Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Outcome of My Meeting

I am often reminded of the proverb "Be careful what you wish for". After going through all of the stages of death from denial to resolution in regard to my position at the university and my letter to her sent on Saturday. The reassurance was her reply that stated she could not agree more and we should meet. This happened late this afternoon. One thing that I am thankful for is her support for new ideas. When I have complaints, I accompany them with potentials solutions giving me the edge. The bottom line is her fear is that the university may not feel it is worth the cost of having two full time native language speakers with the new Bologna program. American Studies is no longer a major unto itself. We have to retool. As a result, I am now the creator of a new sub-specialization of Journalism, Academic, and Creative Writing. The program has to be 50 credits and completed in three semesters. Each course will be 3 credits each and we decided on an internship for the last 5 credits. I submitted a list of 22 possible courses with descriptions. I will design a program with mandatory classes to be taken the first semester of the specialization and then they will be able to select electives also. There is a journalist who works for NBC in NYC here for one semester teaching at the University of Szeged, but they want to keep him here another semester. I am hoping we can incorporate his expertise to kick start our journalism portion. In addition, the head-head of the departments of English studies forwarded an e-mail for me to respond to from a gentleman from an institute in Washington state would like to create a cooperative program with our university. They offer an MFA in Creative Writing. I was successful in getting a Writing Lab established with 10 computers, 8 of which will be connected to the Internet. Classes will be held in this room as well as a separate writing lab program that I will oversee. Being one who thrives on challenges, I could not be happier.

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