Earlier today I was reminded that I neglected to follow up on the remark, made several days ago, that the Dean had her amanuensis summon me into The Presence.
To my astonishment, what She wanted to do was carry out one…last…annual review. Why, I could not imagine: it’s pretty obvious that at my age I’m not going to get another job, and since the state government, universities included, is crumbling like a chunk of limestone dropped into a bucket of vinegar, it’s especially unlikely that I’ll be finding any appropriate openings at the Great Desert University, the Tucson variant thereof, or the Flagstaff variant therof, any of whose supervisors are allowed to see employee evaluations. It seems like a vast waste of Her time and mine…but whatEVER. She’s the boss.
Hang onto your hats, folks: Her Deanship delivered the single highest performance rating I have ever received in the entire 16 years of my tenure at This Great Institution. She raved about my genius and then generously offered to recommend me for any damnfool thing I imagine I want to apply for.
The performance score she dealt out comes under the heading of Not Possible. Truly: it is amazing.
What, oh what does it mean?
Let’s bear in mind that Deans do not speak plain English. They speak in tongues. This happens because there are a lot of things (as in “most things”) They can’t safely say directly, for more political reasons than any of us (the Deans Themselves included) can count. Like the Delphic Oracle, university Deans speak to you obliquely. They imply. They suggest (subtly). They emphasize. They de-emphasize. Whatever it is that They wish you to understand, They rarely (perhaps never) say it directly. It is not in Their nature to do so.
So, two Sherlockian questions present themselves:
a) Why on earth would Her Deanship spend Her valuable time on what appears to be an utterly futile and pointless exercise?
b) Whence this rave review (after we’ve been becalmed for a full year!), and why?
As for question (a): It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Her Deanship is just being kind. Possibly she wants to send off the underling with good feelings; possibly she truly does feel bad about the demolition of a project that took untold hours and effort by staff, faculty, and administrators to launch and has proven to be utterly unique on the planet.
Could be. Anything’s possible. Nooooo…..
There’s a reason for this. Could be that She knows something’s up. Experience shows She always knows when something’s up. She hinted around that opportunities may arise near the end of our tenure at GDU. Inscribing an ecstatic performance review into the record could put Her in a position to do a targeted hire (oh, no: make it “will” put Her in that position), much simplifying Her life and everyone else’s. It also would help Her to argue effectively for…whatever She expects to have to argue for. And She knows that if I don’t hate Her, I’ll write any proposal She asks me to write. I’m very good at writing proposals. The more entrepreneurial, the better. University presidents love entrepreneurship. For that reason, university vice-presidents, the immediate bosses of Deans, love entrepreneurship.
So, there’s that entertaining possibility. One can always daydream.
It also could be a good review of me (i.e., our office) makes Her look good.
Okay, this brings us to question (b), most succinctly expressed as “HUH?”
I just can’t imagine!
Last summer Her Deanship agreed to let us hire a third RA, giving us a total staff of five. At about the same time, She apparently became aware that our days were numbered. Consequently, She kept putting me off every time I lobbied for more client editors, more work, oh god anything to keep this horde of eager young geniuses occupied. It became painfully clear that She knew something, and that what She knew meant that She dared not commit our services to faculty editors, because She either knew or expected that those services were about to go away. The result of it was that we didn’t have enough work to keep all our staff busy, and the result of that has been that I have foisted every scrap of work my associate editor and I might have done ourselves onto the graduate students. Otherwise, they would have had nothing to do, and they’re here to gain experience and learn from it. As a matter of fact, one of them ended up with precious little to do, much to my chagrin. This has been the worst year our office has ever experienced.
One expects She knows it. And that, with singular circularity, brings us right back to question (a).
Mysterious, isn’t it?
Image: Sherlock Holmes, by Sidney Paget. Public Domain
Wikipedia Commons
I am still pitifully naive as to the ways of administrators. You are way ahead of me. As far as I can tell, administrators do what they do because a)they have to, and b)whatever it is will help them hold on to their jobs and maybe move up in administration.
Didn’t you pitch something a while back? Maybe this is related?????
@ frugalscholar: Yes…those generally are the motives. The likelihood that she’s trying to do something altruistic is almost zero.
Weeks ago, I sent her a proposal that we cut the office’s schedule from 12 months to 9 months. Our office is the only one in the college that provides 12-month research assistantships to graduate students; on the entire campus, the only other 12-month RAs are in the hard sciences, where laboratory work can’t be left to languish over the summer.
She did not even acknowledge receipt of the proposal, which took me days to write and which was reviewed by a half-dozen colleagues. A second request asking if she had received it similarly elicited no response at all. I tried to bring it up during the annual review charade, and she dodged me.
So, I can’t imagine what her motivation is. Maybe she has none. Is it any wonder I clench my teeth until they break?