The theme of the past few weeks has been “the visit”: the visit of the president, the visit of the job candidates in our two searches, the visit of—ulp—the specter of economic downturn. I’m sure there’s a clever 2000-word essay on this theme just waiting to be written, but I trust you’ll be content with a brief dispatch at present.
Our hosting of President Mason on her tour of the English department’s precincts--which thanks to the efforts of our resourceful staff were buffed and shining well-nigh past recognition--and during her brief meetings with new or junior(ish) faculty won us well-deserved praise (see Dean Maxson’s note below) and gave us a chance to show off some of our many strengths. As I listened in on President Mason’s conversations with faculty, I was reminded of how remarkable we are in the range and depth of our interests, and to what high intellectual and creative standards we hold ourselves. In the Q & A session that capped her visit, President Mason gave us the fullest account I'd yet heard of the recession’s effects on the university and sketched out what she envisions as a good response. That response, she promised, would include following through on plans to use FEMA funds to rebuild the flood-damaged Arts campus as well as protecting the university’s core academic mission.
Pitching in to support that core mission, many of you have spent many an hour lunching and dining with, listening to, reading about, and escorting around town the candidates for the Early Modernist and Americanist positions. Their visits are now over, departmental discussions and votes have taken place, and plans for making offers are moving ahead. I’ll keep you apprised of where we stand as we move towards filling these crucial positions.
The slower than usual pace of the hiring process is, no surprise, directly linked to the budget reductions the university is facing as part of the national and state-wide recession. While I don’t pretend to have a view of the whole picture (President Mason’s recent e-mail message with news of a website addressing the expected $17.5 million budget reduction may help with that), the impact for the department has become much clearer to me in the past week. In order to come up with its share of the university-wide reduction, the College has asked all departments for a 5% cut-back in their 2009-10 budgets and has requested a plan for various efficiencies; at the same time, the College is reducing TA lines and looking at other ways to cut costs, including by increasing enrollments and reducing course releases. I’ll have fuller details to share with you soon, but let me just say now that while we are certainly going to feel the pinch, our situation is by no means dire. In fact, I’m confident that we will be able to continue our teaching and research and service work with largely undiminished vigor and continued satisfaction, despite the cut in resources.
Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters
Robin Hemley has a website for his forthcoming book, Do Over, to be published by Little, Brown in May of 2009. The website is available at Robinhemley.com. Do Over is going to be a featured alternate of the Quality Paperback Book Club and it will also be a selection of BOMC2, the online book club. Hemley also had an article about a war in the Philippines published in the February 5th issue of The Wall Street Journal. Click here to read "The Bells of Balangiga: A war in the Philippines that has not been forgotten".
Cheryl Herr will present a paper called "Bono's Sweat" at "U2: The Hype and the Feedback," a conference being held in NYC in May 2009. Also, Cheryl's essay, "Images of Migration in Irish Film," was published in Irene Nordin (ed), Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture (Peter Lang) as part of a new series on "Reimagining Ireland."
Mark Isham gave an all-day Seminar in Workplace Writing on January 22, 2009 at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The seminar included topics like basic writing tools, writing for different audiences, choosing the best medium, note-taking, conveying a difficult message, choosing an appropriate style, and strong sentences as a basic tool. The audience included engineers and marketing and human resources professionals.