Administration

 

February 9, 2024

It was revealed to me that my old studio at the 109 Roberts Street is now an expensive boutique hotel. I wonder what they thought when they got to my studio, filled as it must still have been with paintings and supplies. I rather cherished my illusion that it was still intact, a ghostly tribute to effort that came to nothing.

UNCA announced a six million dollar deficit, and the intent to gut faculty in order to pay for it. The announcement came from the very people who caused the problem, our increasingly incompetent and, sometimes, malicious administration. The doers of the deed wringing their hands over the sad results of the deed is so commonplace as not even to be noticed anymore. Anyone with powers of observation saw it coming. Ever declining generations of chancellors and provosts-- who had not our interests in mind, but their next post-- alternately neglected and undermined what had been a promising institution. Our immediate previous provost so perverted the hiring system that there was no way out of the hole his predecessors had dug. We were among the finest faculties of small colleges in America. The destruction of that legacy was sneering, systematic, and deliberate. In fifteen years we declined from a university to a top-rate high school, then continued downward until we were not even that. We hired cheap, and according to the politics of the hour. Administration was stuffed and then over-stuffed so the seventh vice-provost had nothing to do to justify her existence but make work for other people. Extra administration and pricey consultants were hired to do jobs that a faculty committee could have handled in a month, and then did them wrong. Firing everyone in administration who has nothing vital to do would alone solve the deficit. Actual education was disabled at every turn, insofar as it interrupted the smooth sale of degrees. If the faculty would just get out of the way and let the administration hand students the diplomas they’d paid for everything would be fine. Education was a joke to be laughed at over the heads of the naive. Scholarship and critical thinking  became irritations. When I retired we were a degree sales operation and no longer a university. It’s grown worse since then. My professional life as an educator was devoted to an institution being intentionally sabotaged at the other end. It is unforgivable. It is a waste of time, energy, and the aspiration of students; the hard stands beyond calculation. The hope that the right people will be blamed is probably vain. They will fail upward, as they always have.