Meetings

My department here is very small, with six full-time (non-visiting) faculty. One result of this is very few faculty meetings, which for the most part is a good thing (just listen to any faculty member who has weekly or bi-weekly faculty meetings). All of ours have had to do with the search for a new faculty member, pretty much, and it makes me think that we won't really have many whenever we're not actually in the midst of a search.

This leads to several issues though. For one, when someone wants to do something (i.e., invite a speaker, host an event, work on rewriting all of the freshman science labs), they can just do it. This on some level is good, but it leads to this isolation in the department where everyone just is sort of doing their own thing, and well, inefficiencies arise.

There's also a feeling of a lack of cohesion. For example, I was never "formally introduced" into the department at some meeting, and while I knew everyone, and they all remembered me from my interview, it was just a strange feeling when I arrived.

Of course I'm past that, and overall I think it's a good setup for the department, and I shouldn't complain for fear of things changing for the worst.