Not just mine, mind you, but everybody else’s. The reason for this empathy, however, may sound a bit self-interested as well.
Last April, we received the Calls for Promotion from the UP Administration. I was a member of my department’s Academic Personnel Committee (APC), and was tasked to assist the Chairman in all the promotion matters. Suddenly, my humdrum life as an APC member, which hitherto consisted mainly of watching fidgety and nervous teaching demonstrations from applicants, became a high-octane existence.
We, the members of the APC, worked at refining the guidelines for promotion, making sure that the “scholarly/creative work distinct to the unit” was added, so that our poets, playwrights, actors, and directors could have some share of the promotion pie. This task, because of some silly miscommunications and misunderstandings, probably took us nearly 100 man-hours to finish.
Then there was the task of collecting the portfolios of every interested faculty. The thing that bothered me with this part of the promotion was this: How could we be so strict with the submissions of our students (showing the height of anal-retentiveness by specifiying the font size and margins and folder color and paper type and format and all and refusing to check-or even accept-anything that strays from this format) and be so lax about rules and guidelines ourselves? I could only think of a handful of faculty members who followed the format of the portfolio. It was absurd. It got even more absurd when some faculty members actually argued that their format was “almost exactly like” the prescribed format, so can’t we just accept them to spare the teachers the work of having to reformat? It was crazy. Rules and formats and guidelines are exactly what they are–being a teacher doesn’t excuse you from them, in fact it’s your supreme responsibility to follow them, so that you could lead by example. Anyway, we chucked our anal-retention aside and took in the portfolios, but somehow that simple exercise of collecting them left a bad taste in my mouth.
Of course, there was the job of assigning points to the portfolios, looking for missing proofs and documentation, quadruple-checking the computations, and placing everything in the all-important matrix form. This was hands-down the most mind-numbing experience I’ve had in my career as APC member, for the simple fact that the promotion guidelines seemed written in water and open to misinterpretation. So we had to compute and recompute, and argue endlessly who got the correct interpretation of this or that guideline. Then almost daily we received emails from the Dean regarding “corrected” guidelines, so we had to go back to square one, and sometimes the work we had achieved in some of our marathon meetings (from lunch up to 9PM at one time, up to dinnertime in so many others) were scrapped.
All this work inevitably frayed our nerves. At times I seriously contemplated some form of recreation to alleviate our stress (boxing each other glove-less perhaps?). We lived, breathed, and exhaled the promotions. We were neglecting loved ones (Thealove was becoming increasingly suspicious of my “overtime”) and even ourselves. Here one piece of advice I got somewhere became very useful: never take your work home. After every marathon meeting I’d take a cold shower to wash the sweat and revitalize myself, then I would read Stephen King or The Motorcycle Diaries by Guevara to, as Wittgenstein once said, “wash the mind.”
The promotions are now out of the APC’s hands (I pray). We submitted the final matrix to the dean, including all the summaries with all the computations, remarks, and Coke Zero stains intact.
So you see how I meant that wishing for everyone’s promotion can be self-interested. I’m not really a fan of everyone in the Department, sorry. But if somebody doesn’t get promoted, after all that brain-bleeding APC work, I’m going to be really pissed.
Dedicated to the APC of the Department of Humanities 2007-2008 
