As I’m guessing most of you know, last spring I agreed to serve a 3-year term as my department’s Chair. While I’ve spent roughly a third of my time here at Syracuse serving as the Director of Graduate Studies, occupying that position on three separate occasions, I’d vowed fairly publicly that that would be the full extent of my interest in administrative/leadership roles. There’s a whole separate post (or series of posts) about what administration means in the context of the modern university, but suffice it to say here that I was perfectly content to be a regular professor. Our department was in a position, however, of needing someone to take the job, and I was in a position, very much against my will, of being perhaps the best person to take it at this moment, and so Chair I became.
Chairing a department is a lot less like assuming a throne than some people seem to imagine. Part of my negotiation to take the job included being able to have some time to get used to it, which I’m glad I had the foresight to ask for, because the job is quite different than what I’d thought. One of the things that was never apparent to me is the degree to which there is a near-constant stream of tiny details—student questions, requests from other programs, procedural issues—that cross my desk and my inbox on a daily basis.
If I were listening to myself from the outside, my reaction would be, “Oh no, you have to answer a few more emails?” but it’s honestly a little more than that. I’m assuming that this will eventually get easier for me, but most of them require some amount of research, conferring with a couple of people, and sometimes brief conversations about how to resolve them. I don’t often answer those emails myself, but figure out to whom they should actually go. And so even a 2-sentence email can involve 15 or 30 or 60 minutes behind it, where my job is to coordinate the inquiry, the people involved in weighing in on it, and the person responsible for addressing it.
I’m not really complaining, because one of the things that I learned to do for myself during the pandemic was to prioritize my inbox as a measure of my stress load. When it gets too large, that means that I’m letting too many things gather and I’m more likely to let some slip through the cracks. When my inbox is lean, that usually means that I’m top of everything. For me, the magic number’s around 50, including the emails that contain long-term goals, upcoming meetings, standing zoom links, etc. But that’s number been tougher to achieve as Chair than it was as DGS, and now that classes have begun in the spring, I find myself using the hour that I was spending here.
This was a very long way of saying that posts here will be a little less frequent for a while, as I get caught up with the new semester. I have a couple of things in the pipeline, but I’ve also got a lot of work right around the corner. Stay tuned.