Saying no

Shortly after I entered the deanery, a colleague told me that she’d heard that Deans/administrators lose roughly 10% of their friends for every year they are in the job. I laughed it off (nervously) and when I asked a former Dean of the College about this, his reaction — slightly paraphrased — was: ‘Well it’s a good thing neither one of us entered the job with any friends.’

I’m not panicking yet, but I do wonder sometimes.

That’s mostly because while I spend an awful lot of time helping make decisions that positively affect my colleagues and otherwise help them do the task that they do, I also contribute towards a fair amount of saying ‘no’.  And it’s about things which are often dear to my colleagues’ heart, or perceived as important to their curricula, or to their research agenda, or favorite hobby-horse, or …

Don’t get me wrong. I say ‘yes’ much more often than I say no, and it’s great fun to do that. But the ‘no’s are hard. I am not yet used to that.

Something similar happens when I am parenting — I can’t say ‘yes’ as often as I like, or as often as I am asked, and I have to tolerate not always being my child’s favorite person, all the while unsure if I am actually doing the right thing with discipline, or in making up the rules that I am following, but which I see as important and necessary.

And entirely unlike parenting, the colleagues making requests of me are sometimes/often the ones with the experience and the wisdom. Or else they are in fields so far from mine that we communicate across a wide gulf about curricular issues. And sometimes they are close colleagues and  — given the small world of Northfield — part of my circle of friends. But I feel compelled to make the decision from where I stand, and I do so as carefully as I can, with as much help and consulting from bosses and colleagues as I can manage. But all the while I am aware of the awkward line I am walking in these situations and this is definitely one of the challenges of the position. Not to forget all the other wonderful ways in which the ‘arrogant style’ of physicists can lead to awkward moments.

I do the same sort of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ saying to student requests as well; and sometimes that’s painful, too, and in extreme cases parents get involved, and so on. But that’s another story.

 

Materials science on NOVA

As I’ve noted before, condensed matter physics, despite being the largest subfield of physics, is often overlooked by the general public. Disproportionately, physics coverage in the popular media focuses on astrophysics and high energy physics. Thus, I was excited to hear about the NOVA series, Making Stuff, that begins tomorrow. Although not condensed matter physics per se, this program about materials science (supported in part by the Materials Research Society) might introduce people to the idea that physicists can work on interesting problems other than unraveling string theory or chasing subatomic particles. At least, that’s my hope.

Physicist brain, Dean brain

I left last Sunday for the Oregon Center for Optics, where I was being hosted by Dan Steck.  Dan and I both did graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, though we didn’t actually overlap there. Still, I know his adviser Mark Raizen, and his post-doc adviser Salman Habib, and plenty of common acquaintances, so he’s part of what I consider my ‘Research College’. Last year at DAMOP, we had one of our longer conversations, and it struck us that there might be a possibility for the two of us to collaborate — that was the primary motivation for this visit. I’m always looking for conversations, either with experimentalists interested in exploring the connection between their work and some of my ideas on the signatures of the quantum-classical transition in nonlinear systems, or with theorists whose strengths I might complement. Dan happens to be both, remarkably enough.

My visit included brief discussions with Steven Van Enck on entanglement verification, with Mike Raymer on his quantum optics experiments, Mike Kellman on the foundations of quantum mechanics, several excellent meals, and some extended conversations with Dan and his student Jonathan Macrory. The latter were promising, and we shall see how far we can continue discussions, both on the theory side and the experimental side.

I also gave a talk on signatures of the quantum-classical transition: It’s always a great experience to give a talk on your research to a new audience. The feedback is invaluable in so many ways, and for someone as starved of physics as I am right now, it was a superb time to review the matter, summarize whatever recent progress had happened on my long-standing projects, and in short, to be a physicist again.

While my days were full of physics, the Deanly email flood hadn’t been turned off, of course, and that’s what some of the evenings were about. Though honestly, not cooking, cleaning or parenting opens up enough time during traveling that I tend to do ok with working late. The true damage came when my flight back on Tuesday got canceled, so I lost the next day (scheduled for multiple important meetings, of course) to travel, and arrived back in Northfield to back-to-back-to-back meetings over the next two days. And the email flood wasn’t turning off any during this time, either.

The hardest part of the week was not the intensity of the physics, nor the intensity of the deaning. The hardest part was straddling those two worlds. I inhabit the world differently in either role (starting with the dress code) and operate from a different part of my brain. It’s not quite left brain-right brain, but there is a similar sort of divide between the technical, mathematical, absolute world of my arguments and models as a physicist, and the human, anecdotal, rapid-fire-striving-for-sensible-principles-decision-making world I inhabit as a Dean. I’m still growing the neuronal whatevers for the latter, and this week again confirmed how much I enjoy and miss being a physicist. It seems like I don’t have a choice but to continue trying to inhabit both identities.

Except on the weekend, when it’s about domesticity and parenting and … ‘life’. Most of the time.

Visualizing my job

This afternoon, after writing a big pile of recommendation letters, my brain was fried so I took a break and found myself exploring wordle. (For those of you unfamiliar with wordle, the website takes text and turns it into a word cloud with the size of the words related to the frequency of their appearance in the text.)  Most of the writing I do is for professional purposes (I’m not a journaling type), but it was fun to see what wordle produced for course materials, grant applications, etc. One of the documents I put into wordle was my prospectus for tenure review. The prospectus is my ten page personal narrative summarizing my professional trajectory while at Carleton. I thought the result gave an interesting snapshot of my professional life:

One thing is clear, interactions with students are central to my work. I knew that, but I was amazed by how that word dwarfed all others.

Two other thoughts…

I was surprised that the word research appeared more often than teaching. As a Carleton faculty member, quality teaching is the most important aspect of my job. Perhaps the relative frequency of research versus teaching (and the prominence of several technical terms) was because my discussion of teaching was more nuanced than my discussion of research and therefore I employed a richer vocabulary in writing about my teaching and a more limited, technical vocabulary in my discussion of research.  (I spent about an equal number of pages in the document discussing teaching and research.)

A few words were either conspicuously absent or small relative to their importance to me, namely colleagues, advising, and community. All three loom large in my professional life, but they hardly registered in this document.

Anything else catch your eye?