The first week of June from the Chair’s Desk looks very different from the first week of August. The waves of unread and unanswered email have subsided dramatically this week. The stacks of forms and papers are slowly shrinking and I can see sections of the surface of my desk. The first year in this post has revealed a lot to me about the nature of higher education, the importance of literacy and the value of people. I’m sure I already knew all of these things that were revealed this year, but this experience has enriched my worldview in ways I could have never anticipated.
Wins and Losses
In my methods classes I sometimes teach Bill McBride’s Entertaining an Elephant. The main character, a mid-career high school English teacher named Mr. Reaf, is in survival mode at the beginning of the story. A great illustration of his survival plays out in the first chapter as Mr. Reaf counts his “wins” on one had and his “losses” on the other. The goal: have just one more win than losses at the end of the day. What constitutes a win? If the class works steadily throughout the hour without disruption. Throughout the story, with the gentle guidance from an unlikely source, Reaf begins to reflect on more meaningful interactions with this students, and he ultimately finds new life in his teaching practice.
At the risk of sounding like Reaf, I find myself at the end of my first year as Chair reflecting on the successes, and some failures. I am going to choose to celebrate the successes and learn from my failures.
We’ve made remarkable progress this year as a team. Our year began with the department coming together to cast a vision of what we would like our department to be. Themes of unity, cohesion and collaboration. This really set a positive tone for the year ahead and everything that happened afterward is a direct result of the vision put forward by the department. Some of these larger accomplishments include:
- In the fall I asked each division of the department to prepare Staffing and Curriculum Priorities reports. These reports revealed a great deal of positive ideas for the department. Most notably, the literature division devised several areas of international literatures that could be added to our curriculum through future hires.
- Throughout the year we also examined our learning outcomes to see if there was, perhaps, room for consolidation and reprioritizing. The English Department wrote over sixteen outcomes eight years ago when the college developed a comprehensive program assessment plan. Sixteen is a lot of outcomes. With the help of everyone in the department we were able to propose a new assessment plan that measures five outcomes across all divisions in the department.
- The development of a new Teaching English as a Second or Other Language (TESOL) college certificate program. We are excited to begin offering the new courses in this program to advance Elizabethtown College students’ application of the language arts in such a way that will lead to meaningful life work.
On Enrollment
It’s no secret that many, though not all, private colleges will struggle for the forseeable future to determine how many students it can reasonably enroll and serve given the resources available. I have believed for some time that our English Department has the capacity to enroll more students. Throughout the year our department participated in a number of recruiting events and made purposeful attempts to invite and engage prospective students to join our community. Did it work? I don’t know, but I have one year of data to examine.
The enrollment model suggested the English Department would enroll 9 incoming students this year. As of May 1st we have enrolled 16 who have declared English or English: Secondary Education as a primary major and 10 more indicating English as a second major. I’ll take this as good news for sure.
I am under no illusion that a small bump in enrollment is going to solve all of the concerns and problems we face in the humanities in higher education. This one small positive data point is not indicative, yet, of a roaring comeback we have been looking for in the last eight years. It is, however, an indication, a sign of life, and that may be just enough to muster the energy and enthusiasm needed to make it happen again next year.
At the beginning of the year I posted a brief reflection on becoming a chair, a phenomenon that my four-year-old is still trying to comprehend. In that post I said, “I have found that I love this work. It is challenging, it is engaging, and it is important.” Now, at the end of the first year I still love this work. In fact, I think I love it more than I did in October. Are there parts of it that are unpleasant and nasty? Sure. But that is true of just about any other job out there. The positive aspects of the job, however, are truly inspirational in the most meaningful of ways.