meetings, meetings, meetings, and meetings

Actually, I only had two of them today… 90 minutes interviewing one of the outgoing Deans, and another hour of the Senate Faculty Affairs Committee.

I fully realize that the standard position among most academics is something like “administrative work sucks.” But I’ve never even been comfortable with the phrase “administrative work.” I call it “reality work,” though “policy work” would do just as well. What you’re getting in these meetings is a sense of where the genuine problems lie, and only this gives you some hope of fixing them. You’re also suddenly in a position (or at least I am now) where it’s your responsibility to come up with actual solutions, and I enjoy that pressure, especially since this is a fairly unique university and I care about what happens to it.

It’s the Latourian in me that holds that building an interface between two ontological concepts is the same kind of thing as identifying and solving a policy problem that affects many colleagues. Even better is the fact that such problems are always tied to local conditions with specific histories, and can’t be solved by fiat; they need finesse, and since no one is born with such finesse, you have to develop it on the fly.

And ironically, I now have the same post at AUC that Latour has at Sciences-Po. He’s promised some hints, and they’ll be most welcome.