We have this administrator whom everybody loves with a swoony, salivating passion. Everybody, that is, except me. I don’t respond positively to his attempts to ingratiate himself with the people by pretending he’s one of us, the man of the people, somebody who recognizes no hierarchies. This is something manipulators do, and I have no use for it.
This administrator is all smiles, jokes, and popularity chasing but work has stopped since we’ve been cursed with his presence. First, he was appointed interim dean. As a result, the college stopped funding travel to scholarly conferences (and by stopped I mean refused to give even a crooked dime to show some good will), started pretending that scholarship doesn’t exist at all, but instead started organizing bizarre parties for our completely useless, overpampered, and endlessly mushrooming bureaucratic personnel where every paper-pusher would get fresh flowers in a vase courtesy of the college.
This administrator distanced himself from any responsibility for the budget cuts by taking the position of, “This is them, not me, I’m one of you, folks, I hate it as much as you do” while sneaking in one destructive measure after another.
Now this tiresome fellow has been appointed interim chancellor. And everybody is happy because people’s endlessly suppurating egos appreciate fake friendliness over any actual work. What nobody wants to understand is that a good administrator (manager, etc.) is not supposed to be your best buddy.
Workers always pay through the nose for the pretense that there’s no hierarchical distance between them and their supervisor. An honest environment of strictly articulated roles is always less oppressive than the one where the boss pretends to be your friend and disarms any resistance with appeals to this fake friendship.
Like this:
Like Loading...