Farewell to the Chair: A Reflection with Professor Kaston Tange
By Kira Schukar ’22
Professor Kaston Tange was first hired as a Victorian scholar in 2015, with the expectation that she would become chair two years into her tenure. After serving four years as chair of the Macalester English Department, she is taking her first sabbatical in more than a decade to focus on her personal projects, get back into essay writing, and talk to her plants.
On her first day of teaching at Macalester, Professor Kaston Tange walked into Olin Rice, wound her way through the hallways to her classroom, and found the room locked.
“So I just kind of walked around, basically looking for a professor-shaped person,” she recalls. She wandered around the unfamiliar building, hoping to find someone with a spare key, “and I ran into Kelly McGregor!” she smiles. A faculty member of Macalester’s Geology department, Professor McGregor had never met Professor Kaston Tange before, but she was more than happy to help out a new colleague. The two began chatting and have since become close friends.
“It was just like the most beautifully Macalester introduction to colleagues and everything about this campus,” Professor Kaston Tange says. “Like, you don’t know anything about what you’re doing and immediately somebody will swoop in to help you out and then become one of your dearest friends.”
Her first day on campus has defined Professor Kaston Tange’s time at Macalester. She rarely finds herself locked outside of buildings anymore, but over the last six years, she has worked on projects across multiple departments on campus—including the Digital Liberal Arts initiatives, an interdisciplinary first-year course called Living in the Anthropocene, and Old Main’s annual First Thursday series—all while juggling her duties as chair of the English Department.
“It would be impossible to be the chair of the English grammar without [our department coordinator] Jan Beebe,” she says. “There is no way a person could do this job without her just tremendous generosity and capacity every time I turn around for students and faculty and everything else.”
Even with Jan’s support, stepping into the position of chair in 2017 meant a huge shift for Professor Kaston Tange’s daily routine. “What I didn’t fully anticipate was that exponential increase in emails,” she laughs. “And it sounds really dumb, but like, I think I get on average 50 emails a day….It really took some time on my part to figure out how to not let my whole day be email so that I could get actual work done.”
When Professor Kaston Tange describes her role in the department, she imagines an iceberg, where only one tenth of her work is visible to everyone else, and the other nine tenths stay hidden where only she can see it.
“It’s your job as chair to do your best to keep the situation as optimal as possible for as many people as possible,” she says. Creating an optimal situation involves paperwork and meetings, but it also means supporting the emotional needs of the community. “Being a listening ear I expected was going to happen, but needing the kind of support that we’ve all needed,” she says. The events from the last year, from the pandemic to the election to ongoing police brutality and racism, “made a lot of people feel really vulnerable…and I mean that for both students and faculty.”
She views this kind of support as a vital part of the position. “It’s a complicated piece of being chair,” she says. “But I think it’s pretty interesting.”
Being chair also means being connected to the entire English community at Macalester, from new faculty to staff to prospective students. Professor Kaston Tange says that she has “gotten to know way more students in the English department than I did when I was just faculty…and that has been absolutely a delight. It makes me wish that I had them all in all of my classes.”
“And I think in terms of my colleagues,” she says. “I know way more about their work.”
As chair, Professor Kaston Tange reads annual reports and agendas on the faculty members’ research and creative work. “Those little like insights into people’s work and the things they care about and how they think…they’re small in terms of time but they make you feel so connected to the people.”
When she passes the title of chair to Professor Bognanni at the end of this academic year, Professor Kaston Tange plans to take a much-needed break.
“I do think that I might spend a few days just sitting on my porch blankly staring into the middle distance and drinking lemonade or something and just being like, ‘okay, now what?’” she laughs.
Professor Kaston Tange says she has “a next project and a next-next project” that she might start in the next year, but her plans also involve practicing one of her favorite writing mediums: the essay. “I don’t mean articles, I mean really an essay form, like a sort of contemplative thoughtful essay,” she says. “Once, a million years ago, I had a blog which no one will ever find because the domain name lapsed and it got eaten up by the internet. And it made me really sad because I used to write….1000 words a day,” she says. “And I miss that kind of like regular writing.”
Besides writing, Professor Kaston Tange plans to spend more time baking with her family and tending to her garden. “I’m one of those people who walks out every morning in the spring with her coffee cup and says hello quietly to the plants,” she laughs. “And I’m sure people think that that’s crazy but…I think that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
The English Department student workers would like to thank Professor Kaston Tange for her tremendous dedication and tenacity as chair. We will miss her dearly next year, and we wish her a restful sabbatical.