Changes aren't permanent, but change is

What's happening here and what's coming

Photo by Roberta Guillen on Unsplash

At this Substack and in my own life, I always testify to the power of systems. In order to handle the turbulence of an academic life, we all need simple, trusted, coherent systems that we can engage with incrementally to make small changes accumulate over time. And the worse the turbulence, the greater the need.

It’s been about six weeks since my last post, and so much has happened with my own journey in that time that I have never felt that need more urgently.

Today I’m going to give a brief update to explain what’s been going on and what you can expect over the next six or more weeks, as I navigate a lot of exciting yet disruptive changes.

What’s going on

I’ll just state this plainly: After 30 years of being a classroom instructor in mathematics and computer science, I am starting a new chapter in my career as executive director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Texas A&M University.

I’d been thinking about a career move for some time, but never really found the right opportunity. When the job at Texas A&M came open in January, it caught my eye, and the more I looked at it, the more I liked it. I wasn’t sure if I was really qualified to be an executive director of a center for teaching at an R1 flagship university, but I figured I would let Texas A&M tell me that rather than tell that to myself. So with some encouragement from friends, I applied for the position, and then soon I had a Zoom interview, and then in April I had an on-campus interview (shortly before my last post at this Substack).

Since then, it has been a whirlwind of waiting for responses, then negotiating an offer, then accepting the offer and beginning the massive task of ending a job at one place, where I have worked for 15 years, and starting a new one elsewhere where there is a completely different organizational culture and way of doing things.

Oh, and I am also relocating cross country, from the lakeshore area of western Michigan to College Station, firmly in the heart of the Texas triangle. And this is a solo move, the first such move I have made since finishing graduate school in 1997 and moving from Nashville to Mishawaka, Indiana.

Oh, and I am also trying to finish up the manuscript to the second edition of my book on flipped learning, which is due in to the publisher in August. A year ago, when I wrote the contract for the second edition, I put September 1st as the due date, thinking there will be no problem getting this done by the end of April. What’s the saying? “Man plans, God laughs.”

I’ve written elsewhere about how excited I am to join the team at CTE at Texas A&M. It is an elite unit with great people and enormous potential for changing higher education as we know it, for the better and worldwide. The challenges of this career move are going to be great, and I will have a lot to learn. But as I told Texas A&M in my interview, I’m never really happy unless I have a hard problem in front of me and I’m learning something. So I feel like I’m stepping directly into my element.

But it’s a lot of work and time and energy required. So there will be some temporary changes here.

What to expect from Intentional Academia in the near term

James Clear says that professionals don’t let life get in the way. With all due love and respect to James, my life is so big right now that I can’t get out of its way. I’ve not been able to maintain my every-other-Thursday cadence of posts here and I think it’s not self-caring to try to force myself to get on that kind of schedule. My new position at Texas A&M starts August 1st, and I will be moving to Texas on July 17th. During that time, July through the middle of August, I will post when I can, but I cannot guarantee any sort of regular schedule.

On the other hand, you will still continue to get content about meaning, productivity, and purpose in higher education. And it will be from a distinctly different kind of standpoint as I transition into a senior administrative role, but still working with faculty.

• Already I have new ideas about posts that deal with how I’ve constructed systems for myself to manage the chaos of the last six weeks and of the coming six weeks.

• I’ll be keeping tabs on how I adapt my faculty-oriented systems to the much less structured administrative role that I’ll be stepping into. I had some experience doing this while I was department chair in 2019 to 2020, but now it’s going to be my everyday lived experience — and my full-time job.

• Living out the law of the whole person is going to be a particular challenge for me as I step into an open-ended sort of position where most of my job is going to be defining the work that I do. And also, it will be work not to let that work bleed into every moment of my personal life, which will require significant tending to as I will be moving to Texas without knowing a lot of people.

What won’t change

At Intentional Academia, you’re always going to get the straight story from me. Not sugar-coated, totally vulnerable, and completely honest about life and work and how to imbue it with meaning and purpose. There are rich sources of this kind of content right off the vine as low-hanging fruit in the career change and the move that I’m about to make. And I’ll be sharing those with you from a completely honest personal viewpoint.

You can also expect to continue to eat my own dog food. I preach the power of taking small steps within coherent systems that lead to gradual accumulated change over time. And when you do a career and life reset like I’m about to do, there is no better context for seeing how this works and finding the gaps in that idea.

Finally, you can expect me to write about not only my professional life, but also my music life, which is part of being a whole person, and that is not going to be going away. In fact, shout out to all the Rush fans who caught the reference in the title for this blog post. For those who didn’t, here’s the classical reference:

Until next time!