Our regulations specify that faculty members should be given time to express their opinions about budget cuts and layoffs. Administration always comes up with tricks to eat into that time so that it’s wasted and people don’t get to speak. The funny thing about this primitive strategy is that it keeps working.
Yesterday, for example, we had 45 minutes allocated to people representing three programs that are being eliminated. Fifteen minutes each. The Dean started the meeting saying that he wanted to make just one little comment about the terrible suffering of trans people at the hands of the Trump administration.
And guess what?
Everybody bought into it. Everybody. For the next 30 minutes, people ranted and raved about federal politics.
In the last 15 minutes, I made my statement, asked my questions, and received useful information. The other two programs didn’t get to speak about their issues at all. They had swallowed the bait and used their precious time to rant about illegal migrants in Guantanamo.
You can’t help trans people or Guantanamo convicts by prattling about them at a work meeting. But you can help your colleagues and your program. Or you can be tricked into gushing out your energy and sacrificing your time.
While everybody yelled excitedly about Trump’s policies, I wrote down a plan for the next segment of the chapter I’m working on. As a result, my 45 minutes were extremely productive. I got to work on my research project and wheedled out of the Dean some useful points to give to my union rep who is helping me write a response to the administration.
This is what I keep saying about being emotionally undisciplined. Our administrators go to business workshops where they learn to use these tricks. These mechanisms are created to work on gushy, twitchy victims who have no idea how easy they make it to exploit them.
And it’s not only at work. This happens everywhere. People jump up at down on cue, giving in to every attempt to milk them for emotion.
Clarissa's Blog 
This means your colleagues did not come prepared for the meeting. That is quite amazing, considering their jobs and the jobs of the faculty in their departments are on the line. If they had their statements ready and questions written up beforehand they would not have been as easily derailed.
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The Dean doesn’t have a complex and varied bag of tricks. It’s always the same stuff learned at the cheapest, most basic business school workshops. You’d think a monkey would figure this out after all this time.
And yes, I seemed to be the only person sitting here with papers, notes and tables of numbers.
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I have often observed that academics fail to rely on facts when trying to do admin-related things. There are too many feelings at the faculty meetings. When you want to get something done, it is relatively easy to sit down, collect data, and come prepared with Tables or Figures and concrete data to support your position. It is then very hard to argue your point since other people do not come ready with data to support their position, just with their feelings. Of course, it does not prevent them from ignoring you… This approach to doing things completely boggles my mind since I work in a STEM field and we are supposed to deal with data for a living.
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And the weirdest thing is that they weren’t even emoting about the destruction of their programs but about something completely extraneous. One would think that if your livelihood is in peril, that kind of becomes a priority. But apparently not.
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“they weren’t even emoting about the destruction of their programs but about something completely extraneous”
That’s an old strategy (not sure if it has a name or not) dangle emotional bait to a group of people who are upset at you so they can vent all their emotional fury there and then have none left to direct to you.
I’ve done that a time or two in one and one situations but it works with crowds too.
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How is it possible that people keep falling for it with the same administrator many times in a row?
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How is it possible that people keep falling for it with the same administrator many times in a row?
It’s called wilful ignorance.
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