The previous Dean was a passionate supporter of Elizabeth Warren. Pro-social justice, all that stuff.
His biggest achievement on campus was firing half of the administrative staff and forcing the rest to do the jobs of two or three people for the same pay. These are workers who are paid $24,000-$32,000 per year. I challenged him about this decision repeatedly and publicly. As a result, he hounded me and refused every work-related request I made that could be refused. (E.g. travel to international conferences.) Now that he stepped down as a dean to dedicate himself to the political fight for social justice, I’m continuing to work to get office staff compensated appropriately. The new dean is less progressive, so I’m hopeful.
The progressive dean’s other major proposal was to fire the low-paid copy center workers. All of them, just like that. Thankfully, this plan he never managed to bring to fruition.
He also destroyed two out of 10 tenure lines at my department. I could go on but you get the drift.
Clarissa's Blog 
Similar cuts were made here, too. We lost designated copy-room staff a few years ago. We probably have 1/2 if not 1/3 of the staff who deal with real stuff (students/postdocs, accounting, foreign employee visas, space allocation, teaching assistants) that we had when I joined 17 years ago. More and more of the administration has been shifted to faculty. I am much closer to a one-person startup (where I do everything, and constantly worry about how I’m gonna pay my group members) than I am to anything resembling a scholar pontificating in an ivory tower. There is no pontificating, there’s only grant writing and pulling my hair out when funds don’t come in and doing all my own grant administration and budgeting.
What irritates me most is the addition of new staff who are in charge of donor relations and PR/image, and who seem completely divorced from the actual mission of the university. And these bullshit positions are paid much more highly than the accountants and copy-room staff we lost.
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