Opportunistic Greensboro Gives Community Service Award to Brady

I had to reread this story several times before I was able to overcome my firm belief that I must be misunderstanding it. However, and hold on to your barf bags, here is what was released in the Campus Weekly this morning:

“Chancellor Linda P. Brady and NC A&T Chancellor Harold Martin received the Thomas Z. Osborne Distinguished Citizen Award from the Greensboro Partnership at their annual dinner. The award is presented to a citizen who has demonstrated extraordinary service and achievement within the community; it is the highest honor given by the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and is presented jointly with Duke Energy. Brady and Martin were recognized for not only the significant work done at their respective universities, but also for the unprecedented level of teamwork and collaboration that they have exhibited in working to make projects such as the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering, Opportunity Greensboro, and the Union Square Campus a reality.”

Apparently, Opportunity Greensboro members hold the mistaken belief that Brady has “demonstrated extraordinary service and achievement within the community.”

I am having a very hard time imagining where that idea came from.

First though, let me clarify, while the award could be, in theory, given to any citizen, it just so happens that this time the citizens who ‘deserved’ it were both members of the Opportunity Greensboro cabal.

I have no beef with Harold Martin, I don't know him or his work, but the mere idea that the words community service and Linda Brady could be put together in a sentence without a negative separating them makes my skin crawl.

Apparently, you can severely damage several communities and yet still receive an award for outstanding work if, and here’s the catch, you benefit in some way the people who are giving out the award. So that raises the question: which benefits are being given to whom in such a way that Brady’s work would seem meritorious?

Let’s take a look at this “significant work done at their respective universities.” During Brady’s administration:

• The Glenwood fiasco
• The Wreck Center and its fee hike
• The UNCG3 / Paul Mason
• The unnecessary $12 million give back
• Raises for the highly paid
• Shrinking student numbers
• Academic Program Review Circus
• Alienation of HES donors and alumni
• Forced reorganization (twice!)
• Multiple new upper administration positions
• Massive loss of employment
• Underperforming nano program
• Ever shrinking Union Campus Initiative
• Demonstrated racism in UNCG police
• Wood frame housing subject to fire at Spartan Village
• 85% of faculty experience morale as a significant problem on campus
• Culture of bullying rampant in administration
• Rise & Fall of Learning Communities
• Faculty flight
• Staff disappearance
• Enormous increases in health care premiums & co-pays
• Increased teaching loads
• Lost course sections
• Wrestling program dissolved
• UNCG Magazine abandoned
• #36 on list of Fastest Growing Sugar Baby Schools
• Fallen off list of best places to work
• Jan Zink's fundraising impotence
• Tragic branding campaign #dsba
• Greatly increased police presence at BOT meetings

I could go on. And on. And on.

Now put that up against the benefits of the nano school and union square campus:

• Union square already twice reduced in size
• Currently at 85,000 square feet that will cost $90 million to build (a popular number as the rec center cost $91 million)
• Meanwhile, 500,000 square feet of unused space at Gateway East and Gateway North
• Nanoschool has currently produced four PhD graduates in 4.5 years at an outlay of $700,000
• Unfortunately, the outlay for those who dropped out was about $2 million
• In other words, this is a program that produced 4.5 students at $971,000 per degree)
• The nanoscience program was supposed to enroll 110 students (and the nanoengineering a further 110)…in nanoscience they seem approximately 100 short - makes you wonder about the University's prediction of 320 for the Dr. of Nursing to be offered at the Union Campus
• The JSSN cost $65 million to build and equip (odd that the rec center should be so much more expensive…)

I’m still waiting for the benefits from either of those projects to become clear to me.

What is clear to me is that Randall Kaplan, who is a member of Opportunity Greensboro is also part of the founding group for Capital Facilities Foundation, the group that purchased the rec center land in Glenwood and made it available to the university.

Here is what Brady has really done that has earned her this award:

Turned the university into a mechanism for real estate development.

It is clear that a lot of university money is being pumped into real estate in and around Greensboro and that some people benefit directly from the sale of that real estate, some benefit from the property value increases, some benefit by skimming, some benefit through kick backs for construction contracts…and some benefit from lying through their teeth while rubbing elbows with the Greensboro elite.

What are we positioning for here? Who is benefiting from all of these projects? I guess it could be a coincidence that despite the lived experience of thousands of people which indicate that Brady has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, when that is placed by the side of hundreds of millions of dollars of student and taxpayer money being funneled into private hands that Opportunity Greensboro sees Brady as a hero, but I think not.

The poor bastards writing for Campus Weekly should be given hazard pay for having been made to handle this toxic material.

Sherri's Been a Good Girl

Sherri has been very helpful to Paul Mason. She was the one who compiled the bogus efficiency reports. She was the one who watched English and Wilson in case they went across the street to their parked car or walked down for coffee. She was also the one who called IT and asked them to perform an audit on the computers belonging to Carpen, English, and Wilson.

She’s done a lot of legwork and it looks as though she’s about to receive the reward for her perfidy. Read on…

Edna Chun, Associate Vice Chancellor for Human Resources, has submitted a request for the creation of a new position: Senior Director, Media Relations. The person who fills this position would report directly to the Associate Vice Chancellor for Marketing (Paul Mason). The job description is signed off on by Paul Mason and followed by an organizational chart showing three new director’s positions the Senior Director of Media Relations, a Senior Director of Strategic Communications, and a Director for Digital and Social Media.

Looks like we’re about to get three new positions, right?

Wrong.

Before I get into that, though, I want to point out a little asterisk that you might not have noticed. It’s in the box reserved for Sherri MacCheyne’s position. If you follow the asterisk to the bottom, you will find that she is now scheduled to have her salary revised.

Sherri’s getting a raise – a little reward for all the hard work she’s done carrying boxes of fabricated evidence that Paul didn’t feel like picking up. Here, in these times of financial hardship, I suppose it could be coincidence that she has been singled out for a raise...

But back to these 3 ‘new’ positions.

When Debbie Schallock and Betsi Robinson were relieved of their positions through a Reduction in Force (RIF) initiative created by Paul Mason, the reason for their release was listed on their letter of termination as due to ‘reorganization.’ This is one of the six officially sanctioned reasons that an employee can be ‘separated’ as part of a RIF under the Policy Manual for SPA and EPA-Non-Faculty Employees. In other words, these are positions where the employees cannot simply be fired at will.

This “reorganization of positions within the unit which materially changes the nature of one or more positions” was undertaken and Schallock and Robinson were let go. Now those positions are back. The material changes to positions? The former position of Director of Marketing has been renamed Director of Media Relations. The former position of Director of Communications has been renamed Senior Director of Strategic Communications.

The sneaky bastard fired two outstanding employees by removing their positions one day and then bringing the positions back under another name. And now open to be filled by those who are more desirable by the administration. This is akin to when Clark Kent puts on his glasses assuming that no one can recognize him as Superman with such a superficial change. Only, we’re smarter than Lois Lane and even if Mason puts on a fake beard and an English accent, we can still smell him.

That third ‘new’ position? It’s the disguised version of the one that was vacated when Lyda Carpen, who was Director of Creative Services, was arrested as part of the means of terminating her employment. Now that there’s going to be a public hearing and the possibility of her firing being overturned once and for all, they have decided to remove the position she once held and replace it with this Director for Digital and Social Media.

Does that mean that if her firing were to be rescinded, she could simply be removed because of a RIF due to reorganization? I don’t know, but I can see where they are headed with this. If there’s a chance they’ll try it.

This reorganization leaves the department with 16 positions, just like it had before…only there’s one more crucial difference. The previous positions were all classed as SPA, an acronym that stands for State Personnel Act. This is the act that establishes the policies and practices for the hiring, employment, and termination for state employees. 

This is the law that does not allow the Chancellor, for example, to fire an employee at will.

The new positions created are classified as EPA. This stands for Exempt from Personnel Act. These new positions would not have the same protections from unreasonable termination as that which the Chancellor has so proudly upheld in her latest response to Carpen’s grievance process.

Therefore, we have shifted these positions from being created for employees who can count upon some level of protection from the whims and caprices of their supervisors to those that would make the employee wise to ask no questions and have no scruples should they wish to maintain their employment.

The new job description was created on November 1 and received by Human Resources on December 9. The players have been busy recently. There’s more in here, but we’ll leave it at this for now.

So, Sherri gets a raise and Paulie gets three new Directors. I think I know some people who should apply…