The Venting Thread

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Please stop spewing your racist vitriol in my direction. Go read a fucking book and educate yourself.

[FishProf]

Students are required to meet with an advisor in order to register for the next semester.  No, going onto the online portal, picking classes, and then clicking "ask my advisor to review" is not sufficient.  And now, you've missed registration and the classes you need are full.

Not my circus, but it IS my monkey.

[marshwiggle]

Students are required to meet with an advisor in order to register for the next semester.  No, going onto the online portal, picking classes, and then clicking "ask my advisor to review" is not sufficient.  And now, you've missed registration and the classes you need are full.

Not my circus, but it IS my monkey.

Not being familiar with the situation, I'm curious why the "ask my advisor to review" option is there if a meeting is required. Why wouldn't the process be completed in the meeting?

[FishProf]

Students are required to meet with an advisor in order to register for the next semester.  No, going onto the online portal, picking classes, and then clicking "ask my advisor to review" is not sufficient.  And now, you've missed registration and the classes you need are full.

Not my circus, but it IS my monkey.

Not being familiar with the situation, I'm curious why the "ask my advisor to review" option is there if a meeting is required. Why wouldn't the process be completed in the meeting?

The company that makes the software has it enabled as default and my Uni won't turn it off.

[AmLitHist]

My college made IHE today, once again*, for all the wrong reasons. This, despite constantly being told we're a "best place to work," leading the way in innovations, God's gift to academia, etc., by admin. This incident involves (arguably) hate speech by an employee to a student, and campus admin allowing (though "not condoning"**) similar threatening speech by an outsider to go on for several hours.



*The last two times were when a student's assault went unacknowledged and uninvestigated for over a week while TPTB were out of town on a retreat, and when a previously-unannounced RIF took out 1/3 of our math and English departments district-wide.

**Not quite sure where the dividing line for that lies: I get the First Amendment aspect, but when overt, targeted threats are made. . . .

[marshwiggle]

My college made IHE today, once again*, for all the wrong reasons. This, despite constantly being told we're a "best place to work," leading the way in innovations, God's gift to academia, etc., by admin. This incident involves (arguably) hate speech by an employee to a student, and campus admin allowing (though "not condoning"**) similar threatening speech by an outsider to go on for several hours.



*The last two times were when a student's assault went unacknowledged and uninvestigated for over a week while TPTB were out of town on a retreat, and when a previously-unannounced RIF took out 1/3 of our math and English departments district-wide.

**Not quite sure where the dividing line for that lies: I get the First Amendment aspect, but when overt, targeted threats are made. . . .

I wonder how much of this stems from abandoning expectations of civility from everyone. So speech is either "free" and therefore unrestricted, or "hate" which must have explicit punishments, but otherwise no-one can be told that they need to tone it down, regardless of whether what they are saying is true and/or important.

[Puget]

A further update for anyone interested in this saga. We did, shockingly, just get emailed apologies from the dean. I'll give him credit for taking responsibility for how this was mishandled, albeit after the division head and chairs all demanded he do so (and I heard the provost also weighed in with concerns). The loss of trust and good will cannot easily be repaired though. I'm still not sure he realizes how much damage he has done to his relationships here, not just with the faculty directly affected, but with all our colleagues as well.

He is now asking for what he should have in the first place instead of this fiasco, which is that we each work with our chairs on more realistic multi-year budgets for our start-ups. They do still want us to come up with end dates, which we all think is short sighted in a lot of ways (it is to the university's advantage if we have rainy day funds to keep our labs running if we are between grants, fund new pilot data collection, etc.). But "come up with a reasonable plan" is a hell of a lot better than "account terminated effective immediately".

An update: The division of science chairs sent a very strongly worded joint letter, and the dean has agreed to meet with them next week. Apparently the Division Head sent an even more strongly worded letter. I have not seen that one, but apparently she is really out for blood–the dean's, primarily, though deanlet is likely to get caught in the crossfire (deanlet seems like a generally nice guy who is just way out of his depth, especially when dealing with the sciences - he's a classicist and I think has no real understanding of things like indirect costs).

Untenured faculty facing such trust breaking actions might be encouraged to reenter the job market.
Tenured faculty facing such a problem (if any) should be rallying for a no confidence vote to make Bull a steer! 

As much as I'd love making Dean Bull a steer (love that joke, Clean!), I don't see that happening. Upper admin will do what it always does and circle the wagons around their own. But this and a thousand other ways they are trying to balance the books on the backs of faculty and while asking us to do more and more work with less, are inevitably going to do damage to the institution.

Chair pointed out today that those of us who have unspent start up funds have them precisely because we (a) have been successful in bringing in grants, and (b) have been prudent in budgeting our start ups for things we can't charge to the grants, including collecting pilot data for new grants. I don't think dean or deanlet (both of whom come from the humanities and have no experience with grants or more than minimal start up packages) have any idea how much $ the university could lose in the longer run in grant indirects as a result, not to mention the potential for well funded people to leave.

The division of science chairs are all meeting today to plot a unified response. Seeing how strongly and quickly our chairs and senior colleagues have our backs is the one bright spot in this fiasco.

[dismalist]

The eternal struggle over resources.

[AmLitHist]

Somebody backed into my car while I was at work yesterday and didn't leave a note. The security cameras are disconnected because of all the construction near the parking lots.  I probably have several thousand dollars' worth of damage.  Yahoos.

[downer]

Why do so many undergraduates write the word "utilitarianist" when they have never heard anyone say it?

[dismalist]

Why do so many undergraduates write the word "utilitarianist" when they have never heard anyone say it?

Because they've never heard the word "utilitarian", either.