Officially Discovering What We Already Knew

There's nothing like a blinding flash of the obvious.

Last year, UNCG administered a survey known as the COACHE survey in order to make an effort to measure faculty satisfaction. Just on the off chance that outbursts, protests, letters, the AAUP survey, position statements, and general conversation didn't REALLY represent what faculty were feeling.
If there's one thing I always say about the faculty is that they are uncommunicative; it's just so hard to get them to really open up and talk...

In any case, Provost Dunn created a PowerPoint that summarizes the findings from this survey. Here are the absolutely unsurprising results:

It turns out, faculty are generally satisfied with each other and their departmental leaders (although that falls off a bit at full professor - probably not difficult to understand why that might be). Faculty are generally satisfied with tenure and promotion policies and procedures.

This next one, and this is the doozy, so let me say it clearly: FACULTY ARE OVERWHELMINGLY DISSATISFIED WITH SENION LEADERSHIP AT UNCG.

I'll give you a moment to get over your lack of surprise.

So, Brady is gone, although threatens to return to the classroom to bring her trademark wit, warmth, and wisdom. Imogene Cathey is gone, Paul Mason is gone, Edna Chun is gone, etc. etc. However, there are still plenty of sharks left over and it seems to me like it might be time to take a real long, hard look at them.

I'd say it's probably high time that anybody in executive administration didn't just get to continue to coast. The default assumption shouldn't be that they are doing fine. Instead, they should have to prove themselves, reapply for their position, demonstrate that their overwhelming failure to gain the confidence of the entire faculty isn't just something that can be brushed off as if unimportant.

And it would be difficult to imagine that a staff satisfaction survey (which was never administered) would show anything except for another section of our community that finds senior leadership to have performed well below expectations.

If an academic department, or heaven forbid a center, were to receive this kind of feedback, the entire area would be under review with the threat of closure/dismissal/defunding - why should senior leadership get a pass? That's the fat at the university and yet we act as if they are indispensable and absolutely immune.

If Gilliam wants to start from anywhere but in a hole, he's going to have to clean up this mess that was left behind before him. The message is clear.

Now, I'm just going to wait for the survey to determine if it's a nice day outside, so I can have my fill of finding out what I already know.

The Fight for a Living Wage

Across the country today, workers are joining the struggle for a living wage.

Why we seem so thoroughly convinced that universities shouldn’t get money from the state and yet seem perfectly content to let those same dollars subsidize the externalized costs of big companies is something tragic.

In any case, the reason I bring this up is because UNCG participates in this shameful low wage cabal. What I mean is that we aren’t all poor struggling to get by, UNCG just has some employees that it pays a pittance to and some who get fat raises at the same time.

For example, Tim Crews who has worked for UNCG for 19 years is employed full time for $10 an hour. If minimum wage had kept up with cost of living increases it would now be $18 an hour. So, we pay him only slightly more than half of what the absolute bare minimum pay should be.

After 25 years of loyal performance, Alice Courts only makes $23,762 a year. And she’s on the list of essential employees who must come to work at UNCG even when hazardous weather causes others to stay at home and the university to close.

Imogene Cathey, however, pulls in a handsome $85 an hour.

Jan Zink rakes in $137 per hour.

And they get to stay home.

UNCG has more than 200 full time employees earning less than $15/hour. Adjunct pay is shameful too.

Nancy Maree has been willingly teaching our students in the nursing program for 12 years and in return? She get $1,000. That’s all a class is worth? That’s all her expertise and insight are worth?

And, of course, the enormous raises given to those who already make more than they deserve continue to roll in. The execs get bigger salaries while the rest of us have to deal with nothing or fight among ourselves for scraps.

We are the workers.

We are the people.

We can do better.

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.

Everybody Do the EPA Shuffle!

Are you tired of the static nature of secure employment?

Had enough of knowing you can’t be fired just because somebody doesn’t like you?

Fed up with being an ongoing part of a community that develops a feeling of mutual trust while working together over a number of years?

Well, fret no more! It’s out with the old and in with the new as UNCG changes SPA positions to EPA and all with a great beat!

C’mon! It’s the latest, greatest craze there is! Here’s how it goes:

You take a position
You put in the pot
You do some voodoo magic
And you make it what it’s not
 Change the S into an E and
Remove job security
 That’s what it’s all about!
 

It’s hard to keep your feet from tapping right along isn’t it? Good, because you are going to want to stay in shape as employment moves from secure to at-will!

Ready? 

Set. 

Dance!