This was going to be "A thing that happened" but it was overshadowed by my university

I'll never get used to writing on a delay, but until I physically have primary computer I worry about the blog going dark so I'm spacing things out in an effort to make it so there's a steady content stream.

Even if that content isn't always the most interesting (e.g. something seems to be in my walls.)

I've been recommending Jeannine Diddle Uzzi's translation of Catullus (made in collaboration with poet Jeffrey Thomson because if you want to translate poetry right it helps to have a poet on hand) lately because opportunities keep coming up, talking about lost work someone brings up Obscenities in the Greek and Roman Languages (by the same Librarian who wrote the salacious* The Twelve Caesars) and that led to Catullus being mentioned because he's one of the reasons we still know some decent profanity.

Before that it was talking about mental vs physical illness, because she helped me through some very hard times and I figured I'd throw in, "By the way, her translation of Catullus is out now."

Don't remember what it was before that.

So I went to her facebook page, and asked if I could get a signed copy because ... wahoo!, that's why.

While there I read some of the stuff on her page, a lot was about her getting a new position at my university.  You may recall me mentioning, I hope with enough profanity that Catullus would approve, that she was fired (technically illegally retrenched) without cause last year on Halloween.  It was a part of the university's then-current policy of self immolation.

She didn't get her old job back, unfortunately.  So Classics is still dead at this time.  She was hired as Provost and VP for Academic Affairs.  I don't even know what that means.  But I do know that bad provots were a problem in the past and a lack of attention paid to or care given about academic affairs (it's a university for fucks sake) is the single biggest problem that the institution has had.

So hopefully she can work on salvage and improvement, because we used to be a great school.  Something the people tearing it down never seemed to understand is that the University of Southern Maine was far better than it had any right to be.  An underfunded public school should never have had teachers that good or programs that impressive.  The people they ditched weren't there for the money because they deserved (and had what it took to get) higher paying jobs elsewhere, they were there for the students and the university.

That kind of thing can't be bought back, though if we can get back the people who were booted, that'll get it back.  But that's probably too much to hope for.

Even if we could convince people to hire them all back (or it was ordered in court) a lot of people need to eat.  After getting shit-canned they looked for new jobs

In March Jeanine started work as Director of Faculty Programs at the Associated Colleges of the South.  USM is not in the South.  They wanted her to move to, I think, Georgia.  Since the job didn't actually require her to be there in person she managed to get them to let her stay in Maine, but if she had been forced to move to, I think, Georgia, she wouldn't have been able to simply move back.

As it was she had already sold her home before getting the news that there might yet be a future for her at USM and needed to find a place (or places) for her entire family to crash between then and when her getting the position was finalized because she couldn't just go out and get a permanent place to live on the possibility of a job here.

Anyway, the Associated Colleges of the South lost a great employee, though they did get some solid months out of her, and for the first time in forever something happened that gives me hope for USM.  In these past years the closest we had to good news was that bad things had been prevented, delayed, or reduced.

So, you know how it says in the title that this was just going to be "A thing that happened"?

One of the comments about her getting back at USM was

The Phoenix rises. You rock, Jeannine!

Fuck yeah.  USM's primary campus is in Portland.  Portland is a city that had a habit of being burned down.  (There were some wars, and some accidents.)  The seal has a phoenix rising from the ashes** and the only thing written other than "City of Portland, Maine" is "Resurgam" across the top.  Resurgam means I (feminine singular) shall rise again.

This made me think that the defunct USM Classics Club needs new t-shirts something along the lines of "We shall rise again," perhaps with a subtitle of something like "no matter how long it takes"

This has problems.  "We shall rise again," is easy.  Resurgēmus

Problem: I've definitely forgotten whatever words would be needed for no matter how long it takes or equivalent, so I stood up with purpose and asked the world, "Where the fuck is my Cassell's" and started to search.

And that is a thing that happened.

I'm open for suggestions on what should be the sub-motto under RESURGEMUS.  Preferably something more optimistic than "Eventually... I hope" (Aliquando ... spero***)

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* When you work in the greatest library of your time you know all the dirt and all the smears.

** Don't bother looking up the seal.  Even though I know it's supposed to depict a phoenix rising from the ashes, it still looks like just a random bird to me.  It'll probably look the same to you.

*** That's actually "At some point ... I hope," because I'm not sure how to render "eventually" more directly.

Sunday Sermonizing: An American Tune

I made a video.  Photos and video from the goings on at my university set to music

The song is Paul Simon's American Tune as preformed by him in 2011.

Obviously the pictures of articles are ... you know, pictures of articles.  Most of the photos of students, and most of the video of students, comes from this day.  The first bit of video of students, however, is from when students we kept out of a public building by handcuffing the doors shut.*

The "Don't have a friend who feels at ease" series of shots zooming in on someone's door were taken on the most recent day I was at the university.  I had stop by to pick something up, and I noticed that they hadn't torn down her signage yet.  Still her door, still her bulletin board.

Classics being cut never really made the paper the way that French did.  The reason is not, as you might think, that cutting French in Maine** was so shocking it made news, but rather that they had to vote to cut French.  Classics, on the other hand, was cut without a vote.  As were various other programs including every single (non-French) language program.

The reason they could get away with cutting those programs without a vote was that they'd been doing some bureaucratic shuffling for quite some time which kept the programs from being officially recognized as programs.

Anyway, pictures of the office of a teacher who has been terminated.  She was mentioned in a recent article, so have a quote:

One of my most exemplary colleagues teaches classics, and we’ve shared many students. Her students learn Latin and translation; they learn a different way to view the world, and a closer and more critical way to read the information around them. They learn to make sense of themselves and their lives in new ways. Just recently, she proctored a reading group of veterans who read Homer’s Odyssey together. It was an experience that helped all of them see their experiences in a new way. It was a surprising and transformative experience. It was the kind of experience that universities make available to those in their communities. But it was, apparently, “grandiose.” That colleague, Jeannine Uzzi, who recently published her second book with Cambridge University Press and has only begun what will be a long and distinguished career, was retrenched recently, in USM’s rush to stop trying to be a “flagship.”

The "wonder what's gone wrong" pictures of the Board of Trustees, featuring President Flanagan, are from the meeting where over 70 people, including myself, came to speak out against certain cuts because they were economically harmful (cut something that turns a profit and you end up deeper in debt) and morally repugnant (I could go on for ages.)  No one on the board responded to a single point raised in public testimony.  Some didn't even listen to it (Flanagan was having a side conversation with a member of the BoT during the part where someone explained the negative effect the cuts would have on providing healthcare to children of color.)

I've already pointed out that the rest of the video is from this day.

The "the ship they call the Mayflower" picture is just pointing out that they cut American and New England studies.

The "the ship that sailed the moon" is a picture of, and article about, the professor that had an asteroid named after her.  Not named one after herself, that hardly merits note, had the International Astronomical Union choose to name it after her (much to her surprise.)  Probably for her contribution to knowledge of comets.  (I guess a comet wasn't available so they gave her an asteroid instead.)  She was, of course, let go.

We can afford to pay two university presidents at once (high level administrators are never fired for incompetence, they're replaced but paid for the rest of their contract) but can't afford someone whose name is written in the stars.

I fucked up the formatting of the article trying to get it to fit nicely, and as a result if you pause and read the article you'll see the words "ago. Ziffer was part of the team that" before and after a line break.  Not a big problem (better than something getting left out) but it means on your initial read your brain will try to parse the sentence "Ziffer was part of the team that ago," which cannot be parsed.

And I think that about covers everything.

Next semester's going to be another working day.

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* Things to note:

• The doors had locks.  Using handcuffs was entirely to send a message.
• There never would have been that many students if they'd been allowed in the building; forcing them to stay outside caused them to draw a crowd, myself included.
• The building in question houses the law school and the administrative offices but the two are largely separated by floor.  If the administrators had really wanted to hide they could have locked down their floor (the penthouse) without disrupting the law school.  Instead they forced the law students to all file through a much smaller side door, which was never intended to service the entire building, where they were each individually confronted by police who were tasked with making sure that they really did have pressing business in the building.  After half a day of seeing the law students treated like criminals, the person in charge of the law school decided to cancel classes.  Said person: not consulted on the whole shutting down the building in which the school resides.
• Note the "after half a day" thing in the last point?  Students, being students, need to attend classes.  The demonstration was at it's greatest point during a 15 minute break between classes and, in its entirety, lasted about two hours.  The armed guards were there all day.  The main entrance was closed to the public all day (though in the afternoon it was un-handcuffed and simply guarded by police officers with batons out.)  The secondary entrance was closed to the public all day.  The tertiary entrance was closed to the public, save law students who were subject rigorous verification that they were law students with classes at that time and not simply impostors who were trying to sneak passed the armed guards, during the first half of the day, and closed to the public entirely during the second half.
• The parking lot, where the protest did not take place, was closed all day.  The only cars were police cars.  The only people who set foot in it were police officers who did a very good job of looking perpetually pissed off.  The reasoning for this has never sufficiently been explained.
• I've often felt forsaken, and certainly misused.

** First you have to realize that cutting French at USM cut the major system-wide and is going to seriously fuck up the French teacher supply in the state.

Second you have to realize how important French is in Maine.  Where I live French is mostly spoken by recent immigrants.  That is not why Maine has so many French speakers though.  Maine's Francophone culture runs deep.

It has to do with Acadia.

Acadia was a French colony.  It included New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, parts of eastern Quebec, and most of Maine.  (I live in the extreme south west of Maine, which was not part of Acadia.)

The French settlers allied with native tribes.  Some members of those tribes speak French still.  Those are the deepest roots you'll find, French speakers whose families have been here for as long as there have been people here.

The largest portion of French speakers trace their roots to the French settlers themselves, of course.

The border of what is now Maine took a long time to get solidified.  That didn't just mean absorbing parts of Acadia, well after Acadia had ceased to exist there was a dispute over exactly where the border was and so there were parts of modern Canada that people considered parts of Maine and parts of modern Maine that people considered parts of Canada.

That only partially matters because British rule of the entire area was solidified by 1763.  That sort of stopped French people from coming in large numbers to settle in areas that would eventually become part of Maine.

In fact, it led to an exodus, (more from the other parts of Acadia than from Maine, though.)

The exodus resulted in the creation of Cajun culture in Louisiana.

Which brings us to how many people in Maine are French speakers, as compared to the rest of the USA.  It, like so many things, depends on precisely how you count.  Maine might have the highest proportion of French speakers of any state if you count one way.  Or, if you count another way, it's second to Louisiana.

Sunday Sermonizing: At the BoT meeting

I still haven't written up anything on the Board of Trustees meeting that students crashed.  So in place of that, and in case I never get to that, have this video from said meeting.  These are the voices of the student body at my university.

Quick response to the BoT meeting yesterday

At some point I want to do a proper write up, but until then here's what I posted on Facebook last night.

So, after the BoT got up and ran away (for a five minute adjournment that lasted way longer than five minutes) and we took their chairs (because ... I don't know, someone near me suggested it), we had some very good calm, reasonable discussion about the problems we see in their decision making process.

For once the person quoting the Letter from Birmingham Jail wasn't me. Always a good place to go when people feel that a direct action campaign is untimely, disruptive, and/or rude.

After a while of discussion regarding accounting, the importance of higher education, the future of the university, the value of fact based decision making processes, and so forth we yielded the floor to the BOT who listened to a presentation on accounting and then asked questions that demonstrated that they don't know what accounting is. (Flanagan was the most embarrassing.)

When the meeting was over (technically adjorned to executive session at another location), one of the trustees came up to me and said that it's good that students are showing up because now there are differing ideas on the board instead of thoughtless unanimity. He expressed hope that with more work things can turn out well. Which is more hope than I usually get from a member of the BoT.

Also, they always have Coca-Cola (classic and diet) and the best food on campus. This time they had some really nice ham sandwiches. I recommend that everyone show up at BoT meetings and get fed.

Apparently being snubbed is the same as being happily talked to

Correction: Someone said it was the provost, it was in fact the executive director of public affairs Chris Quint.  Which makes more sense because I was pretty sure the reporter called him, "Chris," and the provost is named James.  I have corrected the following to reflect that.

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I wasn't going to talk about my university today, I figure that everyone's been hearing enough about it.  That said, this one is sort of new for me.

At least three TV news stations were sharing equipment and a reporter.  This led to some unnaturally long pauses, especially when some of the stations had everything they wanted and others not so much.

That's not really a problem since nothing was live anyway.  But it does sort of leave people standing around not sure what to do while wires are being connected and disconnected, microphones being added, removed, or adjusted, and so forth.

So here's what happened:

There was a press conference.  It ended.  The executive director of public affairs unexpectedly gave an unscheduled interview.  That was on my way home so I stopped to watch.  Apart from the two cameramen, one reporter, and the PR guy there was no one there but me.  The interview got put on hold so that the equipment from various news agencies could be disentangled and one of the cameramen could go home.

After the interview was put on hold and the PR guy was left standing there looking like he had no idea what to do.  After a little bit of that, and when it became clear that it was going to take several minutes before the interview could resume, I asked him a question.

He responded, nicely enough, with mostly vacuous boilerplate but also a promise that he'd grant me an interview when he finished with the TV news.  He didn't say that he'd do it "happily", he said that he "would be happy to" but the post title really does sum up what happened.

So he went back to standing there looking like he had no idea what to do and things went back to silence.  There aren't crickets in that area, you see.  Other places I pass on my walk home there are all kinds of bug noise, but in that particular spot not a damn thing.

Every so often a leaf fell.  It is fall, after all.

I seriously wondered if he knew what it meant for an interview to be on hold while he did his befuddled mannequin impression.

Eventually everything was sorted out, the reporter resumed the interview, and it ended not long after.  He did a half turn, shot me a dirty look, turned the remaining ninety degrees, and walked away.

During the time after he promised me an interview but before the on-hold interview resumed, another spectator had shown up.  I mentioned to her that I didn't feel like I was being happily talked to.

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I'm not surprised that he lied to me.  The words he said felt like something he had practiced a thousand times to the point that he didn't even attach meaning to the words but just saw it as a rote response.

That said, I was prepared to pull my notebook out of my bag (my pen was already out) and preform a legitimate interview.  It's probably been a decade since I interviewed anyone and that was done via email and about a game.  A good game, but still a game.  This would have been an interview with someone in power on the front lines of what is a national issue in the United States.  And, of course, now that I have Stealing Commas I actually have a place to publish an interview.

But it wasn't to be.  If there is one thing this administration has made clear, it is that they have no intention of being honest with students.  This just shows that they are, at least, consistently dishonest.

Personal Testimony: Me and my university

I've never done witnessing, never made an altar call, I'm not big into evangalism, but I'm told that telling your story is something you should do on occasion.

I came to the University of Southern Maine after a year spent doing nothing.  I don't mean a year spent relaxing.  I mean that I have clinical depression, it'd be almost a decade before we found a treatment that worked, I hadn't even met the psychiatrist who makes up the other part of that "we", and I did nothing.

If you've never done nothing, I highly recommend against it.

Depression sucks.  I remember a time when, for months, beyond eating, using the bathroom, and occasionally drinking water, I could not muster the energy to move.  I watched the Shawshank Redemption too many times to count because I couldn't mange the effort needed to stand up, cross the room, and change the DVD.

Pushing, "Play," on the remote every time it looped back to the main menu after the movie had finished was preferable to listening to the menu loop or having nothing going on at all.

And so my time was spent semi-supine on the couch during that period.

That was a not-so-bad time as these things go because there was something (the Shawshank Redemption) going on as opposed to nothing.

But then I managed to apply and then went to the University of Southern Maine as a math major.

I took Latin as an elective because I'd done it in high school and figured I'd keep on doing it.  I didn't know it but that choice landed me in a stellar program even though the university, even then, didn't acknowledge it.

At the time Peter Aicher was in charge but that passed back and forth between himself and Jeannine Diddle Uzzi.  Peter Aicher you know from TV.  If you missed him on the National Geographic Channel you probably saw him on Discovery, if you missed him there then probably The History Channel, if you missed that then Nova, and if you missed that then probably some other channel.

He is, quite simply, the world's foremost expert on Roman Aqueducts and he gets asked to speaking engagements around the world.  In addition his understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of Greek Mythology is incredible, and if you want to understand the architectural propaganda of Rome as the Romans understood it, you'll want to buy his latest book.  Plus, who else can make James Joyce make sense?

Jeannine doesn't have quite the same level of fame, but she is no less good at her work.  She realized that an incredibly important area of study had been overlooked by two thousand years of scholarship and, with her debut book, worked to fix that by writing what is still the definitive work on the subject.  She has advanced our understanding of childhood, both actual and symbolic, in the ancient world, particularly that of outsiders.

She's taught a class for Harvard via the Center for Hellenic Studies and done so in Greece on a trip that visited virtually every major archaeological site in Greece, Crete, and the Cyclades covering over three thousand years of history.

Her translation of Catullus, which is revolutionary, awesome, and, unlike so many, not diluted for the purposes of sanitizing, will be  published by Cambridge soon.  (I've had the good fortune of reading some of it pre-publication.)

Which is to say, when I chose to take Latin as an elective I stepped into an amazing program without realizing I had done so.

If I'd done some research I'd have found out that the University of Southern Maine had a stellar reputation.  Since then I've heard some say that the reputation has been tarnished.  That's inaccurate.  Tarnish is what happens to silver when it's allowed to age like a fine wine.  Plus a layer of tarnish forms a protective layer on the surface of an object preventing further degradation.

If one takes a whiff of my university's reputation now they'll quickly realize that what the reputation is coated in is not oxidation, it's been dragged through copious piles of excrement.  Despite popular rumor, excrement is apparently not corrosive, but it is toxic and it does tend to make things worse if not cleaned up.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For four years I showed up to classes every day, despite my still-untreated depression and the two hour walk to get to the university, kept my head down, and earned a degree.

Then my sister was going to start a business.  Though I was told I only had one class left to graduate I decided to take a semester off so that I might help her.

This was 2008.  The global economy collapsed before our eyes and the credit market froze.  The loan we would need to start the business became impossible.  (Since then someone else used the same idea and has been a great success.  Having an idea first means nothing if you don't reach the market first.  That said, I'm happy someone else did it because it fills a need that was previously unfilled.)

Inertia and depression took over.  I spent another year doing nothing.

When I returned with the plan of taking that one class it just felt weird to come for one class only, so I looked for an elective.  I'd never studied ancient Greek, beginning Greek was being offered, so I took that.

It turned out the one class I supposedly needed was just a computer error.  I could have graduated before the year I spent out of school.  I could drop all my classes, put in the forms, and gradate with no more effort if I wanted to.

I took the Greek anyway.

In getting ready to apply to graduate and receive the degree I had already earned I realized that, via electives, I had earned a classics minor.  All I had to do was declare.  While filling out that paperwork Peter pointed out that in another year I could turn that minor into a major and graduate with a double major in Math and Classics.

So I stayed.

At this point something needs to be explained.  I don't make friends well.  I get along with people at school well enough, but I've never been good at the transition between friends at school and actual friends who you see for reasons other than having the same class.  But because of seeing them a lot and small class sizes I got to know the classics students and the two professors very, very well.

They've become like a second family to me.

When the time came to graduate with a double major there were two things on the horizon, both of them tempting.  Peter gives a class in etymology that everyone who takes it raves about how good it is.  Jeannine specializes in art but I had never once taken an art focused class with her.  Peter was giving the class, Jeannine was teaching an art class.

I decided to stay around just one more year to take those two classes.

I am not good on buses.  (I'm getting better.)  Especially the kind of buses that a multi-city university would hire to run people between their different campuses.  People are crammed in like sardines, unfamiliar voices assault you from all sides, it's like chaos itself rammed through your senses assaulting your brain.  And above all it's uncomfortable.

The art class was on the distant campus.  The bus over was generally sparsely populated and thus not so bad.  The ride back was a level of Hell that is omitted from the Inferno simply because bus technology did not exist in the time of Dante.

Jeannine gave me a ride back to the Portland campus almost every class.

It was a hard time in her life, both personally and because she was chair of the Faculty Senate and this was the semester of the no-confidence vote against Selma Botman.  Controversy and attention she never wanted was dumped on top of her.

In spite of that she was able to help me, and I don't just mean with the ride.  My depression was still untreated.  At this point it wasn't because nothing tried worked, which has historically been the reason, but because nothing was being tried at all.  I'd fallen out of the system and wasn't even getting people trying to give me treatment.

Those rides, the talking done during them, and her support in other areas, made me better.  Being better is not the same thing as being cured, it is not even the same thing as being good.  It's less bad.  When everything is bad, less bad is something vitally important.

Indeed, sometimes I did actually leave a conversation with her in a state of actual good.  Mental wellness in a time when unwell wasn't just normal but almost, if not quite, uniform.

The rides between campuses might have been a one-semester only thing, but the support was not.  At times when I couldn't think, couldn't work, couldn't accomplish shit, Jeannine was there for me.  She was always supportive.  For the longest time she was the only person in my life without high level professional training in mental illness who had even an inkling of how destructive depression could be.

She showed me compassion when other people didn't give a shit.  She showed it consistently, and she did it regardless of how badly things were going in her own life.

She isn't just my teacher, she's my friend.

It wasn't too much later when I went to the university's Counseling Center (for the second time) and got on the road to getting not just better but getting well.

Two things happened before I got on a medication that worked.

One was that I looked into what staying around for longer could be used for and settled on getting two separate degrees instead of one degree with a double major.

The other was that I got laid very, very low by a depressive episode.  (Without getting into medical terminology too much, I have both chronic and acute depression.  Chronic makes everything bad forever, acute makes some things really, really, really bad for a while.)  I failed everything.

Right now what I really want to do is overwrite that period.  I can do that, I just have to retake the classes I failed.  For some reason the classes are scheduled such that I can't retake them in nearly as short a time as I failed them.  (It was possible to take them all at once before, that's how I failed them, but now their times conflict with each other.)

I've earned my two degrees.  I just want to replace that failure with success.  This isn't for GPA, though it will help with that, it's for myself and my mental health.

Since I started paying attention, the university has been claiming huge deficits (and then earning surpluses every year which always earns an, "Oops, we were wrong about the deficit, but this proves we're awesome and credit to us, not those who did the work," from the top but never gets a, "There seem to be systemic problems in our accounting mechanisms that are making us think we're running deficits when we're actually running surpluses year, after year, after year.  Maybe we should fix those problems.")  The solution offered is always the same, "Cut everything."

The cuts always, without fail, target profitable programs which makes no sense.  If you cut profits you lose money, not save it.  In previous years pointing that out was enough to stop the lion's share of the cuts.  This year not so much.  Two days ago I was at a Board of Trustees meeting.  After hours of citizen testimony, some from CEOs saying that they would find a way to pay for one of the programs because they needed it to train their employees (there had only been 18 days notice so no one had time to come up with a plan, you see), some from economists and accountants pointing out that cutting profitable programs would loose money, some from people saying that cutting French in the state with the second largest French speaking population, an extremely large boarder with Canada, important trade relations with France, and a steady stream of French speaking immigrants, was probably a bad idea, and so forth, the Board voted to cut the profitable programs and lose money.  Logic ("This will make you lose money, and is thus counterproductive") is no longer persuasive.

When they came for others, I spoke out;
When they came for others, I marched;
When they came for others, I demonstrated;
When they came for others, I stood up to be counted;
Now they're coming for my degree, my teachers, my friends.

In spite of snow and rain, in spite of blizzard conditions that sometimes, somehow, don't get school canceled, in spite of an ongoing stream of ephemeral administrations that don't care about me, in spite of once falling into an open manhole (the snow made it so you couldn't see it was open), in spite of the fact that I've worn holes in the soles of all of my shoes and now they let water in, in spite of the mismanagement at the top wearing a hole in my soul, I show up.  I come to school.  I walk two hours in and two hours out.  In eight years of attending (non-consecutive) I've missed only four days of classes (had a nervous breakdown; didn't set foot outside my house for a week.)

I've put more energy and effort into the University of Southern Maine than any of the bastards who make decisions.  I've certainly put in more money.

These days it's always a question where tuition will come from, in the beginning I put it in up front.  Believe me, I wish I still had that money.  The first two weeks of this semester I miscalculated and ran out of food two weeks before I had money to buy more.  I scoured my house and found peanut butter.

I lived on that for two weeks.  Not peanut butter sandwiches.  I didn't have bread.  Just peanut butter.

I happened to mention it to my teacher afterward, the teacher they want to fire, and she said that if anything like that ever happened to me again I should tell her.  She'd get me food.  That's Jeannine, she doesn't even know if she'll be fired (she'll find out on Halloween, which is strangely appropriate) and she's wishing she'd known that I needed help because she would have given it to me without hesitation.

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If you would like to tell people not to set the university on fire:

The Board of Trustees (for the entire system, my university is USM):
ums.trustees@maine.edu

The Chancellor (again, of the whole system):
patshaw@maine.edu

The University of Southern Maine President (finally just my university):
president@usm.maine.edu

The state of my university

Things are fucked up.  The people in charge say things are fucked up.  The things which are fucked up are not the things the people in charge say are fucked up.  The primary thing that is fucked up is that the people in charge are saying things which are not fucked up are fucked up.

To wit:

In an ideal world the budget is a best guess as to expenses and revenue for the coming year and a plan on how to spend money such that money will not be lost.  Meaning that even if everything were perfect the budget would still not reflect reality.

The reality is that my university makes money.  My university system also makes money (individual universities in the system may lose money some years, but those loses are offset by the surpluses elsewhere.  That's the whole point of having a system instead of a bunch of isolated universities.)

The budget, every year, says that my university will lose a metric fuckton of money so we need to cut, cut, cut.

Thus the only real problem is that the budget is wrong, consistently, year after year, and always in the same direction.

If the administration didn't say that things were fucked up, nothing would be fucked up.  Their saying it is a self fulfilling prophecy.

While the deficits projected by the budgets are imaginary or fictitious (depending on whether you're betting on stupid or evil) the need to balance these budgets creates a very real deficit when it comes to spending money on things like salaries.  Since you need to slash spending by enough to make up for the fake deficit, real damage is done to the university.  What happens at the end of the fiscal year when actual legal reports need to be filed with non-fictitious numbers?  The money goes into the reserves.  That's how the reserves got so bloated.

The cuts do have an effect upon revenue.  A teacher who isn't at the university can't teach a class and so the university can't make money off the class.  So revenue is dropping.  It's just that so far it hasn't dropped enough for the university to stop making money.

The need to "fix" the projected-but-never-actual deficits means hard choices about who can stay and who must be let go but here, again, the administration does stupid things.  They get rid of profitable people.

Now it's important to remember that profit != value.  The university counseling center is of great value, but since the service is free (as it fucking should be) it doesn't make any money (and it's impossible to determine how much it retains by keeping student's we would otherwise lose.)

The reason for the focus on profit is that all of the things that don't pay for themselves need to be paid for, and since the deficits aren't actually real they are in fact being paid for.  What pays for them?  The things that make a profit.

By cutting profitable things, we have less money left to pay for the non-profitable things.  For example one program being slashed returns two dollars for every one dollar put in.  That makes for easy math.  Pay for one person and you get the money that you paid back, plus enough money to pay for a zero-revenue person with the same salary.

Flip that around and you see that if you get rid of one person in that program, you can afford one less zero-revenue person than you could before.

Now we're still in surplus territory.  They can already afford more zero-revenue people than they actually employ.  But once there start to be actual deficits the cuts to profitable programs will necessitate cuts to zero-revenue ones.

And that's when things will really go to shit.

The university is suffering enough when the horrific problems we face aren't actually real.  Once they are real it's going to get very, very bad.

Sunday Sermonizing (Image Post)

That's me with the green notebook

All attempts to recover the audio recording I made of my speech have failed, that might be a good thing as it wasn't prepared.  I tried to prepare it but, as I told the people there, I ended up with maybe 16 beginnings, some number of middles, and no ending.

Thus what follows is not a transcript.  It's not even really an attempt to recreate the speech, it's more a shot at recapturing the impression.

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We've been here before.  A new administration attempts to dazzle us with math that doesn't add up, economic models that don't model economics, and claims that aren't factual.  Then they tell us they have no choice but to cut, and their supposedly money saving cuts are to profitable programs.

All that's really different this time is the scale.  Fifty faculty being fired--you should know that when they claim that retirements would offset these firing they're lying.  If you want proof look at Jeannine Diddle Uzzi.  Peter Aicher is retiring and by this administration's own rules that means Jeannine doesn't get fired.  She's getting fired.

Why the lie?  An argument could be made that they're hoping to get rid of more people by convincing some to retire and then saying, "Too bad, we're firing the fifty anyway."  I don't think that's it.  I think it's something simpler.

By making the question, "Which fifty faculty have to go?" instead of, "Do fifty faculty have to go?" they can turn us against each other by default.  Because if we accept that framing then when I say, "Jeannine should keep her job," which is true, it becomes twisted to mean, "Some other teacher should be fired in her place."  We can't accept that framing.  We can't let it mean that.

We have to understand a truth as profound as it is simple: "We're all in this together," isn't a meaningless platitude, it's a universal and incontrovertible truth.  I was here, in a classics class, when I first read Martin Luther King Jr's words on the subject.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

When a physics teacher is cut it affects me, even though I've never taken a physics class here.  When they eliminate the language programs it effects you, even if you'd never have taken a language class anyway.

We all know this.  We're a university.  We aren't just caught in the network of mutuality, we embrace it.  We don't have a French University and a Physics University.  We don't have a Philosophy University and a Political Science University.  We don't have a Music University and a Math University.  We have the University of Southern Maine.

All of us under one roof, often in the same classroom.  One class I take is classics, art, and women and gender studies.  By having all three groups in the same class we all benefit because we're all looking at the same thing but we each see it from our own perspectives.

When we hear the others insights and their questions we grow because they see things we would never see and they ask things we would never think to ask.  The diversity of the university benefits us all and when it is lessened we're all diminished.

The idea that we're all responsible for each other, echoes through history.  This example is kind of heavy handed, but Genesis isn't known for subtlety.

When Cain asks, "Am I my brother's keeper?" he does it as the first murderer.  It's an example of how not to be.  Because we aren't supposed to need to ask.  We're supposed to know.  I am my sibling's keeper.  I am my classmate's keeper.  I am my colleague's keeper.  I am my student's keeper.  I am my teacher's keeper.  I am my program's keeper.  I am my university's keeper.

I was here last time even though no one I knew was being targeted then.  I was here because when they're unjustly firing people it matters to me even when I don't know them.  It affects me, even if only indirectly.

Last time this was tried we stopped it, and we can stop it again if we remember that my problems are your problems and your problems are my problems.  That everyone matters to each of us.

One last thing is that the very idea of a public university is based on a concept that the current administration doesn't seem to understand.  The idea is that the least of these should be entitled to as good an education as anyone else and not need to be rich and be shipped off to Boston.

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Or something like that.  With the recording useless that's all from memory and without a prepared statement it was pretty scattered as it was being delivered.  I give you additional pictures, these ones taken by me:

Hooking up the microphone never worked so we started off with a megaphone.

Of course if you need to hands to handle your statement that can lead to awkwardness:

Then the megaphone died.

This might be when I spoke,

At events such as these you always need at least one economist,

because events such as these are caused by people doing bad things

and making false claims about economics to justify them.

Thus, economics person:

(Image Post) All that remains

A week and a day ago I was sitting outside South Station in Boston when I saw this artifact:

It is, as near as I can tell, what remains of a bike after you have stolen everything that can be stolen including, but not limited to, the front wheel, the rear wheel, the chain, the seat, and the rubber grips on the handle bars.

It wasn't until the following Tuesday that I realized that this is the administration's vision for my university.

The University of Southern Maine is run by incompetents, liars, and jerks.

It's vacation at the university, so news has slowed down, but before that it was coming so fast that I'm not even sure what the most recent news was.  It might have been a press release from the university administration saying that, after realizing that they'd become a disgrace to the entire world east of the international date line and west of Israel (yes, Israelis are pointing out how bad our administration is) and being held up as an example of everything that is wrong with the world by the New York Times, they decided to actually talk to the people in one of the programs they had summarily cut and found that --surprise-- it didn't need to be cut.

This marks the second time that they've decided to talk to a program that they were considering cutting instead of just cutting it with the thinnest of notice to the program that it might even be considered for being cut.  This also marks the second time that such talking revealed that with some minor bureaucratic reshuffling the program they were thinking of cutting didn't actually need to be cut to save the university money.

Thus far, one hundred percent of the time that they work with faculty everything works out for the best.  The problem is that, thus far, they've only done it twice.

They've actually reviewed whether or not their plans to cut an academic program were, you know, intelligent a full three times.  All three times it turned out that it wasn't a good idea to cut the program.  The third time they didn't have to work with the faculty, they just had to have everyone who paid even cursory attention to USM any time in the past, say, eight years point out to them that that program was profitable.

But the point here is, notice a pattern?  When the administration works with the faculty instead of shuts them out of the decision making process things tend to work out well.  The administration avoids working with the faculty like the plague and in two years has done it all of twice.  Also, the current administration has never cut or considered cutting a single program that, on closer inspection, should have actually been cut.  What they have done is avoid closer inspection, again like the plague.

The same goes for faculty.  The English department, for example, has not been cut.  Members of the faculty in the English department have been.  What happened when they were asked to give an explanation of why?  They said there were too many faculty given the number of majors in the department.  Just one problem.  They didn't know the number of majors in the department.  They based their decision to terminate people on the wrong number.

When it was pointed out that they were using the wrong number --that the number was in fact way off, that any calculations they had done using that number were completely wrong, that their entire rational for laying these people off was in fact bullshit-- they stuck to their guns and laid them off anyway.

Be happy that they have only metaphorical guns because someone who fires even after learning they're pointing the gun in the wrong direction is not someone who can be trusted with firearms.

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BUT maybe the latest news was that we're terminating all of these teachers because, allegedly, we can't afford to pay them and yet the same people say that we have enough to hire seven new people at the same salary with the same benefits.  Doesn't that, logically, mean that we could avoid terminating at least seven of the teachers?

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Or maybe it was that every independent study conducted found out that there wasn't a financial crisis in the first place.

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Or maybe it was that the bloating of our reserves always seems to coincide with crying crisis:

"We can't afford to pay you.  It's a financial crisis.  We're in debt."
"But what about all that money behind your back?"
"That's reserve money, we need it just in case."
"Of course we need reserve money but isn't that like eight times what we actually need?"
"Ten times you idiot."
"And don't we keep reserves so they can be used during crises?"
"Yes."
"So if this is a crisis, shouldn't we be taking money from the reserves instead of putting money into it."
"You don't work here anymore, it's not your concern."
"What are you talking about?  I have a class to teach in 15 minutes."
"Yeah, but you're being laid off because of the crisis."

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Or maybe it was that the administration is blackmailing professors into retiring by threatening to fire other people, largely at random, unless the ones they want to get rid of "voluntarily" retire.

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Or maybe it was that the administration is intentionally trying to pit departments against each other ("that union guy wants your cookie") to prevent them from presenting a united front.

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Or maybe it's that people who were driven out due to their utter incompetence have been rehired to higher paying jobs, which don't actually accomplish anything, and in spite of a last in first out seniority system those high paying not-actually-useful jobs are not even under consideration for being cut while jobs that involve actually teaching people and bringing money into the system are being shed like raindrops from a monsoon off the back of a well oiled duck.

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Or maybe it was that profitable universities in the system are being forced to take the brunt of the cuts while the parts of the system that are actually losing money are getting off light or, in some cases, without any negative impact to them at all.

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Or maybe it was something else.

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The point though is that USM is being run by people who can't count, say things that aren't true, and resort to blackmail.  I think that covers incompetents, liars, and jerks.

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And here's the sad part:

I would still recommend a great school where you can learn from excellent teachers.  It's just that if someone wants that they'd better come quick, because it's in the process of being dismantled.