coldhearted scientist وداد

And she was executed, after torture, one hundred years ago tomorrow. She hated Prussian men.

In this rentrée, how many of your departments were threatened with loss of program? It happens to us every third year or so and it is very unsettling. I am sure it is a tactic designed to throw us off our game and distract us into self-defense mode, such that we then give them reason to say our evaluations and publications and grantraising fell. I am very tired of it. It amounts to harassment, not because the threat isn’t real but because we are asked to make efforts at program expansion while the administration makes efforts to sabotage these, and when we reach a stalemate, we are then left alone for a year or more.
In the first year, we recover, in the second, we plan on our own terms, in the third, we really start to stream ahead with our work, and then the war is started again.

Also, I spent over an hour making career and graduate school plans with one of our minors, who graduated in December, and was glad to do it, BUT: in the past I could have claimed this as a teaching activity, which is how I think of it, but now it would be a service activity, and would only count if the student were a major and were assigned to me. So I guess it is public service. But my point is that it was meaningful, something a professor should do with this student, and in this case I was the right one to do it, but because this one does not fall within our statistics it is exactly the kind of thing the university considers meaningless now, and because the university had not specifically assigned me to do this for and with this student, they can accuse me of having wasted time today by doing it. D–n them, really.

Axé.

Clearly, I worked too hard too late yesterday.  I knew I was exhausting myself, and I am exhausted. This morning I have lolled about, reading news and e-mail.

Today I will make three phone calls and work out, and work for fifteen minutes. This should put me in shape again.

Axé.

After sleeping late and reading news, I worked on travel plans for a conference and wrote 150 words of a proposal. I wrote two letters that needed writing, and I will make two phone calls and work out tonight.

Update: what I really did was add 580 words to the proposal and hit submit.

Moral 1: once you get started, it’s hard to stop.

Comment: most of the proposal was cannibalized from prose I already had drafted. It still took all afternoon and into the evening, partly due to formatting issues, but mostly due to rereading, thinking, and arranging.

Moral 2: things take a long time, there’s no escaping it. When I am told I must finish things in less time than they really take, I find that I simply stop. Ergo, just allowing myself to spend a good 7 hours on a good 700 words, even when I started out with a draft, has to be considered good enough by every efficiency expert, because doing this at least put me in a position to hit submit.

Axé.