Proto Himbo EuropeanSince I'm here and nobody has to read this if they don't want to:
I've spent a lot of this semester (i.e., since mid-January) preparing and walking seven separate undergrad student #research teams through projects: Conceptualization, literature review, research design, measure selection and other operational definitions, online survey creation (no way am I managing seven teams doing in-person data collection), data analysis, creation of poster presentations, and tomorrow... presenting! Hooray!
This means my semester gets a bit easier after tomorrow, because those teams represent about 1/4 of my coursework, and they will be mostly done after tomorrow.
Meanwhile, my dean, part of an upper administration that has been legally smacked down very recently for their attempt to unilaterally increase teaching load, is piloting "arbitrary targeted teaching load increases," meaning about 10% of faculty have been given extra courses. I'm one of them. His reasons make zero sense; I think it's because I've spoken up about administrative overreach and anti-labor stuff repeatedly for the past decade, and because the dean (correctly) guessed that nobody in my department would come to my defense.
The kicker is that, after a couple of back-and-forth emails and a meeting in which he grilled me for an hour, searching for some justification of this increased teaching load, he eventually gave me a reason: Insufficient variety of service. In other words, as he explained, I didn't serve on enough university committees because I was doing too much service for my department. This is not a category in any manual or policy document. He made it up so he could give me extra workload. Completely lost on him is the concept that it probably doesn't qualify as "leadership" to give someone more work to do if they're not doing enough as it is. But it's bullshit; he just needed an excuse.
He has interrogated me more than once about my activities. He knows how I spend my time. He knows I spend hundreds of hours a semester mentoring student researchers, and managing the software systems that make it possible for other faculty to do the same. That's my department service. I'm the department student research coordinator.
I've waited a bit to see if he says anything reasonable, but he's doubling down. The union might or might not be doing something--they're a very mixed bag. Now I start messaging all faculty and letting them know that they should be cautious about actually doing any of the "high-impact learning practices" the upper administration has been demanding for the past few years: I did that, and got directly punished for it. I'll be scaling that back aggressively next fall, both to avoid further retaliation for doing the teaching I've been told to do, and to have enough time for family, myself, and anything other than emailing students.
This will probably not change anything except pissing off the dean, but I'm OK with that. He and the provost have made it clear through their actions that I will never get a promotion, university award, or sabbatical, and now I'm teaching near the (current) legal maximum, anyway. Not a whole lot to lose. I have tenure, and there are ways tenured faculty can be fired, but at this point my work quality of life is in the toilet so fuck it.
Jenny
Helder Mira
nerdycrab
Gwenny Powers