My friend Monte Cristo related the following tale to me. Monte is in the natural sciences and getting grants is a big part of his job. In a recent department meeting, Monte's chair asked if Monte would be willing to take some of his (Monte's) Federal Government grant money and pay for one of Monte's PhD students to teach a section of Basketweaving. For those of you not familiar with the rules regarding Federal grant money, suffice to say that this is illegal.
Why, oh why, would an administrator ask someone to break the law in front of an audience?
Administrators being idiotic and unethical?! I never heard of such...
ReplyDeleteOh Good Lord. My guy works in a dept where one of the faculty members (we'll call her Dipshit) paid a good grad student out of Dipshit's own grant to practically ghost write Dipshit's student's thesis because her English was so damn bad.
ReplyDeleteWhen abuse like that happens, John Q Public who is already irate about grants, tenure, etc. has all the more justification to be irate.
Let's not lose focus on the feel-good, heartwarming part of this story. The department head was thinking of paying the grad students for teaching. That's not always part of the deal for the lowly grad student.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's not ALWAYS illegal. If money for course release had been budgeted for in the grant, then the uni would be paid money to find someone to teach a certain number Monte's classes. So I suppose the chair could have assigned Monte the section of Basket Weaving then used his course releasse money to re-assign the section to Monte's Ph.D. student.
ReplyDeleteBut I suspect that's not what happened here.
Remember my file idea? This is perfect for that, or maybe the Count could go to the local media and expose this incompetent. Either way works.
ReplyDelete