Well, they didn't fire me. They did everything but, but they didn't terminate me. I'm devastated. I'm just destroyed by all this. I have been stripped of the chair position, all advising (meaning now there is no one in the department that can advise students), committee work (because, you see, I demonstrated ignorance of professional ethics by having a public blog), and have to submit to tenure-review with the implied revocation in the offing. Should I object to any of this, I am invited to resign.
Beware all: The PTB out there are completely oblivious to the blogosphere and the practices/conventions thereof. Apparently I am the only historian animal lover in the world who has a blog. And anyone can find anybody's blog with a few keystrokes, even if it's pseudonymous and non-specific.
Oh. And students can destroy a career by alleging disrespect - with no evidence and using each other to corroborate. For receiving a bad grade - or one they think is bad. Another student alleges that I disrespected advisees - I have no clue what that's about, unless it's when a student wanted me to drop everything - including my inability to drive - to meet hir for advising in person on a day that was convenient for hir. I couldn't open a closed class for hir, over-ride an enrollment cap or invent a class that would meet hir availability. That apparently means I disrespected hir. The fact that the other faculty couldn't advise hir is my disrespecting students, not the fault of the other faculty who refuse to advise students.
They did find that the allegations of harassing MsM were unfounded, that I did not abuse my position and bias the search committee. They insist that I did abuse my power as chair in the crafting of the job description and lead MsM on to think that the job was hers. Never mind that I told Ms M a dozen times that the search had to be clean, proper, real and we had to seriously search for the best candidate, whoever that might be. Never mind that everybody up the line signed off on the job description; they all insist that conversations that I remember clearly never happened. The dean: "I never heard it because you never said it." Bullshit. MsM wanted me to sabotage the search - I refused, and now they're finding me guilty of sabotage!
And BTW, they screwed up the investigation process, according to the AAUP's criteria. There was no faculty review process, no chance to respond to the charges (or even prepare for the meetings, as I never knew what the meetings were going to be about until I was in the room). There is no appeals process.
So yeah. I'm asking to meet with my lawyer tomorrow. And BTW? I'm leaving for Africa in 36 hours.
Here finally and OMG, that is horrid on their part. You're right that the AAUP has conventions which UU has strangely ignored in their quest to claim tenuous high ground. If they signed off on the job description and the search, they are equally responsible. No chair is the only determinant of a search. Nowhere, no how. No way.
ReplyDeleteOn the upside, if they're taking you away from advising and committee work, happily take that as a sign not to worry about those issues. Even when it roils your stomach to see the stupidity that they perpetrate. If you're not wanted, you can't be held responsible for their failures.
And, oh, I would love to be a fly on the wall when a lawyer who has some experience in academic practice gets a gander at all of this. Let me know if you need help finding anyone to advise you. I'm up north but I would do all that I could to get this reviewed by people who are in a position to see how unprofessionally the administration has conducted themselves, not you.