We have this Humanities professor who has always been everybody’s favorite. When we suddenly lost our Dean and then our Chancellor, this professor was appointed first to the deanship and then to the chancellorship on a pro tempore basis. Everybody was overjoyed because the idea of having a colleague, a fellow educator and not some professional administrator in this role was very appealing. (I hated him from the start but that’s because I have a profound insight into human nature. Everybody else jumped around with joy and some people even drew celebratory posters and cartoons because of how happy the appointment made them).
Being an administrator, however, spoils people. It infects them with the administrative rot that they don’t seem to be able to resist. It took a very short time for our colleague turned administrator to start treating us like any typical admin would. As you know, our state still doesn’t have a budget, and it increasingly looks like the situation might become permanent. As a result, professors finally decided to unionize. Our part-timers are unionized, and the union has been great for them, so now tenure-track and tenured faculty members want a union, too.
So what do we hear from our newly minted administrator on this subject? That the union is a bad idea because it will make the relationship between faculty and administration “too adversarial” and, anyway, we have “a special environment” on campus and a union will somehow destroy all that specialness. Also, a union will end our shared governance (which I personally don’t mind since that shared governance is a total joke anyway.)
This is how it works, folks. You give a fellow a chance to smell an administrative appointment and he becomes a sell-out in a second.
Clarissa's Blog 
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