refreshing

Having not yet fully recovered from the embarrassment resulting from accidentally sending out my web profile update to an entire listserv, complete with a new photo, I have been contemplating an entry on just how much time all these sorts of updates take this time of year. And yet having recently come across some faculty pages that are woefully out of date, and having recently learned that the NRC will soon be conducting its review of doctoral programs mostly by scrutinizing faculty profiles available on departmental websites, I also realize the importance of the update mandate.

Still, though, it takes so much time (especially when one is in two departments and an additional program), and it always seems so dreadfully serious and unfun--rivaled only by the actual filling out of actual rolodex cards in triplicate each semester, a practice that only stopped this year in one of my departments (hint: it's the department in which no one gets big science grants). My other department however hired a professional photographer last spring for its soon-to-be unveiled website, and just this past Friday, we received notices that this shiny, swanky, still soon-to-be unveiled website? It needs our updates.

All of this is why Josh's recent entry on the matter made me spray my laptop with half-chewed pretzels.

Comments

[elfhead]

Oh, if only that's how NRC were compiling its data. The whole project seems to be a vast machine designed to make hapless people go to a lot of weird meetings about how to compile data, and oh dear, faculty will be getting "surveys" and all the rest of it. But their surveys won't be as long as the ones graduate students officially working on their dissertations are going to get. Just remember, the answer to every question is Excellent. Or more excellent if that is an option, because we are an excellent University of Excellence! It's all about Teamwork! There's no I in Illinois, People! Excellently done!

This NRC thing is really interfering with my life long ambition to squander my potential, betray my early promise, and dull the cutting edge.

[elfhead]

On the theory that if one is good three are EXCELLENT.

[dhawhee]

Excellent.

Except that I prematurely deleted your second and third excellent iterations thinking that the re-postings were on account of our not-so-excellent server, or Insight's. Oops!

[elfhead]

You are too good, that's the trouble. Seriously, go to the grad college website and look at the surveys. (Jeebus). A handful of programs are getting heavily scrutinized -- you're in one -- but it seems as though more and more will be getting the same sort of scrutiny as the years roll by.

I have plenty o'ideas about questions to include on the faculty survey, but no one listens to me. Counting up these so-called publications is fine for those who actually have publications, which I don't really, but whatever, but what about making a series of cross university comparative indexes around such issues as:

1. Number of times per day you stare out window, yearning vaguely for a life more fully lived.

2. Number of times per week you wonder why you didn't choose a different career.

3. Percentage of your colleagues you can imitate with frightening accuracy

4. Percentage of your colleagues you actually do imitate at parties and dinners

5. Number of books you plan to write per week

6. Number of those books provoked by something weird or wrong you just read or heard

7. Number of these imaginary books that will change the field as we now understand it

8. Mix of becoming modesty and completely understandable need for approval you plan to perform on the occasion of the publication of your imaginary book (choose most recent imaginary book for purposes of survey)

You see where I'm going. No one listens to me. Why?

[katka]

Cuz you're too damn funny.

[dhawhee]

1. none--no time.
2. none--no time.
3. 72% (I used to have a killer Pat Summitt imitation too)
4. 26.5%. But only spontaneously or accidentally. Never, EVER on request.
5. This one is a little ambiguous. One. Sometimes two.
6. None. I invent my controversies ex post facto.
7. Understand it?
8. Ah ha! I see the trick here, you NRC people. There is neither modesty nor NEED in excellence. So 0 and 0. But I can imitate the hell out of both.