Oh, and the BIG FREAKING THIRSTY.
The Big Thirsty is one of the strongest links back to RYS, and it's an integral part of the ongoing dynamic, blah-dee, blah-dee, blah-dah.
No, I just like the Big Thirsty. You had 9 posts yesterday and not ONE Big Thirsty. What are you doing there in the compound? You don't have a stockpile of these? I have 100 I could lay on you right now. Fab, buddy, fewer road trips and more attention to detail!
I'll give you a free one. Whatever you do, though, don't call it a Friday Thirsty. That's some leftover bullshit. It HAS to be a BIG THIRSTY. That's where the cachet is, man. That's got cachet up the ying yang.
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Q: If you could jettison one colleague, just have him/her shipped to another school, who would it be? Why has he/she been a thorn in your side? What is your least favorite memory of said person. How would your life be less miserable?
My current colleagues I love, but in my last job I had someone across the hall who could NOT stop clearing his throat. Endless. Loud.
ReplyDeleteI asked him once if he was feeling okay, and he smiled. Then he cleared his throat.
Every day. All day. I know it seems like a small thing, but it was like a burr under a saddle. When I got my new office, I couldn't believe the quiet. The person across the hall brought me tea. She was quiet as a mouse!
Hmmm, what to do... respond with the current truth, Prof A or with Prof B who USED to be my first-to-be-voted-off person until Prof A joined the department? It's a dilemma because Prof B is still eminently vote-off-able and is also kind of hilariously awful.
ReplyDeleteBut in case blogging it makes it happen... Prof A please.
Prof A is a bully, and a smug git, and has had a hugely negative impact on group cohesion - noone wants to go to lunches or out for a quick drink after a hard day in case Prof A is there, apart from Prof A's cronies. Prof A is a UK Professor - equivalent of a Full - and gained that position 'on their star potential', appointed straight into a Prof position here from a junior lectureship at another UK institution. Prof A has not, shall we say, fully demonstrated their stellarness... no successful solo grant applications, no wonderful solo papers etc. Prof A has continued to publish... always with former colleagues or current post docs. Prof A has acquired some funding... only when others have written the applications. Prof A is a cause of work in others, for example, Prof A makes appointments to see students then isn't in their office (which is in the newly refurbished bit of the building, large, actually CARPETED, and hard to find), so they come and ask other people for advice. prof A fails to answer student email, so someone else has to address the problem. Prof A goes to conferences which, oh dear, clash with the bits of teaching they're doing (our modules are mostly team taught). Prof A's preferred pedagogic style is to assign each student a paper (usually one co-authored by Prof A) and then get them each to do a presentation summarising the paper. Then they write a review of the paper they found most interesting. Which, you know, is fine for SOME of a module...
Prof A doesn't like me for some reason. Our department is quite good, but Prof A told me that 'your research doesn't fit with our ambitions' when they'd only been here a few months. Prof A talked and sniggered throughout my last seminar. Prof A is an expert at the snide comment in the corridor, the sneer, the nasty little rumour that you can't trace back to source.
Prof A needless to say is Best Buds with the Head of Department. Prof A likes to think they're Best Buds with the Dean but accidentally copied a rather unpleasant email to the Dean which may have messed that up a bit...
Oh, how I wish ProfA would be head-hunted to a 'real university' as they put it - they clearly think they're good enough, and the rest of us could then try and regain our friendly, pleasant competence...
Prof A sounds like an unspeakable dickhead.
DeleteI've had the impression from one thing or another that you are female; perhaps I'm wrong If you are, I would add that Prof A is an unspeakable misogynist dickhead.
Who is good for nothing but blowing his own horn and expertly parasitically attaching himself to other people's work.
Yup, female as charged. Prof A's cronies are all male... but he's a dickhead to the non-favoured males as well as women, so he's pretty equal-opportunity!
DeleteWe have one deadbeat in our department. He refuses to actually work. Since he and I teach similar courses, I often am assigned to take over whatever duties he didn't complete (be it reports for the department, teaching a course, mentoring new faculty, or advising students). He has tenure. He shows up, sometimes goes to class, sometimes doesn't, hires a student worker to do all of his grading, and sits in his office playing computer games during his office hours. The chair has ignored him and continues to give him a schedule that "does the least damage." If I could, I'd jettison his lazy ass into space.
ReplyDeletePeople in my own department are pretty lovely, but there is someone who I do research work with that I'd like to send to the moon Princess Celestia style.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the object of my disdain is male and several times now has gone on and on in my presence about how two of the lead female researchers in the field don't deserve whatever-the-hell honor they were getting. With the first one, I was shocked. With the second, I just got pissed. Without those peoples' research none of us would be doing the work we are doing. He ONLY does this with female proffies and it pisses me the hell off.
But that really isn't what has made me want to vote him off the island. He's not quiet about the fact that he prefers to do presentations where he doesn't have to do any work. Last year that meant literally not saying anything except an introduction to the rest of us. Wow, way to work for that CV line. This year I suggested he present about some stuff and he MAGICALLY then decided within 48 hours that we call the whole speaking engagement off.
Are there other reasons for that? Well yes, and listing them here might well give my identity away so I won't do so. But still, it pissed me off.
We had been teasing him about standing us up and just not showing to something we were supposed to do last year as well, and he called us out on it saying he NEVER missed anything important. This was after he had made a public post about never missing meetings, and had missed several of ours.
Well, fuck you sir.
In short, I understand the work our team is doing is not his priority, but he doesn't have to be an ass about it. Furthermore, while some of the work he's done for us is great and important I really just want to say "Dude, I can take it from here. Go away."
I used to think he was pretty great and a lot of fun to be around and someone who was doing cool work which meshed with mine in really interesting ways. Now I just want to strangle him. I don't need to hear the folks that got me into this field torn down, I don't need a freeloader on my presentations, and I don't need anyone to highlight for me again and again how the work we're doing together is neither a priority, important, or even something worth putting in their fucking day planner.
In short, I vote HIM off the bloody island.
Most of my colleagues are assholes, which is to say, smart entertaining people who have as much tolerance for student bullshit as I do, ie none. However, in my dept we do have a happy-clappy contingent who are all about student satisfaction, and profs being buddies rather than authority figures, and because that's how they are, they NATURALLY end up being the people on the, committees particularly the hiring committees, because the assholes have better things to do, like research, writing, or hound-dogging after their students. The happy-clappers are the people I want to see heading for the high jump, but instead, they seem to be multiplying.
ReplyDeleteI've got a similar colleague to MLP, except it is a She, not a He. She wrote a Big Book a few years back, and landed a senior admin role in the university, so her career hasn't been unremarkable. If any other female colleague gets a grant, an award, hell, even if they get the quick one-liner quote in the student newspaper's question-of-the-week, she goes ballistic and comes down on everyone else, trying hard to convince us all that so-and-so's work is ridiculous etc. If she's on the hiring committee, you can be sure another woman isn't getting hired. Oh, and she's bat-shit crazy too, so her rantings make no sense whatsoever.
ReplyDeleteThe technical term for this is 'Queen Bee'.
DeleteI can't stand Tenure Track Tony who, once he realizes there is nothing you can do to help his career, does not acknowledge your presence.
ReplyDeleteNumber 1 would be the nasty, smug, old fool who has drunk the Kool-Aid pushed by the ed school, thinks that all student learning is entirely the responsibility of the teacher, also thinks that the way to treat young faculty and staff is to dump ever more stress on them, has a thick German accent, and has the air about him of a child molester. What's great is that he's close to retirement.
ReplyDelete@Sarcastic Bastard. Oh God, my number 2 is Grad Student Gertie who is the exact same way. Her favorite person in the whole world is the person I wrote about above. Ugh.
ReplyDeleteI think my choice would be a dean whom I have never actually met, but who, in his reported disdain for anything associated with teaching and his tendency to, when forced, evaluate the quality of teaching only by spreadsheet (in other words, those #$%! student evals), has made life difficult for me, directly and indirectly, more than once. But we're experiencing some administrative turnover, which, at least according to rumor, will eventually include him, and I may well realize that he was more a symptom than a cause of systemic problems, or a convenient bogeyman/scapegoat, or in other ways more benign than I imagined.
ReplyDeleteOther than that, I have a few consistently mildly annoying colleagues, and others whom I generally get along with but periodically find annoying, but no one I would take the chance of seeing replaced with someone worse.
I guess I may tend toward a "better the devil you know" attitude.
For all of my ongoing and immense frustrations with Tuk U, most of my colleagues are actually pretty decent individuals, even when I disagree with them. A few have their quirks. One is pathologically incapable of letting anyone finish a sentence without interruption. Another has a little TMI problem ("Have I told you about my colonoscopy?" etc.). It has been suggested that one of the important functions of a university is as a kind of asylum to keep such individuals off the street.
ReplyDeleteWe used to have this one guy on the faculty though, Dr. Q. Q. would get a big project going, then vanish. "Almost done" would be his constant refrain as time went by and deadlines loomed large. He was of course a Very Busy Person, but he'd get it to you next week. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Every time, someone else would step in and save the project. Q. would then add the project to his CV, and burnish his image.
And then, about two years ago - it all worked out. All that CV polishing got Q the bigshot job he always craved at some hot R1 uni down south (Edmonton, I think).
And he left.
Here at church-affiliated SLAC, we have too much nepotism. I am quite fortunate that I don't have to deal with any of the outright jerks identified above. So it's almost with apology that I mention that I'd like to see some of the winners of the nepotism lottery go.
ReplyDeleteUs too, though the nepotism lottery winners at Tuk U, are actually pretty decent people. But one of my favourite Despair.com posters is
Delete"Nepotism: We promote family values almost as often as we promote family members."
All.of.them. I wouldn't even know where to start. Eunuch Eugene? Narcissistic Nancy? Wendy WASP? They are the most insufferable load of sots to ever wander the planet.
ReplyDeleteI'd vote for Mal the Malignant Narcissist. There are benign narcissists, who are assholes, but they don't actually notice anyone else so the damage they do is limited to their families and people who love them. But Mal is malignant. He notices other people all right, and damaging them makes him feel good. His targets vary; the only persistent motive is malice.
ReplyDeleteI've never met anyone before that I couldn't find any way to justify or excuse. I can't find a narrative that would make his behaviour acceptable. It's just evil. It takes a little bit of pleasure from my day every day, knowing that I will very likely run into him when I go in to the office.
I'd ditch Eurocentric Eustace, who reads from 30 year old notes as though the field hasn't changed -- along with the course title and description -- since they took it as a young grad student many decades ago, and grades as though they were personally responsible for keeping our averages up. Personally nice, and beloved by students (for obvious reasons), but a classic example of what Tom Lehrer called "ivy covered professors."
ReplyDeleteAggie the āglāc who, for 25 years, has tortured, bullied, and lied to students. All in order to get a free summer trip to her favourite foreign country. Once her pet study abroad trip has its required number of victims, she drops all pretense at being nice and reverts to her evil schemes for wrecking students’ futures.
ReplyDeleteShe retires at the end of this academic year, and the whole university cannot wait.
Distance Education Deadenders who teach double loads and spend about two hours of their time on each class every week. The software--"learning modules"--does all the work, including grading multiple choice tests (which are often unconnected with DEDs' assigned reading), posting the grades, and calculating percentages. "Discussion groups" are vapid, unmonitored chat rooms where DEDs' will add a short comment once every other week.
ReplyDeleteSome of these folks are pulling down full-time, tt paycheckss, and their huge overloads (and where's the fucking Dean/chair who assigns them) take work away from adjuncts.
Large Urban Community College is so large, as are our multidisciplinary mega-departments, that I think I should be allowed one pick per department minimum (except for Pre-Kindergarten/Childcare Studies--everyone is so nice there that I reserve the right to move that pick back to my own department).
ReplyDeleteIf I have to pick one, I'm going with Crazy Lab Director. I mentioned him in an earlier post. He's tenured, has been teaching in my department since I was in junior high, and has no rhyme or reason to his actions. One day, he's as sweet as honey; the next, he's not talking to Person X and that person has no idea why. When he does deign to speak to us, conversations are like reading James Joyce if he had also been taking meth while he wrote. He is willing to work on committees, but no one wants to work with him because he's so dictatorial and prone to throwing temper tantrums at the drop of a hat. He also believes all the stereotypical things associated with silverbacks: seniority is everything, and all the main job duties (teaching, grading papers, holding office hours, returning emails and phone calls from students) are optional, and, in any case, should be done by 2:00 p.m. at the absolute latest if they are done at all.
He swears he's never going to retire and will die at his desk. If it were legal, I would help him.