Our current Dean (who will only remain Dean for the next few weeks, thank God) says that it will be “insensitive” to give professors cost-of-living salary increases (that we haven’t seen for 3 years now) when we are forced to fire some support staff people. We have an enormous support staff bloat and having to eliminate a tiny portion of it as a result of budget cuts is actually a godsend.
A more idiotic argument against salary increases for professors the world has never known. Everybody seems to adore this Dean except me. He is this very saccharine sort of person who just smiles, signs and equivocates just as he keeps doing really shitty things.
He’s the one who flatly refused to offer even $10 towards my trip to Oxford, by the way. In the meanwhile, he wasted quite a bit of money on a reception for support staff where every useless paper-pusher on campus received a rose courtesy of our university. Obviously, nothing of the kind has ever been organized for people who solve all the problems the stupid paper-pushers create.
Clarissa's Blog 
SO CRAZY
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I would look at things differently …
If things go really well at Oxford, by the time you get home, you may have introduced yourself to the people who can help introduce you to your new employer.
I know plenty of people like your current dean, and they’re playing a “gambler’s ruin” game with their people. They don’t think qualitatively, they don’t think in terms of multi-dimensionality (or even in terms of spectra along an axis), and so they don’t see why their best people have to be paid markedly more than their everyday staff.
Inevitably the better people go somewhere else, go rogue, or go home, and sometimes a bit of all of these.
Your trip to Oxford is in a sense an academic audition.
In another sense, it’s a threat to a weak manager who’s threatened when people exercise their already available options …
The worst part of this is that these people never learn any useful lessons, so they inevitably behave like weak managers in their new positions, with more or less the same results. Weak leaders love people like this because they are just bad enough to save the weak leaders from having to execute any drastic measures on their own.
[for further amusement, watch Lars von Trier’s film “Direktøren for det hele” (“The Boss of it All”) for a more hilarious look at weak leaders and weak managers …]
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This is such a good comment. I love this comment.
Inside my own mind, I have put my university on notice. It either recognizes that I’m special soon enough or I will withdraw my affections. I gave it six years of my life, and it’s still not sure? What’s up with that?
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You already made the choice to accept Rilke’s challenge of a different life. Now you have to understand how to make that choice possible, and this is part of doing that …
This really doesn’t have as much to do with your current university as you might first believe, especially if you think of things from the perspective that they might not actually have any Rilke in them, so to speak. (“What’s some old statue of Apollo got to do with anything?” 🙂 )
[and now there will be a short break while I perform some mundane IT crap in order to resurrect the rest of my Windows-based writing environment …]
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Administrators always consider their own kind superior to faculty. If they could they would eliminate all faculty and just have students pay tuition in order to fund their salaries. They could then issue worthless degrees. The model of the degree mill is the dream of every university president.
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What’s really scary is that this guy was just a regular retired professor who was appointed interim dean for a single semester. So it didn’t take him long to be transformed into this creature. It’s like the office is infected or something.
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The bit about “corrosion of character” shouldn’t be dismissed — I think Richard Sennett’s book on it is definitely worth a read if only to provide a perspective of “the co-opted” …
[if only Corporate Stockholm Syndrome meant that you could visit Stockholm more often] 🙂
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Ugggg. Completely short-term thinking. He’s right that it looks bad to fire people and then give raises, but it’s the sort of thing that a few people will grumble about very briefly and then completely forget. At the same time, many employees are going to be demoralized and less committed to the institution over the coming year(s) because it’s been so long since they’ve seen a raise.
I hope your next dean is an improvement, though good deans seem to be quite rare.
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Let me guess: the support staff’s union is stronger than the professors’ union?
Has the administrators’ pay upto and including his pay has been frozen or decreased for the same period of time?
If the amount for the luncheon was significant, I’m sure the staff would have preferred it to go to COLA.
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