for six hours or whatever.
What got me started drinking tonight? What brought on this episode of grief and frustration and exhausted anger and feelings of desperation? It wasn't my mom. However stressful it is to care for a mostly-incapacitated person (with unspeakable challenges and all that), my preference would be to have the current state of affairs continue forever--because my mom is lovely and she makes my life feel more meaningful.
So it's not that. It is the administrators who seem incapable of speaking truth. Sometimes I wonder whether they even have any idea what is obviously right and wrong. They rely more on superstition than on reason. They remind me of the proponents of the GOP's healthcare bill--and how mindbogglingly gullible/moronic they seem to think the U.S. citizens are. At best, the fucking administrators are so often like Al Gore--who when last night he was hawking his book (“The Assault on Reason") grinned and called Trump "one of a kind" and pretty much said nothing substantially negative about him.
It's hard having those in power relentlessly attempting to gaslight. It's not like there have never before been Orwellian states or lying presidents. But it's bad now. It's absurd.
It doesn't have to be this way, does it? I remember an administrator I once worked for who would spontaneously call me at random times just to say, "Hey, thanks for being here. I really appreciate you." Those were the days.
Q. Can you identify one administrator who has been wonderful, and why zhe was?
A. _________________________________
Nope, not a one. It seems that upon becoming administrators, their minds are invaded by some alien presence. Even my best---or rather, least worst---administrators have been woefully ignorant of just exactly what it is that people in my field actually do, which from the beginning has led to grossly inappropriate and often downright silly priorities.
ReplyDeleteI've had great friends who became administrators, and were sometimes faculty advocates for a month or so. But in my own experience they just change, and their concerns go to other parts of the overall enterprise. And then they are useless.
DeleteOthers are rotten from the beginning, sometimes clearly so even before they start. My department removed one Chair with a vote of no confidence recently---and not that he didn't try to fight it, because, as he wrote, "it would be bad for [his] career prospects," never mind how his nonstop lies were damaging the department. I suppose it served us right, since we'd all known he'd had a strained relationship with truth ever since shortly after we'd met him. (Maddeningly, if there's anything this peckerhead does do well, it is making a good first impression.) But no one else wanted to be Chair, so he was accepted. So, now he's back to teaching our first-year course for our majors: an inviting prospect, no?
ReplyDeleteI think when many people become administrators, both compassion and common sense can go out the window. Maybe it's the Peter Principle, where people can get promoted to their level of incompetence. Then they prove it.
ReplyDeleteNope.
ReplyDelete{{{{Bubba}}}}
For me, it's not so much outright lies as outright lack of competence. I'm chair of a tiny department (not really any power, but lots of responsibility) and I like my Dean.. but my Provost makes we want to gnaw my own leg off to get out of this job. He wants to turn us into an even worse school than we already are. He dislikes the sciences and thinks we're getting away with murder. He wants everyone to teach more students. He thinks it's just fine to override our faculty senate with the Board of Trustees to do a major curricular overhaul (and has done just that). He's innumerate and political and immune to evidence.
ReplyDeleteGuess who has an important meeting with him this week.
Sigh.
Let me guess: he has an Ed.D.?
DeleteAdministrators who appear to think (when they do think at all) that we scientists can produce published results and mentored students with no resources, including especially time, are indeed to be dreaded. We had one of those, too.
We're getting a new Dean who wants us to increase external funding. He's got another thing coming if he thinks we can do that with 4/4 teaching loads.
Alas, no, it's in the liberal arts.
DeleteIf I'm reading stories about the proposed federal budget correctly, departments that are not currently dependent on "outside" -- i.e. federal -- funding may be the lucky ones.
DeleteAdd in the many institutions that are increasingly dependent on revenue from international students, and a very scary picture emerges.
@Three Sigma: Hey, no taunting the humanities proffies. That's MY thing!
DeleteWe have a dean who's very much in our corner--an avid basketweaver who remains active in advocating for the kinds of basketweaving we do. Which is a darn lucky thing, I realize. And since our dean is just past threescore and ten, we might have to cherish the luck we have right now.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I appreciate the Stevie Wonder links.
I appreciate the ones who are honest. Like the now-retired dean who every semester would override published entrance requirements to keep up enrollment in a resource-draining but for some reason politically-important-at-the-time program. (And by "keep up enrollment" I mean we'd get one or two students per semester instead of zero.) He didn't deny it, or put a happy face on it. He basically said, if we abide by the rules, the program will die, and [important person] wants it to continue, so this is what we have to do.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, he retired shortly after that, so maybe lying to everyone including yourself is better for you in the long run.
We've got some pretty good ones, including some promoted from the faculty, but none of them seem to have much power, even if they're in positions that once involved a certain amount of power. I'm not sure quite what's going on (this is my general take on most things these days), but it seems that we're getting more and more layers of added administration at the top levels, with positions that traditionally involved some real power (and which are still filled mostly by promoted faculty members) ending up subordinate to the newly-created positions (some of which are also filled by promoted faculty, but I'm not sure they have much power, either).
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I'm not sure who *does* have power, inside or outside the university (because outside boards of trustees, and of course legislators, also play a role).
I will say that even our (university) president, with whom I have plenty of differences on other subjects, has been very good lately on national issues (e.g. immigration and bathrooms). But even that has its limits, e.g. he hasn't said much about what we'll do if the flow of international students slows. Maybe it's not time to do that yet; maybe they're thinking and working behind the scenes, and that's the right thing to do. But I, too, prefer transparency.
Hang in there, Bubba. I'm glad you got a bit of a release. Sometimes that's what's needed to pick up and go on.
I wish you all the best, Bubba.
ReplyDelete