Professional Life Part 2

As the 4 of you who read this blog know, I've been writing a series of stories about things that have happened during my professional career as an academic economist. This is the second installment in that series.

As you may know, I spent some time (6 years, 8 months, 3 days) as department chair. It was a horrid job. Here is a story of what happened to make the job so bad. Once again, the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

As a bit of back story, apparently about 15 or 20 years before I arrived as chair there had been this big stink with one of the faculty members. What I'm conveying is what I heard so there is no way of confirming if this is true. She had been advising a PhD student who had serious mental issues. One day this graduate student tells the professor that he is planning to kill three other faculty members in the department. Upon hearing this news, the faculty advisor goes to these faculty colleagues to gleefully inform them that they will be murdered by this student. Understandably, the faculty members are terrified and call the police. However, when the police arrive to question the faculty advisor, she says that she has "teacher/student confidentiality" and can not tell the contents of the conversation. Firstly, there is no such thing as teacher/student confidentiality and secondly, she had already told the faculty colleagues.

The faculty advisor had tenure so she couldn't be fired. Odd but that's higher education. What they did do was send the graduate student to a mental institution and then deported him back to his home country. As for the faculty member, she was stripped of her ability to ever teach a graduate course.

Fast forward to January of 2015 when I show up as chair. This faculty member complains that her salary is lower than everyone else because she has not taught graduate courses. I thought this was nonsense given that you don't get higher salaries for teaching graduate courses and there is no way that this would impact a faculty member's annual evaluation. The easy solution to me? Restore her ability to teach graduate courses. You should have seen her face. She was shocked. She started fumbling for words and complaining that she couldn't be expected to teach a graduate course given the long layoff she had between teaching. I told her no problem and that I'd give her a year to prepare for a new course. She then said that she could only teach this very, very narrow subject since that was where her current research was. I told her that this wouldn't do since the program was too small to teach specialty courses and we would have to teach what was on the books. The excuses just kept coming. I then looked at her current teaching and saw that she taught an undergraduate course which was needed at the graduate level and she could simply teach that. She then complained that the field had left her behind and that the current research had passed her. I said that this wouldn't be a problem and reached out to some colleagues I had in the profession who taught the same course. They gave me lecture notes, exams, reading lists, etc. I freely gave her all of this. Her complaint then? The material was not at a sufficient level of difficulty for students. Keep in mind this was the same person who said she didn't know what the current status of the field was. The excuses kept coming and during my entire time there, she never taught a graduate course.

In my old neighborhood we used to call a person like this a 'punk'. This is the type of person who always wants to fight as long as someone is holding them back. They are always screaming to be let free. However, the moment they are let go, they come up with every reason under the sun why they can't fight. They are in their good school clothes. Their mom is calling them home. Etc. This faculty member just loved to complain and say that she was being held back.

MORE OF HER

After being at the place for about a month, I realized that our web presence was garbage. There was no consistency on the department webpage. We had dead links and so much outdated information. I tasked the office staff with fixing the website. That also meant addressing the faculty webpages. They did not have professional headshots and it looked odd. The same faculty member who I spoke of above had a picture of herself in front of a bar with her name on it.

I told her that this picture was not appropriate for our department website. She would need to take it down and replace it with a professional headshot. Her response? To claim that I was infringing on her cultural and religious rights. She said that she believed that taking pictures robbed people of their souls. Thus, to ask her to take a picture was robbing her soul.

I told her that this was not true. She could keep the picture on her private website but not on the department site. I also told her that she didn't have to have a picture at all, however, if she were going to have one it would need to be more professional than a picture in front of a bar.

I had the staff take down her bar picture and just have a blank spot. She then complained that she was being singled out since every other faculty member had a picture up but she didn't. So what did she do? She took her passport picture and had the staff put that up. It was a headshot but, man.

I know what you're thinking. If she had these objections how was it that she had that passport picture or the bar picture? What about her cultural and religious objections? Your guess is as good as mine. In the end, her complaint against me that I was impinging on her rights was dropped. But this is the type of nonsense which made my 6 years, 8 months, and 3 days as department chair a living hell. But who's counting?

Got a comment or question? Reach me at: garyhoover2012 [at] gmail.com.