Wednesday, October 17, 2007

No Class Again

Remember last week when I didn't have class because my professor was out sick? Well, it turns out things weren't quite that simple.
I'm not sure what's fact and what's just rumor, but things have gotten pretty crazy around the department for the past week. It all goes back to the beginning of the semester (actually, I'm sure it goes back further than that, but since I've only been here since the beginning of the semester, I only know what has gone on in the past two months). At the beginning of the semester, I knew that one of the students in the department was having some conflicts with this prof. This prof was supposed to be her thesis advisor, but they were having tons of issues. Since I only heard the student's side, it sounds to me like the biggest problem was that the professor was going weeks at a time without giving any feedback on the thesis and then suddenly bombarding the student with a request for tons and tons of rewrites [I know that this, at least, is true. I saw one of my friend's chapters and you couldn't even see her typing for all the pen marks and questions all over it.] And then the student was doing the rewrites, turning them in, once again having to wait weeks and weeks (months, even) for more feedback, and then getting feedback that completely contradicted the advice from several weeks before. So the biggest problem wasn't that the professor was asking for a lot of rewrites [the student could actually be a somewhat poor writer, I don't really know] but that s/he was contradicting hir own advice and taking FOREVER to get chapters back to the student.
And I know, I know, this is par for the course. Everyone bitches about their advisor and how long it takes to get chapters back, everyone bitches about having to do rewrites to please one committee member only to have those very same rewrites torn to shreds by another committee member or the same one several months later. It happens. But this was all just too much, and the student was starting to freak out that her thesis would never get finished. So she went and got the department chair involved and the whole problem was finally beginning to resolve itself. Last Tuesday, the professor resigned as the advisor, and the student got a new committee chair, and yay, one less drama in the department!
But then Wednesday we got that e-mail from the prof saying "I'm sick, class is cancelled." It didn't even dawn on me that s/he might have been lying about that. I just figured s/he was really sick. Other people were rumor-mongering about how s/he probably wasn't really sick but just didn't want to come to campus because of all the drama with the thesis situation having just gone down, but I thought that was ridiculous. Why would that situation have affected any of hir other classes? Especially since the student in question isn't even in my Wednesday class.
But it turns out there's obviously a lot more going on that I wasn't even aware of. That afternoon, my friend Emily was in her office talking about the e-mail when the department chair happened to be walking by outside. She said he stuck his head in, said "[Prof's Name] isn't having class tonight?" and Emily said, "No, s/he sent an e-mail saying s/he's sick," and the chair said, "Oh really. Let me see that e-mail..." and then he read it and disappeared without saying anything else.
Because gossip spreads faster than wildfire around here, by the next evening we all knew that the professor resigned not only from the problematic thesis, s/he had also resigned from two other students' committees. And one of the ABDs is apparently a star student, so no one can think of a legitimate reason why her dissertation would be dropped. We also heard that all of the prof's teaching evaluations for the past five years or so were being rounded up for study.
More rumors, more gossip, and on Monday morning I heard from my boss that the professor is not coming back this semester, no one is supposed to contact hir [hir for him/her his/her is ridiculous, but it works], and that someone else will be covering hir classes for the rest of the semester, and could one of us in the Wednesday class please give a syllabus to the secretaries so they could start shopping the class around to see who could cover it.
And then everything got even more ridiculous. The main rumor this week has been that because this prof has tenure, s/he can't really be fired so s/he's going to sue the department, the department will have to counter-sue if they really want hir gone, and we're all going to lose our fellowships and assistantships because the money is going to have to go towards legal bills. I'm choosing to ignore this doozy of a rumor completely because
a) Surely there is some sort of fund within the university for situations like this one, so any money the university needs for legal battles doesn't come out of the scholarship pool.
And b) ever since I got here there has been a new rumor every week about how we're all going to lose our funding. The state budget really is in bad shape right now, and our department is being hit pretty hard because of it. So yes, there's a very real risk that there won't be money for all of us next year. Does that make me happy? No. It pisses me off, and I'd be even more pissed if budget cuts in my subject area weren't a constant worry all the time. Liberal arts don't get the same treatment as sciences, unfortunately, so it will be a constant battle for the rest of my life to prove that what I do is important enough to society to deserve funding. But all I can do is do my job well and hope that if they do end up cutting assistantships, they'll cut other people's before they cut mine. Straight Mate and I were talking about it the other day, and he said, "You know, I can either not worry about it and then be depressed when I lose my funding, or I can be worried about it and worried about it and worried about it and then lose my funding anyway. I pick the former." That's how I feel about the situation, too. Which is funny, because I'm usually such a worrier. This is not something I'm choosing to worry about right now, though. At any rate, I certainly don't think that this whole professor drama will be what causes any of us to lose our funding.
Anyway, that brings us to yesterday (Tuesday), when we got an e-mail from the professor saying, "Class is on for tomorrow, be ready to discuss such-and-such." I was surprised to get the e-mail, especially since my boss had just said the day before that someone new was going to be taking over the course. Nicole and I were talking about it, and she thought it was just the prof covering hir ass for legal reasons and that class woudldn't actually happen. I thought that was just wishful thinking on Nicole's part, even though I wasn't looking forward to class because I was sure it would be awkward.
But it turns out Nicole was right. I came home after teaching my classes this morning and I was worn out so I opted to take a forty minute power nap after lunch. At 3:00 my alarm went off and I moaned and groaned but drug myself away from my snuggling pets. I got on the computer immediately because I wanted to print some notes for class, and I decided to check my e-mail on the off-chance that maybe class had been cancelled just because I really, really didn't feel like putting my clothes back on and getting in the car and then thinking for three hours.
And what should I find but an e-mail from the chair with only one sentence "[Course Number] will not meet tonight."
Wow! Once again, I'm kind of grateful that I get another week's reprieve from doing any work for that class. I'm especially grateful because we were supposed to get our take-home midterms today and I'm happy to put that off as long as possible. But now I really don't know what to think. How bizarre to get an e-mail from the prof and then another e-mail from the chair contradicting it. Apparently there really is a feud of some kind going on.
Between this and the stuff that went down in our Teaching [My Subject] class earlier this semester, I have unwittingly picked the most drama-filled semester ever to enter this university.
With that said, I don't hate it. I don't even dislike it. In fact, as long as the events continue to not effect me in a terribly direct way, it's actually kind of exciting. I think it's one of the reasons I'm making friends so quickly, actually, because we all know nothing forges bonds quicker than something juicy to gossip about.

Here's what is going to piss me off, though:
-If the person that ends up taking over the class decides we still have to do every bit of reading on the syllabus, even though we'll have been in limbo for two weeks and therefore lost that much reading time
-If nobody picks up the class and we all have to drop it and not earn credit for this semester. I can't imagine why that would happen, but that would SUCK.
-If the person that covers the class can't actually teach the material effectively. Because here's the thing. This professor has a reputation in the department for being difficult to get along with (s/he clashes with both colleagues and students), for being a mental case, for being unfair, etc. But the little interaction I've had with hir has been fine, and if anyone ever asks my opinion, I can say truthfully that I thought s/he was doing a good job of presenting the material and that I was enjoying the class and learning a lot. I'm sure there are some major problems with hir, but I hadn't seen them yet. So I'm going to be bummed if the person that takes over leaves me feeling like I haven't mastered the material. I am going to have to know this material for comps eventually, after all. And yes, I know that studying for comps is my responsibility and if I screw up it's nobody's fault but my own. But the entire reason I'm taking this class is that I thought it would be good comp prep!

For right now, though, it's kind of nice to once again be able to waste a Wednesday night.

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