The reward at the end of an extravagantly difficult week (don’t ask): confirmation that I have actually been appointed for three more years at Stanford. No longer do I get a letter of appointment from the cognizant dean; instead, my department’s administrator (the Kelly Battcher in this e-mail) gets a notice from FASA — Faculty and Academic Staff Appointments, the online integrated management system for academic appointments at Stanford. This notice:
Thus implying that the cognizant dean did in fact approve the appointment; there is an actual human being in the middle of all this, you just can’t see them
The background, on this blog:
— from 8/15, “CV time at Stanford”, on applying for a new appointment
— from 9/17, “A moment of renewal”, on receiving an offer of appointment and agreeing to it
October 3, 2025 at 6:37 pm |
I suppose I should note the oddity of a message from an on-line management system that begins “I write to …”, in the 1st person sg. (Presumably a remnant of the days when deans actually wrote the letters — well, caused them to be printed out under their names.)
I’m so old that I have memories of face-to-face interactions with deans, provosts, and in fact university presidents. No longer imaginable.