I HAVE GOOD REASON TO BE TIRED. Last Friday, the retiring interim dean gave his State of the College presentation. The text is not yet available at the Liberal Arts homepage. In addition to the encouraging introduction of this year's Presidential Research and Teaching Professors and assorted other honorees, he presented some pie charts illustrating the share of the university's recent increased student credit hour production handled by Liberal Arts faculty. Hint: it exceeds 90%. His presentation illustrated the folly of misapplying business models, and the lesson generalizes to the private sector. In the early 1990s, the state's board of higher education decided to capitalize on the business fads of "downsizing" and "strategic planning" to trim the public universities. As a consequence, Northern Illinois was deemed "right-sized" with an undergraduate enrollment of about 16,500, a figure that reflected the tail end of the Thirteenth Generation cohort but that missed the bulging middle schools and the effect of immigration from the former Soviet Bloc and Latin America into Illinois. Many of the other colleges could invoke professional entry standards and tighten admission requirements as the entering classes grew (to a size comparable to our greatest extent in 1987-88, when the economics department had twice as many faculty members.) But each student's first two years are effectively in Liberal Arts.

I'm apparently not alone in feeling swamped.

I have a huge backlog of grading to do, a frightening amount, given that I’m teaching three courses with large (for Swarthmore) enrollments. Tremendous amount of reading that needs completion, and substantial preparations for courses each day, given how excellent and probing a lot of the discussions in each of my classes have been this semester. A whole new course syllabus needs to get out there for students to look at as they think about classes. (Almost done if you’re checking here looking for it.) A few straggler references for students need completion or sending. Many and sundry meetings of various kinds in the next week or two.

The problem we have is not limited to being overwhelmed with stuff to do. Often it is the nature of the stuff. Mike Munger's taxonomy of evaluating projects and obligations introduces two dimensions, which he classifies as "urgent" and "important." Admittedly, a 2x2 chart is easier to post on a web site. To do so, however, leaves out a third dimension that might be even more important. For the moment, classify tasks as "enervating" and "energizing." Thus, for instance, program and performance review items, which often have deadlines, qualify as "urgent, important, and enervating." Referee reports, which in economics increasingly have deadlines (and electronic mail makes the production of automated needling reminders cheaper), are increasingly "urgent," they're "important," if we're supposed to have decent scholarship, but in many cases they're "enervating" (and for all my crankiness I'm not going to put a skull-and-crossbones graphic in my response). Research tends to be important and energizing, but when grades are due, it's postponable.

I leave to the reader as an exercise what happens when the in-basket is brimming with tasks that somebody else views as urgent, although their importance is not great, and they're enervating in the extreme.