UMass Boston Faculty Leadership Fellows - Call for Applications
A new and unique opportunity for would-be administrators
This email landed in our mailboxes on March 6:
Dear Colleagues,
I, your illustrious Provost Borg, am excited to announce the Faculty Leadership Fellows Program. Are you a tenured faculty member who has given up on scholarly productivity and effective teaching but is still too young to retire? Have you always dreamed of a cushy job with a nice salary that increases in direct proportion to your ability to screw up the simplest of missions? Does the title “Associate vice Provost” or “Assistant vice chancellor” have a nice ring next to your name? certainly nicer than “deadwood”, right?
If so, you are invited to apply to the faculty leadership fellow program, AKA the place where academic careers, self-respect and reputation go to die. The lucky winners will have the immense pleasure and privilege of being paired with an administrative mentor for the semester; they will shadow the mentor and do everything the mentor does (make sure to bring your favorite book and your deck of cards. You’ll need them). Selected fellows will receive a stipend of $2,000 that we have cut out of our toilet paper supply and our printing budget.
The lucky fellows will have opportunities to learn about a range of extremely important and intellectually stimulating ways to engage in micromanagement, top-down communication and the art of ass-covering, as honed and perfected by our Supreme Leaders. Among the skills you will learn are the following:
Academic leadership - learn a suite of essential skills: how to chart a mission statement and a strategic initiative that are so DEI-focused that we no longer look like a university; how to communicate your decisions top-down while blocking all avenues of engagement and, most importantly, how to babble for hours while saying nothing at all and how to save effort by recycling your speeches ad infinitum.
Data-informed assessment and planning - learn how to royally screw up every important component of the university such as the university website, the university no-dining club, the underwhelming quad and the never ending construction, while babbling on and on about health promotion and accessibility as a distraction.
Ethical decision makingcancelled, due to lack of experience by our Leaders.Shared governance - Learn from me, your illustrious Provost, how to enrich your vocabulary with words like “as we work collaboratively towards being the architects of our own future”, ”creating time and space for meaningful dialogues with each of you as valued campus leaders”, “the future we are charting together”, and “establish new avenues for collaboration and leadership” to disguise the fact that all your decisions are completely one-sided, with zero transparency and dialog.
Inclusive excellence - learn how to set students up for
failure, sorry, inclusive excellence by making admission SAT optional and making sure the math placement test remains unproctored, so that students will be able to cheat on the test and continue to pay and pay for courses they have no chance of passing.Effective responsiveness to constituents - learn from the me, your illustrious Provost, how to avoid all communications with faculty by instructing IT to automatically direct all faculty e-mails to your spam folder.
Budgeting - a special session by former Chancellor J. Keith Motley on how to run a university budget to the ground in a few short years.
Personnel (micro)management - learn from our entire chain of command how to effectively micromanage your faculty and staff by tasking them with meaningless “initiatives” or useless administrative tasks, to distract them from doing their academic work and drain away their energy to confront you about your poor management skills.
Conflict resolution - learn how to bring internal conflicts to the forefront of respectable news outlets like the WGBH, Daily Mail, Fox News and the Boston Globe by forging fights with your faculty whenever they dare question your Supreme leadership, unlimited authority or the fact that we are a university and not a Marxist training camp. Bonus: Learn to avoid some conflicts by remaining silent on campus antisemitism.
Come with us, learn from the best! And if, after all is said and done, you’ll find out that you still have some juice left in you, you can always go back to the faculty.
You hit the nail on the head!
As a former UMB faculty, I found some of these blogs slightly amusing at first. But now I just find them whiny and predictable. It’s too bad all this academic talent possessed by the author is wasted on coming up with new ways to complain. Or maybe the real problem is there’s no academic talent to waste and this is all he (no doubt this is a man) can do. Very sad.