Because everyone needs a little good news

Fourteen years ago today I sat in a comfy chair at our local cancer center dangling between the bad news dominating my recent past and the good news beckoning me forward. After major surgery and months of cancer treatment, I was enduring my final round of chemotherapy while looking forward to finally stepping into a new role as Director of our campus's Center for Teaching Excellence.

Today I'm enjoying a similar sense of anticipation. With cancer treatment long in the past and with administrative changes making the College's budget problems more bearable, I'm looking forward to January, when I'll resume the role of Director of the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence.

This change seemed unimaginable not so long ago. In summer of 2022, I met with the then-Provost to discuss taking on a different role. The ongoing marginalization of the liberal arts made me fear that my final years before retirement would be one long slog through multiple sections of first-year composition and general education courses, with little challenge or variety. I wasn't expecting to ride into the sunset in a cloud of glory, but I was looking for an opportunity to use my skills in a more challenging and rewarding way.

So the Provost and I tossed around ideas and agreed to take a few weeks to think about the options before making any decisions--and then, a week later, she announced her sudden retirement.

So that's the end of that, I thought. The new interim Provost was hired to do a specific job--evaluating positions and programs to target for elimination--and he did it as graciously as he could, but developing challenging opportunities for discontented faculty members was not part of his bailiwick. I assumed that I would just keep doing what I'd been doing and hope for an occasional upper-level class to make things interesting.

But halfway through the fall 2022 semester, I became aware of a gap and jumped in to fill it: department chairs needed some training, so I sent a two-sentence email to the Associate Provost in charge of the problem and offered to design the training in exchange for a course release in Spring 2023. The training was a success and the course release was renewed for Spring 2024--for a "project assigned by the Office of Academic Affairs." I didn't mind the ambiguity. We were, after all, welcoming a new Provost this fall, and she might have different ideas about how I could serve the College.

And now that different idea has become public: starting in January, I'll go back to doing a job I loved and never wanted to leave. I was the first Director of the Worthington Center, so I had a hand in establishing how the Center could serve the needs of the College by offering faculty workshops, one-on-one mentoring, teaching observations, and other services designed to improve pedagogy and professional development. I served a three-year term and applied for renewal, but by then the Provost who had hired me for the position had been replaced by another with a different vision for the position. (Somehow this is turning into a Tale of Too Many Provosts.)

Several other Directors served admirably for the next few years but then the administration moved away from three-year terms and instead tried a new leadership model, which resulted, eventually, in a stark decline in the kind of faculty support the Center had excelled in offering. At various meetings over the past two years I've heard many voices saying "We need the Worthington Center back at full function," but nobody knew how to make that happen in the midst of a budget crisis.

But the new Provost had a plan, which was approved by the Trustees in October and presented to me last week. Before accepting the offer, I asked the Provost to describe her vision for the Center. Once before I got stuck in the awkward space between my understanding of my job and a Provost's shifting priorities, and I don't ever want to visit that place again. But our discussion convinced me that the job will allow me to do many things I love to support faculty development while also teaching two courses per semester--and, if all goes according to plan, I can continue doing this rewarding work until I'm ready to retire.

Am I happy? Of course I'm happy. And judging by the wide smiles and the round of applause greeting the announcement at the faculty meeting last night, others are happy as well. If anyone isn't happy, I'm not hearing about it. I'm already thinking about ideas for workshops and looking forward to working one-on-one with faculty members in search of insight and perspective on their teaching, activities that fill me with excitement. We've had a rough couple of years here and we're not in the clear yet, but looking into the near future, all I can see is good news.