We all familiar with academic coordinators, but unless you have done the job, there is a good chance you don’t have a clear idea what it is they actually do. That is not surprising, since there is no official job description for the position. Management likes to say that “academic coordinator” is not a position, but a “collection of duties”, yet they refuse to produce a list of these duties.
The result is that coordinators are given a certain amount of time on their SWF to do “coordinator duties”, yet these duties are never precisely defined. How then is the amount of time calculated? There is the mystery.
Here and at other colleges your union has long been trying to get management to define the role of academic coordinator by asking them to create a list of the duties that coordinators are expected to perform. Such a list would make it easier for coordinators to estimate how much time they should have allocated to them to do the job.
As it stands now, no such list exists, and so, no coordinator really knows what the job consists of. The problem with this of course is that since the role is not defined, there is no real limit to the duties that coordinators can be asked to perform.
Perhaps it is a time issue…no one in administration has the time to put together a comprehensive list of duties. So, I propose that we help management compile a list of the duties academic coordinators perform. If you are or have been a coordinator, please email me some of the duties you regularly perform as part of that role. I will update the list in future issues of the newsletter.