Shenanigans

Val declared a copout on the last answer I gave, so I guess I need to go again. Most of the answer is there, I just really failed to put it in a good form. To refresh your recollection...

5. You are given unlimited resources/money/staff to change three things about your job/workplace. What do you change?

Ok, so here goes...

1. For me, a tenured position with no administrative responsibilities. I understand that this is sort of the holy grail of academia. Right now it seems like I have really four jobs instead of one. First I teach my classes. Second I mentor and oversee production. Third I administer the Production Technology & Management option. Fourth I am supposed to be developing my career and the form as a way for me to eventually advance to tenure. What really happens is I teach my classes and everything else competes in some kind of Grecko Roman Scheduling battle to see what ultimately happens. At work at the top of the summer I got my "to do" mailbox down to less than 20 entries. Today it is over 120, AND I AM TECHNICALLY NOT EVEN EMPLOYED AT CMU FOR JUNE, JULY, & AUGUST! There's just no time to concentrate on anything. Cutting the responsibilities to just classes and production would make things much more manageable - although by no means easy.
2. A facility that is not busting out all over and was designed specifically for the teaching of Production Technology & Management. This is a hard one to sell at work these days because we are in a building that is less than 10 years old. Even so we are busting at the seams and we don't even do 1/3 of what we ought to be doing. The new space was programmed based on the structure of the old place and neglected to count many of the found spaces that were used, so even though the new shop is that same square footage as the old three shops it is effectively smaller, the theatre is 8 times the volume, and that is for what we needed then not for what we might need in the future. We need more shop space, more office space, more classroom space, more lab space, more everything space. I suppose even if I did get to design my own facility I would hate it in a year, but at least I would go bigger than I needed at that moment to leave some room for expansion. (Of course this neglects the impact of budgets and available land, but I don't have to consider that here.)
3. Ten times the annual operating budget. I figure everything I was looking for in the last post would fit into that number. Maybe I am wrong and it would be less, but its hard to fight the impulse to just say unlimited budget which seems downright wasteful. The 10x budget would hopefully cover items 1, 3, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, & 3 from the last answer. Adding the full amount of the current budget to cover each of 10 new priorities doesn't seem too far off base.

So maybe I wasn't waffling with the last post but rather just being overly specific. The three answers above cover everything I talked about previously except merging a couple of very independent university units, moving the campus to the tropics, and world peace.

And it wouldn't be right to get everything you wanted, even in a fantasy world.