August 21, 2013

Late start. Aerobics, coffee, a little Bach to ease me on my way. Full light.

First department meeting yesterday, informative, unremarkable, except for new and ever unfolding evidence of the determined effort of the administration to prevent the business of the university. There are always new sets of forms, new and wasteful methods of evaluation and assessment whose only actual outcome is to take away from the business of the university, which is first teaching and next scholarship, and nowhere at any point including exposure to the scrutiny of people who lack the ability to evaluate in any useful way. The administration dilutes our energy by demanding new forms and procedures whose only purpose is to justify their existence. Having nothing really to do (that many of them, anyway) they put us through exercises which they then evaluate. None of it is necessary, or helpful. Teaching and scholarship are the business of the university. Those who are not involved in those things grasp for every tatter of relevance, even if they have to invent it themselves. Everyone seems to be more patient about this than I. Maybe I wouldn’t think so if I were inside their heads. I sound like I’m against evaluation, but I’m not. I’m against evaluation whose sole purpose and only conceivable use is to justify the paycheck of the evaluator.

Third day of class, already two urgent e-mails about having screwed up in inventive ways and missed the first class, and couldn’t I give them a personal update?

Wann kommst du? Ich komme

Putting together a chapbook for a contest. The poem are good. I feel my guts relax, stretch out, as though they had been afraid they weren’t.