Our Journey, Day 62

At the end of this week, professional development plans (PDPs) are due. They get turned in to a bulk mailbox called "Dean Forms". Over the next several weeks, the deans read all the reports and give feedback. This is one of the biggest jobs of the Deans, in terms of the hours it demands.

Typically, I have sort-of enjoyed the PDP/PDR process. The PDR (professional development report) is the second big document faculty write each year, describing and documenting the things we have done. Faculty are evaluated on five criteria: teaching effectiveness, research and writing, continuing education, student growth, and service. Since I was overachieving in all those areas, it was fun to brag a bit. In theory, a tenure and promotion application can be built on five years of PDRs. Two of the three Deans I've reported to (yes, in my six years at BSU I've had three Deans) were extremely positive in their responses to my reports. The first one, my first year, wasn't negative, but she was more interested in the form than the content. And in any case I hadn't really done much yet and she may have been constitutionally sort-of unable to say anything encouraging.

The week before we send them to the Deans, we're supposed to send our PDPs to our department chairs for feedback and suggestions. I did that over last weekend. My chair responded, saying he has appreciated having me on the team and I've contributed a lot. But he also said my PDP was too short and that if I was planning to submit a tenure and promotion application later in the fall, maybe I ought to think about adding to it.

The problem is, I can't really think of much more to say, than what I put in already. It's a single page, so I get the chair's point. But let's be realistic. I've been retrenched. In the "teaching effectiveness" section I mentioned that I have volunteered to teach an online section of a survey I have never taught before, so the two remaining history faculty could take the courses most likely to fill to capacity (since it will be important for both of them to continue demonstrating acceptable enrollment numbers). In "research and writing" I said I'm continuing to work on my primary source anthology, so that I can contribute it to the Open Textbook Library before I leave. I didn't say anything about my ongoing historical research projects, because I'm not entirely sure whether or in what forms I'm going to continue them. If I'm no longer going to be a history professor, I'll be converting them to some type of popular historical venue. In any case, it doesn't seem like it should matter to BSU whether I'm continuing to work on multi-year projects after they fire me.

In "continuing education" and "student growth" I really didn't have a lot to say. I'm not pursuing any "professional development" for myself this year, since I have no future in which to implement anything I learn this year in the classroom. And I'm not sure what I should do to encourage student growth, aside from trying to teach well, since the university hasn't even decided whether there will be a History program. And finally, I described two "service" elements that I'm doing this year, that are more related to outreach than services I'm volunteering for on campus. I'm serving another term as president of my county's Historical Society. And I'm preparing a report for the system office (which is the funding source for the grant I received) on the viability of Z-Degrees at universities. The original plan for this exploration had been to prepare for a specific implementation proposal for Bemidji State. That no longer seems like the best way to go, so I'll be reporting more generally on the steps any university would need to accomplish to prepare themselves.

I'm really not sure what else I could add to "pad" my plans in these criteria, without basically just lying and making stuff up. I'll be meeting with my department chair later in the week to see if he has any input. It seems a bit tacky, to be frank, that the university expects anything of me at this point other than teaching my courses as well as I can and sort-of "running through the tape" at the end of my employment. The tenure and promotion application complicates this, I suppose. But even so, that should be judged on the basis of what I've contributed over the past five years, not on what I'm doing now that they've retrenched me. Still, maybe that helps explain my general ambivalence to that whole process. I'll have to come up with some strategy for that, if I decide to go ahead with it.