Sigh

I'm too tired/lazy/annoyed to look for the old posts, but I know I've mentioned several times about my dislike for my department chair. As I said before, it's not necessarily him as a person that I have a problem with (although I'm starting to reconsider this); it's him as a manager. He is a terrible chair - he plays favorites, doesn't stand up for us when there are issues, gossips about us in front of other employees, forgets to pass on important information about deadlines and meetings (not sure if this is intentional or not), and shirks his chair responsibilities (he pushes the work onto the three of us in the department - of course, we don't get paid for any of it, but he does!). He's one of the biggest reasons why both C (the other English prof) and I want to leave the school.

A few months ago, several people from other departments approached us and mentioned that DC had made a remark in front of ten or so faculty members, and several admin assistants, about how M (the other member of our department) was the only one of the three of us who actually does any real work (and he didn't say it in a joking way). Of course, it's all hearsay, but taking into consideration DC's past actions and the trustworthiness of the other faculty members who told us about the incident, I completely believe it's true (so does C). Not only was his comment inappropriate and insulting, it's also untrue in so many ways. M is one of those people who will be at school from 8AM-11PM everyday - and no, he's not actually working all of that time. He takes long naps! Yes, he's at school 12-15 hours a day, but anywhere between 3-4 hours of that time is spent sleeping. He also leaves for at least an hour a day to go on a run. If that's how he wants to run his life, that's cool with me; however, because DC is so clueless about everything we do, he takes M's hours as a sign that he's far more productive and harder a worker than us. He doesn't look at what he actually does during the day - nooo, it's more important that he's there 12 hours (which, BTW, is not required or even suggested).

Over the last year, both C and I have served on two national curriculum committees. Each of these committees involved 3-4 months of meetings, textbook reviews, conference calls, reports, and lesson planning/reviewing. They involved a crazy amount of work - work that we completed on top of our regular duties (teaching 20 classes per year, training new adjuncts, coordinating the freshmen activities, plagiarism committee, etc.). We've also both received numerous teaching awards (I have received one every year since I've started there). Apparently, none of this means anything - it's more important that we don't sit at school extra hours everyday.

Fast forward to today: we received an email about an upcoming visit from big important curriculum committee employee. He is someone we've all worked with extensively, but only DC has met him in person. The email was from DC and contained curriculum guy's schedule - one that includes a lunch meeting between him, M, and DC. There was no mention of C or me. WTF?!? Why did DC schedule M in on a important meeting having to do with the curriculum work we've all done, but not C or me? Well, we knew the answer - not only are we not in his special favorites club, but we also don't do any work. Of course, that's not anything he could say in front of us when the dean mentioned the meeting, so he just made some stupid excuse about trying to keep the cost down. Total bullshit! The dean, who is a pretty no-nonsense guy, just told him to put us on the schedule. He also said DC could invite a few of the adjuncts who might be interested in taking on some curriculum work in the future. A few minutes later, DC sent out the invite to the adjuncts... and included us in on the email as though we were part of the group who has never been a part of the committees. Arg!

Okay, I'm going to stop ranting now because I'm exhausted and in need of some serious sleep (yes, I'm extra cranky right now). Really, there's no other point to this other than to once again say that DC sucks. Sigh.