I'm sure Whale can elaborate more since he's BTDT, but essentially I'll be put in front of everyone who matters and even a bunch of people who don't because, that's the way academia works. |
Yeah pretty much. It takes a long time to hire people. It took about a year and a half from first interview to being hired for me. The wheels of academia turn slowly.
Speaking of, the FGCU Board of Trustees met last Wednesday to propose programs for "further review," meaning they need to justify why they deserve to exist to the BOT, otherwise the BOT is going to propose to have them cut, and if in turn FGCU doesn't cut them, Tallahassee will withhold their budget.
The whole thing is (mostly) determined by how many graduates the program produces in a five year cycle.
Our journalism program started in the 2011-2012 calendar year. So, having only been around three years, we've not had that many graduates -- eight since we started. That's because people have not been in the program long enough to take the classes needed to graduate, because we've just not been around that long. The provost pointed it out repeatedly to them at the meeting.
But the BOT, being the lovely (non-educated) folks they are, put us on the list anyway.
Found this all out on Thursday. We have to go speak in front of the board Tuesday. Spending most of the weekend cobbling together data on the job market for people with journalism degrees, and studies showing we're doing things how a modern journalism program needs to do, and pointing out that despite only having eight graduates, all eight are employed -- with highlights being: one as a war reporter in Syria, one in the NYC offices of London's The Guardian, one as an education editor at a bigger daily paper, and two in the social media departments of bigger marketing firms.
When, in reality, this should just be us telling the BOT "We literally have not had time to have a full graduating class."
State schools in a state with a conservative governor. It's grand. Let me tell you.
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