Review: Faculty Meeting in the Red Room

It was another long night: El Presidente presided over a room full of bundled-up professors only tenuously aware of the subtleties of parliamentary procedure. Why were they bundled up? It's chilly in the Red Room.

Unlike the last time the Faculty Meeting packed this venue to capacity, when a bedraggled junior faculty member ran in after the gavel had fallen, snagged the last available comfy seat and thrilled to pie charts through a ninety minute set and 17 encores, last night the Faculty Meeting was devoid of pie charts. And pie.

What's the first to hit the chopping block after a budget crisis? The high-end snacks.

Undaunted by a singular choice of cookie, however, the Faculty kicked out the jams last night: motions were proposed, amended, and voted on. Amendments were amended. Points of information were obtained and held up to the amps for spine-numbing reverb. The question was called, twice. Someone fell asleep.

Having played this room a mere two weeks ago, mesmerizing rowdy meeting-goers with a long, improvisational jam session, the Faculty were clearly eager to shake up the set list, and the unanimous vote to establish a "Middle Eastern Certificate Program" was an absolute stunner with quick riffs and a haunting and impassioned plea. And who would have guessed that they would dig up a rarity like "Commendation of the Women's Hockey Team"? No one called for an encore. We had seen enough.

The next time the Faculty Meeting plays the Red Room -- and they will -- they'll surely bring back some old favorites -- "Pie Charts," "What's the Difference Between Writing Intensive and Writing Attentive?" and "Dogs on Campus Policy" -- but can anything top last night? Stay tuned.

Opening for the Faculty Meeting was a woman sitting to my right who ignored my feeble attempt at conversation and expected me to take off when the students were asked to leave the room.

Spring 2008 by the numbers

Weeks in the semester: 14
Total students: 19
Courses taught: 2
Total class meetings: 69
Times I was mistaken for a student in the library: 2
Times I told them I was actually faculty: 1
Corncob pipes gifted to me with the express purpose of demonstrating my advanced age to library staff: 1
Dinners eaten at the student dining hall, and approximate time of meal: 1; 5 p.m.
Packed lunches eaten in office: 3
Packed lunches eaten in department lounge: 24
Lunches at the faculty dining hall I was dragged to because the French department found my lunch-eating habits too pathetic: 1
Swings to piñata at end-of-year department party: 3
Direct hits: 2
Papers graded: 114
Oral presentations attentively listened to: 37
Novels taught: 5
Films taught: 13
Evening film screenings: 4
Evening film screenings canceled for lack of an audience: 1
Spanish majors who chose me as their adviser for next year: 4
Percentage of them named Sara(h): 25%
Theses read: 4
Combined total pages of theses: approx. 433
Performances of Don Quijote involving shadow puppets and trapeze artists seen: 1
Faculty meetings: 3
Faculty meetings that ran over the 2 allotted hours: 3
Faculty meetings scheduled during key Tuesday primary contests: 3
Tears shed in my office: 0 (whoo-hoo!)
Total F'07-S'08 regalia wearings: 3
Academic years as Assistant Professor down: 1
Academic years as Assistant Professor to go: TBD

Things I would rather see on the live AmhCam

This is a video of the main quad of campus, where you can stalk anyone walking between the Chapel and my building, it looks like. Entertaining, but I'd rather see a live streaming video of:

• Parking spots still available around the quad.
• Students lurking outside my office.
• A scanning view of the lunch specials at the faculty dining hall and the salad bar situation.
• The inside of the classroom I'm about to enter, with the number of students who've shown up and their relative energy level (eye-level close-ups would do).
• The outside of my building and anyone who's standing there smoking.
• The workout room at the gym, including whether there's a line for the treadmills and which students or colleagues I'm going to run into there.
• My mailbox and its contents, so I know if I should bother to check it.
• The circulation desk at the library, to see if that woman who thought I was a student is working today (so I could either avoid her or find a pipe and a tweed jacket so she doesn't make the same mistake again).
• And also: the inside of the Red Room, just prior to any faculty meeting I must attend there, with a reading of the temperature inside the room on the bottom left-hand corner (so I can bundle up) and a best guess estimate countdown clock of how much longer the meeting's going to go on (so I can properly numb my mind in advance) in the bottom right-hand corner.
  

SPAN-106: My Office and the Politics of Ambient Noise

Now that I have a door on my office, I feel justified complaining about it. First of all, my preference when I'm in my office would be to leave the door open, so that passersby can a) see that I'm in my office, fulfilling the duties accorded me and b) say hello or otherwise remind me that I exist in a social environment¹ as opposed to a hermetically-sealed ivory tower. But all the doors in my building have recently been equipped with highly-advanced fire-protection devices that make it impossible to leave the door open. To keep the door open, you have to prop it with an illicit door-propping wedge that you must hide after hours so the janitorial staff -- fiercely protective of the self-closing door system -- do not confiscate it. This is what I do: I prop my door enough when I'm in my office so that I can nominally see and be seen, unless a) I'm watching a movie² or t.v.³ and I deem that others might find this too intriguing or too disturbing or b) I'm listening to non-classical music louder than at a whisper and I feel this may somehow reflect poorly on my scholarly abilities⁴ or c) it's the end of the day and I'm sick of people so I don't care if no one sees me.

But my office, Barrett 106, is right across the hall from Barrett 105, an annoyingly L-shaped and acoustically-flawed classroom generally used for Spanish classes, but also used for the occasional French class, and this semester for a Black Studies class as well.⁵ Everyone knows that language classes involve a certain amount of jumping around and yelling and pounding of fists and gales of laughter and so on. Well, Spanish classes in Barrett 105 apparently also involve insipid yet catchy Spanish pop songs played at high volume and repeated over and over again (in section after section), such that anyone with an office in proximity will be unable to stop "Por un beso de la flaca yo haría lo que fuera" or "Tú y yo, ale ale ale" or "La la la la la la la la la la la la" from coursing through his or her⁶ brain for the rest of the day. Such was the situation last semester, and, presumably, will be the situation this semester.⁷

But now, of all things, on Monday afternoons Barrett 105 hosts "Black Studies 63: Alan Lomax and the Politics of Afro-American Tradition," which is a course I really wish I could have taken as an undergrad, as it sounds fascinating. It also sounds like an endless loop of Woody Guthrie, what could be yodeling, something akin to hammering on an anvil⁸, some traditional-sounding African American folk songs and what I can only guess was Lomax himself talking about reel-to-reel tapes. Really great stuff, what an excellent class, yadda, yadda, but for the lowly Assistant Professor across the hall who can barely stop checking her email long enough to make it to class on time, too distracting to encourage the timely completion of her professorial duties.

The situation remains blameless -- pedagogy is pedagogy, after all -- but here's hoping this compromising arrangement can be included⁹ on my tenure file.

¹ As awkward as it may be.
² Yes, a Spanish movie.
³ Yes, Spanish t.v.
⁴ Classical music doesn't pose that problem because it's stereotypically cerebral; I don't necessarily agree with that conceit, but I accept that it's either my own insecure bias or part and parcel of the harsh judgments of the academe.
⁵ Full disclosure: I taught in Barrett 105 last semester, and so I'm guilty of the following accusation as well.
⁶ Her. The office on one side is a her, the office in front is a her (me) and on the other side is the bathroom.
⁷ The jury's still out on whether French classes use insipid French pop tunes.
⁸ yunque
⁹ Maybe as a footnote.

Fall 2007 by the Numbers

Weeks in the semester: 14
Courses taught: 2
Total students: 24
Individual classes taught: 61
Oral presentations: 31
Oral presentations in which the presenters threw candy at the class as a motivational tool: 1
Essays graded: 92
Essay re-writes graded: 31
Final papers yet-to-be graded: 24
Movies shown: 5
Video projects created by students: 3
Catalan folk songs played: 1
Inopportune moments the photocopier broke down: 2
Packed lunches I was organized enough to bring to campus: 0
Lunches at the faculty dining hall: 28
Lunches at the faculty dining hall in which all the food was named after Red Sox-related minutia: 1
Free lunches attained at the faculty dining hall through frequent diner card: 1.91
Appearances at the Spanish Table: 1
Faculty meetings attended: 2
Faculty meetings canceled: 3
Faculty meetings almost skipped to see Bruce Springsteen: 1
Clandestine visits the dog paid to my office: 3
Number of times tears were shed in my office: 3
Emails or meetings I had with students who had missed class but wanted to prove that they'd still done the reading: 2
Times this happened at Berkeley: 0
Students with perfect attendance: 4
Combined absences of everyone else: 54.5
Hawks spotted outside my building: 1
Percentage of time I biked, drove and walked to campus (approx.): 32%, 59%, 9%
Department scandals averted, generally speaking: 2
Times I locked myself out of my office after hours: 1
Buildings on campus I can reliably identify: 21 of 89
College sporting events attended: .5
Times I was almost beaned by a puck: 1

I see a doorway, there is no door

That's right, as I mentioned, I have an office, but it has no door. Apparently, there are only two companies that make a door to fit this particular building. If I don't get a door by the first day of classes, I'm putting up hippie beads and installing a lava lamp, administration be damned.

P.S. Can anyone identify the subject heading? Hint: It's Wesleyan-related.