The Week Ahead

I am looking forward to the end of this week. I have my last two finals on Tuesday. While I will miss my students (most of them), I am looking forward to a break from campus and going to University Town for Dr. J's defense. There will be much celebration when I get through all these papers and exams and submit my final grades.

I am not looking forward to my faculty meeting this week which continues discussion of this. At our most recent meeting, I did discover that my cause for concern was correct--I was completely clueless that there is a huge divide in our department As our conversations expanded beyond the initial topic from the administration, a bit of a "fight" between the factions I didn't know about in our department broke out. Over the past couple of weeks I've discovered the ugly underbelly of my department and (although I was waiting for it) the final shoe has officially dropped. I knew that there were politics in my department--I've been watching them play out over the endless series of meeting we've been having of late. However, I didn't know that certain members of the department actually devalue other members of the department. I knew we were a diverse group with different research and teaching interests that stretch the far reaches of our discipline--but apparently I had bought into the lie that we market to the world--that we value our disciplinary diversity. And unfortunately, it goes beyond that to fundamental differences in opinion about what does and doesn't belong in the "discipline" and what our students should (or shouldn't) "waste their times learning." I had no idea there were such fundamental differences in our department, and it is frustrating because it really could end in a very tangible separation. I hate feeling like I have to pick "a side," and I hate knowing that this issue will unlikely be resolved at our last meeting of the year and will "haunt" us all for the entire summer.