thinkfetti

Sometimes, it seems I should collapse under the weight of all the hats I wear. Luckily, not all of the hats are massive…

But as a department chairman, a middleman between administrative interests and faculty needs (both real and very really perceived), there’s some weight there. In a humanities department, there is one advantage over other departments: humanities faculty know at some level that it’s silly to claim objectivity. This understanding is so much a part of contemporary academic humanities culture that claiming to be “objective” is like painting your head red: people will just assume something’s amiss.

So our faculty members each individually claim to be acting in the best interests of the department (see my [last post->http://www.thinkfetti.com/archives/11] about voting), but when the votes are examined, it becomes clear to an observer that no one is acting objectively. In the current department situation, there are several faculty members who want the next departmental hire to be in their own discipline. Given the workloads and individuals’ desires to improve their lots, that’s hardly surprising. What is more interesting is how far faculty members go to convince others — and themselves — that they only have the best interests of the department at heart. And they succeed, part-way.

I’m in an interesting spot as chairman, because I too am thinking I’m being relatively “objective,” although I know I must be just ignoring some of my subjectivity. But my discipline, music, is not one that particularly stands to gain from any hire. My subjectivity is probably diminished in that area. In a Chinese philosophical interpretation (read Taoist), I’m happier because I don’t stand to gain. I’m more valuable because I’m less important.

Now, I’m certainly not claiming perfect objectivity - my wife teaches in the same department. But I’m not trying to sneak some result through because it would be beneficial to her, either. So let’s just face it: the goal shouldn’t be to work towards some impossible “objectivity.” It makes more sense for me, someone who happens to be the chairman at this particular point, to just try to do what I think is best. To do that, I owe everyone in the department my efforts and my thoughtfulness, not just my instincts (as I wrote [earlier->http://www.thinkfetti.com/archives/8], thoughtfulness is a necessary element of ethical action). I’m willing to offer that, and that’s exactly what I’m giving.

In the the book I’m reading now by Lin Yutang, I see that a sense of humor is a necessary counterbalance to a sense of idealism.

In my working environment - and those of many other people, I’d imagine - it’s all too easy for the wrong kind of humor to develop, though: a cynical, black-ish kind of humor, maybe even graveyard humor. I find Dilbert funny, but I’m sad that I do. In practice, this cynical humor goes beyond counterbalancing idealism, producing demoralized apathy.

Throwing up my hands doesn’t make it easier, for me personally, to go to work. But in the face of problems, I look for a way to navigate between taking them “too seriously” on the one side and cynically giving up trying on the other. An ability to change my focal length can help, and a sense of humor - a forgiving, compassionate-without-being-too-serious-about-being-compassionate sense of humor - is quite possibly an important piece of the internal compass I’ll need to draw on more often.

In addition to my other job duties, including teaching and coordinating a music program, I am the chairman of the humanities department at my university. Under the previous chairs, the department usually tried to use some form of voting when it came to making important decisions. Some of the results were satisfactory, but some unhelpful power relationships perpetuated themselves due to the numbers of faculty in specific subdisciplines, and several people lost out routinely.

When I was starting out as chairman, I told the department that I was more interested in building consensus. I’m not far into my tenure as chairman, and I still value consensus highly. But here we are in late October, talking about what positions to request as replacements for departed and retired faculty, and my, are we far away from consensus. And, hold your breath…. voting looks like it’s not going to come close to solving anything either. The votes we’ve had when this issue has come up before, and the inclination to vote now - all of the voting sessions lead to winners and losers, with no one willing to put in the serious effort it takes to build consensus (or, what may be the same thing, to look at all of the various angles of opportunity and liability that the department faces).

I’d like to keep the faculty to the task of forging consensus considering the interests of the department as a whole. But I don’t think I - as a peer leader with some informal authority and a bit of formal authority, but no extensive power - can make them do the work they need to do. I also cannot do the work by myself.

So I may be forced to make the best decision I can, submitting a couple of job descriptions to the vice president after getting input from the department faculty, but without either consensus or a vote. And then inviting the department and/or vice president to ask me to quit the chairmanship if they really want that. Someone else in the position would certainly work differently, but I’m not too sure that the results would be better.

Although there are only a handful of posts I’ve put up on thinkfetti so far, I have been trying to implement some navigation ideas I have. After several hours searching (and trying out alternatives), I’ve decided I will have to try again later.

TagClouds are interesting and visually appealing (and can be used for intrasite navigation), but I would like to be able to display them contextually; after clicking on one tag (”design”, for example), I would like the cloud to display its results for all the other tags present besides “design.” In other words, combining the flat orginizational structure of the tag cloud with the power of hierarchical searching. One article I’ve found describes a theory of tag clusters, which may be closer to the mark. And here is another thoughtful take on how tag clouds may evolve. The same author also refers to faceted classification systems, which may well describe the underlying structure I’m looking for.

Hierarchical categories by themselves don’t solve the problem, because with them, a target document is found by digging down through the hierarchy in the one way it is set up. For example, consider “education/design/music/Beethoven_improvisation”. The “Beethoven_improvisation” page could be found by opening “education”, then selecting “design” from the available options, then selecting “music” from the new list of sub-items, and then selecting “Beethoven_improvisation”. But you wouldn’t arrive at the page by selecting “music” then “design” then “education”, because the hierarchy wasn’t set up that way. And if “education”, “design”, and “music” were regular tags, you couldn’t use them to refine a search; clicking on any one of the tags would just open up a list of all posts with at least that one tag attached.

This touches on an important point about searching: a good search tool will help you find something you want, even when you don’t know in advance how it has been categorized or labeled. This is why physically browsing at a bookstore can be so rewarding, when constructing database queries may not be…

From Mark Oakley’s Managing Product Design, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1984:

“The role of the design manager is clearly a crucial one in promoting successful results. In many respects the qualities required in order to be effective in this job are substantially different from those traditionally exhibited by managers. The main emphasis must be on the design manager’s ability to deal with change and ambiguity.” (p. 56)

In teaching humanities in a science and engineering university, I have noticed that some engineering faculty find it odd that we humanities faculty members want to limit our class sizes. Teaching “soft skills” such as effective communication and tolerance of ambiguity, or skills that are elusive in both teaching and evaluation, such as critical thinking, requires (in my experience) much more time to be spent in evaluating and responding to student work. In teaching physics courses, I found evaluation of student performance to be more straightforward in most cases. There, I could maximize efficiency in grading and evaluating without sacrificing accuracy and helpfulness of response. Occasionally, I would incorporate error trends in assignment answers into my teaching; this feedback loop could help improve student performance, even in large classes. But where the “right” answer is not so well defined, and the process is being emphasized, there is simply more work to be done in evaluating student effort.

Ethics is not simply a trainable ability to select a “right” answer. Design is not simply choosing what is inevitable, profitable, or aesthetically appealing. Critical thinking is not simply a matter of following an algorithm. And because these activities are non-trivial, evaluating students as they develop their skills in them is time-consuming, and classes taught by a single professor probably cannot be scaled up in size without losing effectiveness.

Ambiguity provides opportunity (and risk), but to tolerate or embrace ambiguity requires time.