Every single time, these email discussions with colleagues end with me wailing, “Never again!” and throwing shoes at the computer screen. 

Most of the colleagues are wonderful people who write great comments. But there are always one or two congenitally aggravating individuals who say things like, “You can’t expect the administration to hand out gifts to you in exchange for nothing.” Because cost-of-living increases after 4 years of no raises are somehow a gift. From the administration. In exchange for nothing. I’m sitting on my ass doing nothing and expecting strangers to make me gifts of their own money. That’s exactly what is happening, totally. Made complete sense to get a PhD to come up with this particular gem of logical thinking.

I do not suffer idiocy gladly.  

Believe me, folks, I hate being an obsessive, one-issue person. And I never participate in the reductive “administration is evil by default” rhetoric. I loved both the Chancellor and the Provost who worked here when I was first hired. The Chancellor was a bit too in love with promoting athletics and doing marketing for my liking. But he honestly tried to do right by the faculty, and he was largely successful. The Provost was a very professional, inspiring person.

Right now, I’m very pleased with our Dean and several (if not all) people in his office. I’m Eastern European, so I respond well to hierarchical structures and authority. I have a military mentality and like clearly outlined ranks of authority. I like both giving and following orders. 

But for those very reasons, I detest it when people overstep their mandate and try to exercise power they aren’t entitled to. I get very very angry when somebody begins to act like a petty tyrant because guess what? I’m Eastern European. I can smell this kind of rank shit from a hundred miles away.

Even if we were to accept that an argument about whether Chairs are faculty is somehow relevant to cost-of-living increases, why exactly wouldn’t they count as faculty? 

Chairs are elected by faculty members from among themselves for a 3-year term. They can repeat the term once. After that, somebody else is elected. While they perform their Chair duties, they still do both teaching and service and are evaluated according to the same teaching \ research \ service criteria as all of the other faculty members of the department. 

It’s a deranged argument to have because if we start down the road of saying that performing administrative duties excludes you from the rank of faculty, we’ll arrive at a conclusion that there are no faculty members at this school at all. Because all of us have some administrative duties. It’s called academic self-government, and it’s something we all are contractually obligated to do. ​

The administration is now saying that we will not get cost-of-living increases unless we recognize that departmental Chairs are not faculty members. This is deranged because they clearly are but that’s not even the point. If we do agree they aren’t faculty, the next thing he will want is that we agree on the meaning of life, the importance of space travel, and minutiae of religious doctrine before getting those puny little salary increases. It’s all a ruse.

But the worst part is that there are already some colleagues who are buying into it and saying, “Well, maybe it is our fault. Maybe we somehow caused the Chancellor trying to give a raise to himself and denying one to us.”