and a wildly atypical year at that.

However. The bottom line was that they saw no reason for the portfolio (which tells me that no, indeed, the Dean did not explain why I'd submitted the damned thing) or to change the prior evaluation of my work (which was a rating of "exemplary").  Now it is all in the Dean's lap.

In the final term of my career at Un-named University, I have done something I can't remember ever doing before: I have gone two weeks in the middle of the term without a single class. Two weeks ago, the university closed the campus for weather on Monday, and Tuesday I left for Major Conference. I arranged for the classes to see some films while I was gone. Then last Monday, I cancelled class because I was very ill with a cough that rattles my toes (yes, present tense, the cough persists); then UU cancelled classes anyway. Tuesday-Friday, I got up every day and discovered that the cough was simply too awful to subject anyone else - even though the doctors said I wasn't contagious, I didn't want to risk it. Not to mention that every time I tried to speak or walk and breathe I started coughing again. Bottom line, if I can get in tomorrow without dislodging a lung, it'll be the first time in two weeks that I've met with a class.

Which means that I can either pretend everything is on schedule, or change the schedule in the hope/plan that I'll miss no more classes. Luckily, I don't do content-focused classes - I don't have to 'get through the Cold War' events, although I will get the concepts, issues, trends and questions. Because those aren't event-centered, but process-centered.

UU's leadership has pretty well destroyed my loyalty to the institution; my students and my friends are what I will focus on in these last weeks.