So do you remember these budget cuts at our university that I’ve been writing about? We were told by our administration that each department had to prepare to cuts its budget by 25% within the next 3 years. We had to engage in a “budget cutting exercise” (that’s how it was called by the administration) explaining how we would cut our budgets to accommodate this serious drop in funding. We were supposed to cut 5% in the first year, 13% in the second year, and 7% in the third year.
Since about 96% of the budget of most of the departments in Humanities consists of salaries, you can imagine how the news of needing to cut 25% of the departmental budget was greeted. We had meetings and exchanged endless emails, trying to figure out how to rearrange our budgets in order to avoid firing people. Obviously, it was not possible to avoid layoffs altogether, which made the environment incredibly tense. Coupled with the end of the academic year when everybody is swamped with work and drowning in deadlines, this budget cutting exercise made everybody’s stress levels go through the roof. Academics are human, so it’s not surprising that people started to freak out.
And then the university’s President came to campus and spoke to the academic community at length. A brave young academic (khm, khm) decided to ask him directly whether departments were really expected to cut 25% of their budgets. The President was so taken aback by the question that he looked completely disoriented. No, he said, things didn’t work like that and he had no idea who was spreading these rumors.
Two days later, a high-ranking bureaucrat at the university sent out an email, explaining that she was the one who had invented this “budget cutting exercise” and spread the rumors of 25% cuts to departmental budgets. The bureaucrat apologized for creating stress and explained that her goal was – just consider the utter cynicism of this obviously brain-dead person – t0 promote creativity among academics. Yes, creativity, that’s the word this person used. Apparently, she believes that people’s creativity needs to be bolstered by threats to take away their livelihood and destroy the university they have worked hard to create. No consideration had been given to the fact that some of the people whose creativity was boosted with these threats were older or not in their best health.
This creative exercise is the second broad initiative this particular bureaucrat has created. The first one consisted of sending profs to clean cemeteries against their will on a week-end. (See here and here.)
I’m sure you can draw all the conclusions you need for yourselves.
Clarissa's Blog 
Sounds like this person’s salary needs to be cut out of the budget immediately.
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That would be a great start.
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“Academics are human”
Do you have a citation for that? I remain skeptical….
Anyhoo, a thing or three to remember:
1. Large organizations use gossip and disinformation to guage opinion and test the waters (management/administration doesn’t like to ask for input so they use devious means to get it when they do want it). There’s also the old trick of leaking really bad news so that the less bad real news is greeted with relief instead of anger or protests.
2. Organizations also like to keep certain character types for various reasons. A person who can be counted to say “No!” to any proposal can very useful. On the other hand so can a major bumbler. Bumblers in positions of authority can be a pain in the neck but they can be really useful when there is pressure to implement a policy no one wants – just call on senora fuckup and after she’s royally screwed up everything up they can pull the plug and say: “We tried, we put one of our best people on it, but it looks like it just won’t work”.
3. There’s also a possibility that this person is involved in some other agenda, for example creating lots of drahma and confusion (so that people ignore the content of what she’s doing) in order to further some other agenda when people are looking (but not noticing, if you know what I mean).
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I’m starting to think that you are definitely right and that she is being kept around as a sort of a lighting rod that will always draw the popular anger to herself.
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Read it now and wanted to share horror stories from the work world of others:
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-buzz/adult-diapers-surprising-trend-among-japanese-women-172721799.html
Japanese media report the trend of wearing adult diapers is becoming increasingly popular, especially for women looking to save time.
…
One 25-year-old woman, who would only be identified under a pseudonym, has been wearing a diaper to work at a real estate agency almost every day for the last six months. She does it to save time and the trouble of going to the washroom. She doesn’t wear one when she’s with her boyfriend and only wears them under a skirt because pants make it too obvious.
This woman is far from alone. Sales of adult diapers surpassed sales of diapers for babies for the first time in Japan this past May. However, a big part of this is Japan’s quickly aging population, meaning there is an increasing number of people who require the diapers.
In the Hebrew article was written women use them because of rat-race workplace conditions. *shudder*
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Japan is a very special society. It makes zero sense to analyze it in terms of Western concepts.
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Working till one commits suicide (there is even a special word for it) or wears a diaper can not be healthy, special or not. Seems like extreme capitalism, no? Working all day, zero time for home and some people crack.
Cultures may be very different, and yet we still use something to judge them, to say that child marriage is wrong f.e.
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“Working till one commits suicide (there is even a special word for it) or wears a diaper can not be healthy, special or not. ”
– Oh, I think it’s the most ridiculous way of life and a really miserable, sad society. But living this way serves an important purpose to the Japanese people. I don’t want to live the way they do, and I’m sure they have no interest in living the way I do. As long as we don’t bother each other, everybody is happy.
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// But living this way serves an important purpose to the Japanese people.
What purpose?
Before minimum wage laws and laws forbidding child labour, was “living this way” serving an important purpose for workers in Europe, many of whom f.e. moved to communism or lived miserable lives as the result?
Couldn’t it be simply because of Japan being a country with not enough resources for its’ people to have your standard of living? And/or example of damaging to people cultural evolution because of inner species competition?
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“Before minimum wage laws and laws forbidding child labour, was “living this way” serving an important purpose for workers in Europe, many of whom f.e. moved to communism or lived miserable lives as the result?”
– Japan is not a European country. It is a civilization with a very unique history and culture that cannot and should not be compared to Europe or anything else for that matter.
“Couldn’t it be simply because of Japan being a country with not enough resources for its’ people to have your standard of living?”
– This is SO not about the standard of living. Cultural differences exist, whether we want to accept that or not. Let me quote myself: https://clarissasblog.com/2013/04/24/cultural-differences/ 🙂
I know it’s comforting to look at other cultures and experience the pleasant feelings of superiority towards these “barbarians.” What we need to remember, though, is that it is extremely likely that a group of Japanese people are discussing our “barbarity” at this very moment. And they are as right or as wrong as we are.
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““Academics are human”
Do you have a citation for that? I remain skeptical….”
– I just discovered you were absolutely right, Cliff Arroyo. In spite of the President’s explanations and the bureaucrat’s public apology, many of my colleagues are still trading chain emails outlining the scenarios where everybody will be fired immediately. It seems like they are addicted to stress and want to make everybody part of their madness. I find their actions to be nothing short of abusive.
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How about a 25% cut in the HR department?
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I already shared how the HR folks responded.
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Where?
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Hee hee.
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They do this so that people will then accept whatever horror they actually do end up sending down as an improvement on the worst case scenario. Exhausting, it is.
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I think this is highly abusive.
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Of course it is. So is sending people out to build houses for Habitat for Humanity to justify the existence of their departments, which my institution seems to do.
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“So is sending people out to build houses for Habitat for Humanity to justify the existence of their departments, which my institution seems to do.”
– Oh God. This is too horrible. And the really sad thing is that this form of institutional abuse on the top level then transforms into more personal forms of abuse on departmental and interpersonal levels. 😦
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—A brave young academic (khm, khm)
🙂 🙂
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You don’t praise yourself, nobody will. 🙂
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