BY EDWIN BATTISTELLA
Like many universities, mine has an annual faculty report, which goes to the chair, the division director, and the provost. Today, the reports are electronic rather than typed, but during the nearly four decades I have taught at various universities, the basic categories in the reports have remained: teaching, scholarship, and service.
When I first began teaching, annual reports for all faculty were available in chained-up binders in a library reading room—like Bibles in a medieval monastery. At the end of the year, punch-drunk from grading, we junior faculty would read the typed or scrawled reports from other faculty for clues to our futures.
It was both eye-opening and jaw-dropping, with reports of colleagues still working on a long-overdue article, using the report to settle scores with colleagues, and sometimes puffing up letters to the town newspaper as publications. The reports were often disappointing but also therapeutic for hungry new faculty.
Later, as an administrator, I was frustrated when some faculty took the reports casually, responding with the same platitudes each year and even occasionally forgetting to change the dates on the boilerplate. I struggled with what to do when faculty resisted. One report came in with a hastily scribbled “survived another year” dead center on the form.
Another faculty member paper-clipped a dollar bill to his with the note “I just wanted to see if anyone looks at these.” I taped seventy-five cents to an index card and sent it to him with the note, “I enjoyed your report; here’s your change.”
Still later, as a faculty member again, I found the reports a hassle at times, especially as they grew more bureaucratic (with questions about trainings, course loads, and travel expenditures). I prefer responding to a form with more open-ended questions: what did you do this year, how can you do better, and what can we do to help? I also struggle with the categories of teaching, scholarship, and service—what one colleague called “the three lemons of academe.” For a brief moment, my university even added collegiality as a fourth category; it didn’t last.
Today’s forms have expandable boxes for different buckets of work. The conundrum of bucketing one’s work as teaching, scholarship and service is that the buckets spill over into one another. Does a public presentation about my work count as teaching or service? I guess it depends on whether the audience learns anything. Are book reviews scholarship or service to the profession, or does it depend on the length of the review? Where do advising, mentoring, and letters of recommendation go?
Then there is serendipity. If I were to add a category to the reports, that would be it. Reports typically ask us to look back and plan ahead. There are courses to be updated, articles to be completed, committees to be staffed. But stuff happens. Unplanned stuff, some of which is good, some of which is so-so, and some of which makes me want to scream. The unplanned experiences, though, can be some of the best experiences: some previous work that gets new life, conversations that suggest alternate directions for a course, a search committee that brings a new colleague with a fresh perspective to the university.
Somewhere near the end of my reports, I sprinkle in the serendipity to show that not everything is planned in advance. And along with serendipity goes calamity: I’m writing this as I prepare this year’s report, which will include the transition to remote teaching in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.
It will be my thirty-eighth faculty report, and I’m going for forty. What I’ve learned is to write them for myself as a reflection on the past year. That way they matter—at least to me.
Edwin Battistella teaches linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University. His most recent book is Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, from Washington to Trump.
