Department chair Radagast

I got the call this afternoon: I am now the department chair. As a welcome-to-the-chairmanship present I got shoved right into the middle of the latest departmental crisis, and spent most of this afternoon trying to figure out what the heck was going on.

The position will last for a year, at which point there will be another election for the next two-year term. It comes with relatively little power (I will primarily "advise" the dean on personnel decisions), a lot of duties (evaluating adjuncts and serving on all departmental hiring committees being chief among them), and not much else. We'll see what I think in a year.

I'm still in disbelief that I'm chair; I never thought that I'd be chair of a large community college's biology department fewer than five years after starting teaching at the community college level. Five years ago I probably would have predicted that I'd still be teaching as an adjunct, hunting for that elusive full-time job.