Goals and groundrules

I frankly don't know what to do about this crisis. That's one reason I'm blogging again: to feel like I'm doing something, and to seek, together with readers, for ways that we can all help. Here are some goals for the blog this time around.

• Sharing information about the crisis at other Illinois public colleges and universities. I'm thinking in particular of our peers who are facing steeper cuts sooner than we are (including CSU, Western, Eastern, and Northeastern): there are things we can learn from their experience. For starters, check out the "Illinois Links" on the upper left.
• Providing an outlet to talk about this crisis. I'm not sure this is the ideal case for a talking cure, but I do think that many of us have been too scared to openly discuss the threat we face. Even a blog may be a better response than silent dread. 
• Figuring out what to do about this crisis. I don't have the answers, but will go looking. And I hope to pick up ideas from others, in comments and elsewhere. 
• Promoting shared governance. Local decisions will affect how SIUC weathers this storm. Both the substance of those decisions and the way in which they are made need to be subject to scrutiny, and a blog can help. To the best of my knowledge, for example, the proposed cuts President Dunn just released were not subject to any sort of formal shared governance. That could be justified in special circumstances, but isn't a good sign. So I'll blog about local decisions, and welcome comments on them. 

Ah, speaking of comments, another goal after the break: Providing a venue for discussion of campus issues.
 

Coming back to life

The crisis in funding for public higher education has led me to start this blog up again.

Last time around, the crisis was local. We faced a lawless, reckless administration intent on using a moderate cut in state funding as an excuse to dismantle collective bargaining and undermine faculty tenure.

That was the easy crisis.

Shutting down shop

Anyone still on some sort of feed for this site will have already reached this conclusion, but my planned ultimate post has failed to materialize, and now I find myself so swamped with administrative work that I don't see myself completing it anytime soon. I'll therefore sign off here.

If I ever come out on the other side after serving as chair and return to some forum like this one, I'll have a new perspective on the sorts of issues I've discussed here. So far I've been struck by two big things. The first is how damn hard people in these administrative positions have to work to simply keep things afloat.  This summer, for many reasons (retirements, budget cuts, a new push to eliminate classes failing to meet the 5/10/15 rule, etc.) has been a particularly chaotic time.  So far nothing has prepared me for being an administrator as well as helping to lead a faculty strike--where the various sorts of chaos and personnel issues we were dealing with were similarly straining and draining. The camaraderie among union confreres was of course oh so much warmer; it's not that I've had any unpleasant interactions with administrative superiors so far, by the way, rather the opposite. It's just that the hierarchy of administration means that too often I'm either asking for money or telling people I don't have money, neither of which makes for bonhomie. Also, no chants so far, or funny signs, though the absence of student worker funding tempted me to go looking for one of those "Qualified Substitute Instructors" puppets to staff the front desk in our department office.

The second thing this sort of work gives one is a greater awareness of the effects of administrative decisions, especially the more dubious ones. Some of these have had the ironical effect of making administrative work itself harder, as centralization, at least in some aspects, seems to have done; every hiring decision (including part-time NTTs and GAs) has to be approved through so many levels that nothing happens as quickly as it could. On the other hand, I find myself wanting to centralize more in my department, at the risk of hypocrisy. Centralization isn't always bad. And some of my old hobby horses infuriate me all the more now. As I walk to my office in Faner, I look out at the $1.25 million Faner Piazza Project, and find myself quickly thinking how much stronger my department's offerings would be next year had we, say, one more NTT, costing $40,000. Did we really need to spend all that money on concrete walks and flower beds?  Is the best way to improve our famously inefficient student services—matters that I as a chair get sucked into rather more often than I did in my halcyon days as a mere faculty member—to spend millions on a new building to house these services?  Here too, sometimes, no doubt, I'll learn that a procedure or decision I would otherwise have experienced only as a skeptical outsider, and found deplorable, makes more sense when viewed from the administrative angle. And sometimes not. We'll see; it will be an learning experience.

As has been blogging. Thanks for reading and commenting.

Penultimate post: on blogging

Despite my evident pique in the last post about comments (a bit more on that later), I certainly enjoyed blogging for the last 16 months or so (about the same time as it took the FA to negotiate the last contract, as it happens). I'm obviously vain enough to enjoy having my moderate rants broadcast to some number of readers, who if not legion were at least rather more than the couple of people around the water cooler I would have vented to otherwise.

Blogging came rather easily to me. It's occurred to me that it is not entirely unlike the scholarly mode in which I wrote my dissertation: a commentary. A bit more on that, then on possible goals for a blog like this, and this blog's successes and failures in meeting such goals.

Comments closed

I've had enough comments: congratulations to some brave & articulate anonymouses, who have now succeeded in shutting them down, though they've only spared us from their drivel for a short while, as I'm shutting this whole thing down soon anyway. Anyone curious as to why I've closed comments should check out the thread under the previous post, where various nameless souls eloquently express their outrage at my removing some of their garbage from an earlier post, at my lack of manliness, at my sycophancy toward my beloved administrative superiors, or all of the above. I've been quite willing and have even often enjoyed responding to some pretty sharp criticism over the lifetime of this blog, from both sides of the union-administration divide, but, frankly, I've got better things to do, especially now that such attacks make up a large proportion of the comments, and most are illiterate, bilious exercises in name-calling, from individuals who can't be bothered to make an argument or present any evidence, but believe that we all somehow benefit from their pointing out that I'm vile, or some other commentator is vile.

As I've said before, the only rational motivation for such comments I can think of would be an cunning effort to shut the blog down, undertaken by individuals who know that they are spewing senseless nastiness. Go home, have a few too many drinks, pretend you can't write a correct English sentence, and call Dave a sycophant, or attack another commentator, or the administration, in a few anonymous sentences that you wouldn't have uttered in your own voice in public even if you were drunk. How clever of you! Perhaps you have a future in politics. Congratulations, if that's your game; if not, well, good luck to you. As I've tried to spell out in an earlier post, I'm shutting the blog down for reasons other than comments, though such comments have increasingly soured me on the enterprise, and obviously the recent happy trend toward the lowest common denominator has resulted in me closing comments earlier than I had planned.

Thanks, on the other hand, to the many who posted constructive comments, pro and con, over the life of this blog. During many periods the comments were far and away the best part of the blog, and I learned a great deal from reading and responding to them. I'll miss the good ones, the thoughtful ones that forced me to rethink things, that helped me see things from a different angle, or led me to do a better of job of expressing my own views.

A technical note: As I can't figure out how to get blogger to universally close comments, I have shut down comments only for the last few posts; for earlier posts, I've flipped a switch so that comments appear to be possible but moderated--but I won't be doing any moderating and won't post any comments.