Thursday, December 8, 2011

And people wonder why I refuse to consider an administrative position...

Dear VP-A: Your brief email today on behalf of yourself and VP-B explaining that you discovered that the board had in fact approved a program that had "ors" for some course requirements (contrary to your contemptuous assertion in the meeting that we had added those "ors" in without authority), and that you had further discovered that you and others had actually approved the later changes to the program requirements (contrary to VP-B's scornful rebuke and assertion that I clearly didn't understand how serious of an issue it was to make these types of changes without following proper procedure), failed to include an apology for attempting to throw me under the bus in our meeting earlier this week as you essentially accused me (as the convenient though low-man-on-the-totem-pole representative of the multi-departmental college-wide program development committee) of lying, of trying to undermine the success of this new program, and of being completely indifferent to the requirements of the grant that is funding this program. So now that you've "discovered" that I was actually speaking the truth, how about if you next "discover" that the senior person in charge of this grant had already clarified to me that we were authorized to make the changes that I was explaining might be needed. 

Oh, and about your comment in the email about how you "now realize that the differences between programs aren't as significant as you were led to believe in the grant meeting." Are you referring to the differences that I repeatedly tried to explain were a result of different campuses using different course numbers in different departments to teach essentially the same content, the same differences that you claimed would undermine the very purpose of the program when in fact they're not even in core courses, just in required foundational courses from other technologies?

No worries, though -- I'm certainly not going to hold my breath waiting for an apology or anything that remotely implies that you were at all mistaken. 

I did at least find it entertaining to learn that my department chair, who is retiring at the end of January, is planning to include this incident in her exit interview report as one of the examples of why no one in our department is remotely interested in applying for her position, even though we are all highly qualified for her position -- we know that we'd be fools to take a step even closer to the black hole of administration. I will very gladly stay down here at the bottom of the totem pole.

7 comments:

  1. Oh, this all sounds very familiar. Administration is more and more of a black sucking hole. The chair is seen by the administration as the administration's foothold in the department, not as the department's representative to the administration; is forced daily through reams and reams of paperwork generated by people who have no idea what a university is actually supposed to do; is given almost no incentive (in the form of money) to do all this work; and is routinely subjected to hostility by the department he or she is trying to protect and serve. It's a horrible job.

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  2. We have seen this again and again on this blog. it seems to be some kind of a universal constant. As soon as people get more out of teaching and more into administration, strange things happen to them. The threshold somehow re-aligns the atoms of our bodies, we revolve around a new axis - we Mr. Hyde without real fangs. Our soul darkens, our brains lose their wrinkles and become smooth, but keep the seam down the middle for distinguishing between A and B, so that the world fits into black and white, you vs me, this or that, rules and paragraphs. But without the folds in our cortex, complexity is incomprehensible, except as a good in and of itself. More rules are good. Standardization is good. Regimentation is good - this we comprehend in our two-sided world. But all these things are also unmanageable, since they are complex.

    We become slaves to new magnetic poles. We navigate by different stars. Two steps removed from the body of the college - the students - we fix our sextant on a different corner of the horizon and, our new world being made flat to account for the limited variables our simple model can encompass, we sail off the edge of the earth...

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  3. @AdjunctSlave: Thanks for so awesomely expressing what I've long had an inchoate sense of, but could never put into words.

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  4. I'm not admin, but this is what I think happens:

    Instead of engaging in thoughtful, insightful work -- eg, lecturing or designing investigations into one's specialty -- the promoted faculty member has to suffer through 40 hours a week of mind-numbing work. For an academic, this creates a sort of revolution in the brain, for the worse.

    Instead of tracking the progress of 2, 3, or 4 classes, the admin has to track the happiness of 30 faculty members, all the while making sure that they are following the arbitrary guidelines established by other brain-dead admins.

    Even the administrative person hoping to do good (and we have all followed the antics of poor Dean Suzy!) are restricted by these rules and regulations, contradictory at times and complementary at others, always confusing, always binding, always an exertion of power from one source or another.

    We are all fucked. Grandma Geek, my goodness what a terrible tale. The longer admins are in such positions, the lower their capacity to see fault and apologize.

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  5. I'm with Rand/orG; AdjunctSlave, that was lovely. And horrific.

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  6. AdjunctSlave, that was horrific. Also (responding to a previous comment of yours), you are wildly underpaid.

    GrandmaGeek, was thinking more about your post. What really gets one is the contempt. Incompetence in a miserable job is, well, regrettable, but one can deal with it. But the condescension and contempt on top of that is what makes dealing with administrators truly insupportable.

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  7. Well ranted, GrandmaGeek. We need a new CM word for the specific type of prick personified by VP-A. Sorry you were on the receiving end. If it's any consolation, other faculty (and maybe VP-A's higher-ups) will read between the lines.

    On the other hand, your retiring department chair sounds like a righteous soul. I hope you all send her off with numerous toasts, including thinly veiled digs at VPs if any are present.

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