Africa, part 1

That frequent call to check your privilege certainly has a place here. If you want a reality check, come to Africa. Subsistent level farming, extreme poverty, hard-scrabble existence hard against significant signs of prosperity, great wealth and enormous privilege. Wow. Grad School Friend (hereafter GSF) and I are constantly, achingly aware of our pure luck in being born in the 'right' part of the world.

We've been visiting schools - so far only primary and secondary schools. They use a British style system here, as they are a former British colony. Primary 1-6, Secondary 1-4 gets them to the O level, Secondary 5-6 to the A level. After that, if they are incredibly lucky and can scrape the money together, they're off to university. The classrooms are rudimentary and packed - huge classes. Enormous. Equipment? It is to laugh. They usually have a blackboard painted no the wall; if not, it's a board, battered and with large pieces of the middle missing. No matter, they use it assiduously. The students have precious books we'd find in a trash can behind the dollar store. Pencils that seem impossible to use are carefully held and precious. The buildings are ... depressing, dark. Few have glass in the windows (not much need, given the climate) - so far, there's been precisely ONE with a ceiling - and that's a new building funded by the World Bank.

The students? Amazing. Intent. Creative, intelligent, sharp - on. They hang on your words, be they from their regular teachers or weird American visitors. GSF usually teaches university seniors and grad students, so she's really finding a way to approach younger kids. She gets questions like 'what are better ways to trade?' and 'how do we approach issues of corruption?' One class listed problems of development - corruption, unemployment, profligacy. PROFLIGACY. That's the level of vocabulary for the A level kids. My students at Unnamed University (hereafter UU) would never use that kind of vocabulary and most likely wouldn't know the meaning of the word. She gets profligacy. And yes, they defined it clearly and correctly. And used it comfortably in conversation.

I generally take the younger ones, and we have a lovely time. I tell them what I do, and ask them to ask me questions. Many are very shy, so they send questions up front on scraps of paper. Everything from 'how many children do you have?' to 'how did the USA consolidate power after independence?' Heart-rending pleas for bursaries - yesterday I had a student ask to go home with me, as she has no family and is very poor. Astonishing questions on if the Chinese are witch doctors, if all US musicians are devil worshippers, how do the Illuminati operate, is it good to promote homosexuality in the world, why did the US stop aid because of Uganda's anti-homosexuality laws, what is homosexuality, what is archaeology - astonishingly varied. What are contours? What is your faith? What is the deepest lake in the world? I love this, as it addresses the kinds of things they are thinking about, studying.

We leave the schools excited, energized, amazed. We went to sit in on a debate the other day - Students should determine performance (grades) not the school (teachers). There must have been nearly 200 students in attendance - and when the call came for other speakers, there was a steady line of students going up, all carefully following procedure, making their statements, being scored by other students. And when I'd asked the kinds of things students liked - what subjects, etc. - perhaps half said 'debating.' Far more than football/soccer or the World Cup. Those debates - run by their peers and open to all - are a favorite activity.

I'm getting an amazing education here. So far, even on our weekend excision into the country side, I've seen the following wildlife: perhaps a dozen kinds of birds, four monkeys (a family group), three river otters, and some spiders. I have to count the spiders, or the list is even more pathetic. We saw the source of the Nile at Jinja. Went up Mt Elgon. Saw Mbale. This weekend, we've been promised Murchison Falls. I'll believe it when I see it.

OMG

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.

Hey Y'all!

I've tinkered with the settings, and hope I've enabled comments. Could you check and just make sure that it works?

Getting Close

To my African adventures! Scary, exciting, weird. It's been a full week.

1. I have an appointment on Monday with the provost and the dean (no HR!) to hear the results of The Investigation. Lots of speculation, no facts.
2. My fears that MsM would file a personal lawsuit have been quieted. Talked to a friend who is also a judge - and she said that any lawyer that would take such a suit on contingency would be stupid. That the costs of such a suit would be prohibitive unless MsM has buckets of money. Since she doesn't... I'm feeling less threatened about that. Sleeping better.
3. I had an epiphany on the Africa thing. I remembered that I've lived in rough conditions for that long (granted nearly 40 years ago) but did it without much problem. Even the knowledge that I'm 40 years older than I was then doesn't really matter. The conditions will also be different, much less rough. And I have stuff I didn't have then: DEET, mosquito netting, appropriate clothing. So I can do this. If I think of it as camping, anything beyond an army cot is luxury (and actually, I never found those cots all that uncomfortable). I can do this.
4. I got another lovely hug from my vet. He's this Big Guy who actually inspired my Galapagos trip - and he's totally jealous that I'm going. Took F in for his annual shots, and BG wished me a great trip, told me to bring back lots of pictures and enfolded me in a lovely, fantasy-enducing hug.

Am I ready? O hell no. I haven't packed. I have - more or less - gathered all I need for the trip. I have a few things I need to get: my anti-malarial meds, my antibiotics, my insoles. Flight is Wednesday - arrive Entebbe Thursday night. Scary, exciting, weird.

New Place, New Space

So it's taken me a couple of days, but yeah, I have a new blog.

I'm limiting readership to protect myself. Because all the crap that I'm going through continues. And the PTB at school were really pissy about a blog, no matter how I disguised self, location, university, actors, etc.. So now they can't get to me!

I leave for Africa next week. And I was really, really hoping that there wasn't going to be any more contact between me and the PTB. However. They had the provost's secretary call me and wrangle a 30 minute meeting on Monday. This all pisses me off, as I am on a 9 month contract, and they've been most unwelcoming when I showed up for stuff on campus. Now they want me there so they can tell me something.

I have no feeling for what will happen on Monday. If it goes my way, they'll say the charges are unfounded and reinstate me as chair - and warn me not to retaliate. If it goes against me, they'll make me not chair, increase my teaching load by one class, put it in my record and maybe call for a post-tenure review with a view to revoking tenure. They may fire me. Wide range of options available. Since they only asked for 30 minutes, I'm figuring I'm not getting fired. But I don't know that.

And honestly, at this moment, I don't really care. Isn't that a hoot.

Flabbergasted. Disgusted. Stunned. Dismayed.

Friendship gone bad. Really bad. Someone I liked a lot, trusted, confided in and wanted to hire has, upon finding out that he didn’t get the job, filed a complaint with my employer against me. Charges include abuse of power, sabotaging a national search, harassment, demeaning and harassing students and attempting to destroy his professional career. X found my blog, and has scoured it, finding what he calls evidence that I lied and set him up to fail, sabotaged the hiring process, harassed him and intentionally undermined him. He has also accused me of giving another university a bad recommendation for him. All false, of course, but X has a hard time accepting responsibility for his actions. The Investigation is in its third week, and if feels like it’s been going for months.

On a personal level, it’s such a personal attack that I cannot but feel that. And I’m really pissed that he outed me and my blog to the university authorities, and is trying to use my own words to support an action against me. I hate that I had to kill a 7 year writing project.

On a professional level, I’m just disgusted. Just because somebody thinks they ‘deserve’ a job doesn’t mean that they can afford to ignore a supervisor’s request for documentation. It certainly doesn’t mean that repeated requests for such documents amounts to harassment. ‘Deserving’ a job doesn’t come into it, not in this market! Not in any market. The university and the department were out to find a candidate that would 1) meet the needs of the department; 2) work well with the rest of the department and 3) contribute to the university as a whole. X met those qualifications and expectations until he 1) blew off repeated requests for departmental documentation; 2) went into a four month pout during which he locked himself in his office and refused to interact with 1/3 of the department; 3) withdrew from all university functions except the barest minimum and 4) conspired with students to bypass the normal hiring processes and force his hire through direct and open student action. 

The university handled the notification badly as well. X says he found out he hadn’t gotten the job through my blog. Well… there are so many bad things embedded in that I won’t go through the list, but I’m sorry, that is NOT my fault. The dean should have told him long before X went out digging around and finding a blog that I rarely mention on campus. And that blog? Nobody knew where it was, or what my pseudonym was - and there’s nothing on that blog that would enable a direct connection between it and me unless they already knew me. And then? They’d have to know my pets, because those are the pictures and identifiers I used.

So I’m writing this on my laptop, and not even posting it until I can ensure that I’ve created another, denser online identity that X can’t find. And that? That pisses me off.