Monthly Archives: January 2009

I’ve been pretty busy this week already with my pesky day job, though there are a few things I’m hoping to post here in the next couple days, some bits and pieces that have been piling up in my in-box I thought worthy of sharing. But I thought I’d start with a brief shout-out to President Martin and a thank you for coming to the English department meeting. Oh, and I say this here, but I have absolutely no idea if she reads EMUTalk.org, unlike someone from the (slowly but surly) increasingly distant past.

I think Martin is doing a tour of different departments this term, and English was her stop on Monday. I will spare you the details of particular concern to my department; I’ll only say I thought my colleagues did a pretty good job of conveying that we are a large and complicated department that does lots of stuff and that mostly manages to still get along with each other. She did her part by being upbeat and optimistic while simultaneously warning us that the budget cuts from the state for 2009-2010 might be very very ugly indeed.

Of the four EMU presidents I’ve “met” in some fashion or other in my time here, she strikes me as the most “human” (with the possible exception of Willis; but then again, since he was a “temp” employee, he didn’t have to perform too much), and maybe the most savvy in what she said and how she said it, at least among faculty-types. She didn’t come across as all “political” like some previous presidents. So I was and remain impressed, despite my thoughts last spring that she wasn’t the right candidate for the job.

My department colleagues might be willing to pass along their impressions here, and I suspect others have thoughts on Martin’s performance at their own department meetings. I’ll just pass along two anecdotes I heard indirectly from colleagues:

• Her take on the salary for the football coach was “it will pay for itself,” I presume more or less based on the money the program takes in, motivating alumni, PR, etc. I dunno about that one; I guess we’ll see how that turns out….
• One female colleague, chatting with her briefly in the lounge, commented on Martin’s shoes, which were of course tasteful and professional, but perhaps a bit out of place given the winter weather conditions. My colleague, who herself was wearing fashionable and much warmer boots, asked if she really had walked over to Pray-Harrold in those shoes. Martin replied something along the lines of “Well, I have to look presidential and everything.” I liked that– that’s what I mean about being like a “human.”
  And, of course, it underscores the fashion pain of being a suit er, an administrator.