Tag: Dysfunctional academic departments

Dave’s Diabolical Plans Go Awry

Dave Denial was a dedicated teacher. Or at least he like to think of himself as a dedicated teacher. Dave repressed a lot. He was so full of anger at having been twice passed over for tenure-line positions in the department that the anger just oozed out of him, even in his interactions with students. He had an incredibly self-effacing affect. But it was such a caricature of genuine deference to others that it fooled only the incorrigibly stupid. It was obvious to most people that Dave was a huge hypocrite, that while he pretended to cater to everyone’s wishes, even at the expense of his own time and happiness, in fact, he didn’t really care about anything other than nursing his own sense of righteous indignation over the unjustness of his fate. 

Dave had developed a positive genius for undermining the attempts of all the other faculty in the department, with the exception of the adjuncts, to actually accomplish anything. He always surveyed the other religion faculty concerning their views on issues relating to the religion program, but then he would go ahead and make all the decisions concerning those issues himself and report them as a fait accompli to the rest of the faculty. It hadn’t always been this way, though. To be fair to Dave, it is important to acknowledge that in the beginning, Dave had made genuine efforts to involve the other faculty in the decision-making process. The thing is, most of the faculty, the tenure-line faculty anyway, didn’t give a crap whether the religion program offered a certificate in, for example, spiritual counseling, or when program events were scheduled. So Dave had gradually given up on them. And when he realized that no one seemed to be aware that he was effectively running the program all by himself, he began to devise ways to take advantage of this to make the lives of those professors against which he had particular grudges a living hell. 

I have already remarked on Dave’s devious scheduling practices, so I won’t go over them again here. Sabotaging the schedules of professors he hated was only one way Dave had of making them miserable. There were myriad other things Dave could do. For example, he had access to the teaching schedules of all the religion faculty, so it was easy for him to schedule events with students at times when professors he disliked would be unavailable. Since he was usually the person who organized such events, he was also the person other faculty consulted when they, uncharacteristically, attempted to organize events themselves. He would bend over backwards (or at least appear to be bending over backwards) recommending locations that would turn out to be completely unsuitable and recommending food vendors that were so expensive the poor professor would exhaust the budget they’d been allowed for the event and end up having to pay for many of the refreshments themselves.

Constance, for whom Dave had developed such a hatred it had achieve pathological proportions, had suffered so much at Dave’s hands that she had, oh so gradually, figured out what he was up to and had begun repeatedly complaining about him to Willard Weasel, the department head. Unfortunately, Willard was one of the few incorrigibly stupid people who was actually taken in by Dave’s thin veneer of pretended consideration for others, so Constances complaints to Willard about him fell on deaf ears. 

Constance was one of the professors whose schedules Dave repeatedly sabotaged. He’d schedule her classes during the same term he scheduled competing classes. For example, if Constance were scheduled to teach a seminar on the New Testament, Dave would make sure that an introductory course on the New Testament was scheduled for the same term. The religion program was so small that there were not enough religion majors to fill a seminar on such a subject, so in order for the course to get enough students to run, it would have to draw on non-majors. No non-major will take a seminar on a subject, though, if there is an introductory course on the same subject scheduled for the same term, so the intro course would fill, but the seminar wouldn’t and would have to be cancelled at the last minute, forcing Constance to scramble at the to teach a course she had not been prepared to teach. 

Dave could also reduce the pool of students for a particular course Constance was scheduled to teach by simply scheduling a high number of sections of the same course in the terms immediately preceding the one in which Constance was scheduled to teach it, so that by the time Constance was supposed to teach it, there were no longer enough students who needed to take it that year to fill the course, and again, it would be cancelled at the last minute due to low enrollment. 

This term, Dave felt he had actually outdone himself. Never before had he devised such a diabolical plan. Constance had had a student for several classes who had become genuinely devoted to her. Constance’s students had a habit of doing that, which irked Dave no end because he had convinced himself (Constance’s teaching evaluations notwithstanding) that Constance was a really shitty teacher. So anyway, Constance had had this student who had wanted to do an independent study with her on religious existentialism, but Dave, as Religious Studies program director, had to approve that plan and he had convinced the disappointed student that Vince was actually the person the student needed to work with. So the student had dutifully done that. Dave had known, of course, that Vince was flat-out allergic to work and that it was unlikely that he’d meet very often with the student, so he went to the student, just after the midterm, to inquire how the independent study was going. 

Dave feigned exaggerated concern when the student complained that he had been unable to arrange more than one meeting with Vince. “Oh that is not good!” Dave had replied, realizing, as he rubbed his gnarled hands together gleefully (which gesture the student thought was pretty weird), that he could effectively kill two birds with one stone by getting Vince in trouble for not meeting with the student, even while he would make Constance’s life more difficult by dumping this student on her only a few weeks before the end of the term. Because Constance, he was sure, could not possibly refuse to take on one of her favorite students who had been abandoned by the feckless Vince.

Except, Dave was wrong there. He’d overplayed his hand some time ago, though he didn’t realize it until Constance, who had finally gotten wise to his tricks, refused to take on the responsibility for the independent study so late in the term. She responded politely but firmly that such an act would be a disservice not only to herself, by adding immeasurably to her workload that term, given what would be required to create an entire course included readings and assignments, etc., it would, more importantly, be a disservice to the student, who could not possibly get from the few remaining weeks what he should have been able to get out of a course that ran an entire term. No, Constance had declared firmly, the only thing to do was to get the student a late withdrawal and to allow him to arrange a new independent study with her the next term. 

Dave had not seen that coming. It was bad! That is, Dave was now stuck in the position of leaving the student to the sham independent study with Vince, a course he had directly admitted to Constance was a sham, and about which he feared she might complain to Weasel, or actually allow the student to withdraw and endure the unpleasant grilling about the dwindling enrollments and course offerings in the Religion program in his annual review for that year. The latter, he quickly decided, was the greater threat, because he needed to keep the numbers of students enrolled in Religion courses up in order to keep the program from being axed, and had to that end, actually been arranging an number of these sham independent studies with Vince for some time. 

On the other hand, he’d so defamed Constance to Weasel that he felt he could be fairly confident that any complaints she might bring to Weasel would fall on deaf ears. And he was right about that, of course. What he hadn’t counted on was taht but by this time, Constance knew he was right about that, so after she learned that Vince had flat-out refused to meet with the student because in his own words (which Dave had quoted in an email to Constance in the hope of coercing her into taking on the responsibility for the independent study), he felt it was a “waste of his time,” and after she learned that the student had received credit for the course, which meant that he’d actually paid tuition for it and that Vince had gotten credit for “teaching” it despite that he had not taught it, she wrote not to Weasel, but to Manny Wahrsagen, the associate dean for academic standards.

The Curriculum Committee

There were three people from the religion half of the department and three people from the philosophy half of the department on the curriculum committee. The three religion scholars were Constance Alethea, Dave Denial, and Frank Forkedtongue, and the three philosophers were Tanya Turgid, Dolores Decepcion, and Richard Ressentement. The reader will immediately see the problem with this. First, even if everyone on the committee liked and respected one another, there would still be the slight problem that an even number of members could result tie votes on the matters that came before the committee. 

That the curriculum committee, one of the most notoriously dysfunctional committees in a notoriously dysfunctional department, had an even number of members was not, however, the result of any sort of oversight, but had been diabolically planned by Frank as a way of drawing out committee deliberations interminably and hence giving Frank, who had only ever published one paper, and that co-authored, an excuse for why he didn’t publish more. That is, Frank’s repeated failures to publish anything else had convinced him that he needed to conceive of himself as a kind of administrator, even though for most of his tenure at Cliff Edge, he had not actually held any kind of administrative position. 

Of course that sort of argument would not have been persuasive to the other members of the bylaws committee when they were considering the structure of the various department committees, so Frank had hit upon the rationale that an even number of members would prevent a tyranny of the majority, so to speak. A five or seven member committee, he had explained, would have enabled the majority of three or four to force course changes on the disempowered minority of two or three. The logic was impeccable, and in a department where bullying was out of control and where people were thus sensitive to potential opportunities to fall victim to it, and where no one much cared about the future of the curriculum anyway, the specter of a completely ineffectual deadlocked committee held no horrors. 

Even Willard Weasel had approved of this novel approach to faculty governance, since his main job, he knew, as head of this dysfunctional department was too keep the dysfunction from filtering up to the level of the dean, or God forbid, the provost. Anything that would keep the faculty preoccupied with sniping at one another rather than at upper-level administrators outside the department seemed a good thing. Unfortunately for Willard, things did not go as planned with the curriculum committee. 

Dave had had it in for Constance ever since she’d leap-frogged over him to a tenure-track position while he’d been forced to remain at the level of a mere “instructor.” They’d actually been friends in grad school, not close, or anything like that, but they’d hung out together and had been a source of mutual moral support when both had been on the job market. They’d both come to Cliff Edge as “instructors,” which was a non-tenure-line position with twice the teaching load of the tenure-line faculty. Constance had succeeded, however, in securing a tenure track position. Both Dave and Constance were good scholars, but Constance had had the advantage of being a woman at a time when “diversity hires” were all important. So even though both had applied for the tenure-track position in religion when one had opened up, it was Constance who got it. This was not Constance’s fault, of course, but once Frank had hung the “kick me” sign on Constance’s back, she became the most natural target for Dave’s anger at having been passed over, and indeed for his anger at all the tenure-line professors who despite trumpeting what they believed to be their progressive bone fides, could not have been more conspicuously contemptuous of the “instructors” and adjuncts who made up what is known in the profession as the “contingent” faculty, which is to say the faculty who did not enjoy the job security of tenured faculty. 

Dave was one angry dude. To be fair, he had a lot to be angry about. He was every bit as good a scholar as most of the tenure-line faculty in the department, and even better than some. He was also a dedicated teacher, but he labored under an absolutely debilitating teaching load, so his work on his magnum opus, the book he hoped would make him famous: Queering Heaven, was progressing with glacial slowness, while Constance, who had had half the teaching load since she’d moved to the tenure track, was already on her third book and seemed to publish at least one new scholarly article every year. 

Dave hated pretty much everyone in the department. His most intense hatred was directed toward the tenure-line faculty, but he also hated all the female instructors and adjuncts, whom he believed relied on their husbands’ incomes for living expenses and viewed their own meager salaries as sufficient for “mad money.” Of course there weren’t really many women in such situations but that didn’t keep Dave’s over-active imagination from assuming that most of them were. He generally liked the male instructors and adjuncts, since they were the one group to whom he could feel comfortably superior, unless they failed to commiserate with him over the injustice of their respective fates, in which case he hated them too. 

Dave would never admit he hated anyone, though. He liked to think of himself as a good guy, socially conscious, liberal, progressive, and all that. He went out of his way, as religion program director, to make sure women were represented in the various course syllabi, even while he secretly loathed and despised most actual flesh and blood women, but again, this was something he would never admit to himself. His particular cause was LGBTQ rights. He was always championing this cause, challenging as that was at an institution such as Cliff Edge that had almost no LGBTQ students or faculty.

Dave had decided Cliff Edge needed a 200-level indigenous religions class. Frank had put him up to that, whether Dave realized that this was yet another attempt on Frank’s part to piss off Constance, who had several times lamented that they didn’t have anyone qualified to teach such a class, or whether the fact that he, Dave, saw it as yet another opportunity for him to harass and bully Constance is hard to say. Dave repressed a lot.

So anyway, Frank wrote up the proposal for the new course, and Dave brought it to the curriculum committee for a vote. In the meantime, however, unbeknownst to either Frank or Dave, but beknownst to Constance, the department had just received permission for a new hire, and Constance was elated at the thought that they could finally get an actual specialists in the field of indigenous religions. So when Dave presented Frank’s new course proposal to the committee, Constance politely opposed it on the grounds that since the college curriculum committee required that new courses could be proposed only by full-time faculty with a demonstrated competence to teach them, they should first argue for the new hire to be an expert in indigenous religions and only after they had appointed such a person, should they propose the new course. 

That was when all hell broke loose. Frank had several times included indigenous religions in his 100-level “Introduction to the Study of Religions” course and had begun to think of himself as an expert in this area. Of course he wasn’t. He simply made up everything he said about indigenous religions. He didn’t realize he was doing this, of course. He viewed himself as sort of channeling the spirit of the peoples whom he had come to think of as his ancestors, and without an expert to contradict him, he could basically say anything he wanted. Frank liked that. He liked being king of his classroom, so the specter of a new hire who could actually expose his teaching for what, he knew on some level, it was —i.e., a complete fabrication — was profoundly disturbing to him. 

Tanya was the chair of the curriculum committee. Her discipline was philosophy, but she and Constance had discussed the need for an expert in indigenous religions. They were both very excited when they learned that the department had been given permission for a new hire because there was basically no difference between indigenous religions and indigenous philosophies, so they could advertise the position as in either philosophy or religion and in that way increase the likelihood of getting a really good hire, a hire who would straddle both disciplines in the department (because the religions course could be cross-listed as a philosophy course) and hence enhance the department as a whole. 

On the other hand, if they put through a proposal for a new 200-level course on indigenous religions, the college curriculum committee, which is to say the dean of the college of arts and sciences, and eventually the senate committee on academic matters, which is to say the provost, would assume that they already had a full-time person competent to teach such a course, and they’d never get approval for a hire in that area. The new hire would go to someone in liturgical studies, or the Protestant reformation, or some other area that students could not care less about and would not help the department as a whole at all. No, the new hire had to be an expert in indigenous religions. That was the only way they could expand both the religion program and the philosophy program at the same time. 

But Dave dug in his heels. When both Tanya and Constance pointed out that Frank’s forays into indigenous religions in his into to the study of religion class didn’t qualify him to teach a 200-level course in which he had no graduate training and no publications, Dave disingenuously argued that even if Frank didn’t have the competence to teach a 200-level class on idigenous religions, Vince did have such training and that he was willing to affix his name to the new course proposal, even though Frank had been the one who’d actually written it. 

Vince didn’t have any such training, of course, but he knew what side his bread was buttered on. He wasn’t tenured yet, and Frank had been on his mid-tenure review committee. He’d seen Frank go after colleagues he didn’t like, so he was determined to get on Frank’s good side and stay there. Vince’s area of specialization was environmental ethics and there were indeed strong tie-with indigenous religions so he looked like he might be competent to teach a 200-level course in that area. He had no plans actually to do that, however, because that would have meant adding a second course to his pedagogical repertoire, and that, in turn, would have cut into his “research” time. He knew, though, that all he had to do was to be willing to append his name to the proposal and that once the course had been formally approved, he would not be required to teach it, that Frank could teach it, or that they could just farm it out to an adjunct.

The committee was deadlocked for weeks. It had been the men against the women. Once Dolores, who was notorious for her bullying and harassment of other female faculty, tired of the debates, however, she threw her lot in with the Dave, Frank, and Richard cartel. The proposal for the new 200-level indigenous religions class taught by Vince Viscous passed with a vote of 4 to 2. 

Tanya and Constance were, to put it mildly, livid! Both were young enough to actually care about the future of the department and the quality of the education they provided to their students. Both suspected that Vince not only did not have the competence to teach a course on indigenous religions, but that he wasn’t going to teach it anyway once the course had actually been formally approved, so they simultaneously drafted an email to Manny to that effect so that he would be prepared when the proposal came to the college curriculum committee.

They also drafted a complaint to the Office of Equity and Diversity that the men on the committee had harassed and bullied the women until they’d succeeded in getting one to vote with them. They pointed out as well, that adding a course on indigenous religions to the curriculum when they had no one who specialized in that field could potentially offend native American students, of which Cliff Edge had quite a few because of a special scholarship fund that had been set up by a native American alumna who was the head of a small oil company in Oklahoma. 

Cliff Edge didn’t really care much about sexism, which was pervasive throughout the school. It did care, however, about offending native Americans, and cared even more about offending a particularly wealthy donor, whom Tanya and Constance had intimated in their email might inadvertently learn of this slight to her heritage. 

And Manny cared very much about catching Vince in a deception.