1. The LMS is down for the third time in three weeks. It conveniently goes down every time I have an assignment due through it, causing mass panic and an email box even Roto-Rooter couldn't unclog easily.2. Our chair hired a crazy guy to run our lab. So far Crazy Lab Manager fired a third of the staff, got two longtime employees to request transfers, and got most of the remaining staff written up on some trumped up or made up issue. But hey, the new decorations look great, so that's what really matters!
3. Our board of regents has requested that all employee evaluation systems be re-evaluated. Guess who's serving on the faculty committee? They expect nothing less than a complete overhaul of every form and procedure we've ever used because they just know most of our employees are lazy bums who have been coasting all this time.
4. Layoffs are coming. So far we know at least two and possibly as many as four faculty in my department are getting the ax. Across the system, it could be as many as 20. Thankfully I'm not among them, but I will be losing some good, hard working colleagues who deserve their jobs far more than some who refuse to retire even though they hate teaching and gave up on students 10 years ago. It's not because we don't have classes to teach; it's because we must employ more adjuncts since they are "cost efficient."
5. We just learned one of our brand new buildings has plumbing issues because a construction manager directed the contractor to take the funds and put them toward building a better kitchen for the administrative building. The latter was not part of the original funding plan.
6. The administration is messing with summer school again. How many classes will we be able to offer? What are the new maxes and minimums for enrollment? Who gets to teach? How much will we be paid? We were supposed to know all this by the end of last term. We have to have the schedules entered in less than a month.
7. I'm posting this from a conference for which I got a paltry $150 to attend. That doesn't even cover the hotel cost. Employees are on an out-of-state travel moratorium unless it's specifically approved by the provost. Meanwhile he travels overseas regularly and our board attends conferences in Hawaii.
8. Mice have taken up residence in my department's building. Perhaps we can get the feral cat colony living on campus to come in for a few days and take care of the problem. They certainly couldn't do any worse than facilities management, which has yet to respond to work orders requesting inspection and extermination.
9. Besides the LMS issue, we've had three other major technology failures already this term. Some were for only 4-5 hours; others lasted days. As we're in a hiring freeze (except for administration), the IT sub-departments across the system just keep poaching from each other, the work keeps piling up, and blame gets put everywhere except where it belongs.
10. Though most of my students are actually doing pretty well so far despite all the technology crap that's affecting them, I can already see four who are going to fail because they either can't or don't read. Telling me that Hamster Fur Classics is a great book and has many similarities with The Epic of Gerbil's Journey because both are about rodents and having nothing else in your paper which addresses the "compare and contrast" prompt is a clue for me that the only reading you've done is of your peers' work or some idiot's essay on helpmewriteapapersinceiamtoolazytoread.com.
Pipe bombs in the right places would solve a lot of those problems.
ReplyDeleteNow that is some misery. My sympathies are with you.
ReplyDeleteUgh. To all, but especially to #4, and especially to this -- "It's not because we don't have classes to teach; it's because we must employ more adjuncts since they are 'cost efficient' " -- which pretty much sums up the reality of the supposed "Ph.D. glut" in many humanities fields -- the work is there, but no one wants to pay a living wage to have it done.
ReplyDeleteAnd a really painful conundrum -- do you offer the adjunct work to the laid-off full-timers? To do so would be insulting, but not to do so would also be insulting.
And again: ugh.
Cassandra, our board has requested that we reach out to retirees and those laid off to ask them to come back as adjuncts since they've already proven themselves and know our students. So yes, we want you to teach; we just don't want to pay you for anything else you do or give you benefits. We've also all but eliminated our lecturer positions, which were non-tenure track but renewed annually and paid benefits. The latter attribute was the reason for getting rid of those jobs. The people who lost them were also invited to come back as adjuncts.
ReplyDelete