For the second time in as many weeks, I spent some time cleaning out my office on campus. I’ve been hindered by the capacity of the three paper recycling bins on the first floor of TEAC and by my own capacity to trash a decade of my professional life. Walking by the photos of smiling students and colleagues posted in our hallway to the recycling bins doesn’t help either.
I recycled copies of syllabi with notes from rounds of curriculum revision.
I dumped the numerous drafts of our P-12 leadership goals and copies of national professional principal standards.
I binned drafts of syllabi I created as a baby professor for research methods courses.
I turned out my mid-tenure review binder and shook it over the bin.
I resigned to the recycling bin piles of notes, drafts, and literature for strands of my research I’ll never work on again.
I stacked in the hallway piles of books for courses that I will never teach again.
I pulled down the 11 stages of research that I had posted on plain white printer paper around the wall by my desk, not quite a decade ago. Each of these Post-it notes started at stage 1: idea. And I moved them religiously to proposal, data collection, data analysis, drafting, editing, submission, revisions, and finally to this pile of my completed works, representing my academic career. I’m trying to figure out how to frame it, to preserve this layer of sticky notes representing hours and hours sitting in this office. I took pictures of the 8 or so sticky notes of the project in proposal, data collection, data analysis, and writing, and scribbled them down on a piece of paper that I shoved in a box of stuff to keep. Hopefully, I’ll finally be able to get back to these projects that have largely been on hold this year, thanks to the months and months of pointless jumping through hoops to try to save EDAD, and to be the face and voice of faculty as the chapter president of AAUP.
I also pulled down several of these little posters our former department chair made each fall from our annual reviews to celebrate our collective successes, from creating new doctoral specializations with defined pathways and increasing our recruitment efforts to our tallied publications, presentations, and awards. For a small department (I think we’ve been about 15ish since I started at UNL), these numbers look pretty good to me. In 2018, more than half of our faculty won a college or national award. In 2017, 2018, 2021, we averaged 20 peer-reviewed publications… spread across the five or six tenure line faculty that averages over 3 per person, more than the college tenure requirements of 1-2 per year (and our research approportionments would put us closer to that 1 than 2). But we knew that already because the CEHS P & T committee wrote a letter saying, essentially, ‘What gives? Faculty in TMFD and EDAD have been tenured and promoted with flying colors over the last decade!’ Indeed, somewhere in the pile of notes from people across campus is the envelopes with my own department and college letters.
Although I know this is not the end of my career as a professor of educational leadership, there is a genuine sense of loss. Loss of colleagues I’ve worked with for a decade, through thick and thin. A loss of collaborators across the state (and a project we just got off the ground after several years of trying). A loss of relationships with students, some of whom I’ve been advising for years now. A loss of a program that I poured untold hours into (and yes, it worked, look at all these Ed.D. graduates who finished in four years or less!). And a sense of loss of who I am. If I’m not an R1, Big 10 faculty member, who am I?
That sense of loss extends to home as I am also packing up my home office… and every other room, after my husband couldn’t cope with the months and months of me being in constant fight or flight mode and consequently checked out of my life before deciding to make that official. All the platitudes in the world for UNL admin about how hard this has been and how we just need to move on can make any of this right, but definitely not that. And I would wager by the time all four of the departments are finally wound down that I won’t be the only one experiencing that loss on top of the professional losses.
But hey, as I was cleaning out my office, I finally found the smoking gun: I single-handedly put EDAD over its binder clip budget.
