Why does the Dean want to interview me?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I applied to be in the adjunct pool for a University in my area. A few days ago, I heard back from the chair of the department I’d be working for. He’d like to put me in the pool, I need to talk to this lady in HR, let’s talk in person in a few days, etc.

That’s nice. It means I might teach a class or two for these guys maybe sometime in the future. Nothing wrong with that. I assume the face-to-face is to make sure I’m not nuts or totally lying on my CV or something. (I assume this because he said in the email he wants to put me in the pool, which makes it sound like I’ve practically got the position, as long as I don’t prove to be nuts or something when he talks to me face to face.) So I told him when I’d be available for the face to face meeting, and waited for him to write back.

Instead of him writing back, I got a phone call from the Dean of the university, asking me to come in tomorrow for an interview. Tomorrow is definitely not one of the times I said I’d be available. In fact, I wasn’t available. But hey, I made myself available immediately. But I don’t know what to make of this call. There was no warning that I might be contacted by the Dean. And I’m surprised the Dean doesn’t have better things to do than interview every applicant (or nearly-accepted applicant, anyway) to every adjunct position. There are alot of adjunct pool spots out there, after all.

I think it’s pretty normal for even tenure track applicants to be hired based almost completely on the recommendation of the department. I’d assume for adjuncts it goes even more so.

So why does the Dean want to talk to me?

Anyone have any experience with this kind of thing? Am I wrong to think this is atypical?

Also, the job could involve my teaching a course in College Writing. On the CV I sent them, I punched up the fact that I, on my own initiative, because I just love it so much gosh darn it, voluntarily grade college student work and offer them substantial suggestions for revision with a view towards bringing it up to Academic snuff, as part of my unprofitable self-employment venture www.igradeyourpaper.com. I did not indicate in any way that I’ve ever actually taught a course on the subject. But once I heard back from the department chair, I decided to start designing a sample syllabus. And then when I heard from the Dean this evening, I tried to double time it. I don’t have a syllabus yet, mostly because I have not had the chance to look at any of the usual textbooks people use in this course. But I do have a set of notes for such a syllabus, explaining what kind of prompts I would use, what kind of work I’d be having the students turn in, and so on. If anyone here has any experience with this kind of thing and would like to take a look and comment, here it is. Does it seem plausible to you? And does it seem non-ridiculous to hand over this kind of document in lieu of a full blown finished syllabus?

2

Not academic, but used to dicks:
Take a choice:

  1. He’s a jerk who wants to jerk you around.

  2. He’s working you around his golf game because your promotion isn’t all that important to him and it’s a fait accompli.

I’m leaning toward the latter. Show up on time, demonstrate you can construct several sentences in Standard English, laugh at his jokes, and you are home free.

3

Are there department-set course competency papers for this course? In my experience with general College Writing courses there usually are, maybe not in your situation. Either way, rather than detailing a semester’s worth of assignments on a syllabus, they’re mainly looking for:

  • your grading policy

  • attendance policy

  • a basic outline of the semester, like Week 3: 1st rough draft due, read pages 20- 55 (nothing says you’re stuck with this)

  • basic info – you don’t know any of this yet, but leave placeholders for office location, hours, phone, course number, meeting days and hours, class description (copied from course catalog)

If you have this, you’ll pass muster easily, and they’ll know you’ve got a decent head on your shoulders. BUT, it would be pretty unusual for anyone to expect you to have a syllabus in hand for a course you’ve never taught - and having not taught any in the past.

Since you’re meeting with the dean, you might do well to be able to express your philosophy of education in a few concise sentences. Good Luck. Oh, and overdress, because you can never really overdress for this stuff.

4

Giving him some (but not too much) credit:

Your boss recommended you. His boss needs to make sure you won’t be an embarrassment and wants to pretend he has a hand in the selection, but without doing any actual work.

You kids in academe think you have it different from us guys in industry. Nope.

5

How was work in July? I wouldn’t know.:wink:

6

Frylock, he’s seen the photos, and wants to know just how drunk you really were.

Seriously, good luck and report back. (and burn the rest of the photos)

7

IANAP, Frylock,but would it be helpful to list some learning outcomes on your syllabus? Successful completion of this course will ensure . . .

Perhaps the Dean is sizing you up for more than the adjunct pool and not in the discipline you imagined?

Let us know after the interview . . . enquiring minds and all . . .

8

This is one possibility that came to my mind.

9

I have a few suggestions for the syllabus, if you still want them. (A family member of mine teaches college writing.) I see that your interview is today, though. Good luck!!

10

Likely something along those lines. There’s some low-level issue with adjunct faculty that’s just important enough that the Dean wants to put his hand on the tiller.

Maybe the last adjunct hire wound up as a huge HR nightmare. Maybe there’ve been higher-than-usual student complaints about adjunct faculty. Maybe preparedness of adjunct faculty was an issue during the last accreditation visit. Maybe there’s a particular issue with the class they’d like you to teach.

I suspect this has nothing to do with you personally, it’s just that you were next in line when whatever underlying issue it was came to the Dean’s attention. Why not just ask him?

11

umm—could it be about affirmative action?
Suppose the university as a whole is under pressure to keep a certain level of diversity, with quotas to meet, etc…That’s the dean’s responsibility.
The department head is only concerned about his department, and his recommendation is probably based solely on your academic qualifications.

But maybe the dean is concerned about other issues.

(disclaimer: I am making blind guesses here–no accusations of impropriety by anybody. Don’t Pit me!)

12

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I’ve incorporated material responsive to both sets of advice about the syllabus notes. Sydney, I’m definitely interested in hearing what you’ve got to say, though I’m heading to the interview right now so won’t be able to incorporate it into what I’ll be presenting to the Dean. Please do tell me your thoughts though!

As for the reason for the interview, someone expressed what is indeed my fantasy–that he’s got in mind the possibility of something bigger than an adjunct position. But in seriousness, I can’t think of any reason he’d pick me out for something like that. I have an undistinguished CV. So I think it’s almost certainly got to be one of the bureaucratic scenarios described by other posters in this thread.

Anyway, off to the interview, I’ll report back.

13

Alright, so it turns out this all signified nothing.

It’s just a small enough school that the Dean can take a personal hand in the hiring process for all employees.

I did learn some things from the interview. For example, while I knew it was a small school oriented toward business and technical students, I didn’t know that they expect their teachers to follow pre-written curricula. I won’t have a hand in designing the course I’ll be teaching. I’ve worked for Kaplan Test Prep before so I’m roughly familiar with this kind of teaching, and I can do it and money’s money. But I don’t think this is a particularly good position to put down on a CV if you’re going for an academic position so that’s bad.

Also I have to take a six week training course that’s paid–but not paid until I finish teaching my first course. And he says the training course takes up 20 of one’s hours each week. That’s… not good at all. But I wonder if it really has to take that much time.

Okay, so anyway, I’m still glad to have written up the half-syllabus I did, because I can use a more developed version of it for future positions I may apply to, so that’s nice.

14

I was going to guess the Dean was going to put you on double-secret probation. But I guess not.

15

In the better late than never department.

I’ve interviewed for scads of academic position and in maybe half of them I spent a half hour chatting with the dean* (and sometimes a higher up like a provost).

Some places do that, some don’t.

In those sort of situations I try to look normal (which is hard for me), talk clearly, talk in big picture positive terms. They just want to know that you will be a regular person who can communicate and such.

  • At first I typed “dead” there. Calling Dr. Freud.
16

Nothing too earth shattering to add here. FWIW, my dad taught college writing for 35 years, and he used the Harbrace College Handbook as a reference text. He spent part of the first few class periods addressing common mistakes in punctuation, grammar and usage. There were one or two quizzes of a “correct the sentence” format to test these concepts. (This might be too basic for your students, though.)

The writing assignments you’ve described make a lot of sense (good idea on the feedback and re-writing). I agree with others who have suggested that it would be a good idea to flesh out a basic outline of when major and minor projects would be due during the semester.

Even if you don’t design the syllabus for the course, if you would be grading all of the students’ papers, that’s a substantial responsibility and valuable experience, right? I hope you don’t stretch yourself too thin with finishing up your thesis and working at the same time, although it sounds like you’ve been working on the web site for some time now.

17

Missed the edit window. The Harbrace College Handbook may be called Hodges’ Harbrace Handbook now.