Okay, my chair emailed me back and basically said that he "tries very hard to balance the work load." So, basically, he's saying trust him, he's being fair. Then at the end he says he would share a list of who is on who if I really want it (but he didn't share it in this email).
So now I don't know what to do or how to respond. If I have him give it to me and I disagree that the workload is fairly distributed, then I'm just being a jerk by disagreeing with his self assessment that he is fairly balancing the work load.
4 comments:
I'm not sure of the best thing to say to him, but let me just point out the following. By my count, you're on 4 committees, and the chair just asked you to be on 2 more. If you have 40 people in your department, and the work is evenly distributed, that means that there are at least 160 committees to go around, and possibly upwards of 240. Yeah, somehow I don't think so, even at a university level. I for one would really like to know how many other people are on 6 committees. Maybe you could at least ask that. Besides, presumably that school district rep can come from another department, though then he'd have to tell the deans that he doesn't have anyone and I'm sure he doesn't want to do that.
My guess is that he would respond that some committees are more time consuming, so others are on only one or two because of the time commitment. For instance, he explained that my mentor (male full professor) is only on one committee because he is also chairing two people's tenure cases. But, they're not going to be going up for tenure for another 2-3 years. When they go up, that'll be a ton of work, but right now, it's almost 0 work. So I think his view of how much work stuff takes isn't consistent with my view.
OK, well, that's lame, but what if you compare yourself to other associate profs? Are you all at least doing similar amount of service? Or are the d00ds doing less?
Great question. Maybe I'll ask him to release the data anyway. Meanwhile, I've decided that being on two IRBs is just too insane, so I'll decline it but offer to be on other committees instead to compensate. I calculated the time to be on IRB and those two committees alone would take 2 full work days a month, which doesn't even count for all the other service stuff. So...no.
It is awkward & hard to say no.
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