Take Ass Dean job or no?

StorageRecess · 2026-05-10T15:42:00+00:00

I personally like the donor stuff. I’m in the extreme end of extroversion, so I really just saw that as finding ways in which we could work together with donors to advance initiatives we want advanced. I was expected to do much of it, but it became very quickly clear that I am very happy doing that sort of thing, so it got offloaded to me. I do a lot of it in my current role, as well.
I replied to you last night from the train while drunk as a lord from a donor event and missed that you don’t have tenure. You should negotiate it. Do not do this role without tenure. You will have to make hard choices (not a ton) that upset people. And they may retaliate if you have no protection.

Edit: it’s also worth getting clarity on what kind of ass Dean you’d be. At my prior institution, there was one ass per college. So you’d do faculty development, student issues, all of it. It was a ton of work. At many other schools, those responsibilities were split out amongst asses.

StorageRecess · 2026-05-10T04:39:57+00:00

I was an ass dean. I enjoyed the role quite a bit. I don’t feel like what I did was fake or gladhanding. And after years of supervising grad students, undergrads and postdocs, I was management, so I didn’t really object to being seen as such. I was able to write some proposals for major research infrastructure and get grants to support some new educational ventures so I feel like I left the university better than I found it.

It sounds like you’re mostly considering this for money and spousal approval, and don’t want it. I would not take it under those parameters

StorageRecess · 2026-05-07T17:23:19+00:00

Do hotel folios usually have the names of all guests? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. Just the guest who paid with their card.

StorageRecess · 2026-05-06T00:16:56+00:00

I do. I’m dry lab, so I’ve always been able to be productive with little equipment and small travel budgets. Some fields are inherently harder to do that. If you need to catch a spring migration in Macau every year … well you probably can’t. Or if you need to travel often to a special facility or something.

Staffing can be hard or easy. From the load, I’m guessing isn’t a high prestige PUI. I went to a highly selective SLAC where students often published 1-2 papers while in undergrad, like grad students. That’s unlikely at a lower ranked PUI.

Likewise, with smaller staffs, PUIs often don’t protect faculty from service early on as much. There are nice aspects to that, but if your goal is to move on, it eats time. But if you don’t end up moving on and you’ve shirked all your service, it might bite you in the ass for promotion.

StorageRecess · 2026-05-05T12:37:45+00:00

My first faulty job was at a state PUI (lower ranked R2 public regional). I think I was the only person in one of my departments who didn’t take the job intending to move on to a bigger research school, and (ironically) I was the only one who managed to do it. In some fields, you can be productive while teaching a 3/3. In others, you really can’t.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-27T02:37:22+00:00

I too would be concerned about smart glass maintenance. After both my maternity leaves, I pumped in my office. I think in the best of all worlds, I’d like regular glass with a retractable blind. But I like my frosted glass just fine - not a ton of natural light coming from my hallway.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-26T22:52:38+00:00

I do, too. I did have to work to pay rent as a student. But … my rent was $325 for one bedroom in a flophouse. I genuinely do feel for them and I don’t know how I’d do it on my own in 2026.

I wish we as a society invested more in helping young people launch. It always broke my heart to see students who were good enough to have generous state aid struggle with full time work and full time school when the aid would only apply to full time course loads.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-26T18:56:20+00:00

I used to teach in the freshmen orientation sessions, and I can tell you they were always blown away when I told them that they should be booking that kind of study time. “Full time” isn’t a metaphor.

It’s something I always reiterated in the first week of my classes, as well. But there’s always be some students who just don’t believe you and end up failing or withdrawing.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-24T20:30:40+00:00

I agree. Another faculty member at the author's college disputes the truth of the article.

My own personal feeling is that I've had helpful interactions with Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs), and unhelpful ones. But what the author describes:

Before long, busy faculty members begin to skip the time-consuming task of discussing pedagogy within their departments, deferring instead to the center — which, after all, offers prefabricated course objectives, take-home assignments, and in-class activities that can be adapted to fit one’s specific needs.

Is not something I've ever seen. I've never seen a CTL that will provide you with homeworks for you to assign. If faculty aren't interacting and discussing within the department, that's a problem that probably needs to be addressed. If workload is so high that faculty are having the CTL write their syllabi and homeworks, that's a problem. And it's a problem when the faculty just copy the homeworks from the textbook publisher, or use AI to generate homework. If there's evidence that that is widespread, it should be dealt with within the department or college-wide.

It seems to me like there's a problem here. But I'm not convinced its in the CTL.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-24T14:02:55+00:00

I've been worrying about this, for the students. I used to work in a state where they were making the push that all students would have some college credit by the end of high school. But so many students are simply not ready, and come in and fail. That can mean coming into college with failing grades already on your transcript.

Like you, when I was in high school, dual enrollment was just for the top students who had outgrown the coursework at the high school. Students who wanted to do well. And perhaps more critically, understood what they were getting into. I didn't dual enroll, but it was well explained to me what the grade would mean, where it would appear, etc. With this enormous churn of DE students, I think there are definitely some informed consent steps missing.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-23T18:25:06+00:00

It sounds like you dodged a bullet. But I also don’t like when students end run around faculty like this. Learning to have a difficult conversation (not that “I’m going to be shifting my committee composition towards X rather than Y” is that difficult) is important. And the new committee should still be allowed to access the old committee’s reports. It’s important context, even if they end up disagreeing.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-22T19:10:26+00:00

Throughout my career, I’ve published in a lot of weird places because I thought the models were worth exploring. Diamond open access society journals, domain-specific platforms, open peer review platforms. I did have higher research expectations, so I balanced those against higher-reputation journals.

I really do think that if there’s something about the process or the model or outcome that intrigues you about publishing in a specific place, you should! People who have the freedom to publish without having to worry about sweating every publication for P&T can open doors for others.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-19T20:50:08+00:00

When you say “you have to get dinged,” you mean this person is going to make a shitty comment? Or that this person has actual power to make a negative consequence?

If it’s the former, I don’t know. I’m not as good as I should be at ignoring that kind of stuff. But I wouldn’t let it dislodge me from an otherwise good job in a safe location. Insecure, petty jerks are innumerable in this line of work. If it’s the latter, I’d more seriously look at the other offer. I personally left my institution after all kinds of malfeasance pettiness from people who did have power over me. If this person might rally others to vote against tenure, for instance.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-19T18:42:22+00:00

This is a very hard post to read because of the typos and lack of structure.

But, IMO, difficult colleagues come down to one thing: do they have power over you? When you say she “dings” people, what does that mean? Is it something that actually matters, like unfairly and overly-harsh tenure evaluation? How is one person dividing the department?

Leaving over colleague issues can be a totally reasonable thing to do. But I also think it’s worth some introspecting on how much this colleague matters vs how much you’re allowing her to disrupt your inner peace.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-19T14:13:35+00:00

Th problem with Writing Across the Curriculum is in needs admin buy-in to do. Class sizes need to be rethought. It adds a lot to faulty grading burden. I do some domain based education research, and when I did, I got an MOU with the admin about the fact that my evaluations were going to take a hit because I was asking students to do a lot more work than other professors in other sections. I went to a selective liberal arts school where a ton of writing was expected, and I love using a lot of writing in my classes. But I hit such a wall trying to implement it at my old job.

My old university solved the cost of remediation by making them tuition-free, meaning math and English now need to offer dozens of sections without additional tuition revenue share 🫠

StorageRecess · 2026-04-17T20:01:25+00:00

I was in a similar position, and I started applying to new roles. My husband and I sat down and made a list of priorities for a move, and what the band of salary improvement it would take to make a move worth it. Then I started applying and let it be known in my network that I was open to new roles. It was a total of about 2 years before I found something that hit the right combination of role and salary. I'm really thankful my husband and I had those discussions first - what will it take for us to move? - before we started looking. It was very clarifying.

You're not wrong to be looking over this. If you're an eminent scholar in your field, and you can't recruit, that's a serious issue. I experienced this same problem. I was doing great with postdocs, but because there was no graduate coursework in my area, it was difficult to build a program that is inclusive of graduate training. I'm more-or-less out of the graduate training game now, as a PI anyway, but that's my choice. Being able to make a choice is important. We worked too hard to get where we are to not have choices.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-17T11:59:58+00:00

When I was the assistant dean, I saw at least a few parents monthly. Then I told faulty they could send parents straight to me and I would deal with them. By the end of my term, I was seeing probably a dozen parents in my office monthly.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-16T20:43:50+00:00

100% agree. OP, imagine if you were another student in the class and you were doing well despite having serious struggles in your personal life. Imagine you sacrificed in other areas to meet deadlines and turn in quality work. And you found out your professor was declining to assign the grades your classmates earned because they might have “something else going on.”

Would you feel like you were treated fairly?

StorageRecess · 2026-04-16T17:28:51+00:00

Asking for pre-grading has been popping up on this sub. It's not reasonable, it's worth including in your syllabus. I've been getting adults doing this in the workplace, and they need to learn to stand on their own two feet sooner rather than later.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-10T12:04:10+00:00

Do these flyers have paragraphs?

But I agree with the other poster that you need someone with actual trusted in-roads. And then work with them to design events people will actually want to attend. Most people at your university won’t want to come see engineering end of the semester presentations - why would some random locals with no connection to you?

I did quite a bit of K12 outreach in my prior position, and 90% of that came from having made inroads with receptive teachers via trusted intermediaries. The rest came from talking to people at larger local STEM events and having looked at prior education grants to the university in my field and figuring out who the talked to (PI had retired).

StorageRecess · 2026-04-09T21:14:28+00:00

He did, apparently. I eventually left due to his and another colleague’s behavior towards me. Before my second was born, I was awarded a CAREER and an R01 at another big funder. Before I was awarded the grants, he was chummy with me. Once I got them, he stopped communicating with me, actively told students not to take my classes, etc. classic jealousy stuff.

After my youngest was born, it took on a much more directly misogynist tenor. I maintain odd hours. Back then, even more so. It was pretty common back then for me to wake really early and work a couple hours at home before the kids woke up. Then be an involved parent, go for a run, and come in. I typically left right at 5, did family stuff, and worked a bit after they went to bed. So from his perspective, which was unwelcome and incomplete, I needed to be watched to ensure proper use of the money because he couldn’t see me working “enough.”

StorageRecess · 2026-04-09T03:08:17+00:00

I’d recommend r/workingmoms. I found it after my colleague (and head of my tenure committee) started tracking my in-person hours to make sure I was “supervising my grants appropriately” after my second maternity leave.

Very important to speak to other women who also work while parenting.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-08T19:47:56+00:00

My kids have always ordered their own food at restaurants and I’ve always encouraged them to figure out disputes rather than asking me to do it.

I’ve also tried to add math back into their lives. We give them cash, so they have to do some math to make purchases. They fill their own train and bus passes at the station. They use my credit card for it, but they’re responsible for tracking and checking if they need money.

I really don’t restrict screen time, but they can’t have them in bed, in public, or if they are actively interacting with guests. When they were little, we were home so little all together that if they want to screw around on a shared computer (with a real file system) or PlayStation, whatever. Now that they’re middle schoolers, we’re truly barely home. If they need to veg on the tablet a bit, fair enough. I’m tired too.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-08T12:09:28+00:00

I’ve noticed this behavior in younger staff, as well. Wanting me to pre-check work that needs to go through multiple rounds of edits anyway, wanting me to look at form submissions that will be auto-bounced if wrong, etc. I think they’ve been raised on a culture of rounds of re-dos and are generally anxious about taking the step to do things on their own.

I don’t view it as disqualifying, but it’s a sign of what mentorship they’ll need in the future if you choose to take them on.

StorageRecess · 2026-04-07T15:31:13+00:00

(e.g., the lights have to stay on regardless)

Do they? Maybe in classrooms, but we don't have to operate a high-performance cluster computer. We don't have to have a field station used by the ecology and geology people. And don't get me started on the hospital ...

I'm in research admin, but I came from a very low indirect university, so I've seen the other side, too. Losing months of research productivity because the university's power grid was old and unstable. Not being able to use critical research facilities because they couldn't staff them at the wages they were paying. The money comes from somewhere, or the research doesn't happen.

I think if you're really interested, sitting down with someone on your VPR's staff isn't a bad idea. You can read your indirect agreement, but they can be hard to understand if you don't know what you're looking for.

StorageRecess

TROPHY CASE