My first department meeting and Bora wind

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am part of an English department.  (The History department conducts all of its classes in Croatian and therefore was not a possible home for me.)  This department is interdisciplinary, with about half of the faculty teaching literature and half teaching linguistics.  Coming from an interdisciplinary department back in the States, I like this mix.  I have already learned a lot from conversations with my new colleagues.

Today I attended my first department meeting, and it seemed both unfamiliar and familiar to me.  The unfamiliar elements....
1. It was conducted almost entirely in Croatian.  The department chair explained, "We start the meetings in English but then slip into Croatian when discussing hot button issues."  The Croatian began almost immediately.
2. All but one of the 16 faculty in the room were female, and many appeared to be around my age.  The department chair is female.
      In the States, though my department's faculty is balanced in terms of gender, my university is not at all.  About 20% of the tenured or tenure-track faculty, and less than 30% of the students, are female.  In my 20 years as either a faculty member or graduate student, I've never had a female department chair.

And the familiar elements....
1. Heated discussions were clearly taking place.
     But I wasn't part of the "heat" and didn't know, for the most part, what was actually being said.  This meant that the meeting was just interesting to watch and involved no stress for me.
     A fellow Fulbrighter who has been teaching in another European country since the fall had explained to me that she liked what she called the "foreign language" approach to university meetings and will recommend this "stress-reduction method," as she put it, to her department chair and others back at her home university.  Now that I've experienced this approach firsthand, I plan to make the same recommendation.
2.  As I came to learn, the meeting covered familiar topics: enrollment for next year, poor software (in this case, required by the government for all universities in the country), and financial problems.
3. I sensed that decisions were made in a fairly democratic way.

On an unrelated note, today our family experienced our first Bora wind, common to this region.  When going up a hill to my office building as the winds were blowing, I found it somewhat hard to walk.  Also, my office building (finished less than a year ago, I believe) sounded as though it was playing music because of the way the winds were blowing.  It was actually quite beautiful.

Laura