Allusions to "Lost" are Accidental

My sabbatical time is running short and I have yet to get a publication finished, which frustrates me. I am also getting daily requests from the home institution to come back to campus for meetings. I have a pile of committee work to do for the home campus too. This is part of the spinning plates problem where one can't focus too much on one thing or all the other things come crashing down. I sometime wonder who keeps starting new plates spinning. I try to keep a couple up and all the sudden I see a couple more are spinning behind me and there is nobody around.

Some colleagues suggest that to be a "successful" faculty member you must be selfish about your time and personal resources. That definition of successful appears to be exclusive to the individual faculty member reducing their teaching load and getting publications and grants so they can do less teaching and service. I have seen several PUI and MCU departments tear themselves apart as tensions build between camps of "self focused resource sponge faculty" and "non-productive teaching focused faculty" disrespect each other. This is where it is critically important that the administration of the department and college must act thoughtfully to mitigate the problem before it gets out of hand.

As individual faculty members each of us must prioritize our resources including time and lobby our Chairpersons and Deans to support our individual priorities. As supplies of all resources shrink it will be critically important that administrators communicate with the faculty about the level of available resources and how they will be distributed to the long term benefit the department as a whole. In tough times we must work together or all fail individually.

Of course none of this solves my paper or grant writing problem, so it's back to the hood for me.

T.S. Hall