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.

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"

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.

It's a Legacy...but Is It a Good One?

The News & Record has run its obligatory whitewash of Brady’s ‘legacy’ at UNCG. I was disappointed to read it, but maybe John Newsome had to write it…and anybody who knows the story at all can understand the lack of effusive praise exactly as it’s meant to read. As a blogger, however, I’m not beholden the politics of the city newspaper.

I think we can all definitely agree that Brady’s legacy has profoundly impacted Lee street. It’s whether or not that legacy requires a positive or a negative qualifier that matters. After all, the mere acknowledgement of an impact should be the very lowest bar to set on any human existence. Basically, Newsome has acknowledged that Brady existed. I don’t disagree.

While it is a tradition to name campus buildings after their leaders, I think Newsome’s suggestion that should the Board of Trustees ever consider such an act (doubtful at best) they would be well served to name something off campus since her ‘legacy’ at UNCG is one that, at best, we will shake off, at worst, has damaged us for years to come.

Some faculty are critical of Newsome’s piece, and I understand why (and will address those points in more detail in another post), however, what comes through loud and clear, through nothing more than a recitation of the facts, is the lackluster quality of Brady’s unfortunate tenure at UNCG. Many things were in the works before she got here, some things were accomplished because of others, and everything that she directly initiated resulted in gridlock at best (fill in your own at worst).

It was also interesting to note that she has clearly not learned anything about communication from any part of her experience at UNCG as her only response to the N&R request was another highly polished ‘no comment’ delivered by Joe ‘tight lips’ Gallehugh. 

Susan Safran, the equally unresponsive – thought uncommunicative – chairperson of the Board of Trustees said (and I am not making this up):

“We wouldn’t be in the shape we are in without Linda Brady.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Dear Linda

Dear Linda:

I just want to say how glad I am that you did that interview with The Carolinian where you were egregiously candid enough to admit how sorry you were that we are all so difficult to work with.

I mean, if only we had known that none of this was your fault, that the problem was US and not you, and that we were simply too hard-headed to understand what was best for us, why then maybe we could have been better people. 

I’m sorry we are so disappointing.

I mean, now that you’ve explained, again, how difficult we are, I really feel like a great era of healing and togetherness is just over the horizon. After all, you only make enormous amounts of money (plus nice bennies!) to do your job, so how could we ever have expected you to be the one who was responsible for anything? I feel so foolish.

You’re right about so many things. It is tough to have a frank and open conversation when one side refuses listen. It is so complicated when something like the Faculty Senate can’t just nod and agree with everything and insists (!) on asking questions, representing various constituencies, and having access to information. Who could have known that people at a university would be so concerned with knowledge, right?

I’m sorry we’re so weird and different in that a racial discrimination scandal seems to have ended your career at Oregon State while an entirely different type of scandal seems to have brought it about here. Surely, there is nothing for you to learn from any of those situations because, as you so candidly explained, it’s everyone else.

I, for one, am enraged on your behalf that people would be so callous as to suggest that shared governance means a “sharing” of the “governance.” I can see why you would find that frustrating.

I’m sorry that the press wasn’t able to paint more glowing reviews of the change you knew was best for us. Where were the headlines saying: “New Rec Center Provides Enhanced Pigeon Roosting Opportunities” or “She’s Got a Green Thumb for Growing Executive Administration”? Instead, it was all “destroying my neighborhood” this and “overwhelming faculty dissatisfaction” that.

I mean, I know if that kind of continued conspiracy were to egregiously happen to me, the only thing I could think of to do would be to have people investigated and arrested. That’s what I did once when my cat wouldn’t use the litter box and I haven’t had a problem since!

Anyway, I know you spent a long time really doing some soul searching before you were able to satisfactorily conclude that you were blameless and that’s never easy, so I salute you.

Hopefully, everyone will be able to remember your honesty clearly when you rejoin the faculty in 2016.

Tchus,

Sophie

The Carolinian & The Owl

I spent just over four hours talking with Emily Bruzzo and Spencer Schneier. It was worth every minute.

They didn’t just ask me easy questions either.

I wore a hat and we sat in a coffee shop, just because Deep Throat was willing to meet in a parking garage doesn’t mean that I need to be so uncomfortable. They have promised me, and I believe them, that they will never reveal my identity. In fact, since they did not seem to be able to discern it, it is even more certain it would not be revealed.

They have treated the story with respect and I believe they gave Brady the best opportunity possible in which to express herself. Her message was no different than it has ever been: it’s not her fault, the faculty are irrationally difficult, times are tough.

Athena and her Owl

I do get the impression that she truly believes that is the case. I guess I find that slightly more disturbing than just assuming she was crafty. She may live in a reality where UNCG is idiosyncratic and all of this is confusing. Or maybe she’s “soul blind” it’s hard to tell, but it hardly matters since she has left. Maybe I’ll enroll in one of her classes when she rejoins the faculty.

To distill four hours of conversation down to a one page newspaper article and still capture both the essence and depth of the interview is no mean feat and I tip my hat to both Bruzzo (who endured the lengthy interview with the chancellor as well) and Schneier.

One question they did ask me but that didn’t really fit with the article is something that actually has come up twice since then and so it seemed fitting to answer it myself. Why the owl? What does it mean?

The owl is an ancient and contemporary symbol of wisdom (think Winnie the Pooh and The Sword in the Stone) and clear sight. The owl does not have her vision obscured by darkness and is able to distinguish the features of her surrounding even on the murkiest of nights. Particularly appropriate to UNCG is the close association of the owl with the Greek goddess Athena, whose Roman counterpart Minerva serves as a prominent symbol for the core of UNCG.

In ancient Roman folklore, the owl could be seen as a harbinger of death. If Sophie’s owl symbolizes death, it is only the death of a culture of bullying and of the obfuscation to which this administration has dedicated itself with the piety of ancient worshipers; however, given the paucity of ancient Romans reading this blog, I rely on the more popular understanding of the owl as a symbol of wisdom.

Finally, of course, the owl asks a very important question: “Who?” And its persistence reminds us that just because it is not easy to find the answers, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking the questions.

The Top 9 Least Wanted, Or, Why It's Not Yet Time to Move On

Paul Mason is gone, relegated to the ‘better opportunity’ given to him by staying at home and off of UNCG campus. The Chancellor is leaving in July, albeit to a year with full pay and no work expected and, after that, the possibility of (heaven forbid) returning to walk among the faculty. Imogene Cathey has been demoted, although for some reason that doesn’t mean that she gets paid any less…and she surely wasn’t demoted for excellence of service, so you’d think it would.

But there are still bullies at UNCG and we need to smoke them out before the work here is done. The culture that Brady created will take years of hard work to undo and given the makeup and bent of the search committee as well as the type of downward pressure exerted by the Board of Governor’s, it doesn’t bode well. If our next chancellor is any of the things that we have requested, it will be due to the dedicated work of a few members of the search committee or a complete accident.

I guess that means that our biggest hope is that the incompetence this Board of Trustees has shown so far extends to an inability to select the candidate they want, thereby inadvertently choosing someone good for what UNCG has always stood for: community in scholarship.

We are a microcosm of what is happening in the North Carolina system as a whole, which makes our demons a bit more difficult to exorcise. But it will be done. So, here, I give the UNCG Top 9 Least Wanted List:

1. Bonita Brown**

2. Jan Zink

3. Bryan Terry

4. Kim Record

5. Edna Chun*

6. Benita Peace

7. Imogene Cathey

8. Linda Brady

9. Paul Mason

So, we’ve made some progress, but there is work to be done. Let these people be on notice – their behavior will be under the microscope so they’d better shape up or ship out. Nobody loves a reformed sinner more than we do, so apologies and a sincere (and successful) effort to abandon their bullying ways might put them on the road to make amends.

No more yelling at staff, treating them with disdain, or using condescension as a default tone of voice.

No more driving our staff to tears, to therapy, to drink, to divorce, or despair.

No more being technically correct while at the same time being ethically bankrupt.

No more superiority, swagger, or immunity from consequences.

The owl will be watching.

*Updated as of 4/16/15 to reflect her dismissal
**Updated as of 9/14/15 to reflect her resignation