A Letter of Introduction to Chancellor Gilliam

I decided it was time to introduce myself to the new chancellor and so I have written him a letter. I have sincere doubts that there will be any response, but one is not needed if actions indicate an understanding of the situation.

"Dear Chancellor Elect Gilliam:

I know we haven't been formally introduced, but I thought it was time to say hello. Your predecessor certainly knew me and the Acting Chancellor has made it clear she is familiar with my work as well. I have had high hopes for you as the first step in a new era at UNCG but am having a somewhat difficult time holding on to my optimism.

Serious damage was done to the UNCG community by Linda Brady and before those wounds can be healed, we are in need of some plain speaking honest dealings. The ugliest of the scars was created by the scandal of the UNCG3. That injury was exacerbated by the mountain of lies that followed it and the complete failure to acknowledge any error on the part of the university administration and board of trustees. Instead, we have seen how executives protect each other and we have been left twisting in the wind. 

Your tenure here has started in the midst of lies that you did not create. It is just this distance that should allow you to clear the stables and turn out the darkest pockets of failure and incompetence. Your administration can only ever hope to escape failure, rather than aspire to engender greatness, while truth continues to be ignored.

Your choice is between restoring faith and hope to the employees at UNCG or acting as a plaything for scoundrels.

Choose wisely. And remember, as always, the owl is watching.

Sophie"

When It's All Said and Done

Remember the good old days when we used to be reassured that if we knew everything, we'd be outraged about the heinous crimes of the UNCG3?

I've finally had a chance to see the final report on their nefarious activities and I can testify that it contains not one new piece of information, not one twist, variation, shift, or enhanced explanation. It turns out, we did know everything that the Board of Trustees knew.

Well, with the exception of one thing:

The Board of Trustees didn't know that we knew.

I don't mean 'we' in the sense of the royal we, but rather 'we' in the sense of every member of the campus community. All the while that they were pretending they were right, we all knew they were wrong. Some of us chose to believe that the powerful have the right to be wrong...or at least that if we ignore their wrong, they might shower us with benefits.

So now what? The Board gets to have led us down this disastrous road, shepherded us toward the scandal and acted in every possible way to obfuscate the truth and cover up the lies.

Is it really possible that this group of people should be the ones our new chancellor must work with so closely? They clearly have only their own interests at heart (with the exception of Linda Carlisle who couldn't stomach being part of the whole mudslide). If we are hoping for the spring sunshine, the cobwebs still need to be cleared away.

The absolute refusal to be accountable for their actions and failures does not set the tone for the new administration. Their incredible (by which I mean unbelievable in the true sense of that word) belief that they are immune from the requirement to be responsive to the rest of us is not only disgusting but demands address.

These are not gods, but men and women who hold us in contempt. It's time to for a change.

It's not too late for spring cleaning.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

So, Brady is gone, right? Members of the university community should be linking arms and singing! Birds should be landing on our shoulders! And yet, the best we can see right now is the hope that we can be optimistic. Why is that? I think that Richard Levy has said it brilliantly, and so I share his thoughts with you below:

"Chancellor Brady is gone.  A cancer, nearly universally disliked and disrespected, has been ignominiously removed from the UNCG body.

     Yet one senses little joy as a new Chancellor will soon come on board.  Why?  Four reasons come to mind.

     --No apology has been forthcoming for the actions causing "Firegate".

     --Neither Dr. Brady nor those who chose or defended her have acknowledged what a huge

       mistake her hiring was.

     --There is no provision for rectifying the error when a bad choice is made.

     --Dr. Brady embodied many larger problems in modern university conception and

       management, none of which has been addressed.

     Dr. Brady has continued to defend her lies and inept handling of the firings that brought her down, disrupted several lives, and brought decimated UNCG's reputation.

     Her total lack of introspection is unsurprising.  But the silence of the UNCG Trustee Board and Chapel Hill higher-ups creates the scary impression that they either agree with her or just don't get it.  Either way, the continued input of these people and their future monitoring of the new Chancellor does not engender confidence.

Dr. Brady's unsuitability for the position was clear years ago.  She was temperamentally wrong.  She made no effort even to learn the names of faculty or even major financial contributors.  She ignored input and tried to rule by fiat.  She made poor personnel decisions.  She gutted academics while substantially increasing administrative and, especially, athletic budgets.

     Dr. Brady's style was already well-established.  A reasonable investigation of her time at NC State or the University of Oregon would have uncovered it.  (And perhaps it did.  Perhaps those choosing and monitoring Dr. Brady actually liked her style.). Whatever reasons allowed her to continue are scary; these folks might do it again.

     But people do make poor personnel decisions.  The question is:  How long do you go before you admit the mistake and correct it?  There was a large and growing disenchantment with Dr. Brady almost immediately.  Yet no one at the local or Chapel Hill level took action until her mishandling of "Firegate" forced Chapel Hill to force her retirement.

     These matters are all serious.  But they pale compared to the last item.  UNCG is particularly poorly run (according to a study undertaken by the NC Legislature).  But it is hardly unique.  Indeed, it is typical of public universities and colleges.  Several examples:

     --Administrative budgets, already outrageously high, continue to expand dramatically, until

       they are often equal to the educational budget, which meanwhile stagnates or is even

       reduced.

     --Athletic budgets proliferate, even as they lose more-and-more money, and at schools like

       schools like UNCG have no chance of becoming profitable and provide few measurable

       benefits.

     --A race to build silly amenities increases student fees substantially, even for those students

       who can scarcely afford it and who will seldom or never use the new facilities.  Little attempt

       is made to find out if the students even want them.

     --State universities are vastly overbuilt, under-utilized, and poorly maintained.  Most schools

       have no idea what their building utilization even is.  (Hint:  at most it is below 25 per cent if

       You count 8 AM-10PM Monday through Friday, plus summers.)

     --Universities are being re-defined so only research or majors with short-term practical

       payoffs really count.  The very real benefits of other academic disciplines are ignored.

     --Professors are asked to spend substantial amounts of time evaluating rather than teaching.

     In other words, public universities are being poorly run and dumbed down (even while their

heads claim they are being run the way a private company would operate, which is very unfunny joke).  But not a word from Chapel Hill or individual trustee boards suggests that these truly important questions are even being thought about, much less acted upon.

     That, more than anything else, explains why university communities are dispirited, and why Dr. Brady's eclipse, welcome though it is, does not lead to a re-set of confidence and optimism."

Hope may have feathers, but it will take much more to grow the wings we need to use them.

Hope Springs Eternal

We at UNCG have had very high hopes for our Provost (and current acting Chancellor) Dana Dunn and for Charlie Maimone, the Vice Chancellor of Business Affairs.

There have been a series of "unfortunate" events...

Other than Dunn’s spate of hysterics at the last faculty meeting in which she apparently mistook me for a character from Lemony Snicket, she generally seems to be much more reasonable than the cabal of cronies with which we have been burdened for the last seven years. People on campus still seem genuinely hopeful that she represents a kinder, gentler administration and I hope they are right.

The same sort of hopefulness was floating in the air in regards to Charlie Maimone (despite the unfortunate possibilities present when rhyming his name with “My Money”). His first strike was a vote for a totally closed search, in direct contrast to the hybrid model for which the faculty senate had unanimously voted. However, he quickly fell of the radar again amid the fireworks being set in the rest of the executive administration.

Only now, with Edna Chun’s summary dismissal and her complaint is his name rising to the surface again.

The jury is out. Chun says he created a hostile work environment and labels him as “instrumental” in the firings of Carpen, Wilson, & English (the UNCG3). Now, that’s a new twist in the plot, isn’t it?

Is this a woman desperately clawing at others as she falls from grace? Or is there something more here that needs attention?

Shockingly, Maimone has not responded to the allegations (probably he has received coaching from UNCG’s spokesperson extraordinaire Joe“no comment” Gallehugh.)

In the same allegations, Paul Mason continues to look like the bull in the china shop that everybody already knew he was, but now somebody has actually said it out loud (or in print, which is as loud as we need).  This is the first time that anybody in the upper administration at UNCG has admitted that there might have just been even the tiniest bit of wrongdoing on Mason’s part.

Those left standing in upper admin and on the board of trustees at UNCG have been repeatedly told that there needs to be some truthtelling in order for there to be reconciliation. Generally, the response has been to clamp down completely (for example, to date, the letter that faculty member Hannah Mendoza wrote to the BoT has gone unanswered).

It looks like the truth is going to come out no matter what. The only question remaining is: how badly do they want to be part of the reconciliation?

The first step to forgiveness is admitting that you have a problem.

We’re all ears.

Linda Carlisle Steps Away from the Board

Carlisle, who had two years left on her term with the Board of Trustees, announced this week that she is leaving the board effective June 30. She has not revealed her reasons for leaving, but I am willing to speculate.

Carlisle has a conscience.

There, I’ve said it.

She has watched UNCG administration become increasingly dysfunctional and crooked over the last six years.  The Board has been complicit in each act of tyranny and deception. However, the Board of Trustees is made up of individuals and doesn’t always act with complete unity and accord. Carlisle has had the difficult job of trying to support the university while remaining true to her conscience.

People have many ideas about how change should be brought about and here we have a strong aversion to airing our ‘dirty laundry’ [the primary criticism levied against what I do]. Carlisle did not get to be on the Board of Trustees because she is a hot headed revolutionary, so her tight lipped response to questions about her reasons for leaving is not surprising.

Would I prefer that she spoke out about why she is leaving? Sure. However, we have learned to read between the lines. When a higher up makes a decision and specifically declines to give reason for that decision…it means exactly what we suspect is exactly the case.

Carlisle sent as loud a message as she could.

This board is toxic. The executive structure at UNCG is falling apart. From staff to board, good people are getting out and sending a strong statement: we won’t be part of the assault on the heart and soul of UNCG.

We’re losing the robber barons and the Robin hoods. There are still plenty of us here working on the inside in whatever ways we can; and there are still plenty of us here working now from the outside in whatever ways we can.

The winds of change are blowing.

Numbers Don't Lie But You Have to Ask the Right Questions

One of the cards that administrators like to use when paying for things that they want while saying that there isn’t money for what others want (need) is the idea that the money they have to spend somehow exists in inviolable separate bundles. They use this mantra to indicate that their hands are clean, but that they are bound to, in an amazing coincidence, pay for the things they wanted at the expense of others.

This has been demonstrated time and time again to simply be untrue in the strongest, most direct sense of the word. There are (at least) two important things to keep in mind about university finances:

1. Yes, there are some rules from the state regarding money that has been appropriated for specific expenditures not being redirected toward other expenditures. However, we have to keep in mind that all that this means is that we need to ensure that our administration asks for the right things. Legislators don’t wake up in the morning and decide they’d like to fund an unplanned rec center. They have been asked to and once they have determined that they would like to fund such an enterprise (for a whole set of reasons that I hope to be able to address later) that money is set aside for that.

2. There are two systems of accounting at work here. One that is mandated by the state and the other that is set up internally within the university. The one used within the university is changeable and is being misused. The budget is a projection of the ways in which the university would like to spend money, not a reflection of how it has been spent. Right now, it is being used by upper admin to claim that there is simply nothing that can be done to change the way the money is spent and to protect executive expenditures at all costs (pun intended and tragic).

As an example, Kim Record’s basketball pipedream is being funded out of available resources to the tune of $8 million. That money is not legally restricted to funding athletics, it has simply been budgeted for it. It could be redirected (yet another topic I’ll have to cover later) or at least scaled back - possibly tied to her ability to demonstrate a newfound ability to retain employees...

UNCG is also holding approximately $85 million in unrestricted funds that could have been used, for example, to ‘repay’ the money we had to give back because of the ‘accidental’ incorrect projection of student numbers. Instead, the execs put on their long faces and cried crocodile tears as they asked the rest of us to suffer.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Professor of Accounting from Eastern Michigan State laid it all out in great detail, just as he has done for several other universities, and has shown that UNCG didn’t need to go under the knife.

As the Board of Trustees promises the incoming chancellor a salary increase while the message comes down to the rest of us that yet again there will be not only no pay increases but continued shaving of whatever meager budget has been left, I think it’s only right we ask for a full accounting. And while the Bryan Foundation may be footing the bill for the upgrade the chancellor’s mansion, I think it’s time we ask if they would consider donating that money to other university causes more vital to its continuing mission.

And as the legislature hands down more budget cuts while the BoG springs for a tuition increase, it’s definitely time for Jan Zink to reconsider her $150k ice sculpture expenditures (or whatever other frivolous folly she has dreamed up in the meantime).

Heck, I'd even chip in for a dictionary for the execs so that they can use the same definition of the word "civility" as the rest of us.