There are tsunamis of outrage over this everywhere on social media. I must be very different from other people because I would have loved to get this email. I’d love to have this kind of accountability at my workplace. Right now I do this for myself but how wonderful would it be to work somewhere where it’s about achievement, excitement, accomplishment.
In my ideal scenario, we’d all list the books we read and the number of words we wrote each week and it would all be shared among the group. And then we’d talk about it, and what joy would that be.
Everything I read, write, publish, give talks about, etc is tolerated as a sort of an annoying hobby at my work. It’s all “well, if you absolutely have to do it, okay but how exasperating.” I’ve accepted that but still I sometimes think that other people like me must exist even if I’m far away from them. Not academics necessarily but simply people who love to work.
Clarissa's Blog 
—In my ideal scenario, we’d all list the books we read and the number of words we wrote each week and it would all be shared among the group. And then we’d talk about it, and what joy would that be.
You are comparing apples with oranges. In your ideal scenario, you are talking about doing something you like in a company of like-minded people out of your own free will.
Imagine being forced to do the same things under threat of being fired by managers you do not like or respect and who, at least according to your viewpoint, should never become the managers in the first place. Imagine being afraid that even if you truthfully report “appropriate” number of books read and words written, the manager with tech-bro background would deem those books and those words “wrong” either for political reasons or just because they do not have a clue (as a result of being a tech-bro).
LikeLiked by 1 person
My friend, I’m already getting fired. And not because I wasn’t productive. We all know I’m mega productive. If we were getting rid of deadwood, I’d be for that. But that’s not what is happening.
LikeLike
Very good point. This js not at all a constructive email at all. But a threat to get people on their nerves.
LikeLike
It is absolutely a “justify your job because we’re looking for people to fire”. My last job we called these “self-evaluations” and we had to fill them out quarterly. Way more than just an email– it was a whole survey with essay questions and stuff.
On the one hand, I hated those. Like, please, if I’m not worth my pay, just tell me and I’ll happily quit. I’ve got other options. And also: work to do.
On the other hand… I don’t see any reason public employees should be exempt from this sort of thing, if the rest of us have to do it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am very sorry if you will indeed end up among those being fired. I hope you will not. But then perhaps the university will be in such disarray that it will not matter…
But I have to ask- are we talking about principles or about some cross between revenge and “dedovschina”? * How does it follow from “I am likely to be fired” and “people in the private business have less job security than government employees” that everything should operate at the lowest common denominator in terms of job security? That people who have more job security should have less, and not the other way around?
As far as revenge goes, it really starts to look like “for every one of 1600 conservatives who have allegedly been “cancelled” one way or another over the whole history of wokeness (do not remember the source) we will cancel 10 non-conservatives in a month”…
*”dedovschina” is the system in the soviet army where first year conscripts were mistreated by second-year ones, only to become the second-year ones and abuse and mistreat the next generation of the first-year conscripts.
LikeLike
It’s all a game to these billionaire types. They must be laughing at how successful they’ve been at dividing the cattle and have us fighting amongst each other for any scraps of job security that they are willing to provide us.
LikeLike
I believe the point of our blog host is that at least someone is trying to figure out what these people are doing before potentially firing them. Unlike in the case of her university, where there is just going to be firing irrespective of productivity or whether any work is actually being done by the people being fired. I don’t detect any kind of schadenfreude in her words. The way I read the post, she wishes that some administrator at her university would send the same email to her and to her colleagues so that she could have an opportunity to explain how much work she does.
LikeLike
Come on, this is total BS. They were going to fire regardless regardless of how many pretty reports you out. This is completely predetermined at a completely higher level that not you, Clarissa, or I have any say in.
The magic of social control is making people think they actually have a say and that people shoving this down our throats are our friends.
LikeLike
I wrote this kind of email to a co-worker every week while on the tenure track. It helped me when it was time to put my tenure portfolio together. It was basic advice to keep a weekly log like this for academics, because we can easily forget all the tiny jobs we do like peer review articles, write letters of rec, or draft white papers for a committee. The point is that not everything gets recorded on the cv. You also need to see what’s draining time and what is actually producing results.
LikeLike
Did your co-worker threaten to fire you if you didn’t?
I think a lot of you are missing the maliciousness behind Musk’s email
LikeLike
If people can’t be bothered even to answer an email, then why shouldn’t they be fired? I ask in all sincerity as somebody who has been frustrated for years by how people think it’s perfectly fine to not hand in final grades, for example, and then go dark for a week while I turn over heaven and earth trying to locate them. Students are calling the office and coming by in person, their funding is threatened, grad school admission is threatened. The administration is calling me every 15 minutes for updates, and a colleague simply decided she needs her time to rest (while on contract and being paid a salary).
Do you know how often this happens? I wouldn’t be opposed to somebody noticing and doing something about it because it’s a regular calamity (one among many).
LikeLike
The email everyone is angry about is a management technique. A colleague of mine sent essentially that email (except worded worse) to people who reported to him as they were slacking. It did work for him and no one was let go as a result. Now, I have my doubts on this thing working on a very large scale and the sincerity of the efforts of the people who sent it. But let’s not pretend here that the request is (1) totally outrageous and (2) this is something that has been never done before.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have failed to explain to people why it’s humiliating to be forced to attend DEI trainings where you are humiliated for the color of your skin. They think that that is perfectly fine and even helpful. Yet being asked about what job-related duties you performed is an outrage. I can’t figure it out. I have no control over my race. But I do over my job performance. Why do people not feel upset about being hounded for physical characteristics they can’t change or control and are very upset about a work-related email?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Because it’s coming from someone who doesn’t have the knowledge and emotional maturity to properly understand the responses.
People would not be upset if such emails came from their supervisors. Or capable new managers who were hired.
LikeLike
You do realize that this does sound like something a 5th grader would say, right? “I don’t mind when Mrs Smith says not to pass notes in class because she’s NICE. But when Mrs Jones says it, she’s just doing it to be mean.”
LikeLike
“You do realize that this does sound like something a 5th grader would say, right? “
No, I don’t. We think in such different ways that I’m not sure if we’re the same species. It must be coming from our different assumptions.
Are you assuming Musk or people on his team know what government is doing and is supposed to do? Their actions so far show they have no fucking clue.
LikeLike
It has been explained five times already that the point of the exercise is to see who doesn’t even bother to check the email. Apparently, your species have problems with retaining information.
Say, are you the Grimes fan from yesterday? The misplaced outrage and self-righteousness are very similar. I wouldn’t want to have two of you hanging around because it gets kind of tiresome.
LikeLike
I’m not a Grimes fan. I think she’s an idiot in general and especially one to procreate with Musk. But I think he is more at fault than she is in the situation.
“It has been explained five times already that the point of the exercise is to see who doesn’t even bother to check the email.”
You trust Musk implicitly when he says that. And I don’t. I can see him using AI or keyword search to fire more people based on what they wrote.
LikeLike
As I said before, both Musk and Grimes are equally disgusting in this story. I can’t distinguish among shades of excrement and don’t see the point. The Ashley person is yet another piece of garbage in all these.
Those poor kids.
LikeLike
“I’d love to have this kind of accountability”
A big problem is that most people don’t understand bureaucracy (why it’s needed or what it does) and attempts to explain just sound… odd.
I thinking back to how I would answer that back when I was in a bureaucracy (for the sake of argument we’ll assume a late February week).
“This week I processed about 200 employment forms which either put people into the payroll system or change elements of their employment, checking that the conditions of their employment (or the change) meet institutional and union guidelines. This involved This involved about 40 phone calls to administrative contact people to correct erroneous information on the forms submitted or to resolve ambiguities. The details were then entered into the local computer system and the paper forms were sent on to the next stop in the employment chain (where the forms are checked in terms of accounts and state regulations).
This week I filed paperwork on the maintenance about 30 accounts that are either empty or nearly so but which cannot be officially closed.
This week I moved three desks from one office to another (because the part of the institution that would do that charges too much and it takes them too long to get here).”…. I could go on but I won’t.
What are the chances that a DOGEr would understand any of that? And what are the chances that they would just decide it was useless busy work (to some extent it certainly was) and fire me and the rest of the office and then in a month or two when people stop getting money people will be looking around and find the accounts to pay people have been empties and no one knows where the money is…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Musk is saying he’s very impressed with the responses that were received and with the people who actually read the email. But many won’t read it. I’m in the public sector and I know for an absolute fact that people believe it’s fine not to read work-related emails.
LikeLike
And Musk never lies.
LikeLike
Every day, at the exact same time, the clumsy sarcasm brigade storms the beaches of this blog.
LikeLike
“Musk is saying he’s very impressed with the responses that were received”
How many has he read? How many would he read? I have the idea that all the responses are fed into AI and the purpose of the exercise is to figure out how to replace as many people as possible with AI…
I assume the only reason AI is being pursued so doggedly despite the minimal returns so far is the mass elimination of jobs.
LikeLike
There are already many people in the private sector who are laid off because of AI. If we are worried that AI will eliminate jobs, that’s a big, legitimate worry. But somehow this doesn’t get brought up.
What I don’t understand is why my yesterday’s story about my university layoffs is evoking less interest than this email story. Do people hate state school college professors more than government bureaucrats? I’d say both groups are equally annoying. Why are the bureaucrats receiving all this compassion and we aren’t?
I personally don’t need compassion, God forbid, but I’d like to understand the principle at work here. Because this is exactly what happened with my acquaintance over “Jessica.” Clearly, there is something at work but what?
LikeLike
Because the university layoff story affects many fewer people than what Musk is doing with the government. Your university layoffs will not result in me getting food poisoning from contaminated food, but his layoffs might.
LikeLike
So you think these are critical function people who perform their critical functions without showing up for work and checking email? They are probably out in the battlefield, slaying the dragon that poisons food with their bare hands.
Jokes aside, I respect your position. You believe that these are very crucial workers. Many people don’t believe that at all. The issue has been adequately explained and I thank you for it. I sincerely didn’t know people thought these government bureaucrats stood between them and food poisoning. It could not have occurred to me that anybody thought that.
LikeLike
What you fail to appreciate is that Clarissa’s university layoff story is not unique. There are many more universities/colleges that are going through program reorganization, layoffs and shutdowns. Many of these places actually serve students who don’t have a chance at being accepted at a more selective university. The current US education system is being dismantled brick by brick and nobody pays attention because it’s “only happening in this one insignificant place and not many people are being affected.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh yes. I received two detailed emails yesterday from people at other universities that are undergoing this exact process.
This is precisely the dismantling of public education that I’ve been warning about for many years. People might believe that the bureaucratic apparatus of the state is important while education isn’t but real education is going to be available only to the wealthy. As I’ve said for years.
LikeLike
Also, I hate to break it to you but your food and water are already contaminated by all kinds of stuff (microplastics, medications, glyphosate, …) all the government employees notwithstanding.
LikeLike
As a nonfaculty public servant at a state university, this email would enrage me. A significant chunk of my job already consists of counting, recording, and explaining the value I add to the university. I have biweekly meetings with my supervisor, bi-yearly presentations to my unit, and an annual review — not to mention the ad hoc requests from various other bureaucrats that already come my way. I could do more if I could document less. Having to explain my productivity in yet another way would do nothing for the institution or the state that pays my salary.
It’s particularly galling when the pressure to document, count, record, and follow procedure is packaged as “money-saving.” We could be feeding students three meals a day on what it costs in time and staff power to order a few pizzas for an event and defend the expenditure.
LikeLike
Do you know any people at your job who bring no noticeable value and then you are stuck doing their work for them? Because at mine it’s easily 80% in every type of service. There’s always one mega productive and knowledgeable person who carries the entire team while they pout, cluck and flap their wings. The whole secret of getting anything done is to identify such person in every division and work directly with her, bypassing the 15 layers of her perennially confused and rude coworkers.
LikeLiked by 2 people
One of the problems was that it wasn’t coming from their boss. Emplyees were told to report what they did to a completely different government agency and to cc their boss. For people in classified positions, this left them stuck between violating their jobs’ secrecy requirements, violating the email, or being accused of insolence for sending bullet points of “redacted.”
LikeLike
One example. We have the Higher Learning Commission coming with the attestation visit which happens once every 10 years. People with full-time appointments are asked to be at work for two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) during regular working hours. These are people with $90K+ salaries. Who are asked to be at work for two days. In a decade. Do you want to guess how many will comply? I don’t need to guess because I’ve seen the answer many times before.
People very sincerely think it’s an outrage to be expected to be at work from 9 to 5 for two days in 10 years.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Clarissa, could it just be a matter of your specific university? Wouldn’t things be better at a more prestigious school with actual admission standards that wouldn’t need to be doing remediation?
LikeLike
That’s what I most fervently hope for as I initiate my job search. I do hope we are an outlier and elsewhere it’s different.
Fingers crossed, my friend, and I’ll be updating everybody as I go.
LikeLike
Not that many. And the useless folks seem to relish all the ways they are encouraged to dress up the nothing they are doing as something. Not sure what this email would accomplish that the whole bureaucratic apparatus of review isn’t already failing at.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I actually think that terminating the contracts of everybody who fails to open the email makes sense.
If I could do that starting years ago, I wouldn’t be losing my department right now.
LikeLiked by 1 person