Faculty Life — Pandemic Venting
Venting again: Is anyone else feeling schisms developing in their professional activities with colleagues? I find two sharply different experiences with my projects. One set of colleagues just show up, deliver, address emails with “always good to see you in my inbox” or end them with “virtual hugs”, with a quick “count me in — I’ll do whatever you suggest” even if they are over committed, like many of us are, or with prompt additions to the projects with clarity on what they will do and what they can’t commit to, so we can move the work forward at a pace that is sensible for all.
The other set of colleagues are ignoring calls to work, missing in action, questioning what is being done and actively obstructing it by dragging their feet, not delivering what they are demanding credit and positions for, telling others to do things their way, without explaining their reasons for their demands, begrudging if they are asked ‘why?’ and accusing colleagues of lack of collegiality if they are held accountable for what they said they would do, didn’t do, and still were given credit for, and apart from lack of contribution — actively throwing hostility and tantrums that require more time and energy to placate than any of us have patience left for.
Fracturing happening in ways that makes me consider what I am committed to on a daily basis, to decide whether to stay or walk away, because one can only take on so much of this drama. Most of this is volunteer work anyway. I believe that tenured professors must give back to the community & profession, whatever our modest contributions may be, but not everyone is on the same page. Some of us take ourselves more seriously than we need to. All that we do amounts to an insignificant drop in the sea change that we are living through.
Another vent from the same week (23 Feb 2021)
Venting: An hour long meeting of six professors in a department was called with the agenda to revise the learning goals for six courses now merged into three as we adjust for the new reality of fewer resources. An institutional database on a shared drive where details of all courses are stored for access by everyone and for review by administrators and the accreditation agencies was also shared so we could see what the old learning goals were and build the new ones to also record and store there. After waiting for the late comers and small talk, we get to business fifteen minutes into the meeting. One person can’t access the folder and others can, so we guide him to how to sign into his institutional account to get to see them. The meeting leader suggests the best way to do this would be to assign leads for each of the three new courses so they can draft something that we can discuss as a group. I like that because synchronous editing by a committee of six is the worst nightmare, although not uncommon in spaces I have been in.
I volunteer to revise the two closest to my subject expertise. I open up the two files for these courses, even though it’s for a program I have never been assigned to teach yet, just to start the assessment of how I might help. Both turn out to be blank documents with xxxxxxx placeholders where learning goals are supposed to be, below the campus logo and course number plus the short descriptions required for the program website. When I mention this into the zoom room, the person leading the program says — yes only the two people who have taught the courses — one being her and other her right hand man — have the learning goals in their syllabus. The program has been running for over four years and the institutional memory is empty and is privately guarded as their own intellectual property. Rather than sharing it or finding it for review by others, it is suggested that they should be the ones revising these. I surrender.
Thirty minutes into the meeting, we are still ‘assigning’ who will revise what — and starting to discuss if it can be done in two weeks or shall we plan another meeting in three weeks.
Meanwhile I have pulled up similar courses in programs I have taught in, from the past two iterations of the revisions under three different administrators and two different accreditation regimes — and shared in the zoom chat — all possible learning goals that have been used in the past. Hoping we will eventually get to have some discussion on priorities for the new world we are facing. Nope — we will be using the remaining time to continue to ‘assign’ the work, rather than doing any of it, separately or together, and conclude with deciding when to meet next.
Six people — one hour — is six hours of essential worker time in an era of ‘overworked to exhaustion’. All we accomplished was what IMO would have been best done by a simple email, as we each have a limited and different expertise already known to all from all that we have been teaching over the years. The only thing accomplished a half hour into the meeting was to expose the sham of building any institutional memory. The blank documents placed in folders were merely to give the illusion of everything being organized for a poorly run program that should be shut down instead of being cut down.
I am wondering where my famous patience has gone or if my ability to ‘do the work’ as an individual contributor has made me useless as a team player. I literally would have taken ten minutes at best, to make up the new learning goals — as we have plenty of expertise on what’s critical and essential. We could have then spent another ten discussing it, if there were any disagreements or sticking issues, about what topics are no longer relevant and what are worth keeping or need to be introduced. Instead, we literally had a meeting to decide to have another meeting. We continue to reward incompetence, if not celebrate it in ‘collegial’ community. A couple of people have it all in their heads or in their privately stored ‘syllabus’ that won’t be shared. All they want is a periodic audience for the theater of being the ones who are the brilliant ones to do the most for the institution. I am frustrated beyond belief and just needed to vent. Normally these would be discussions with colleagues at conferences, over dinner, as we commiserate over our respective institutional failures — but with conferences having moved to zoom, there is no place to vent these frustrations.
In sharp contrast — the other meeting of the day with a colleague at another institution was setup for an hour and we wrapped it up in 40 minutes with clear goals on what needed to be done, dividing the work and discussions of supportive suggestions to make it happen well for each other, and how we might revise and redo what used to be done in the physical spaces as we adjust for the new reality on that work front too. We left smiling and I was so glad to let them know how much of a pleasure it was to work with them. I learn and contribute and stuff gets done. Some teams are functional and others aren’t I guess.
