"Don't borrow trouble."

As my dad has many times said to me.

My chair just came and found me to talk to me. The "big issues" are "There's going to be more of a push for online classes but you're probably not going to be affected, because the majors classes you teach would lend themselves very badly to that format." But also that there may be a push for people to teach the non majors class as an eight week online session. Which would kind of stink but wouldn't be a dealbreaker for me to want to stay on here. (And actually: having a more open schedule for half the semester might be kind of attractive. If I could pick which half and pick the half that was more amenable to doing field research)

The "load issue" was "You're teaching an overload in the fall. I can do one of two things: I can put in for overload pay for you, or, since we have a new adjunct coming in who really needs more hours, we can give her the nonmajors lab you're teaching as an overload." So: more time or more money. I didn't expect to be given that choice.

I opted for more time. I told her I wouldn't make a fuss if it fell through and I still had to teach the lab, but I'd be certainly happy to have those couple hours of my Thursday afternoon back. (I teach an evening class on Tuesday and have my big lab Wednesday, so by Thursday I'm pretty shredded. This will mean I only teach one class Thursday....)

And thank goodness we were able to hire two adjuncts - one of whom I know well and I know will be a good and responsible teacher - to help us deal with our staffing issues. I'm not a big fan of relying too heavily on adjuncts because it's not very good pay for them and they don't get benefits - but the person in question has a spouse who has a decent income and benefits that cover her, so it should be OK.

So it wasn't anything bad. Some of the "long term future" stuff the legislature is pushing for is a little illogical and may lead to problems, but I have every hope that (a) the election cycle is short enough or (b) legislators tend to be easily distracted so some new shiny thing may grab their attention before they fully implement the stuff that might be hard for us to work within the framework of.