Getting my head back in my administrative job

I write and teach, but I also work as an administrator: I direct the MAP, or Morse Academic Plan, NYU's general education program.  My office runs the courses that must be taken before graduation by every NYU College of Arts and Science student, as well as students in the schools of business (Stern), the arts (Tisch), education (Steinhardt), and other units.  It's an enormous endeavor: we mount about one hundred courses a year across nearly thirty departments, and that's counting just the core courses, not the foreign language and the expository writing courses that constitute part of the MAP.

As administrative jobs go, it's interesting, varied work: I work with departmental chairs ensuring that good faculty teach our courses; I maintain the curriculum in close contact with our instructors and the faculty committees that oversee new courses, check in on current offerings, and plan for the future; I work on graduate student pedagogy, because our courses rely on grad students to teach labs and recitations; I do PR for gen ed across the university, which involves raising the profile of the program among students and faculty and reminding the higher administration what resources we need to keep things moving; and I put out the occasional metaphorical fire.  I've got two terrific Associate Directors who do all manner of work to keep our courses up and running, and faculty and students happy.

But it *is* administration, and there are frequent moments when I need to take a step back, take a breath, clear my head, and think hard about how and why universities work the way they do.  Since I spend more than enough time in front of a screen every day, I turn to books rather than blogs.

At the top of my list on universities is Bill Readings' The University in Ruins.  I don't agree with every argument Readings makes, but I find its dark vision of education and its purpose provocative.  When I'm full to the brim with talk about "academic excellence" and "outcomes" -- Readings is especially good on the meaninglessness of the first term as it's currently brandished in academe -- I turn to this book.  The author died young in a plane crash, and I'm sorry I'll never meet him.

Also on my shelf is Jennifer Washburn's University Inc.  I first read it when I realized that I'd agreed to  direct a program in FAS (the Faculty of Arts and Sciences) without knowing much at all about the S.  Washburn concentrates on the relationship between commercial and foundational research funding and the sciences in American academe, but it includes food for thought for all of us, especially around pp. 218, on the move to put humanities and science courses on-line.  This is a complex issue, and one we need to discuss collectively as faculty now before we find ourselves unhappily forced to lecture to cameras and "talk" to students by IMing them -- or unhappily forbidden to do so -- depending on how you look at it.  

More on this topic soon.  I've got some letters of Cicero to read, and a Wire episode to watch later tonight.