Posts tagged facultymeeting

English at our University is very flexible reflecting a variety of meanings with very simple constructions. If you say: faculty meeting – this would be most likely the gathering of faculty of a small department, such as mine. If you say: facultymeeting – you imply an act of interaction of our Rector Magnificus Karel Luyben with a handful of people representing all faculties, levels and occupations at our huge technical university.

I have attended one on Tuesday. The previous session I was present for was three years ago. I must say I did not like that one: the people talk stiffly and officially, hardly interacted and listened to each other. This session was much better: the organization has drastically improved, the atmosphere was open and friendly, people spoke themselves out and this was helpful in many respects. Perhaps last part where we were forced to play a manager-course-like game was less inspiring for me, but the total was much better than I expected.

Among other topics, we have discussed a new political development: it looks like soon the Associated Profs will be able to promote their PhD students (it is a peculiarity of Dutch law that they cannot do it officially, and this is usually experienced as a psychological tension by many generations of Associated and Assistance profs). Great news! – yet my concern was that this may invoke more control than it is needed in intimate relation between a student and its supervisor. It appears, however, that the rector has other concerns, of more organizational nature.

We have discussed how to improve the quality of teaching: please do not smile, the discussion was rather substantive. I was surprised that many colleagues support the idea of promoting people to full profs mostly for their educational merits – at the moment, the research is main criterion. I’ve double opinion on this. From one hand, I see some people who have concentrated on education, work hard and excellent – and remain underpaid and un-promoted. From the other hand, long time ago in Russia and more recently in France I saw education-concentrated profs – frankly, I’d rather not. There must be a flexible solution to the problem.