February 12, 2020

Cloudy morning, the calling of crows.

Though Circe was the gentlest soul on earth, she must have repressed Maud in some way, for she is now settling into her role as sole chatelaine, occupying spaces she didn’t occupy, following me about and cuddling as was not her wont.

My credit card bill tells me I spent $500 on submission fees in the last period. Three times that on a sick cat; $500 on a new lap top which I have not yet taken out of the box.

Jeff wondered in the church kitchen why UNCA has become a second-rate enterprise. He’s running tests and making charts to see why our retention late is low and getting lower. He says, “I blame the new faculty.” I see how it is possible to blame new faculty, but I think the larger problem is that new faculty are not only not encouraged to greatness, but discouraged–at least by the culture-- from attempting it. When I arrived, critical thinking, intellectual courage, experimentation, boldness, high standards were expected. All of those things are perilous now. The cause of this descent is mission creep on the part of administration, which has exercised every opportunity to interfere with operations that in a good school would be strictly hands off to them. Administration has no right to a say in academic operations (though the faculty has an excellent right to say in administrative matters), and the reversal of this at my institution has ended its career as a meaningful center of learning. The problem is insecurity and uncertainty on the part of faculty, which makes us scamper like rats to what dark safety we imagine is provided. Insecurity on the part of the faculty is visible to the students, who then assume–alas, rightly–that they are attending a second-rather institution. Administration wants to run the university as though it were WalMart, a happy experience where every customer gets what she wants and never has reason to learn a thing. I’m sure this is clear, in various stages, to everyone. No one wants to say it, because Academic Speech and Freedom of Expression were among the first to go.