{"id":1846,"date":"2010-05-18T20:47:19","date_gmt":"2010-05-19T00:47:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1846"},"modified":"2010-05-18T20:47:19","modified_gmt":"2010-05-19T00:47:19","slug":"crabby-comments-from-a-higher-ed-union-activist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1846","title":{"rendered":"Crabby comments from a higher-ed union activist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m in a slightly cranky mood from spending most of the last two days&#8217; work hours on copyediting. This says little about the material I was copyediting and more about the nature of the task (and why I did not get a job to spend <em>all<\/em> of my time copyediting). So I&#8217;m ending the day in a crabby mood and still want to be productive, but I may not want to contact any people about current issues. So it&#8217;s time for crabby comments about situations that popped up in the semi-distant past (at least 12 months ago), and I&#8217;ll refer to them vaguely enough that they could apply to all sorts of situations. If you think any of the following is about you, you&#8217;re probably wrong.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Did you realize that if you hadn&#8217;t tried the procedural short-cut, you would have won the argument on the merits?<\/li>\n<li>You can probably get away with half of the stuff you&#8217;re loading on your faculty. Which half do you care about?&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>The union has membership, staff, institutional memory, and access to lawyers. We&#8217;re plum out of magic wands.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>I know you&#8217;ve got a Ph.D. and a winning smile, but other people can remember things, too, and sometimes we check factual claims.<\/li>\n<li>Your hallway is not the whole university.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t care what Gordon&#8217;s or Drew&#8217;s trustees let them do. &nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;ve got several very smart administrators in your office. We&#8217;ve got several hundred members. Maybe you could outthink the lot of us, but your behavior makes me suspect you&#8217;ve never played a role-playing game.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>If wishes were fishes and gripes were wet wipes&#8230; no, let&#8217;s not go there.<\/li>\n<li>Yes, you&#8217;ve got academic freedom and I&#8217;ll defend that to the hilt, but it may not be wise for assistant professors to run up a large debt in deviance credits. The interest alone is murder.<\/li>\n<li>You didn&#8217;t take advantage of the opportunity when it was in your lap, and you&#8217;re now hoping the expired opportunity returns and doubles or triples in size. On your way out, could you please pick up my jaw and hand it back to me?<\/li>\n<li>I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate you. &nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Your strategic vision appears to rely on throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. Pardon my brashness, but not even the most tendentious Soviet\/corporate five-year plan has had &#8220;al dente&#8221; as a bullet point.<\/li>\n<li>I see you&#8217;re trying out the new Elizabeth Taylor fragrance, &#8220;Entitlement.&#8221; I may be overstepping the bounds of friendship by saying this, but I think you&#8217;ve applied a bit too much.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ll give you 10 out of 10 for venomous intent, but my long-term exposure to teenagers has immunized me.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m sure I can take this horrible day and turn it into a conference presentation or article.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My thanks to G.K.R. for the model.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m in a slightly cranky mood from spending most of the last two days&#8217; work hours on copyediting. This says little about the material I was copyediting and more about the nature of the task (and why I did not get a job to spend all of my time copyediting). So I&#8217;m ending the day [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-academic-life","category-union"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-tM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}