U. of Kentucky May Turn Over All Its Housing to a Developer

It’s not so much that you can’t explain to the clueless. It’s that the explanation has to be so danged long, and you need to give it to so many different people. It’s easier to suffer in silence.

The other side of this is that our state legislators don’t get it either, at least mine don’t. Every year initiates a bill to eliminate tenure. I live in a state with lots of land and a small population; hence few colleges and unis. To find a new job in my field (not an unreasonable expectation, you would think) my family and I would literally have to leave the state. In how many other occupations is that the norm?

“Or, perhaps, the notification comes via a visit or phone call”? Then the first thing you must do is insist that all communications on the matter be in writing.

Conversely, during my teaching years, I found myself on boards where student affairs professionals waded into areas in which they had no special expertise. We had a wave of student protests about the length of reading lists in some courses, and the student affairs person on that committee called his mother, a high school English teacher, to determine what was (his phrase) “A professional amount of pages per week.”  We had another SAP who counseled students doing badly in biology to protest the grade because the professor
“believed in evolution” so “a Christian can’t get a fair grade in his classes and we need to get him out of here.” 

I do strongly say to new faculty that if they want you to serve on a review panel, you are getting something that is ultimately good for you, despite being a great deal of work and annoyance.  First of all, there is no other faculty service line where you will so quickly get an actual picture of what campus life is like, and an understanding what your students cope with (yes, it is quite possible that the struggling student’s roommate has invited her boyfriend and his band to live in the dorm room with them, and she has had some days without sleep or study, and is afraid to defend herself); secondly, you’ll get an idea of the relative truthiness of excuses and student tales of faculty misbehavior (i.e. some are true and some are not and most are in between and sorting is imperfect); third, you’ll learn to recognize the professionally aggrieved along with the faculty behaviors that attract them, which means you’ll deal better with them.  A final benefit only occurred to me after I left the committee: I taught controversial works regularly, and because the committee all knew me and I knew procedure, I never lost an appeal because I knew how to quickly and clearly establish that the work was in my syllabus for a good reason (and sometimes that the student or my fellow faculty member was objecting from an unsuitable agenda or misinformation). 

The worst time I had was an hour spent in front of the VPAA explaining that an edict handed out from a new employee at Student Affairs (“no one should be required to read a work in which a suicide occurs unless there is counseling and the suicide is clearly condemned by a trained professional”), which I was the first person to fall afoul of, would rule out a pretty big chunk of the works that humanities students are expected to know, and that “I am a trained professional in suicide prevention” does not make one the arbitrar of Ajax, Seneca, or Hamlet.

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davidfromdarkestpa seems to have supplied all the answer that 11179102′s note requires, though kamikaze is the more usual spelling.  Nonetheless, since I am procrastinating finishing some paid work today, I will now pound this horse into the ground, in hopes that it may not be dead yet.

Student Affairs Offices have an ingrained tendency to try to own the fundamental issues of the humanities, because students, regrettable though that may be, are human and encounter those issues.  But the perspective of Student Affairs is necessarily limited and limiting; not getting hammered every weekend is important, and may be the most important thing in an individual student’s life (in which case time off from college may be advisable), but it is not a substitute for or a supplementary perspective on Eugene O’Neill’s explorations of how alcoholism can smite down a whole lineage in a way recalling the House of Atreus. 

For what it is worth, when I taught Sophocles’s Ajax, I pointed out, at about this length, that Ajax kills himself because he (correctly in his society) perceives that he can never recover his time (Greek word teemay, not English time), and that time as a concept has been gone for millennia.  Not because I feared what the students might do, but because we were trying to understand what the play meant to an Athenian in 500 BC, and that had quite literally nothing to do with present-day suicide, and everything to do with how Sophocles structured a dramatic action around an abstract concept.

To then declare that class discussion time must not be spent on that complex, difficult, mind-stretching issue because we needed to hear some clown with a masters in student affairs regurgitate “Chapter Six: Tell them Not To Kill Themselves” would be to accede in the gradual stupidification of the American academy, and to signal to the students that we must continue to give time, money, and attention to the platitude specialists, something which is already done far more than necessary (or has no one else ever been around a human resources office?). 

Though I might have lost the quarrel (in this case I did not, our VPAA being a literate and worldly basketball coach), the struggle was part of what I was there to do, and one reason that so much of academic life has been ceded to anti-academic (or at least unconcerned-with-academic) people is that faculty are not willing to profess what they are professors of.

Student Affairs is, as I tell the students, an excellent place to go with problems of the material realm, may be a very good place to go with problems of the spirit (even just to find out where else to go), and is a perfectly awful place to go with problems of the mind.

It’s even funnier when they start asking YOU to stop put things in writing.  True story.  

 Changed it entirely, 11179102?  I thought your response was a perfectly valid one to what I had said; I just didn’t agree with it, and so I further elaborated.  Sorry it upsets you to discover that I think that students are here to tackle hard issues — intellectually rather than emotionally hard — and that the caregiver/nurturing aspects of the college experience are secondary, with a tendency to become primary that must be struggled against.  You advocated your side very ably; I just don’t think it’s right, and explained at some length why I don’t.  I think for the benefit of the others you might restore it, with perhaps a note that you would not have bothered to write it if you had known what an obnoxious person johnbarnes is.

I quite agree that this has gotten away from the issue of what to do when accused of misconduct; it is peripherally related because some accusations do originate with offices and people whose business they are not, and faculty senates may, for example, wish to take up some of the issues of where and when non-academic offices should be inserting themselves in the classroom.

Thank you for responding. The reader can take as much responsibility as the writer to understand the words. That’s what makes dialogue so important. That said, I think you’re right. When under investigation, it is essential to be cool. Even if you’re not under investigation, it’s best to be civil; civil by choice without deference.

This is not only important when under investigation, but also in every day activities, or you may find yourself under investigation.

Let me provide an example. At a faculty meeting, our then-dean called a then-faculty member, let me call him the provocateur, to the podium in an off agenda segment of a faculty meeting. He aggressively began to berate me and my website in full view of the entire faculty. I was totally blindsided. The provocateur had advised the faculty to stand and discuss disagreements at any point. I stood and vigorously challenged his accusations. The whole room erupted in a cacophony of outbursts–my website was the subject of most of them. Colleagues also came to my defense. I advised the provocateur that our website welcomed news stories, opinion pieces, and took seriously the reliability of our news. I would immediately address any issues of inaccurate reporting he or others had. And that they should also provide reasons and evidence that stories were inaccurate. They were primarily concerned, however, that some stories on usmnews made them or the school look bad. Not much could be heard over all the hollering, so I left, along with other faculty. After the meeting, the then-dean and a group of ally faculty reported to the USM President that I had gone berserk and had terrorized them. Some time passed and the administration began to take formal action for my alleged misconduct. I was under investigation. The dean and his allies had by then put their accusations in writing. Unknown to the dean and his allies, or me, a colleague had recorded the entire meeting. It was and is the most compelling evidence that the dean and his allies set up and fabricated the scene and their written representations. They got caught. Were it not for my keeping relatively calm and the colleague’s recording, I may have been fired for cause.

Your advice, in my experience, is sound.

Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA (Accounting with a minor in Logic and Ethics), Professor, School of Accountancy, College of Business, University of Southern Mississippi. Recent academic research: http://ssrn.com/author=397169 ; Novels found at Amazon: Rufus McCoy and Profiteers in the Ivory Tower, and TobaccoPharm, A Divine and Deadly Green Factory. Editor, http://www.usmnews.net

The sad part is the frequency of occurrence and the assumption the Dean, student and/or faculty bringing the accusation always tell the truth.  Learn why these individuals act they way they do at http://www.workplacebullying.org/. It would be sad if they didn’t cause so much harm.

From the website: Who Gets Targeted, Why me? and Why U.S. Employers Do So Little

Unlike schoolyard bullying, you were not targeted because you were a
“loner” without friends to stand up to the bullying gang. Nor are you a
weakling. Most likely, you were targeted (for reasons the instigator may
or may not have known) because you posed a “threat” to him or her. The
perception of threat is entirely in his/her mind, but it is what he/she
feels and believes.

WBI research findings from our year 2000 study
and conversations with thousands of targets have confirmed that targets
appear to be the veteran and most skilled person in the workgroup.

Targets are independent. They refuse to be subservient. Bullies seek
to enslave targets. When targets take steps to preserve their dignity,
their right to be treated with respect, bullies escalate their campaigns
of hatred and intimidation to wrest control of the target’s work from
the target.

Targets are more technically skilled than their bullies. They are the
“go-to” veteran workers to whom new employees turn for guidance.
Insecure bosses and co-workers can’t stand to share credit for the
recognition of talent. Bully bosses steal credit from skilled targets.

Targets are better liked, they have more social skills, and quite
likely possess greater emotional intelligence. They have empathy (even
for their bullies). Colleagues, customers, and management (with
exception to the bullies and their sponsors) appreciate the warmth that
the targets bring to the workplace.

Targets are ethical and honest. Some targets are whistleblowers who
expose fraudulent practices. Every whistleblower is bullied. Targets are
not schemers or slimy con artists. They tend to be guileless. The most
easily exploited targets are people with personalities founded on a
prosocial orientation — a desire to help, heal, teach, develop, nurture
others.

Targets are non-confrontive. They do not respond to aggression with
aggression. (They are thus morally superior.) But the price paid for
apparent submissiveness is that the bully can act with impunity (as long
as the employer also does nothing).

According to the 2007 WBI-Zogby Survey,
45% of targeted individuals suffer stress-related health problems.
Additional findings regarding targets’ health can be found in WBI
research and the PTSD-related research by others posted at this site.

Read our checklist of common signs of bullying.
Why U.S. Employers Do So Little
Many of the facts below have been confirmed by the 2007 WBI-Zogby Survey.

Bullying is Legal
Most workplace harassment and mistreatment (80%) is completely legal.
Remarkably, a hostile work environment is actionable (illegal) only in
very few situations.

America’s individualistic society feeds aggression and competition in
the workplace. These traits block an empathic concern for the
well-being of others, make bullying look tame when compared to other
forms of physical violence, and justify inequality of status across
ranks within organizations — dubbing a few as winners and the rest
losers. Bullying is not only tolerated in business, it is often seen as
necessary. Lawmakers are reluctant to pass laws that reign in unfettered
workplace violence resulting in psychological injury.
Poor Leadership, Inept Managers
The majority of bullies (72%) are bosses…

Bullies derive most of their support from…HR. It’s a club, a
clique, that circles the wagons in defense when one of their own is
accused.

Some executives command bullies to target particular employees.
Bullies are simply good soldiers following orders in a blind fashion.

Supervisory training is nearly nonexistent. No budget. No time. Few good skills taught. OJT transmits bad habits.

Executives blame the problem on a “few bad apples,” deflecting blame
for systemic causes and denying responsibility for systemic cures.

Employers Don’t Know How to Stop Bullies
Everyone walks on eggshells and is afraid to confront “the golden”
bully, the boss’s favorite.

HR misapplies the tools of traditional conflict resolution, for example,
mediation. Wrong solution for the actual problem.

The workplace culture holds no one accountable. Confronting bullies is
unthinkable.

Executives and senior managers have been badgered by the bully, too.
They are afraid of an emotional confrontation. They loathe conflict and
remain paralyzed. By not acting, they tacitly endorse the bully.

They fear lawsuits brought by the bully if they dare investigate or
punish the bully. There is rarely a basis for such suits. The fear is
irrational.
Bullying Is Underreported
Forty percent (40%) of targets never tell their employers…

Bullying is erroneously branded as “conflict” or a mere “difference in personality styles.”

Both are true, but bullying is also a form of violence. Simple labels minimize its impact on both people and the organization.

Historically, complaints lead to retaliation (revengeful hurting) or reprisal (taking away of rights or status).

Knowing this, targets are reluctant to use internal employer processes.