Wednesday, January 17, 2007

It's Nice to Hear

The big committee I'm on this year deals with annual review and tenure and promotion cases, and in today's meeting (I'm not divulging anything here, by the way), an issue came up about whether and how to document the kind of good citizenship things we do around the department, like informal mentoring and collegial activities.

I mentioned that I'm not sure I would even want to list that stuff, since I simply consider it part of the fabric of academic life rather than a duty, and the committee chair (a former department head and now a named chair) remarks off-handedly, "Well, when you're up, you certainly won't need to."

I think there are a lot of ways to read this, but I actually think he was saying that based on what he'd already seen of me, I didn't really need to sweat the tenure thing. Of course, I'll sweat the tenure thing, but it's nice to know that some folks think I'm not at risk of falling short.

No comments: