Friday? How Can It Be Friday?

I know people think that being Media Studies chair is a glamorous job, that it's the best table and the waiter retreating to the kitchen to bring out those special sweetbreads the chef was saving for Mayor Newsom and his organ-loving entourage. Also, famous writers want you to blurb their latest book, the thoughtful tome that sorts out all the rest of this brave new century.

And that's all true, all of it except for the frequent assumption that being chair actually entitles you to a chair, a really nice one, more of a throne really with a nice expanse of red carpet leading up to it.

But there actually is a downside, and one facet of that jewel of pain is monitoring class enrollments during registration week. We try to offer just as many fascinating courses as we can, thereby bringing variety to the students -- and faculty, too, for that matter. Yet when you walk on the razor's edge of pedagogical profusion -- new metaphor, please; the one you just handed me seems to be broken -- some courses under-enroll, and some courses must be canceled and teachers reassigned, and tears flow (mostly mine).

So those of you wondering why I haven't been posting, my finger has been on the pulse of the enrollments for Spring 2009, and sometimes one feels weakness, multiple weaknesses, and the time of triage arrives.

Like now.



Girl mourning cancelled class