Aberration

The colleague who teaches French gave me these flowers for saving the French program.

Of course, I saved it only for the moment. In larger terms, it’s gone. For years, our senior faculty member in French openly refused to do absolutely anything other than teach the same 3 lower-level courses. For years he responded to every suggestion I made with “this is how it’s always been.” Now he’s retired, and the French program is on the chopping block.

The neoliberal administrator is a jerk, for sure. But we have brought it on ourselves. For over a decade I’ve been saying that getting a $90,000 salary for showing up for three hours twice a week to teach French 101 is an aberration. It can’t exist forever and it won’t exist forever. But nobody listens.

It’s extraordinarily hard to convince people to try something new, to see things in a new way. They pout endlessly and then… there is no French program.