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A. Jay Adler's avatar

Josh, I like this weaving of different elements into a single theme. I’ve watched Band of Brothers, and a variety of related documentaries, multiple times. Contrary to what Richard Winters says, he was the epitome of a hero, including for going home, as he expresses in the series, just to lead a normal life. I highly recommend the follow up series, The Pacific, a more spiritually harrowing experience.

My entire tenured teaching career, with one exception, was shadowed and brought to a gradual close by such hostile and imperious college Presidents. In the end, another president on that five-year cycle arrived during my post-chair service, when I was senior member of the department. During his faux listening and into his tear-down phase, acting on advice from other administrators, he systematically excluded me from every consultation and planning meeting regarding the English program. The current chair and the rest of the department sought my leadership in fending off his effort to recreate the program on his terms. As part of that effort, I was already leading preparation of our own lengthy and detailed planning document for a reconfigured program. He used his powers to prevent its consideration before the academic senate. The department’s only success, in the only meeting with him I ever attended, was in stopping his de facto assumption of departmental rule, which included, by the way, our “voluntary” devotion of hours per week tutoring in the writing lab at no additional pay. So nothing was achieved by anyone. It was at that point that I concluded finally I had no happy future on the campus.

A too brief counter anecdote, from when I was department chair, of that exception. During service on opposing contract negotiating teams, I and the college’s future president, with a reputation as a hard ass, developed a joking but increasingly respectful relationship with each other. When she assumed the presidency, we trusted each other, had regard for each other’s vision, and worked well together. We accomplished a lot and it was the happiest time of my teaching career.

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Jason Hills's avatar

I spent nearly two decades in faculty leadership ending with multiple terms as faculty president. At all three institutions I worked at, it was the same: the administration didn't trust their faculty even in their own field of expertise. I think that it is telling that most of the upper administrators I encountered we never faculty, and had degrees in "educational leadership" that ensured a chasm those making decisions and those having to live with them. At my last institution, where I was for 10 years, I noted that the president only walked in the liberal arts building a handful of times, which makes it less surprising that it hadn't been remodeled in 60 years, while the buildings he loved and frequented were always up to date.

What I don't get ... even as I do ... is how oedipal academic leadership is. And even when not that, how brazenly opportunist.

As you noted, Josh, one thing they don't get is that cutting a faculty line almost certainly ends that person's career given that colleges fill their classes with part-timers in lieu of full-time positions in a naked, exploitative, cash grab. Of course faculty are going to be prickly--they've spent their whole professional lives being exploited!

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