One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Sigmund Freud
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I side with Easterly.On a side note, the familiar reader may know that Bowling Green (Ohio) State University extended my first academic job offer, the proverbial road not taken. I loved BGSU and came close to accepting the offer (and almost certainly would have been tenured there). The deciding issue was UWM gave me an opportunity to teach graduate school classes and had an MIS PhD program. I knew almost instantly I made the wrong decision. My very first semester the (informal department chair--technically the business school wasn't departmentalized, at least while I was there) threatened my own tenure process when I privately criticized one of his students' incompetent dissertation proposals. There were other things that happened at UWM, but DH's threat was an unthinkable breach of professional ethics. (The student's (DM) proposal was a mess; he had hoped to use DH's contacts at nearby Wisconsin Bell to do an experimental test with employees (something I knew would never happen) and he had a backup plan of using student subjects. He had some vacuous hypotheses that improved information would result in better decisions, but almost nothing was spelled out: specifics on how the study would be operationalized, statistical power, etc. I personally liked the doctoral candidate, but I urged him to withdraw his underdeveloped proposal, because I knew it would be shredded by a competent faculty. He declined, pointing out that he wanted to job hunt in academia and nobody would taken him seriously without a defended proposal.)
DH had arranged for a dog-and-pony show at WB (not related to the thesis); since I was new to the area, an MIS grad student CK (not yet doctoral candidate--and there's an entirely different corrupt incident involving him) offered me a ride. Somehow we ended up in different groups with his tour preceding mine, and when my group finished, he was gone. DH offered me a ride home. I lived in an apartment within a mile or so (walking distance) from campus. Within 5 miles or so of my apartment, DH abruptly mentioned that he knew I had had a discussion with DM about his dissertation proposal. He paid lip service to DM needing to address my valid criticisms of the proposal. And then he said, and these words are burned into my memory, "You know, you have no vote in your own tenure process."
He then went on to say that he had recruited PN, a well-known organizational behavior professor I had not met in person, onto DM's dissertation committee, and PN had been marching orders to take me out if I dared to open up my mouth at DM's dissertation defense. I had no idea if DH was making this shit up, if he was just trying to intimidate me.
This had shaken me to my core. This was naked power politics against a rookie professor, a breach of ethics I had never even heard of or imagined earning 4 degrees at 3 different universities. Now I may not have checked out DM's proposal when it was frozen, except for some reason, DM had repeatedly refused, apparently under DH's orders, to discuss or see a draft of his proposal. I never had a clue the proposal was worse than anything I could imagine; what it did do is provoke my curiosity over what DH was trying to hide. But there would be a day of reckoning--the freeze period when DH couldn't infringe on my rights to check out a copy.
Now, to be frank, I was a cocky young professor and researcher. There had been some rumors of adversaries of troublemakers showing up at my dissertation defense, and my response was, "Bring it on!" I was not intimidated by the threat of PN being DH's attack dog and trying to make me, rather DM's fetid proposal, the issue. I would have questioned how PN, sitting on DM's committee, had failed to critique that steaming pile of cow patties, a breach of professional responsibilities.
The problem was that PN and other professors would also have votes on my own tenure, not to mention if DH decided to oppose my tenure, I would almost certainly be denied.
The fact of the matter is that I had no power in the situation; I wouldn't be on the PhD faculty for another semester (I was one of the first, if not only rookie professor to achieve that, and I'm almost certain that resulted in a policy change that automatically gave that status, earned or unearned, to faculty after their first year). All DM had to do was get the committee's sign-offs. Perhaps the best I could have hoped for was to embarrass the student and committee enough to postpone accepting the proposal. But I was convinced that if I had done so, it would have been interpreted as some sort of personal vendetta against the student. I attended the defense but didn't see a need to repeat my criticisms; I had already made my points. If the committee signed off on it, they alone bore responsibility. I would not have.
But I knew I was done; the question wasn't whether if I would leave UWM, but when. I don't know if I ever checked back with BGSU, but they never touched back after I passed on their offer. (I think they attributed my decision to a scheduling issue that almost resulted in my missing the last flight out which would get me in Houston via connections. Nope, but it didn't help that my escort had to gas up on the way. I literally had to run to the gate, and the door was closed.) I was now willing to set aside my preference for a research university; I wanted a refuge from university politics.
I had a 3-year contract with UWM. If I had had another offer during that period, I would have left earlier. The only positive thing was I did get to teach graduate classes, but my favorite was teaching human factors in IT during my last year in academia (visiting professor, ISU). I took an offer from UTEP, which was a mistake: they desperately wanted my resume in their AACSB (accreditation) application. I had the (non-MIS) department chair from hell. Once they won accreditation (and I don't claim credit for that, but I was only the second MIS professor with a publication record), I was so miserable there, I went on a campus visit (job interview) to northern Louisiana (no offer) during final exam week my first semester (not my choice).
The UTEP MIS faculty, outside me (recall I had initial intentions to enter the celibate priesthood),was colorful The other research professor (MM) was rumored to have engaged in plagiarism in his last appointment and bragged about having sex with a well-known female MIS professor while they were grad students at Texas Tech (he literally joked about it: he said, "What else is there to do in Lubbock?") [he brought up the topic; I knew who the woman was, but I didn't knew they attended college together], and the rumor going around about our Latino colleague was the university was trying to reach him one day, and a coed answered the phone at his hotel room.
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Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne via Townhall |
