The Excitement is Palpable

If you liked that cliche, get ready for many more because in about thirty minutes, the long awaited announcement of the identity of the new chancellor will be revealed. I am hoping it involves a smoke machine and laser lights at the very least.

Obviously, this will all be done via the typical democratic process of deciding in secret and then unveiling their identity in another city.

I may or may not be at the reception this afternoon, but I will be tweeting the livestream announcement of our fearless leader's unmasking...because if it can't be summed up in 140 characters, it's still at least more in depth coverage than that provided in the peppering of 'no comments' we get from Joe Gallehugh.

I'm @uncgcleanhouse on twitter if you want to follow me during this epic event of the century. If you can't I'll post the transcripts here later.

Just be prepared: mixed metaphors and sports analogies will be thick on the ground.

How to Reform a Wayward Executive

I’m getting reports that Bryan Terry has been quieter recently. It seems like many on campus are in a holding pattern, just waiting to see the new chancellor.

Our new chancellor has an excellent opportunity to come in and turn this institution around. I’m not talking about massive infusions of funds (although that’s there too), I’m talking about setting an example for the way in which administration, staff, faculty, students, alumni, and community members should be working together. If Brady created (or exaggerated) this culture of bullying, it’s clear that the next person has the chance to create an atmosphere befitting of an academic institution. The fact that people are waiting for the new chancellor before they show their cards again means that the time is ripe for leading them in a new direction.

I wish her/him all the best in this. I think the lessons learned are clear and anybody with half a brain doesn’t have to read my blog in order to have understood them. There are a lot of positions to be filled and the choices made will have a profound impact on UNCG.

In case some people need a little extra assistance, I’ve put together some suggestions for helping transition the folks in upper administration who haven’t been able to ‘move on to better opportunities.’

Bryan Terry’s contract will include mandatory anger management classes as well as a slow and detailed explanation of the difference between a compliment and an insult.

Kim Record’s salary will now be calculated as a percentage of the profit from ticket sales to sporting events. She will be assigned a board of advisors to assist her in all decision-making. This board will be made up entirely of members of the former wrestling team.

Kim Record's Board of Advisors

Bonita Brown will be required to join the Girl Scouts and earn a badge in ‘plays well with others.’

Benita Peace will complete a spiritual journey under the guidance of the Dali Lama until she can find her center by reciting ‘hostile work environment’ in the lotus position.

Jan Zink will serve in the peace corps digging ditches and building water filtration systems until such time as she understand that the word ‘authentic’ can be used in other ways than to distinguish fake and real fur coats. Or until the earth crashes into the sun, whichever comes first.

There. That’s a good start. 

Tune in tomorrow when I’ll provide some application and interview tips that could help us weed out the a$$holes before they are hired.

SuperChancellor and The Zink Take On: Timmy or Something (Episode 420,092b)

(crowd gathers and then begins pointing upwards and murmuring. Finally, a little boy yells out)

Look! Up in the sky!

It’s a bird!

It’s a plane!!

It’s a secret chancellor candidate!!!

(*cue theme music*)

I guess since it has been said that the faculty and staff at UNCG are looking for a superhero in the next chancellor that it only makes sense that they have a secret alter ego. Maybe they come to UNCG in the uniform of a groundskeeper but then, the call goes out, (alarm blaring: woooooohaaa woooooohaaaa)

Could groundskeeper Willie be our
next leader??

It’s an…emergency executive brunch!

Suddenly, the mild mannered, glasses wearing groundskeeper dashes into the handicapped stall and changes into:

The Chancellor (dynamic music).

Who is it? It could be anybody! Well, not really anybody. I mean, they probably won’t ever have been connected with UNCG before. And they will surely have done something magnificent to deserve the $100k raise over Brady’s pay. And they can fly.

But most importantly, they have courage! The courage to hide their identity …and…and…

Did I mention they can fly?

Never fear! Surely, by doing exactly the same thing that we did last time, we will have completely different results this time. I don’t see why we wouldn’t. Isn’t that one of the primary things that faculty have learned from doing research? Same method = different results. Or something like that, I wasn’t really paying attention the last time they explained it to me. It’s hard to listen when they keep going on and on and on about ‘transparency’ and ‘deep wounds to the UNCG community’. I mean, really.

Where was I?

Oh yes – With the speed of an interoffice memo requiring three levels of signatures for approval, The Secret Chancellor is on the scene. And little Timmy is rescued from the well.

Unfortunately, the budget was also cut by 4%...but Timmy, look! He’s out of the well.

Oh no.

Oops.

The Chancellor’s Sidekick “The Zink” has mistaken Timmy for an enemy because of his grubby face and ‘urban’ clothing and is pelting him with gift baskets.

Oh well. They tried and that’s what really counts right? Besides, Timmy was asking for it. And they didn’t do it. And it wasn’t their fault.

And so, another peaceful day on UNCG’s campus draws to a close as The Chancellor once again dons the uniform of an ordinary groundskeeper and The Zink wanders off, looking confused, to hand address envelopes.

All is quiet once again. Or is it?? (ominous music leading to credits)

Stay tuned folks, next week we’ll watch The Chancellor handle the thin line between technically correct and The Outright Lie!

(all resemblances to people living or dead is simply bizarre.)

99 People and Counting...

I've just received a few more names to add to the list of those who exited UNCG under Kim Record's distinctive leadership. Nearly 100 people found the environment worth leaving behind. Nearly every day I hear from someone with a confirmation of the toxic nature of her management. She has been protected by the bubble of administrative superiority for a long time, but now that this bubble is deflating, I wonder how much longer she'll be with us?

She never seems to have been particularly compatible with UNCG, almost as if she wants to make us into something we're not. A favorite tactic seems to be to cut off resources from those who need them and then to claim surprise at their failure to thrive. Sure it's underhanded and not particularly sportsmanlike but why would we look to the leader of our athletics program to demonstrate notions of fair play?

In any case, at least she did play a little defense after her assistant AD Brian Battle tried to strangle a soccer player on the field. By which I mean, she buried the story and possibly paid Battle to go away. That's a move that's pretty standard in the UNCG playbook, I'm sure he followed some better opportunity. It seems that even if you mess up badly (ie somebody catches you) your "externalization" is still padded.

That's why I guess I'm still surprised that they didn't offer that same face saving opportunity to Edna Chun that they did to Paul Mason (who apparently either was paid off enough that he doesn't need to work...or it's awful hard for him to escape what his name has come to represent). I wouldn't feel too badly for Chun though, after all, she's used to moving on. In fact, almost all of these executive types are. It's too bad we can't do a trade, get back some of the people who were long term members of UNCG's community in exchange for the release of some of these upper admins back into the wild.

Barring that, or a genuine reformation by those remaining, it'd be helpful if we could wrap up the executive admin exodus before the arrival of the new chancellor; give her/him a fresh start, a fighting chance. We all want our new chancellor to succeed and in order to help ensure that s/he can swim, it's time to release some of the dead weight that might pull even an olympian to the bottom.

Kim Record
Benita Peace
Jan Zink
Bonita Brown
Bryan Terry

If you love us, you'll leave us. And if you don't...we'll drum you out.

A bit of helpful advice.

Edna Chun Should Start Packing

When I was job-hopping through college and in the years after it, I remember hearing that it was important that I show people I could hold a job.

I’m now questioning that advice. It seems like the people who have been holding down the fort at UNCG for the longest are not the ones who are rising to the top. Instead we get people like Edna Chun and Paul Mason who seem to think that a two-year stint at a single employer is long enough.

No wonder they fire or drive away employees with 15, 20, 25 year histories with UNCG – it just seems suspicious to them that somebody would stay that long somewhere unless they were getting some illicit benefit. Having never worked anywhere long enough to become part of the community, they don’t trust that it is possible to become loyal to a place.

When Chun joined UNCG in 2011, they boasted of her past which included three years at SUNY Geneseo (2003 – 2006), one year at Brooklyn College of the City of NY (2002 – 2003), and two years at Kent State University (2000 – 2002). Her record holding length of employment was a five year period with Broward College where she served as vice president for human resources.

Unfortunately for Chun, it seems that the longer-term employment at Broward didn’t agree with her. In 2010, Chun was a finalist for the position of Chancellor of Peralta Community College district. That search was eventually restarted after all three of the finalists were rejected by a unanimous vote from the board.

This must have come as quite a blow to her since she had recently been fired by the Broward College President J. David Armstrong. The racial discrimination charges were brought to the administration by an employee and deemed sufficiently damning to lead to her dismissal with full and unanimous approval by the Broward College Board of Trustees.

And so UNCG continued in its new habit of taking in wayward administrators and added Chun to our ranks.

You would think Chun at least would have picked up a thing or two about dealing fairly and equitably with employees, but she seems to have remained confused about the relationship between race and the right to a healthy work environment when she told various UNCG employees that if they weren’t a member of a protected group, there just wasn’t a darn thing human resources could do about continued harassment.

This does raise the question: exactly what is the job of human resources, then?

And

Isn’t it about time that Chun moseyed on to her next short term bout of employment?

After all, if you stay in one place too long, your incompetence is bound to catch up to you.

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.

Don’t Be Fooled

There are those who will say that this blog is weakening UNCG – that it could destroy it.

I am not so egotistical as to believe that the words I write have the power to destroy without foundation. If UNCG is so weak as to be able to crumble as a result of a blog, well, it’s hard for me to believe it was standing up to begin with.

What is weakening is the ability of the administration to do as it pleases with no fear of repercussions.

What is weakening is the shadow that has been cast by this administration and the possibility that it will continue to block out the sun for years to come.

I will be glad to see those things weakened and destroyed. Don’t listen to the execs when they tell you that these words have harmed UNCG. These words bring to light the harm that they have done to UNCG…and they would like you to believe that they are the heart and soul of the institution.

They are not.

If Jan Zink can’t bad mouth our donors and squander their money, UNCG will be stronger.

If Bryan Terry can’t verbally abuse his staff, screaming and yelling like a tyrant, UNCG will be stronger.

If Edna Chun and Bonita Peace can’t ignore the heartfelt pleas of faculty and staff for just treatment and basic dignity, UNCG will be stronger.

If a chancellor can’t accept the position assuming that we are their personal piggy bank with an unruly mob meant to be suppressed, UNCG will be stronger.

If anyone working here now or in the future knows that they must make a commitment to the larger university and Greensboro community when they accept a position, knows that they are taking a place in a vibrant and dynamic culture, understands the bounds of human decency, and accepts the mantle of responsibility to something larger than their own agenda, UNCG will be stronger.

Don’t ask me to stop working for those goals, because I won’t. And don’t be fooled when those with much to lose whimper as the risk increases. They weren’t thinking of others before and they aren’t doing so now.

I have heard from so many of you supporting the changes in the atmosphere that we are seeing begin to come about; let’s keep shaking things up and let the sun shine in stronger than ever.