ADVISING

ADVISING

On Chairing Fine Arts & Humanities

“Transparency” is a term that used to be pejorative
signifying my true motives shining thru, no matter
how I mean to cover up and deny.

“Sam is so transparent!
You can see right thru him!”

At some point recently in Administration-Kind-of-Talk,
it has become a positive term: to cultivate transparency
in operations so that anyone can see what’s going on—
everyone more of less in on it, informed: everyone
a Howard Cosell.

It’s almost technologically impossible NOT to be
transparent these days, despite my aim to be open
or closed. Camera phones & e-mail, textual harassment,
Youtube & internet…. It’s a neo-oral age I live in,
bending each others ears as usual, but now in full view.

The Media is the Message. Look: this post ostensibly
is about ADVISING. Actually: it’s more importantly
about itself— talking across the curriculum. Transparently.

Graham posted a call for criticism on our new founded
FAH Blog (Fine Arts& Humanity)—transparently risking
his own thoughts urging us to risking our thinking regarding
the obligations of the new division chair:

SAMPLING
(Reduced & Reformatted For the Sake of Argument):

allocation of resources: understanding
needs and helping with justifications,
including information on relative urgency,
making the case that a reasonable amount
of the overall resources should go to arts
and humanities departments,

do I need to be able to articulate an over-
arching goal ("mission") for the division?
try to engage the faculty in a discussion
toward that end (who we are, what we do,
how to describe it)? Is such a discussion
even necessary?

departmental & performance reviews, what is it
that they are supposed to accomplish and how.

possibility of creating new opportunities, new
excitement, by promoting activities which get
us talking and thinking together rather than
in our own departments? How important,
really, is that task? (mainly as an end in itself
or as a means to the primary end, which is
building strong rationale for allocating more
resources to FAH?

Oversight. Is it part of my job to make sure
that others in the division are properly doing
their jobs? Am I a boss?

Finally, where do these issues fit in?
1) working to see that academics in general
(including issues of scholarship and faculty
development) and the FAH in particular
receive more prominence, both within and
outside the college;

2) aggressively working to get FAH a bigger
piece of the pie and more visibility in order
to redress a imbalance between academic
areas (that bit above about "a reasonable
amount...working to insure that small,
struggling programs don't get left behind
but instead get beefed up (if that's what
they want).

ADVISING: This right here now is a recursive
version of the concern for academic advising that
Gretchen as been working up: 360 degrees flip
IT backwards from one side of the desk to the
other. Advising. Advising. Advising.
Graham is asking for it, and the beauty of it is:
it’s possible now, committee of the whole, to
be transparent—talking amongst each other.
Up for grabs. Putting IT in play. No concern
left behind. It takes a village.

THIS right here now (the transparency going on,
morning sun splashing over the Swannanoa Range)
is more important than whatever token topic or
subject- object matter we might be using/abusing
to engage our selves with in…true? That would
be my advice but any body can improve my
terms and images.

xxxooo, Sam