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Meeting Woes

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I now had to sit through yet another endless meeting where people were wailing and moaning how they shouldn’t be evaluated on research because COVID prevents them from getting published. In the meantime, I have a huge deadline on an article tomorrow, and I’m thinking that the 4 hours we have wasted so far complaining about how hard it is to write could have been used to produce 500 words for an actual article. If you have time and energy for a stupid meeting, why don’t you have any for writing?

Oh, and they shouldn’t be evaluated on teaching and service either because COVID something something. And in any case, they can’t publish and the students write them bad evaluations because of “structural inequities,” so nobody should ever be evaluated again at all. Hours of this, and I’m ready to strangle somebody.

If students give you poor evaluations, it’s because you are a bad teacher. If you can’t publish, it’s because you are a bad scholar. Can someone tell these whiny babies to grow up already?

3 responses to “Meeting Woes”

  1. Shakti Avatar
    Shakti

    So how did they react when you shared the details of your productive year and the strategies you used? 🙂

    [This is an invitation to tell everyone about your productive scholarly year, btw. Brag! I think you had some posts like that where you talked about your Seinfeld streak, and your ring of cards and your bujo but that might have been years ago.]

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      The stupid article isn’t working out, and I’m not even sure I will meet my deadline tomorrow, so bragging doesn’t feel good right now. But at least I have an article to work on. And two chapters for edited volumes. And a book I’m working on.

      OK, thank you, I feel better now.

      I don’t discuss productivity with these losers. They are convinced that those who publish have easier circumstances. That people might have some say in their own circumstances is not something they are willing to entertain. So it’s useless.

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  2. Mendelevium Avatar
    Mendelevium

    At my place it is more or less presumed that no one has done any research whatsoever for the past year. I’ve actually had a quite productive year research-wise but I don’t talk about it (except for one-to-one with the people who need to know) because I would be accused of pandering to the “ridiculous” productivity demands of senior management, or something.
    It is frequently claimed that the move to Zoom teaching is so time-consuming that everyone is dedicating 70 hours a week to it. I absolutely fail to see how this could be the case. New course? Yes, I can concede it will take some time to do all the reading, but this is not something intrinsic to Zoom teaching, and then not everyone had new courses this year (in fact, I was probably the only person in my school who did). If you are only teaching courses you’ve taught in the past, it is mostly a matter of adapting them to the Zoom format. Which, yeah, sucks. But these will be minor, cosmetic adjustments, such as swapping one type of group discussion for other.
    I do absolutely get Zoom fatigue, yes, I’ve found especially at the beginning that I needed more time to recover after an hour of Zoom teaching than I would with f2f. But still – so hard and time-consuming that it takes over your life? Hardly.
    I even had a colleague dramatically asking in a meeting: “How can we keep doing Humanities research when people are DYING out there?”. Look, if a relative or friend of yours died of Covid (or of anything else for that matter), I would of course support that person taking a break from research, if this helps. In my case, however, I fail to see what is it that my colleague was suggesting: is it that I stop doing research (one of the few things that has kept me sane) out of respect for those people who are dying, and instead invest that time on watching panic porn on TV and social media? What would that achieve, other than driving me insane? It’s not as if it’s going to bring anyone back from the dead, after all.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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