I just found the following in Inside Higher Ed:
The e-mail to some faculty members at the College of William & Mary came out of the blue, reminding them to be careful about the language they use in class and, specifically, asking them not to use the word “retarded” in class.
Its appearance last week perplexed some professors and prompted one or two to tell the student newspaper that administrators were questioning their professionalism. Several experts on faculty speech said that the missive was unusual, but that rather than a threat to academic freedom, they saw a sincere effort to protect potentially vulnerable students. “…[T]he word retarded has returned in slang usage to mean dumb or stupid, but this is not an appropriate way to use the word in class,” Kelly Joyce, the dean of undergraduate studies, wrote in her e-mail.
Mind you, there had been no incidents surrounding the word “retard” on campus where this piece of idiocy originated. Based on the email of this sad excuse for an administrator, one could assume that profs at the College of William & Mary run around all day long, calling students retards. However, there was nothing of the kind going on at this college.
The insulting email that this administrator sent to professors is not a response to any existing issue on campus. It is nothing but yet another attempt by an overpaid and useless administrator to take vengeance on the teaching faculty for being more intelligent and productive than s/he is. As we all know, scholars go into administration when they realize that they can’t make a name for themselves in research. Their rage against their more successful colleagues who laugh at their ineptness as researchers makes them lash out at professors with these ridiculous and condescending demands.
The other two groups of administrators are either spousal hires (i.e. useless husbands and wives of academics who are given these cushy positions of authority because they’ll get bored at home) or people hired from the corporate environment whose overall stupidity makes them incapable of understanding what the academia is all about. Of course, such folks have no idea how to do anything useful on campus, so they insult and condescend to professors instead.
I have blogged time and again (and then some) about attempts by administrators to rob educators and scholars of our autonomy, dignity, time, and authority. What is really frustrating is that, more often than not, academics do not resist the offensive onslaughts by the useless and ignorant administrators. Kelly Joyce, the dean who had the incredible gall of sending this condescending message on the proper use of vocabulary to people with PhDs, should immediately become a pariah on campus. A good way of showing this administrator their place would be to recite definitions of words to them whenever they appear in public. For example,
Table, 1. an article of furniture consisting of a flat, slablike topsupported on one or more legs or other supports: a kitchentable; an operating table; a pool table.
Or better yet,
Professor – a person who often gets insulted by administrators, but this is not an appropriate way to use a professor on campus.
One could also email this dean lists of offensive words s/he shouldn’t use in public and explain in detail why these words are offensive and shouldn’t be used.
Unless we start doing something to show these ignoramuses their place, they will continue to insult us.
Clarissa's Blog 
As long as your making an honest effort to be objective and co-operative. God forbid administrators should try and do their job.
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“Joyce said via e-mail that “[r]epresentatives of our Student Assembly who are participating in a national campaign, ‘Spread the Word to End the Word,’ asked me to reach out to Arts and Sciences faculty in support of that effort. I agreed.””
Therefore, not a random, out of the blue attack on the professors. And there were multiple professors quoted in the story that saw no issue.
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Those profs who “saw no issue” are sheep with no sense of dignity.
Joyce explanation is absolutely ludicrous, as anybody who works in academia would know the second they heard this lame excuse.
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So, she should tell the students to bugger off, it’s not her concern?
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Administrators never condescend to address the concerns of students or teaching faculty. They just suck all the money out of institutions and lord it over everybody who actually does some work.
In this case, the clueless dean could have simply forwarded the email from the students to the entire teaching faculty. That’s a dean’s job, to be a paper pusher. Lecturing faculty on anything is not something they can or should do.
Of course, these students also sound like total and complete idiots.
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It would be an interesting experiment to have a campus sans administrators. I would wager it would be an unmitigated disaster. Put the monkeys in charge of the bananas, as a colleague of mine liked to say.
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Without people like me there’d be no one to tell student’s they’re in the wrong office and that what that person in the other office told them is wrong.
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If that were the only thing administrators were responsible for.
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I’d leave a few to take care of administrative issues (that currently nobody takes care of): water in the toilets, chalk in the classrooms, ceilings that don;t have dead birds falling through them, etc. Currently, however, we have entire huge buildings on campus filled with very highly paid people whose only job is to generate paperwork. None of that paperwork has anything to do with the learning process. It’s just several offices filled with idiots trying to justify their existence. And you know who pays their salaries? You. The taxpayer.
In the meanwhile, I have to buy ALL of my teaching supplies with my own money and bring the chalk and the markers to write on the board with me. Can you maybe explain to me why a dean deems it necessary to spend time on policing profs’ speech instead of making sure profs get classroom supplies?
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As an administrator trying to justify his existence (not an academic institution, but in the public service) it is entirely frustrating to consistently have the front line idiots complaining about not having the tools they need, yet refusing to contribute to the data collection necessary to actually have those tools in place. Like you, they simply scream irrationally, “leave me alone with your damn paper pushing”, – yet can’t understand that in order to plan, act and control resources, you need analysis.
I don’t expect you to understand this, or even believe it. If administrators are not worshiping at your feet, constantly telling you how wonderful you are and how important you are, the front line person gets outrageously indignant at how they are undervalued.
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“As an administrator trying to justify his existence (not an academic institution, but in the public service) it is entirely frustrating to consistently have the front line idiots complaining about not having the tools they need, yet refusing to contribute to the data collection necessary to actually have those tools in place. Like you, they simply scream irrationally, “leave me alone with your damn paper pushing”, – yet can’t understand that in order to plan, act and control resources, you need analysis.”
-I have no idea where this outburst comes from. All I can tell you is that I have been officially requesting an office computer that I am entitled to have according to the conditions of my contract. One bureaucrat kept sending me to another bureaucrat. And they all had new, beautiful computers while I had none. Eventually, I just applied for a grant, won it and bought my own computer. If you have any suggestions as to how I should have “collected data” to address this issue, feel free to share.
We fill out a university survey about the problems of resources in the classroom every semester, for your information. So the “data” is collected regularly. But those surveys only exist so that yet another bureaucrat can put a tick on the list named “addressing faculty concerns.” That’s all that is done to address our concerns.
I have no idea how things work in your public service institution, so I don’t presume to pontificate about it. You obviously have zero knowledge about academia, yet think you need to lecture people who work in higher ed. That’s quite ridiculous.
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Oh, of only they just did that and butted out of everything else. . .
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I am on Clarissa’s side in this debate. Clearly there is a role for a few administrators. I don’t think anyone questions that. The question is how many, doing what? In my University, the administrative staff (aka suits) is growing much faster than the faculty or students. I am in my 13th year here. The demands for “data” from administrators has grown at an exponential rate during that time. To justify their own existence, perhaps?
For anyone interested, I highly recommend:
The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters by Benjamin Ginsberg.
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There’s no dispute that the ratio of administrator/faculty has grown. This is a phenomena at private industry as well (growth of middle management) . What I take offense to is Clarissa statements:
“As we all know, scholars go into administration when they realize that they can’t make a name for themselves in research. Their rage against their more successful colleagues who laugh at their ineptness as researchers makes them lash out at professors with these ridiculous and condescending demands”
“The other two groups of administrators are either spousal hires (i.e. useless husbands and wives of academics who are given these cushy positions of authority because they’ll get bored at home) or people hired from the corporate environment whose overall stupidity makes them incapable. . .”
These are absolute statements, encompassing all administrators in one huge arrogant misrepresentation. If we were to replace the word “administrator” with any identifiable ethic group, it would be quickly dismissed as hate mongering. But, since they aren’t ‘real academics’, I guess it’s okay to try and marginalize them.
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The difference between being an administrator and belonging to an ethnic group is that an administrator chooses this career path while one cannot choose one’s ethnicity. Surely, you know why condemning people for something they didn’t choose cannot possibly compare with criticizing them for what they did choose.
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“a phenomena”??? Please!! the proper usage is “a phenomenon” since plural nouns are not used with an indefinite article, at least in English.
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How’s the fire, Benji?
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Dealing with thin skinned administrators (and faculty) is part of life. The fire seems about ready for marshmallows.
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How you getting along now that Jason sold the field for Quentin to go to Harvard?
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Since the club turned it into a golf course I bet you get to see plenty of ………….. CADDIES
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Fostering animosity is fostering animosity. I don’t care if they’re a rock star, a pan handler or a Francophone. Gross generalizations and vilification are dangerous. Creating an “us vs them” mentality is the short road to nowhere.
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I don’t believe in sitting there like a patient dummy, accepting mistreatment and abuse. Whenever I see a case of an administrator behaving like a miserable idiot, I will blog about this story. If this particular administrator didn’t insult profs first, there wouldn’t be an issue. However, s/he chose to behave in an offensive way and deserves all s/he gets in response.
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Your attitude seems to be a default – Administrators are idiots. Administrators are abusive. I don’t believe you’re being objective. I don’t believe you would recognize a reasonable and valuable input from an administrator, because by your definition, it CAN’T exist.
It reminds me of an experience I had some 20 years ago. I was working on the factory floor, building car seats. My partner and I were working away. The supervisor comes up, says to my partner, “If you use the tool like this” and demonstrates how to use the tool, “then it reduces stress on the wrists”. And he walks away.
My partner waits for the supervisor go go out of earshot, then looks right at me and says , “Can you believe what that fucker just did. What an asshole. Fuck him, I’m filing a grievance!” and off he went to the union office.
To this day, I still can’t figure out what the supervisor did that was so horrible.
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Patrick, this is no way to have a discussion. I asked you a concrete question in response to your strange accusations. In response, you told me a story of your acquaintance whom I have never met and for whom I’m in no way responsible.
If you continue projecting stories from your experiences in your field onto a completely different field, such a discussion will make very little sense.
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If you can’t see the correlation between my colleagues irrational outburst and your attitude towards administrators, then you are beyond hope.
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I can see you are trying to pick a fight for some weird reason but I have no interest in participating.
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Funny. I was thinking the exact same thing.
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Then stop doing it. 🙂
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I’m with Patrick on this one. No, I don’t believe in administrative bloat, and no, I don’t like university administrators who are trying to impose the business model or who don’t understand research and so on, and I made a speech in person against two of them in real life yesterday, which may cause trouble for my promotion and so on. But seriously: somebody has to do administration and a lot of administrators do good work and also have good research records. Dead birds, that’s physical plant not administration for one thing, and the administration is who decided to pay you before fixing the building.
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” Dead birds, that’s physical plant not administration for one thing, and the administration is who decided to pay you before fixing the building.”
-You are saying I should be grateful for getting paid for my work? That’s worse than the Soviet Union, to tell you the truth.
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The problem is that administrators loose sight of the purpose of universities. They are supposedly there to support the work of academics yet in many cases they at best don’t get in the way and at worst make decisions which adversely effect teaching and/or research outcomes.
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Curious. Your definition of ‘table’ runs onn the end of the line. To read it, I had to highlight it and copy it into a word processor.
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I know, I have no idea why that happen to this particular portion of the sentence.
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This absolutely correct. We have 1700 academic staff and approaching 3000 staff laughably called ‘professional’ staff. I say laughably since many of them don’t have any professional qualifications. Yet we have a school of professions. I have yet to see the professional staff manage to organise such trivial tasks such as preemptively purchase toner for printers yet everyday I am bombarded with emails mandating academics produce some new piece of paper for the administrators to collate.
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Are you sure you’re autistic? A note stating that the word “retarded” is unacceptable might be stating the obvious a bit, but to go as far as taking it as a personal offense seems like some ridiculous NT emotional and irrational reaction….
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I can’t possibly take it as personal offence because I don’t work at this college and the message was not sent to me.
Are you sure you are literate?
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I don’t usually find the word to be offensive so I would especially resent the email if I received it. The students and administrators are as usual declaring their moral superiority over people who use the word ‘retarded’. From now on anyone who lets one slip will be branded some kind of really bad person.
It seems the word has come back as its official use to describe mentally retarded people has practically disappeared. Also, unlike calling something or someone “gay” which I do find annoying, as it does unfairly slander a group of people, retarded is used to pretty much mean what the speaker is trying to say.
Is it really less offensive to say “dumb” or “stupid”?? Seriously, how can I refer to someone’s stupidity without offending actual low-IQ people?
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I meant to also say that the use of “gay” as a slur, meaning stupid or whatever, makes no logical sense, while “retarded” clearly does. “Lame” is also a sometimes-useful word which is being banned.
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I had a huge group of Internet language-policing folks attack me once for defending the use of the word “lame”. I don’t even use it but it’s the annoying censorship that gets to me.
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I agree completely with Isabel. This kind of language policing is nothing but an attempt to bully people into speaking as little as possible for fear of saying anything that might be deemed offensive for some weird reason.
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