Sunday, December 12, 2004

Looking behind the curtain

A colleague recently observed a meeting between our Dear Leader (flanked by her "team") and a high muckety-muck from the "home office" and came away quite dismayed. Our problems are not going to be solved by this management, either locally (what do they do to earn their inflated salaries, we wonder) or systemically (not being the flagship has its disadvantages, as does being managed by a bunch of nitwits who aren't respected by their superiors or inferiors).

Meanwhile, our own faculty leadership has rejected a proposal from one department that mirrors the practices of another department in the same division on the grounds that it dilutes the quality of teaching..... as if the exodus of competent but disheartened faculty wasn't doing that? As if the failure to fund service teaching positions that would be self-supporting from tuition alone wasn't doing that? As if the use of statistically meaningless quantitative teachng evaluations wasn't doing that? In the grand scheme of things, this is just petty sniping.

I hate old cliches, but the "circular firing squad" sure comes to mind.

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