ON BEING A PROFESSOR: I’m in the office, as usual on Sunday except when I take the laptop to my “other office” at Borders. I’ve finished my TCS column, replied to a couple of hundred emails on my office account that I can’t access from home for some reason, and gone through a stack of mail that includes a lot of junk, offers for textbooks in areas where I don’t teach, invitations to conferences that take place in three days (what’s the point of mailing those things?) and so on.

I got my annual review from the Dean (we get those even when we’re tenured full professors, like me) and discovered that I “exceed expectations” in all categories. InstaPundit even gets a favorable mention. I got a “conflict of interest” form that doesn’t seem to apply to me, but I emailed the Dean to make sure. (The joy of being a Dean is that you get lots of email like that. . . .) I accepted an invitation to speak at a panel on “Communitarian Approaches to Cyberspace.” I threw away a bunch of accumulated paper left over from doing tenure reviews — where other schools send you the scholarship of people up for tenure or promotion for comments, thus requiring you to read hundreds of pages and write a letter about them. Sometimes they pay you an honorarium of $100, which works out to burger-flipping wages or less. Other times they don’t even do that. The library wants back its copy of David Brin’s “The Transparent Society.” And the mailing list software for the list that I run for my National Security Law seminar keeps kicking one of the students out for some reason. I think that’s fixed now.

People sometimes write to wonder how I spend my time, so here you are! And, despite the way the above sounds, I love my job. It’s just amazing how much underbrush I have to clear just to get to the point where I can actually do the stuff that’s actually supposed to be my job. Next week I’ll get rough draft papers back from my seminar — I don’t grade those, but I do comment on them. And the students in my Administrative Law class will turn in their comments. I pick proposed regulations from the Federal Register each year and have them draft comments, which are actually filed with the agency and become part of its rulemaking docket. This is a great exercise, except, of course, that it means I have to read and grade them all. The class is reasonably sized this year, so it’ll only be about 300-400 pages, plus perhaps half again that many in seminar rough drafts, for me to read this week.

Will blogging be lighter as a result? Could be.