Oh, my back
. I've been carrying this chair for years, doing half of his job, all of mine, and occasionally getting the tiniest bit of credit for the work.
My chair likes to teach one special class, a class that I was hired to teach many moons ago. Guess who teaches it? Yes, the chair does.I've moved my specialty to something I never studied in school, the "other" subfield, yet figured it out well enough to stay off the streets.
Yet the chair uses - to this day - a syllabus of mine he pulled and co-opted from the file cabinets
where we are required to file things like syllabi, assignments, etc. (My syllabus had a terribly done typo on page 2, and it pleases and enrages me no end to see that it is STILL there, ten years since the time I last taught the class.)Anyway, my chair takes me out to lunch once a month. It's a not a bad thing, but the limp lettuce and the slimy chicken parm just makes me realize I've been bought off by shitty food.
But how can I be mad? I didn't fight it. When the chair started to move into my territory, I didn't have tenure. I was a junior faculty member. All of my bones made at this college have come by teaching these "other" classes, this "other" sub discipline. When I got tenure I asked the chair about sharing his special class - MY special interest.
"Don't be silly," he said. "I could not risk losing your expertise in the 'other.'"
Did I fight it? Put up a fuss?
No, I bitched about it to my wife. I stare daggers sometimes.
But I let it go, really, and so the blame is on me in this case.
Dammit, I was hoping for a happier ending.
- PP
In principle I believe that nobody "owns" a topic or a course, so that anyone in the department who can should be able to teach it if they're capable.
ReplyDeleteIn practice, though, this is why rotating positions of authority makes the academy more humane.
In any other office, HR would step in, if only to assert a sharing policy.
ReplyDeleteShame, shame. And the chicken parm sounds truly gross.
Is this person really a chair and not a head? If a chair, then nominally he's the "first among equals", rather than "your boss". Do other faculty have problems with him? If enough faculty have problems, you can stage a revolt (really more of a "vote of no confidence" or some such) and ask the dean to remove the chair and replace him with somebody else. I've known cases where this actually worked.
ReplyDeleteFucking chairs. They can be the best and they can be the worst. Sounds like Pusher's chair is one who is using the power he/she's been granted to do evil and to coopt a part of the world. That sucks.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, at least he buys you lunch.
ReplyDeleteYou've got tenure - say something. Like "I'd like to teach that course, please, since it is in my area of specialization. I know you like it too; perhaps we could share it."
You could add, if pressed, "well at the very least you could change the typo in MY syllabus that you've been using for the last TEN YEARS."