Why can it be very great to be an administrator, at least certain kinds of administrator, such as department heads or program directors or maybe even some dean-like people?
Because, from time to time, you get to offer people excellent jobs, like tenure-track sorts of jobs. Such jobs do indeed still exist. Some people are getting them and that means that other people are making the official offers to those people. I have found that I very much enjoy being one of those other people.
That is: It is of course very thrilling to get an offer of a tenure-track position. It is also super cool to be the one making the offer/s.
I like to think about this when the relentlessly trivial and soul-destroying aspects of being an administrator start to gain on the positive aspects.
Below is a highly schematic graph that I hope I can eventually replace with a graph based on actual data (with a Time axis that has real units). This example graph is just to show in a relative sense how super cool making a job offer is compared to routine administrative tasks and the occasional unpleasant (but not catastrophic) financial or personnel crisis.
+ = supercoolness; - = suckiness; 0 = neutral; time has no units...
Because, from time to time, you get to offer people excellent jobs, like tenure-track sorts of jobs. Such jobs do indeed still exist. Some people are getting them and that means that other people are making the official offers to those people. I have found that I very much enjoy being one of those other people.
That is: It is of course very thrilling to get an offer of a tenure-track position. It is also super cool to be the one making the offer/s.
I like to think about this when the relentlessly trivial and soul-destroying aspects of being an administrator start to gain on the positive aspects.
Below is a highly schematic graph that I hope I can eventually replace with a graph based on actual data (with a Time axis that has real units). This example graph is just to show in a relative sense how super cool making a job offer is compared to routine administrative tasks and the occasional unpleasant (but not catastrophic) financial or personnel crisis.
 Super Cool){kind=link}
0 Comments