Selma Botman had a Wikipedia page before she ever came to USM and apparently her Senior Advisor was tasked with keeping it up to date for some time. I question, seriously, whether or not she met the notability guidelines. The USM Presidents before and after her apparently have not as they have no pages, but that's not why I've started writing here (with two other articles waiting to be finished off in the wings which is not usually the case.)
I think she meets the notability guidelines now. When she became the first USM President subject to a no confidence vote and that got people's attentions at least from the Czech Republic to Chicago then I think she rose to the level of notability that Wikipedia enforces, sometimes with absurd force, in an extremely uneven fashion.
I thought Botman was all in the past, I thought that Botmangate (I hate that name, by the way; there's a reason why I'd rather have an eight word long tag than use the much shorter "Botmangate") was over.
Then on the 11th, my mother's birthday, it reared its ugly head again. This time with a relative flurry of activity on her Wikipedia page. It doesn't take much to rise to the level of "relative flurry" because her Wikipedia page generally has exactly zero activity.
It turned out that one of her most vocal supporters decided to try to rewrite history. It was not the usual supporter, the "Senior Advisor" with Wikipedia name Ptortx, nor did it follow the usual pattern. In the past the standard method of Botman supporters had been to delete the entire section of the page regarding everything they themselves have not written, that section being known as "Controversy."
Now at this point I could point out that the sections they did write are mired in problems. First, they are (or were, in the activity that followed the Botman supporter's attempted redaction of history there has been reformatting) out of order. Two times the word "Previously," was used to indicate that as you read further forward you were actually going back in time (until you weren't) other times you were just supposed to know by magic what the order of events were. Second they had no properly formatted citations and the citations they did have were to editorials, the one area of newspapers even less subject to fact checking than the coverage of politics (where it has, only mildly jokingly, been pointed out that if one candidate said the earth was flat while the other spoke the truth the headline would read, "Candidates disagree over shape of world," and the article would never indicate which was right.) Third they were out of date. I'm going to have to look this up because unlike Botman supporters I want to make sure things are actually true before I stick them on Wikipedia, but I believe the university was in a state of financial health for all of one year when she was at it. Yet the Wikipedia article still indicates, with citation, that she restored the university to financial health even though when she left she'd somehow managed to loose seven and a half million dollars (rounding down) with no indication as to where it went thus taking a year that should have resulted in a small surplus (half a million dollars is small when we're talking about the figures involved) based on revenue and operating costs and somehow (I don't think anyone has quite figured out how yet) managed to make it a year with a more than seven million dollar deficit. That's not exactly restoring it to financial health, even though the Wikipedia page still says she did that.
I'm somewhat worried to point out that it has reached the point where deleting the "Controversy" section no longer erases all record of the no confidence vote as it is now mentioned elsewhere in the article. Somewhat worried because I'm not sure that Botman's supporters have noticed that it is mentioned elsewhere yet. (Though maybe that's the reason for the change in tactics.)
I could point out these things, but that would drag me too far into tangent land. (One of the articles waiting to be finished is about Babylon 5 and the rhetorical technique of, "I could mention this, but I won't.")
What I instead want to focus on is this:
Wikipedia's greatest weakness is that anyone can edit it. A few keystrokes and Wikipedia says World War II never happened. Wikipedia's greatest strength is that anyone can edit it. One person reverting the page and suddenly Wikipedia says we're back in a world where World War II did take place.
This is dangerous and at the same time good.
Selma Botman's supporters can keep on vandalizing the page to make her look like a saint or even to simply muddy the waters.* That's were the danger comes in, the revisionism. For example, the section called "Controversy" should have been called "Controversies" from the moment it was added (blame where it is due, fault of the person who added it not Botman supporters). At some point in the editing history of the page someone removed all reference to the first major controversy to break with respect to Botman from everything on the page but a couple of external links with no mention of why they were there. (I think the person who added the "Controversy" section didn't know how to cite references and just added their references as external links. At the time the "Controversy" section was dominated by the pay raise controversy, now it is devoted entirely to the vote of no confidence.) So we can see historical revisionism at work with regard to Selma Botman's page.
But everyone else (for specific examples: 67.255.220.223, Foulolron123, 130.111.129.86, 141.114.161.162, Namiba, 67.255.218.207 (note that those IP addresses are all different) ***) can set the record straight. That's it's strength.
Now that editing Botman's page is back on people's list of things to do**, now that her two most vocal supporters (Erickson and Eagan) are both active on Wikipedia with respect to this and it's reached the point of (Erickson) introducing falsehoods instead of (Ptortx) simply deleting the truth, I think we'll probably reach the point of things being quite interesting with regard to the page. There are already spirited discussions on two talk pages (one on one of the editors', one on the talk page of the article itself.) The annoying thing is that the facts of the case really aren't in dispute.
This isn't conclave the rules to force a referendum are in the Faculty Senate Bylaws, freely available online, the rules for what constitute a passing vote on matters that require the intervention of the Chancellor and/or Board of Trustees (like, say, getting rid of a sitting president) are laid out very clearly (a two thirds vote of those voting) in the university's Governance Document/Constitution (which supersedes the bylaws.) Nothing should be complicated or controversial.
One thing that interests me is whether the other things will come out/come back. The Pay Raise Controversy, for example has been excised from the page, will this new attention on the page get it put back? The Rosetta Stone Controversy probably doesn't have sufficient sources (as I noted in a footnote it's here and on the blog of one of her supporters and apparently nowhere else) to every make it onto Wikipedia, but various other things might. The broken promises, the financial distress, the vindictiveness, the daycare, so on.
The day care is interesting because if you look back through the news it turns out that her position completely changed. Find a news article from when she closed it and you'll see her saying what a heart wrenching decision it is but the money saved will go to supporting academics (most commonly cited broken promise: "The money we save via this painful cut will go to supporting academics," the cut is made, the money never shows up. At least on the academic side.) Find reports from the time of the vote of no confidence (I don't know if you can or if this was done entirely verbally) and they'll say that she got rid of the daycare because she thought no one was using it. (It was always full and had an absurd waiting list.)
I'm trying to remember now whether the shit list was the work of Botman or the person before her. If it was her then that should definitely make it onto the page, but likely won't.
The shit list happened thus:
Administrator 1: We're tight on money, we have to cut.
Administrator 2: Who should we cut?
Administrator 1: I've got an idea (esoteric formulae unrelated to anything relevant) These people!
These people: Uh... you do realize we're profitable, right? So cutting us will lose you money, not save you money.
But there seriously was a list made up of, we don't have enough money so we'll have to cut programs, we've used these (not money related) criteria to make up a list of potential programs to cut. What? They're all profitable? Who cares.
Thankfully, if I remember correctly, nothing ever came of the shit list.
I wouldn't put it passed Botman, but I think the shit list was in the previous regime. Some vague sense of what preceded what leads to that (if it was in her regime it would need to have been right at the start) as well as the fact that the previous regime was best known to me for its leader needing to be taken aside so it could be gently explained to him that, "Yes, this program costs a million dollars a year and so cutting it will mean you're spending a million less, but it makes two million dollars a year. Two is bigger than one. Twice as big in fact. Cutting the program will leave you with a million dollars less, not a million dollars more," which seemed to indicate the same kind of thinking that was behind the shit list.
Then again, Selma Botman shared in that form of thinking.
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* Some of the edits were to change the date of the no confidence vote, meaning that if anyone tried to get more information on the no confidence vote that took place that day they'd find out that there was no no confidence vote on that day.
It is sneakier than outright deleting it. Instead it just makes all information on the page about the no confidence vote suspect because it's like getting a history book that says World War II took place in 1832. How much are you going to trust the rest of the "facts" presented when you start with that?
No, the edit didn't change the year, it changed the month, indicating it took place in the first third of the year rather than the second and that it took place on one day rather than two, and that it took place before the petition forcing it to take place was delivered (mind you the edits also eliminated any mention of the petition.) And eliminated any reference to the almost month long process in which those tasked with organizing the vote tried to get input from all of the faculty (not an easy task since they numbered in hundreds) and constantly worked hand in hand with Selma Botman, the person the vote was about, to create a fair process.
It also indicated that there was no dispute as to the outcome of the vote, where in reality the dispute was never settled and has since become moot. (It doesn't matter that it passed while Selma told every news source that would listen that it failed because a little over two months later, after talks with the guy in charge that were kicked off by the vote, She resigned. Sort of. She resigned in a way that didn't count as quitting and thus kept her huge salary while losing all the responsibilities that were supposed to have come with it.)
** I was going to do a major edit. I was tracking down every news source including one that thought the vote was part of some grand conspiracy for world domination, and incorporating the reliable ones. Learning how things are cited in Wikipedia (my only previous involvement in Wikipedia**** had been reverting malicious edits. Like someone who replaced the definition of tool with the name of a person they didn't like.) Putting things into order, tracing rumors to their source, finding out that the Rosetta Stone controversy stayed almost entirely word of mouth and never made it into a cite-able source unless you count this blog and the blog of one of her two most vocal supporters, and so forth. But then my computer managed to crash in a highly unusual (for it, not for computers in general) way that managed to delete both the draft and the backup I had in case anything happened to the draft.
So that didn't happen, but other people were drawn in by the activity too and thus deleting and falsehood has been undone.
*** Of which I am at least one, I think I do have a Wikipedia account but since what I've done on Wikipedia is seriously limited to reverting malicious edits and occasionally correcting punctuation, I generally don't feel the need to log in. I'd have to figure out what my account was to be sure, but I don't think I've felt the need to log in in years.
**** Unless I've forgotten something, which I don't think I have.
Showing posts with label The many and varied scandals of Selma Botman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The many and varied scandals of Selma Botman. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Saturday, July 7, 2012
On Selma Botman Stepping Sideways
It was not my plan to have the post announcing that Selma Botman had left the post of President of the University of Maine be the top post for more than a day. The thing is, I wasn't able to get much sleep that night (for entirely unrelated reasons) and wasn't really feeling up for writing or research the next day.
On the first point, writing without research, you can hopefully expect posts about pie and Tron: Legacy in the near future, on the second point, research, there's not a lot I can do to look into the Botman situation beyond looking at what's already out there.
I'm not currently in contact with most people who could give me more information, I'm definitely not in a position to get information first hand at the moment, and the person I could most easily contact about it (who also happens to be the one I trust most to have reliable info on it) is the one who was placed under the most stress of all the people I know by it. I don't want to interrupt what I'm hoping is a low stress well deserved vacation by saying, "You know that thing that overran months of your life and put you under constant stress, could we revisit that for a bit?" *
That means that the only information I have access is what's being reported in the press. The press that is still getting very basic, easily verifiable, facts of the situation wrong. (They've had two months and still haven't managed to read the seven words necessary to figure out the difference between needing a two thirds majority of votes actually cast and needing a two thirds majority of eligible voters.)
I'm not interested in making predictions when I don't know what's going on (I will likely never be a pundit), I'm not a tea leaf reader, and even my predictions based on actual facts have a bad record anyway which makes me wary of saying where things will go from here. There are a few things I wanted to comment on though.
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The first is that Botman left the University of Southern Maine in the same way she ran it: by creating a new position that doesn't seem to be needed, the funding of which will require us to leave existing job vacancies unfilled. There's no word yet, but if the past is any indication those existing jobs left vacant will probably be on the side of faculty rather than administration.
The new position will pay her exactly as much as the old position. This is not, necessarily, because the new position will pay the same amount in perpetuity but instead because the fact that she didn't resign and wasn't fired but was instead reassigned apparently leaves the salary portion of her contract in place. (The faculty, last I heard, were still working without contracts.) It does mean that for the next year she gets paid the same amount while shedding responsibilities. The new position is a special assistant, when was the last time you heard of a special assistant being held to the same standards as a University President? When was the last time you heard of a special assistant having their work in a position to be publicly scrutinized to determine if it justified their salary?
The new position is "Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Global Education" in which she will be tasked with encouraging international students to come to the UMaine system. This makes a certain amount of sense considering her apparent interests. You may recall that her plan to ignore existing students and future students from similar locations in favor of dumping funds into trying to recruit students from China was one of the few things she seemed to really care about in her job as USM President. In various other areas she tried to (and in some cases did) hire people into newly invented positions to do her job for her so she wouldn't have to, but shifting the focus from serving students at home to recruiting students with lower standards from abroad was something she really got behind. It was her big plan, and now she's got a job where that's all she'll be tasked with doing, and she'll be tasked with doing it for the whole system, not just one university in the system.
I'm sure there are limitless ways to interpret this, but two seem to stand out.
One is that this was a face saving gesture on everyone's part and nothing should be read into the details. In this interpretation the point was to get Selma Botman out of a position she clearly was ill suited for without her losing her salary or having the embarrassment of being booted out and without the system that hired her in the first place having to admit it made a mistake in doing so.** Everyone saves face, she's out of the job, and the cost of positions remaining vacant is just the price. This would mean that, privately, those in charge recognized that something was broken and decided to start taking steps to fix it, which would be a good thing.
The other is that this really is, more or less, what it is claimed to be. The controversy stirred up may have been the catalyst, but what is being done is seriously believed in by those doing it. Those in charge, like Selma Botman herself, are more interested in hypothetical future students from yet to be determined elsewheres than actual students in the present, and local students in the future. Those in charge, like Selma Botman, are ready to create new high paying positions (more than a million dollars every five years) at the snap of a finger but not willing to devote funds to actually filling the lower paying positions currently vacant even though an inability to meet demand is costing us quality, students and money. Those in charge, like Selma Botman, are unwilling to listen to what the faculty says (which in this case is that Selma Botman isn't worth the money.) Those in charge are ignoring investigating the reasons enrollment is actually dropping and instead putting resources into ways to hypothetically treat they symptoms without first diagnosing the cause. And So On.
Which is to say, if this isn't to save face but instead things are as we are told they are, it looks like some of former President Botman's serious problems were reflections of problems that her superiors, those in charge of the entire system, themselves have. And that would be bad.
-
In one year of her reign if she had done nothing, if the university had been run exactly as it had the year before because there was no leadership so it was being run on inertia, the university would have made half a million dollars. That's not actually good, it reflects dropping enrollment (the year before the surplus was more than five times that), but it does set a benchmark for comparison when considering the fact that that year the university ended up seven million dollars in debt.
The fallout from that, the resulting demand to cut millions from the academic side to pay for the deficit while quietly handing out a million dollars in raises to the administrative side, provided the backdrop for the eventual confrontation. That wasn't all of it by any means. If that had been all she did wrong I probably wouldn't be talking about this now, I certainly wouldn't feel such antipathy toward her and I doubt many other people would either, but at some point things had to boil over and it was in the shadow of that that things did.
That's how she did her job: badly. If you can honestly say to someone, "If you had phoned in sick for work every day last year we'd have millions more dollars than we actually do because you trying to do your job cost us more than than the average American's lifetime income several times over," that person is probably not doing their job well. There are exceptions, but they tend to be in things with bigger income streams than the University of Maine System.
Selma should have been let go, not reassigned.
I want to believe that the reassignment was nothing more than a face saving measure for all involved because that would at least imply a recognition of the problems beyond "Crap, there's a controversy," but even that wouldn't be too much of a comfort because, if it is, it comes at the cost of leaving positions vacant which has been and continues to be a major problem. Given the choice between firing an incompetent person and not hiring multiple necessary people who, if screened properly, should be competent, good management favors the first.
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As mentioned in footnote one, one of the people I trust to get things right has been interviewed by the press. Based on the reported direct quotations from that person, it does look like Theodora Kalikow, the person likely to replace Botman, is a good replacement. We won't know for sure that Kalikow is in until Monday at the earliest but it sounds like the remaining steps are more to make it formal than to make the decision.
I have no personal experience of Kalikow, I cannot speak to what she is like, but it seems that she is someone good and, unlike Botman (see footnote two), that appears to be based not on how she looks on paper but on past work she's done as a University President in the University of Maine System.
So I'm hopeful that whatever problems there may or may not be with system leadership (see almost everything above this section), the University of Southern Maine will at least be well managed.
-
Lastly, a couple of quotations:
From the Chancellor but the sentiment is attributed to Botman herself, "to move forward on all those fronts a change of leadership might be required." Botman leaving has been, for a while now, a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting things back on track. The incoming president will have a mess on her hands thanks to Botman but hopefully things can work out. The understatement of "might be required" jumped out at me so much that I saw it before I saw to whom the quotation (or the sentiment) was attributed in the preceding text.
From Botman we have, "I provided sound fiscal leadership." I lack the words to adequately respond. You know how it is when someone say something that indicates a total lack of self awareness and you're left speechless because it's as if they just claimed the... I don't even know. "The sky is made out of tapioca," is too reasonable to compare to it. It's like Ford and Zaphod's inability to describe the slipperiness of the ice covered marble via simile because there is nothing else that compares to the absolute slipperiness of it.***
Selma Botman's leadership was unsound in so many myriad ways, but her fiscal leadership was one of the few places the unsoundness was quantifiable. If she was able to say that with a straight face, and I'm betting she was, it shows a remarkable capacity for self deception.
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* Though, as you might imagine, members of the press already have, with the quotations being positive. Which is good. But then that adds to things the fact that if I contact zir saying, "Tell me about this," at a time when reporters were doing the same, I feel like I'm pestering.
I wouldn't actually do anything so demanding as actually saying, "Tell me about this," but I'd feel like that's what I was doing regardless of how hard I worked to make sure it was clear that it was a request, not a demand, and it was an, "Only if you don't mind and it's not too much trouble," kind of request.
** It was an easy mistake to make. I'm told she looked very good on paper and pretty much everyone who took notice (I didn't, at the time) thought she'd do a good job.
One of the reasons that it took so long for things to get to the point they did was that people really thought she would be good, and then thought she would be good eventually, and cut her immense amounts of slack because of that. They also provided a lot of help to her, often behind the scenes, well beyond what should have been necessary on the expectation that at some point she'd get into the swing of things and be able to take on the full responsibilities of her job any moment now.
Everyone wanted this to work, and so her mismanagement was allowed to go on for much longer without comment than it would have if people had been against her. There was no one looking for ways to criticize her, instead everyone was looking for reasons to believe.
*** From the second season of the the original radio show of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
ZAPHOD: This rock…
FORD: Er, Marble.
ZAPHOD: Marble, yeah.
FORD: Ice covered marble.
ZAPHOD: Yeah! It’s- it’s- it’s- it’s- it’s slippery as er…er, what’s, what’s the slipperiest thing you can think of?
FORD: This moment? This marble.
ZAPHOD: Right. This marble is as slippery as this marble.
(It's better when you can hear it.)
On the first point, writing without research, you can hopefully expect posts about pie and Tron: Legacy in the near future, on the second point, research, there's not a lot I can do to look into the Botman situation beyond looking at what's already out there.
I'm not currently in contact with most people who could give me more information, I'm definitely not in a position to get information first hand at the moment, and the person I could most easily contact about it (who also happens to be the one I trust most to have reliable info on it) is the one who was placed under the most stress of all the people I know by it. I don't want to interrupt what I'm hoping is a low stress well deserved vacation by saying, "You know that thing that overran months of your life and put you under constant stress, could we revisit that for a bit?" *
That means that the only information I have access is what's being reported in the press. The press that is still getting very basic, easily verifiable, facts of the situation wrong. (They've had two months and still haven't managed to read the seven words necessary to figure out the difference between needing a two thirds majority of votes actually cast and needing a two thirds majority of eligible voters.)
I'm not interested in making predictions when I don't know what's going on (I will likely never be a pundit), I'm not a tea leaf reader, and even my predictions based on actual facts have a bad record anyway which makes me wary of saying where things will go from here. There are a few things I wanted to comment on though.
-
The first is that Botman left the University of Southern Maine in the same way she ran it: by creating a new position that doesn't seem to be needed, the funding of which will require us to leave existing job vacancies unfilled. There's no word yet, but if the past is any indication those existing jobs left vacant will probably be on the side of faculty rather than administration.
The new position will pay her exactly as much as the old position. This is not, necessarily, because the new position will pay the same amount in perpetuity but instead because the fact that she didn't resign and wasn't fired but was instead reassigned apparently leaves the salary portion of her contract in place. (The faculty, last I heard, were still working without contracts.) It does mean that for the next year she gets paid the same amount while shedding responsibilities. The new position is a special assistant, when was the last time you heard of a special assistant being held to the same standards as a University President? When was the last time you heard of a special assistant having their work in a position to be publicly scrutinized to determine if it justified their salary?
The new position is "Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Global Education" in which she will be tasked with encouraging international students to come to the UMaine system. This makes a certain amount of sense considering her apparent interests. You may recall that her plan to ignore existing students and future students from similar locations in favor of dumping funds into trying to recruit students from China was one of the few things she seemed to really care about in her job as USM President. In various other areas she tried to (and in some cases did) hire people into newly invented positions to do her job for her so she wouldn't have to, but shifting the focus from serving students at home to recruiting students with lower standards from abroad was something she really got behind. It was her big plan, and now she's got a job where that's all she'll be tasked with doing, and she'll be tasked with doing it for the whole system, not just one university in the system.
I'm sure there are limitless ways to interpret this, but two seem to stand out.
One is that this was a face saving gesture on everyone's part and nothing should be read into the details. In this interpretation the point was to get Selma Botman out of a position she clearly was ill suited for without her losing her salary or having the embarrassment of being booted out and without the system that hired her in the first place having to admit it made a mistake in doing so.** Everyone saves face, she's out of the job, and the cost of positions remaining vacant is just the price. This would mean that, privately, those in charge recognized that something was broken and decided to start taking steps to fix it, which would be a good thing.
The other is that this really is, more or less, what it is claimed to be. The controversy stirred up may have been the catalyst, but what is being done is seriously believed in by those doing it. Those in charge, like Selma Botman herself, are more interested in hypothetical future students from yet to be determined elsewheres than actual students in the present, and local students in the future. Those in charge, like Selma Botman, are ready to create new high paying positions (more than a million dollars every five years) at the snap of a finger but not willing to devote funds to actually filling the lower paying positions currently vacant even though an inability to meet demand is costing us quality, students and money. Those in charge, like Selma Botman, are unwilling to listen to what the faculty says (which in this case is that Selma Botman isn't worth the money.) Those in charge are ignoring investigating the reasons enrollment is actually dropping and instead putting resources into ways to hypothetically treat they symptoms without first diagnosing the cause. And So On.
Which is to say, if this isn't to save face but instead things are as we are told they are, it looks like some of former President Botman's serious problems were reflections of problems that her superiors, those in charge of the entire system, themselves have. And that would be bad.
-
In one year of her reign if she had done nothing, if the university had been run exactly as it had the year before because there was no leadership so it was being run on inertia, the university would have made half a million dollars. That's not actually good, it reflects dropping enrollment (the year before the surplus was more than five times that), but it does set a benchmark for comparison when considering the fact that that year the university ended up seven million dollars in debt.
The fallout from that, the resulting demand to cut millions from the academic side to pay for the deficit while quietly handing out a million dollars in raises to the administrative side, provided the backdrop for the eventual confrontation. That wasn't all of it by any means. If that had been all she did wrong I probably wouldn't be talking about this now, I certainly wouldn't feel such antipathy toward her and I doubt many other people would either, but at some point things had to boil over and it was in the shadow of that that things did.
That's how she did her job: badly. If you can honestly say to someone, "If you had phoned in sick for work every day last year we'd have millions more dollars than we actually do because you trying to do your job cost us more than than the average American's lifetime income several times over," that person is probably not doing their job well. There are exceptions, but they tend to be in things with bigger income streams than the University of Maine System.
Selma should have been let go, not reassigned.
I want to believe that the reassignment was nothing more than a face saving measure for all involved because that would at least imply a recognition of the problems beyond "Crap, there's a controversy," but even that wouldn't be too much of a comfort because, if it is, it comes at the cost of leaving positions vacant which has been and continues to be a major problem. Given the choice between firing an incompetent person and not hiring multiple necessary people who, if screened properly, should be competent, good management favors the first.
-
As mentioned in footnote one, one of the people I trust to get things right has been interviewed by the press. Based on the reported direct quotations from that person, it does look like Theodora Kalikow, the person likely to replace Botman, is a good replacement. We won't know for sure that Kalikow is in until Monday at the earliest but it sounds like the remaining steps are more to make it formal than to make the decision.
I have no personal experience of Kalikow, I cannot speak to what she is like, but it seems that she is someone good and, unlike Botman (see footnote two), that appears to be based not on how she looks on paper but on past work she's done as a University President in the University of Maine System.
So I'm hopeful that whatever problems there may or may not be with system leadership (see almost everything above this section), the University of Southern Maine will at least be well managed.
-
Lastly, a couple of quotations:
From the Chancellor but the sentiment is attributed to Botman herself, "to move forward on all those fronts a change of leadership might be required." Botman leaving has been, for a while now, a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting things back on track. The incoming president will have a mess on her hands thanks to Botman but hopefully things can work out. The understatement of "might be required" jumped out at me so much that I saw it before I saw to whom the quotation (or the sentiment) was attributed in the preceding text.
From Botman we have, "I provided sound fiscal leadership." I lack the words to adequately respond. You know how it is when someone say something that indicates a total lack of self awareness and you're left speechless because it's as if they just claimed the... I don't even know. "The sky is made out of tapioca," is too reasonable to compare to it. It's like Ford and Zaphod's inability to describe the slipperiness of the ice covered marble via simile because there is nothing else that compares to the absolute slipperiness of it.***
Selma Botman's leadership was unsound in so many myriad ways, but her fiscal leadership was one of the few places the unsoundness was quantifiable. If she was able to say that with a straight face, and I'm betting she was, it shows a remarkable capacity for self deception.
-
--
-
* Though, as you might imagine, members of the press already have, with the quotations being positive. Which is good. But then that adds to things the fact that if I contact zir saying, "Tell me about this," at a time when reporters were doing the same, I feel like I'm pestering.
I wouldn't actually do anything so demanding as actually saying, "Tell me about this," but I'd feel like that's what I was doing regardless of how hard I worked to make sure it was clear that it was a request, not a demand, and it was an, "Only if you don't mind and it's not too much trouble," kind of request.
** It was an easy mistake to make. I'm told she looked very good on paper and pretty much everyone who took notice (I didn't, at the time) thought she'd do a good job.
One of the reasons that it took so long for things to get to the point they did was that people really thought she would be good, and then thought she would be good eventually, and cut her immense amounts of slack because of that. They also provided a lot of help to her, often behind the scenes, well beyond what should have been necessary on the expectation that at some point she'd get into the swing of things and be able to take on the full responsibilities of her job any moment now.
Everyone wanted this to work, and so her mismanagement was allowed to go on for much longer without comment than it would have if people had been against her. There was no one looking for ways to criticize her, instead everyone was looking for reasons to believe.
*** From the second season of the the original radio show of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
ZAPHOD: This rock…
FORD: Er, Marble.
ZAPHOD: Marble, yeah.
FORD: Ice covered marble.
ZAPHOD: Yeah! It’s- it’s- it’s- it’s- it’s slippery as er…er, what’s, what’s the slipperiest thing you can think of?
FORD: This moment? This marble.
ZAPHOD: Right. This marble is as slippery as this marble.
(It's better when you can hear it.)
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Botocracy no more
As I mentioned earlier, the fireworks were delayed a day. As I was doing a last minute check to make sure they weren't pushed back again* (in another place, at another computer) I saw this headline:
USM Pres. Selma Botman steps down
I do not have time to look into this at the moment, and as I've mentioned elsewhere I've been out of the loop for about two months, but considering how damaging she was to the University of Southern Maine it is highly unlikely this is anything but a good thing.
Since people have come here to find out about her I figured I should get this out as soon as possible, even though I don't have much info right now.
She has not left the University of Maine system, her claim is that she suggested a different job to the Chancellor, he agreed and this had nothing to do with pressure from others (by which I assume she means the absolute majority of faculty, and supermajority of voting faculty, that said they had no confidence in her.) Of course that's what you'd expect her to say if she were pushed out.
This, by the way, means that I was totally wrong in my reading of the situation when she had a member of her staff try to erase the controversy, as Wikipedia calls it, from her history. I assumed that it meant she was secure that she'd stay at USM as President and no one would notice anything had had happened. It may instead of have been that she wanted it to appear that that had nothing to do with her stepping down.
I'll see if I can get some more details later, but for now here's some of what I've said before:
The USM vote of no confidence against Selma Botman - The facts of the no confidence vote against then-President Botman without my traditional reams of commentary.
More Botman: Press Release - Not actually something I wrote, just a press release I reprinted.
The rest in chronological order:
I made the paper - A little less than a month before the vote of no confidence I attended a meeting regarding the Botman situation, and as a result I ended up with my picture in the paper.
Botman Update - My initial response to the results of the no confidence vote, one of my first posts about the situation Botman directly. It includes an incomplete list of the reasons that she was bad for the university and, generally, a not-nice person. (Also where I said that instead of the term "Botmangate" it would be better to use more words and proposed as an alternative what eventually became the tags for these posts.)
Updated Botman Update - Later the same day as the details of Selma Botman's interpretation of the vote began to unravel.
Botman, Chess, and Context - In which I talk about Selma Botman's seemingly deliberate misreading of the rules by taking one of them out of context and reading it in isolation and completely disregarding everything else. I compare it to misreading the rules of chess by making a similar dishonest stripping of context, and also, briefly, to the importance of context in the interpretation of fiction
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So, that seems to be the end of University of Southern Maine President Selma Botman, now she's just Selma Botman and hopefully the next person to fill the role will be more competent, more honest, and less vindictive.
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* I didn't think they would be, but I tend to double, triple, and quadruple check things.
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These last few days I've been thinking that maybe I could try to write a book about the events of the no confidence vote. I have no history in journalism, but given that nothing had come of the no confidence vote, or so it seemed, I figured no one else would be asking people to sit down and talk about it and I thought that might make people willing to sit down with me if I asked nicely.
I've been spending some thought trying to figure out how best to ask nicely to people on the other side given that do in fact have a side. I thought I was coming up with some ways that might work.
Now something has come of it. I'm guessing I wouldn't be the only one asking.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
The USM no confidence vote against Selma Botman - A Summary
It occurred to me a while back that anyone coming here to learn about the no confidence vote, and some people did, would have to sort through a lot of commentary to get the facts of the case. Thus I offer a simple summary of what happened:
For many and varied reasons many came to the conclusion that Selma Botman, University of Southern Maine President, was doing her job so badly that her removal, while not sufficient, was necessary to fix the university.
First a petition was circulated. It did not go to the full faculty because there was fear or retribution against those who signed, thus those who could still be promoted were not asked to sign. The petition received the votes of a majority of the top-level professors (the group that was asked to sign) and received more than one and a half times the votes necessary to move forward.
At this point one could already see confusion in news sources about the requirements of the eventual no confidence vote. The Bangor Daily News, for example, reported the necessary threshold as "a majority of the faculty".
After that it was necessary to figure out how to go about taking the vote. This had never been done before and a method had to be worked out. Selma Botman had a hand in that method (and what I think of her demands is by now well recorded.) What was not publicly discussed at this point, at Botman's request, was what would be necessary for the vote to be considered successful.
As noted, the papers had already reported the threshold as a majority of the faculty. This version would soon be forgotten. The Governance Document, which is what actually determines how such procedures are to be carried out, said it needed "a two-thirds vote of those voting". [1] This was never widely reported. Selma Botman said it would need a two-thirds of the entire faculty whether they voted or not. This was widely reported.
When the vote was held the vote a greater than two thirds majority of those voting voted no confidence, which also represented an outright majority of the entire Faculty. [2]
Selma Botman immediately claimed victory and it was widely reported that the vote failed. Some new sources even erroneously claimed it had failed to reach a majority.
What effects the vote might have remain to be seen, but the story of the vote itself seems to end with it being reported to have failed. The chancellor noticed that the vote took place, and came to the university to talk to various people. If anything changes, it will come from that.
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[1] The Faculty Senate did not and does not have the power to remove Botman and therefore the nonbinding vote was a recommendation to those who do have such power. While a no confidence vote against a USM President had never been carried out before, the method for the Faculty Senate to go about making a recommendation to the chancellor and Board of Trustees to do something the Faculty Senate lacks the power to do is in fact clearly described.
Normally such a recommendation would go through the USM President, but Selma Botman wasn't about to recommend she be removed and for recommendations like that the university Governance Document has an entire section (Article VIII.) The procedure is very simple actually. When a senate -be it the Faculty Senate, the Student Senate, the Professional Staff Senate, or the Classified Staff Senate- wants to make a recommendation that the university president doesn't agree with it holds a vote. Then "upon a two thirds vote of those voting" the recommendation is sent to the chancellor and/or the Board of Trustees along with the university president's dissenting recommendation.
Thus, one would think, it would be clear that what was necessary for the vote to be declared a success would be for two thirds of those voting to vote in favor.
[2] The vote was 194 no confidence, 88 not-no confidence. (There were no other options.) The total faculty is 377. Thus 68.8% of those voting voted no confidence, which is 51.5% of the total faculty. Turnout was 74.8%.
23.3% of the faculty came out to vote against no confidence as compared to 25.2% who either chose not to vote or were unable to vote and, as previously mentioned, 51.5% who voted no confidence.
All figures have been rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent.
For many and varied reasons many came to the conclusion that Selma Botman, University of Southern Maine President, was doing her job so badly that her removal, while not sufficient, was necessary to fix the university.
First a petition was circulated. It did not go to the full faculty because there was fear or retribution against those who signed, thus those who could still be promoted were not asked to sign. The petition received the votes of a majority of the top-level professors (the group that was asked to sign) and received more than one and a half times the votes necessary to move forward.
At this point one could already see confusion in news sources about the requirements of the eventual no confidence vote. The Bangor Daily News, for example, reported the necessary threshold as "a majority of the faculty".
After that it was necessary to figure out how to go about taking the vote. This had never been done before and a method had to be worked out. Selma Botman had a hand in that method (and what I think of her demands is by now well recorded.) What was not publicly discussed at this point, at Botman's request, was what would be necessary for the vote to be considered successful.
As noted, the papers had already reported the threshold as a majority of the faculty. This version would soon be forgotten. The Governance Document, which is what actually determines how such procedures are to be carried out, said it needed "a two-thirds vote of those voting". [1] This was never widely reported. Selma Botman said it would need a two-thirds of the entire faculty whether they voted or not. This was widely reported.
When the vote was held the vote a greater than two thirds majority of those voting voted no confidence, which also represented an outright majority of the entire Faculty. [2]
Selma Botman immediately claimed victory and it was widely reported that the vote failed. Some new sources even erroneously claimed it had failed to reach a majority.
What effects the vote might have remain to be seen, but the story of the vote itself seems to end with it being reported to have failed. The chancellor noticed that the vote took place, and came to the university to talk to various people. If anything changes, it will come from that.
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[1] The Faculty Senate did not and does not have the power to remove Botman and therefore the nonbinding vote was a recommendation to those who do have such power. While a no confidence vote against a USM President had never been carried out before, the method for the Faculty Senate to go about making a recommendation to the chancellor and Board of Trustees to do something the Faculty Senate lacks the power to do is in fact clearly described.
Normally such a recommendation would go through the USM President, but Selma Botman wasn't about to recommend she be removed and for recommendations like that the university Governance Document has an entire section (Article VIII.) The procedure is very simple actually. When a senate -be it the Faculty Senate, the Student Senate, the Professional Staff Senate, or the Classified Staff Senate- wants to make a recommendation that the university president doesn't agree with it holds a vote. Then "upon a two thirds vote of those voting" the recommendation is sent to the chancellor and/or the Board of Trustees along with the university president's dissenting recommendation.
Thus, one would think, it would be clear that what was necessary for the vote to be declared a success would be for two thirds of those voting to vote in favor.
[2] The vote was 194 no confidence, 88 not-no confidence. (There were no other options.) The total faculty is 377. Thus 68.8% of those voting voted no confidence, which is 51.5% of the total faculty. Turnout was 74.8%.
23.3% of the faculty came out to vote against no confidence as compared to 25.2% who either chose not to vote or were unable to vote and, as previously mentioned, 51.5% who voted no confidence.
All figures have been rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent.
Friday, May 4, 2012
Botman, Chess, and Context
[Yeah, I know, we'll get back to looking at bad fiction at some point. Anyway, more on the Selma Botman no confidence vote for now.]
Context matters.
Consider the phrase, “and they stayed
together forever.” Imagine that a story ended with that phrase.
Is that a good or a bad thing? Is the ending happy or sad. Is it a
reward or a punishment for the characters? You don't know. You
can't know. You lack context.
Depending on their relationship, and
the circumstances, and any number of other things those five words
could be anything from a down ending so brutal as to shake your faith
in humanity and leave you depressed for a week, or they could be the
equivalent of, “and they lived happily ever after.”
Context matters. And in terms of rules
it matters even more. When I joined the Student Senate at USM one of
the few things they did right was make sure that everyone understood
that our rules existed in context. We had our rules, and they were
withing the larger context of the Student Government Association
(SGA) constitution, which was within the context of the University
Governance Document, which was within the context of many things
reaching up to the US Constitution.
That's important to understand because
it informs how you read the rules. Taken in isolation a rule might
seem ambiguous when in context it is actually quite clear. Taken in
isolation a rule might seem to say one thing when in reality it says
the opposite. Taking rules in isolation can make true things seem
false and false things seem true.
Imagine that the SGA wanted to make a
new position and the decided that the rule would be that someone
could be appointed to that position based on whatever criteria the
Student Senate deemed appropriate. (As far as I know this has never
happened, but it's illustrative.) Take that rule in isolation and
you'd assume that the rule indicates that, “Must be a straight
white cis male Christian,” would be acceptable criteria if the
Student Senate deemed it appropriate, because the rule says whatever
criteria deemed appropriate. In reality the rule would say nothing
of the sort because it exists within the context of all the other
rules, and there are rules against discrimination.
Or, for a non-hypothetical example,
consider chess.
The rule governing how the queen moves
and captures reads as follows:
The queen may move to any square
along the file, the rank or a diagonal on which it stands.
- FIDE Laws of Chess Article 3, Section 4
That
rule is only helpful when looked at in light of other rules. For
example rule defining what a file is, the rule defining what a rank
is, the rule defining what a diagonal is, the rule saying that
bishops, rooks, and queens may not move over intervening pieces, the
rule saying what a move is, and the rule saying when it is legal to
move.
If you
take it out of context then you could use it to argue that, for
example, a queen is unblockable (it says any square,
not any unobstructed square.) Or that a queen can move as a knight
for surely a knight's move meets the dictionary definition of
diagonal.
Botman
is arguing that a queen can move as a knight. Metaphorically of
course.
She is
taking the rule described in Faculty Senate bylaws Section C, Subsection 5, Part b,
and interpreting it in isolation in hopes that she can convince
people that (1,2) is just as diagonal as (1,1) and thus the queen can
move as a knight and so she wins. (Checkmate.)
Or, to
be somewhat less metaphorical, she's using it to argue that since it
says 2/3rds it means two thirds of everyone, not just two thirds of
the votes. Which is all well and good and one of multiple perfectly
legitimate interpretations of the rule if it is looked at
in isolation. A knight's move
really is pretty damned diagonal when you think about it. Where it
falls down is when it is placed in context.
For
example, the document that governs these sorts of things, that being
the document that supersedes the Faculty Senate bylaws, specifically
states in no uncertain terms that the necessary vote is “a
two-thirds vote of those voting”. Which means that the queen
doesn't get to move as a knight. Selma doesn't win.
Except
that the media has, thus far, declined to check the rules of chess,
and awarded victory to the person who randomly claimed it in spite of
all evidence to the contrary. So if you're ever in a tournament in
Maine, keep in mind that you don't have to win, you just have to
claim you win and that's what everyone will report.
And I
didn't have to point to that particular document (the University Governance Document, if you're interested) because it's not the only
thing that governs how these things work, and thus is not the only
thing that says that a two thirds vote means two thirds of those who
actually vote. But since I'm not in the mood to dig through
parliamentary procedure, I'm going to stick with that.
It
states:
ARTICLE VIII: RECOMMENDATIONS TO CHANCELLOR AND BOARD OF TRUSTEES
On matters which require the approval of the chancellor or the Board of Trustees, recommendations of senates not concurred in by the president shall, upon a two-thirds vote of those voting, be forwarded with the president’s recommendation.
So
what should have happened is that the vote be considered a success,
reported as such by any who cared to report it, and then passed on to
the higher ups along with Selma's recommendation that it be
completely ignored. Instead Selma claimed that it failed, the matter
was over, let us never speak of it again, and everybody ran with it.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
More Botman: Press Release
The more I hear, the more that I think I was wrong to imply that Botman may have a legitimate argument for her interpretation of the rules. Unfortunately I'm not really prepared to share that right now. I don't know how the people who have said it feel about being quoted (I don't think they'd mind, but I don't know) and it isn't the sort of thing I'm comfortable paraphrasing. (Unlike the people saying it I am not well versed in the governing documents of the university.)
What I can share is this press release that I've gotten my hands on. I'd like to credit it to my ubiquitous network of clandestine informers, but the simple truth is that it's a press release, the entire point of a press release is to distribute it far and wide. You don't need informers to get your hands on one.
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USM Vote Succeeds in sending a clear message of NO Confidence in University President
Portland, Maine - May 3, 2012 - Critics of USM President Selma Botman say that her reaction to their successful vote of no confidence show just how out of touch she is.
“If this were a gubernatorial election,” said Jeannine Uzzi, chair of USM’s Faculty Senate, “we’d say the winner had a resounding mandate.”
“We had voter turnout of 75 percent,” Uzzi said. “And of those, close to 70 percent voted no confidence in President Botman’s ability to lead this institution.”
On May 1 and 2, USM’s fulltime faculty cast ballots in the institution’s first-ever refer
“This vote is an expression of deep concerns about the President’s lack of leadership and direction for, and commitment to the well-being of this highly respected, well-regarded institution,” said Luisa Deprez, former dean of Arts and Sciences and chair of the university’s recent regional accreditation committee.
At numerous meetings held on each of the three campuses over the last two weeks, faculty spokespeople noted that their colleagues brought forth numerous examples of ways in which the President has weakened USM over the past four years.
These faculty, they say, pointed out fiscal and hiring irregularities that they claim emerged from her office.
According to faculty spokespeople, participants at the forums also recounted significant concerns about the tentative and strained nature of some very important university-community relationships, relationships that they claim the president has disregarded or to which she has not attended.
“President Botman’s claim that the vote is a win for her,” said Professor of Physics Jerry LaSala, “is yet again another indication of her inability to hear concerns and respond appropriately. “
“There can be no ‘business as usual’ when the institution is in such a state of disrepair,” LaSala said.
“The only business as usual”, says Professor of Geography Lydia Savage, “ is that faculty remain committed to working with students as the end of the semester and commencement approaches”.
Uzzi, the Faculty Senate Chair, said that the faculty looks forward to meeting with the Chancellor to talk candidly with him both about the impact of President Botman’s lack of leadership over the past four years and about ways to move forward for the good of the institution and the State.
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Previous posts on this subject, which are all probably less informative than what I just quoted:
Updated Botman Update
I said I'd know more later today, it's later today and thus I know more.
Here's what isn't in dispute:
The no confidence vote took place. The vast majority of those who voted voted no confidence. The exact numbers were 194 no confidence, 88 voted against no confidence. This means that 68.8% voted no confidence.
It also means that 51.5% of all full time faculty voted no confidence. All full time faculty is a category that includes people who aren't even in the country, and thus had no way of voting under the rules set up. 100% turn out was impossible.
Furthermore, that means that the turnout was 74.8%.
Here's where it gets tricky:
The vote needed a two-thirds majority. What does that mean?
In almost every instance, including in the set of rules that govern how the faculty senate operates that means 2/3rds of the vote. Which means that the no confidence vote passed with room to spare.
Under one set of rules, the rules to which Selma Botman is pointing, it means 2/3rds of the electorate. In which case, since only 51.5% of the total faculty voted no confidence (with 23.3 voting against and 25.2 not voting) the vote failed. Hence USM President Selma Botman put out a statement yesterday claiming victory.
Now people have to go around today explaining to the media that just because someone claims they won doesn't mean they actually did. Just because someone says that 68.8% is less than 2/3rds doesn't mean it is. And, also, people need to do a hell of a lot of work to figure out exactly which set of rules is actually in force. That will be a massive headache.
It may turn out that she was right to claim victory, though even if right it seems strange to do a victory dance after the majority of voters, and the outright majority of the electorate, vote to be rid of you, it may turn out that she was wrong. It remains to be seen.
[Added:]
It actually looks like Botman's stance was based solely on taking something completely out of context. When placed in context the rules don't actually conflict, the ones she's pretending don't exist inform the interpretation of the ones she's taking out of context, and everything agrees that two thirds means two thirds of the voters. But I'm not ready to get into details about that right now*.
In other news, there's been a press release.
[Additional Added:]
* Now I am. It was much simpler than I thought. It litterally says "a two-thirds vote of those voting" which is about as straightforward as something can be.
[Added:]
It actually looks like Botman's stance was based solely on taking something completely out of context. When placed in context the rules don't actually conflict, the ones she's pretending don't exist inform the interpretation of the ones she's taking out of context, and everything agrees that two thirds means two thirds of the voters. But I'm not ready to get into details about that right now*.
In other news, there's been a press release.
[Additional Added:]
* Now I am. It was much simpler than I thought. It litterally says "a two-thirds vote of those voting" which is about as straightforward as something can be.
Botman update
[A summary of the events surrounding the vote can be found here.]
[Added] Ok, so apparently a lot of what I say below is premised on something that seems to be true only in the mind of Selma Botman. The idea that 2/3rds of the electorate was required requires a very selective reading of the rules. By which I mean it's looking more and more like she was willfully ignoring what the rules said so she could claim an interpretation more beneficial to herself. Meaning that it looks like the vote of no confidence was successful, in spite of claims to the contrary.[/Added]
I don't think most people who come here care much about the ongoing saga of what has unfortunately become known as Botmangate* but for any who do, I've just heard news today that confirmed I suspicion I started having yesterday about why the voter suppression attempts were going on.
Normally when one engages in voter suppression it's because their opponents supporters are more likely to be screwed over by the attempt. If your opponent's supporters are poor, you make it more expensive to vote (for example requiring them to show ID that isn't free to get), if they're without cars you make the trip to the booth longer, if they're busy you try to make the lines longer, if they're low interest you make it so they have more hoops to jump through, if they're not registered yet you make it harder for people to help them to register and make it harder to register in general, if they're women then you make it hard to vote after a name change (as women tend to change their names after changing their marital status) and so on. You make what sounds like a general rule that actually targets a demographic that you want to suppress.
Almost none of that applies here. The voters are all university faculty and supporters vs. opponents of the no confidence vote do not, so far as I know, fall along any easily identifiable demographic lines anyway. Certainly some people were indeed getting shafted far more than others by the many and bizarre requirements Botman insisted upon for a ballot to be counted, but Botman had no way of knowing whose side those people were on. In fact, in all likelihood the shafting was entirely orthogonal to support or opposition, meaning that it probably didn't change the makeup of the voting population at all, it merely reduced its size.
I wasn't sure why you'd even want that until I discovered that passing or failing had nothing to do with which side got the overwhelming majority of the votes. You see for the no confidence measure to go forward two thirds majority was needed, and indeed more than two thirds of the votes were for no confidence, but that doesn't matter. Because it was a two thirds majority of eligible voters that was needed. (Recall that not all of the eligible voters are even in the country right now.)
[Added:]Ok, it's more complicated than that. She claims that it's 2/3rds of eligible voters, but that is in no way clear. A bit more here.[/Added]
By depressing the turnout, which she did quite successfully (given the circumstances the turnout should have been as near to 100% as elections ever get), she made it so that about 90% of the votes would have to be for no confidence in order for it to actually work.
Her suppression effectively changed the threshold from 2/3rds to about 9/10ths. Which means that, apparently, she succeeded. The vote of no confidence did not pass, even though more than 2/3rds of the votes were for no confidence. (Except maybe it did, more on that in a bit.)
Selma Botman won. Based on her past statements, for example her threat to fire the entire language department because she didn't like someone asking for the context behind her (inaccurate**) figures, I have a feeling things will get very bad. She's already made a very big show of going around to places she would never have been seen before with no apparent purpose other than to personally decide whether or not the faculty she was observing belonged on her enemies list. Her power is limited, but given her vindictiveness I expect her to do whatever she can within those limits to make a lot of people's lives hell.
And that's before we consider how we got here in the first place. The vote of no confidence wasn't because she was a vindictive jerk who will shoot for voter suppression to get her way. It was because she's driven the university into the ground through severe mismanagement, it was because she refuses to take responsibility for her actions, it was because she refused to do her job, it was because she cut people out of the loop knowing full well that success required keeping those people in the loop because she was more interested in being able to blame failure on others (the people she was locking out of the loop) than actually succeeding.
It was because she was lying to people constantly and using those lies to justify backwards policies doomed to failure and then blaming others when they failed. It was because she'd do things like say, "We have to eliminate these three positions, we can't afford them," and then turn around and create three new, entirely unnecessary, positions each of them more expensive than the things we supposedly couldn't afford.
It was because her idea of how to save money is to hire someone with a salary big enough to pay for multiple full time positions we actually need and have that person tell her how to do her job while she's telling everyone else they'd have to cut back even more necessary positions because we have no money.
It was because her mismanagement turned a surplus into debt and her explanation for why that happened was another lie. An obvious lie. The kind of lie that says, "I know this isn't true and you know this isn't true, but I frankly don't care what you think and not only do I not have enough respect for you to tell you the truth, I don't even respect you enough to make up a plausible lie."
It was because she's been basing her plans on obvious falsehoods. (Like the idea that the current students here couldn't leave even though they are leaving and the resulting dropping enrollment is what she uses as a justification for everything she ever does.)
It was because her plan to solve enrollment problems was to ignore all of the students who actually want to come here and instead try to entice students who have never heard of us, who are being courted by Harvard, to come here from China.
It was because she was ignoring the actual situation in reality in favor of hypothetical worlds that, while possibly interesting places to set fictional stories, were flatly contradicted by known facts.
It was because she has continually tried to do things that, as sure as things can be in this world, would lose us money and justifying them based on the falsehood that they'd save money.
It was because she used up more goodwill than anyone is entitled to.
It was because she gave out raises to her people at the same time she told the academic side they'd have to cut back so much they'd have to lay people off.
It was because she funneled more than 3 million dollars from academics to administration when the academic side couldn't afford it and made it so the actual business of the university (you know: teaching, learning, that sort of thing) was funded at the lowest level in the university's history.
It was because she fucked up all the damn time and rather than letting those fuckups being a course correction she'd just keep on going, blaming others for her mistakes while taking credit for anyone and everyone's successes.
It was because she's not good at her job. Not even a little.
And now, it looks like she keeps it. Maybe.
See, there's some dispute over which rules were being operated under, and there's some confusion about details, and while Botman put out a press release saying that she won (by losing by more than 2/3rds) I haven't heard from everyone. It may be that 2/3rds of voters actually is sufficient. And if that's the case then she lost.
So the Selma Botman no confidence saga might not be over. Maybe. I should know more by the end of the day. The vote has been counted, and Selma has offered her interpretation as if it is fact, and the paper has passed that on uncritically, but I don't know for sure that that is true.
But then there's a larger issue at work than even that. The faculty has no power. Even without voter suppression, even without confusion over the rules, even if every single member of the faculty had voted no confidence, all that would happen is to have the vote be handed off to the chancellor and trustees, who make the call. And I have no idea whose side they're on anyway. I'd like to think that they're on the side of the university or the students or something like that, but if that were the case they'd have gotten rid of Botman a long time ago.
I don't know where things go from here.
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* I get that once upon a time it was considered witty to combine Whitewater and Watergate to form Whitewatergate and then -gate became a suffix meaning scandal, but it really has to end. Let Botmangate be the last -gate and from now on instead of Xgate we should say, "the X scandal." For that matter, even here and now, wouldn't, "The many and varied scandals of Selma Botman," be a better description than "Botmangate"?
** To be clear, no one other than Botman knew that Botman was lying at that time. The person asking for context was not trying to catch her in a like because the person had no idea it was a lie. That came out later.
[Added] Ok, so apparently a lot of what I say below is premised on something that seems to be true only in the mind of Selma Botman. The idea that 2/3rds of the electorate was required requires a very selective reading of the rules. By which I mean it's looking more and more like she was willfully ignoring what the rules said so she could claim an interpretation more beneficial to herself. Meaning that it looks like the vote of no confidence was successful, in spite of claims to the contrary.[/Added]
I don't think most people who come here care much about the ongoing saga of what has unfortunately become known as Botmangate* but for any who do, I've just heard news today that confirmed I suspicion I started having yesterday about why the voter suppression attempts were going on.
Normally when one engages in voter suppression it's because their opponents supporters are more likely to be screwed over by the attempt. If your opponent's supporters are poor, you make it more expensive to vote (for example requiring them to show ID that isn't free to get), if they're without cars you make the trip to the booth longer, if they're busy you try to make the lines longer, if they're low interest you make it so they have more hoops to jump through, if they're not registered yet you make it harder for people to help them to register and make it harder to register in general, if they're women then you make it hard to vote after a name change (as women tend to change their names after changing their marital status) and so on. You make what sounds like a general rule that actually targets a demographic that you want to suppress.
Almost none of that applies here. The voters are all university faculty and supporters vs. opponents of the no confidence vote do not, so far as I know, fall along any easily identifiable demographic lines anyway. Certainly some people were indeed getting shafted far more than others by the many and bizarre requirements Botman insisted upon for a ballot to be counted, but Botman had no way of knowing whose side those people were on. In fact, in all likelihood the shafting was entirely orthogonal to support or opposition, meaning that it probably didn't change the makeup of the voting population at all, it merely reduced its size.
I wasn't sure why you'd even want that until I discovered that passing or failing had nothing to do with which side got the overwhelming majority of the votes. You see for the no confidence measure to go forward two thirds majority was needed, and indeed more than two thirds of the votes were for no confidence, but that doesn't matter. Because it was a two thirds majority of eligible voters that was needed. (Recall that not all of the eligible voters are even in the country right now.)
[Added:]Ok, it's more complicated than that. She claims that it's 2/3rds of eligible voters, but that is in no way clear. A bit more here.[/Added]
By depressing the turnout, which she did quite successfully (given the circumstances the turnout should have been as near to 100% as elections ever get), she made it so that about 90% of the votes would have to be for no confidence in order for it to actually work.
Her suppression effectively changed the threshold from 2/3rds to about 9/10ths. Which means that, apparently, she succeeded. The vote of no confidence did not pass, even though more than 2/3rds of the votes were for no confidence. (Except maybe it did, more on that in a bit.)
Selma Botman won. Based on her past statements, for example her threat to fire the entire language department because she didn't like someone asking for the context behind her (inaccurate**) figures, I have a feeling things will get very bad. She's already made a very big show of going around to places she would never have been seen before with no apparent purpose other than to personally decide whether or not the faculty she was observing belonged on her enemies list. Her power is limited, but given her vindictiveness I expect her to do whatever she can within those limits to make a lot of people's lives hell.
And that's before we consider how we got here in the first place. The vote of no confidence wasn't because she was a vindictive jerk who will shoot for voter suppression to get her way. It was because she's driven the university into the ground through severe mismanagement, it was because she refuses to take responsibility for her actions, it was because she refused to do her job, it was because she cut people out of the loop knowing full well that success required keeping those people in the loop because she was more interested in being able to blame failure on others (the people she was locking out of the loop) than actually succeeding.
It was because she was lying to people constantly and using those lies to justify backwards policies doomed to failure and then blaming others when they failed. It was because she'd do things like say, "We have to eliminate these three positions, we can't afford them," and then turn around and create three new, entirely unnecessary, positions each of them more expensive than the things we supposedly couldn't afford.
It was because her idea of how to save money is to hire someone with a salary big enough to pay for multiple full time positions we actually need and have that person tell her how to do her job while she's telling everyone else they'd have to cut back even more necessary positions because we have no money.
It was because her mismanagement turned a surplus into debt and her explanation for why that happened was another lie. An obvious lie. The kind of lie that says, "I know this isn't true and you know this isn't true, but I frankly don't care what you think and not only do I not have enough respect for you to tell you the truth, I don't even respect you enough to make up a plausible lie."
It was because she's been basing her plans on obvious falsehoods. (Like the idea that the current students here couldn't leave even though they are leaving and the resulting dropping enrollment is what she uses as a justification for everything she ever does.)
It was because her plan to solve enrollment problems was to ignore all of the students who actually want to come here and instead try to entice students who have never heard of us, who are being courted by Harvard, to come here from China.
It was because she was ignoring the actual situation in reality in favor of hypothetical worlds that, while possibly interesting places to set fictional stories, were flatly contradicted by known facts.
It was because she has continually tried to do things that, as sure as things can be in this world, would lose us money and justifying them based on the falsehood that they'd save money.
It was because she used up more goodwill than anyone is entitled to.
It was because she gave out raises to her people at the same time she told the academic side they'd have to cut back so much they'd have to lay people off.
It was because she funneled more than 3 million dollars from academics to administration when the academic side couldn't afford it and made it so the actual business of the university (you know: teaching, learning, that sort of thing) was funded at the lowest level in the university's history.
It was because she fucked up all the damn time and rather than letting those fuckups being a course correction she'd just keep on going, blaming others for her mistakes while taking credit for anyone and everyone's successes.
It was because she's not good at her job. Not even a little.
And now, it looks like she keeps it. Maybe.
See, there's some dispute over which rules were being operated under, and there's some confusion about details, and while Botman put out a press release saying that she won (by losing by more than 2/3rds) I haven't heard from everyone. It may be that 2/3rds of voters actually is sufficient. And if that's the case then she lost.
So the Selma Botman no confidence saga might not be over. Maybe. I should know more by the end of the day. The vote has been counted, and Selma has offered her interpretation as if it is fact, and the paper has passed that on uncritically, but I don't know for sure that that is true.
But then there's a larger issue at work than even that. The faculty has no power. Even without voter suppression, even without confusion over the rules, even if every single member of the faculty had voted no confidence, all that would happen is to have the vote be handed off to the chancellor and trustees, who make the call. And I have no idea whose side they're on anyway. I'd like to think that they're on the side of the university or the students or something like that, but if that were the case they'd have gotten rid of Botman a long time ago.
I don't know where things go from here.
-
* I get that once upon a time it was considered witty to combine Whitewater and Watergate to form Whitewatergate and then -gate became a suffix meaning scandal, but it really has to end. Let Botmangate be the last -gate and from now on instead of Xgate we should say, "the X scandal." For that matter, even here and now, wouldn't, "The many and varied scandals of Selma Botman," be a better description than "Botmangate"?
** To be clear, no one other than Botman knew that Botman was lying at that time. The person asking for context was not trying to catch her in a like because the person had no idea it was a lie. That came out later.
Monday, April 30, 2012
To the person in the Czech Republic searching for information on Selma Botman
Hello,
Either there are multiple people in the Czech Republic interested in the goings on at my university, or this is not the first time you've come here searching for information on the Selma Botman no confidence vote. Either way, if you should come here again to read this, I'm quite interested in your story.
I haven't gotten a lot of traffic incoming from my own country on this issue, but you clearly know about Selma Botman, know that there is a no confidence vote, and want to know more. Yet you live what is, I'm told, between 1/7th and 1/6th of the circumference of the earth away.
Are you a student or teacher who happens to be abroad? An alumnus/alumna? Someone who knows Selma? Are you considering coming to USM?
What's your story?
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As for what you came here about, I've been very tired lately and thus have not been staying on top of all the latest news. The vote on whether or not to have a no confidence vote passed, which then left the question of how to go about doing it. Similar things have been done before, but not the same thing. Thus an entire process had to be worked out.
Selma has insisted on measures that, from my angle, look like attempts at voter suppression. For example there will be precisely as many ballots as there are votes to be cast so that if a ballot should be lost or damaged in transit it will not be able to be replaced, the faculty member will simply not be able to vote. An involved process requiring id and multiple signatures has been worked out which seems to be based on the idea of making as many steps as possible in hopes that members will fail to complete at least one of them correctly and thus accidentally disqualify their vote. Other measures have been taken that appear to be taking aim at those members of the faculty who are currently elsewhere (it is never the case that every faculty member is in the area.)
Once the vote is taken, which will be next month I believe (though I don't remember exactly when, I'm almost entirely sure before the 20th, so some time in the next 20 days) there will be a committee to count the votes, which will include a representative of Selma's and there is some worry that this will turn into one of the recount fiascoes we've grown unfortunately accustomed to in this country these past 12 years or so. That said, apparently there will be an outside observer (a lawyer of some kind) on the committee, so perhaps that will help keep shenanigans to a minimum.
And that is where things stand as last I heard, but, as I mentioned, I haven't really been on top of things. Mostly I've been so tired I couldn't do much of anything.
It is especially important to note that my information could be out of date. Perhaps things changed and the stuff that seemed like voter suppression won't actually happen, or perhaps something worse will happen. I don't know for sure.
-
[Added:] For anyone who has no idea what this is about, I've previously brought up the situation at USM (hence getting me hits from people searching for "Selma Botman no confidence vote") in this post. Though not exactly in great depth even there.
Either there are multiple people in the Czech Republic interested in the goings on at my university, or this is not the first time you've come here searching for information on the Selma Botman no confidence vote. Either way, if you should come here again to read this, I'm quite interested in your story.
I haven't gotten a lot of traffic incoming from my own country on this issue, but you clearly know about Selma Botman, know that there is a no confidence vote, and want to know more. Yet you live what is, I'm told, between 1/7th and 1/6th of the circumference of the earth away.
Are you a student or teacher who happens to be abroad? An alumnus/alumna? Someone who knows Selma? Are you considering coming to USM?
What's your story?
-
As for what you came here about, I've been very tired lately and thus have not been staying on top of all the latest news. The vote on whether or not to have a no confidence vote passed, which then left the question of how to go about doing it. Similar things have been done before, but not the same thing. Thus an entire process had to be worked out.
Selma has insisted on measures that, from my angle, look like attempts at voter suppression. For example there will be precisely as many ballots as there are votes to be cast so that if a ballot should be lost or damaged in transit it will not be able to be replaced, the faculty member will simply not be able to vote. An involved process requiring id and multiple signatures has been worked out which seems to be based on the idea of making as many steps as possible in hopes that members will fail to complete at least one of them correctly and thus accidentally disqualify their vote. Other measures have been taken that appear to be taking aim at those members of the faculty who are currently elsewhere (it is never the case that every faculty member is in the area.)
Once the vote is taken, which will be next month I believe (though I don't remember exactly when, I'm almost entirely sure before the 20th, so some time in the next 20 days) there will be a committee to count the votes, which will include a representative of Selma's and there is some worry that this will turn into one of the recount fiascoes we've grown unfortunately accustomed to in this country these past 12 years or so. That said, apparently there will be an outside observer (a lawyer of some kind) on the committee, so perhaps that will help keep shenanigans to a minimum.
And that is where things stand as last I heard, but, as I mentioned, I haven't really been on top of things. Mostly I've been so tired I couldn't do much of anything.
It is especially important to note that my information could be out of date. Perhaps things changed and the stuff that seemed like voter suppression won't actually happen, or perhaps something worse will happen. I don't know for sure.
-
[Added:] For anyone who has no idea what this is about, I've previously brought up the situation at USM (hence getting me hits from people searching for "Selma Botman no confidence vote") in this post. Though not exactly in great depth even there.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
I made the paper
The free paper, The Portland Daily Sun, but I'm on the front cover in color, so that must count for something. See:
Closer up:
Ok, so the story is this:
I attend a university. USM. Which stands for University of Southern Maine. It's a good school. It's currently being run by someone who is not good at what she does. Selma Botman is just not a good administrator. She makes decisions the same way we've seen Republicans do when they're claiming to be fiscally responsible: She cuts without thought to what the costs of such cutting will be, she spends where she wants to while telling everyone else there's no money at all.
One of her earliest moves, and I didn't know about this until the meeting where I was photographed, was to shut down the daycare. The daycare with a one year long waiting list. The reason that there was a daycare was because if people don't have a place to put their kids they can't attend classes. That had to hurt enrollment, it can't not. It also signaled clearly that she wasn't concerned for the students.
In the past few years upwards of three million dollars have been cut from academics and transferred into non-academic areas.
We haven't been hiring new teachers to replace those exiting.
The faculty have been working without a contract. They're being offered a .5% raise over the next two years. They haven't had a cost of living raise in three years. Because, apparently, we have no money. On the administration side, where Selma works, there have been raises. The biggest being upwards of 40%. You know, more than 160 times what the teachers have been offered.
But that's not the big thing. The big thing has to do with the fact that, even though enrollment hasn't dropped enough for us to be losing money* we are losing money. A lot of money. As a result each of the colleges that make up the university have been told to cut a million dollars from their budget. This means firing people. There simply isn't enough money for it to be otherwise. (It will be the lowest rate that academics have been funded in our history.) That's the big thing.
In that situation we shouldn't be giving out raises. Not when it means other people losing their jobs.
And the problems go so far beyond that, because the cuts will make us a worse university, which means lower enrollment, which will be used to justify more cuts. Everything Selma does puts downward pressure on enrollment.** She's trying to cut things from the budget without considering that a lot of the time doing so cuts revenue.
And it's not like we don't know how to make money, we've got departments that have more demand than we can supply. If we expanded those we could make more money almost instantly, but we aren't. Instead other parts of the same university system are trying to set up outposts near us and poach because we're leaving so much demand unfilled that it's actually profitable for them to set up entirely new facilities. All we'd need to do is hire new staff. Whatever they're netting, we could net more.
But no, the only solution she sees is to cut, cut, cut.
And she is a complete and total ass, for what it's worth. When someone asked her a substantive question (which was about how the drop in enrollment related to the drop in faculty) her response to this language teacher was, "You know, Jeannine, plenty of good universities just use Rosetta Stone and don't even have language departments." Yeah.
So, first, people don't come to university to take Rosetta Stone, which means that'd drop enrollment even fucking more. Second, threatening to fire someone, and every one of their colleagues, when they ask you an unrelated question is not an appropriate response.
Also, Selma has changed her habits since it looked like a no confidence vote might be coming***. She used to ignore the faculty. For example, she had them design a reorganization plan, and then once they signed off on it shut them out from any input (which the plan required and without which the plan has not worked.) Now she attends every meeting. Every single meeting. If the faculty is going to discuss anything she'll be there, watching.
My response to this was, "marking and designating faces for death with her eyes," which isn't quite right, it should actually be "every one of us" instead of "faces" but the point here is that I wouldn't be able to make an Against Cataline I reference from memory if I'd learned from Rosetta Stone. (Original Latin: notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.) Classics: it lets you make strange references.
Anyway, the faculty is awesome, the administration sort of sucks. That's what's going on here.
-
* Last year we made 2.7 million in profits, student credit hours dropped 3.4% which means we made about 2.2 million less, so we should be half a million in profit, not 7 million in debt.
** Her current plan to fix that is to recruit students from China. We have nothing to offer Chinese students, we don't even have enough of a Chinese presence to teach the language. If they want to be thrown into US culture and told to sink or swim on their own, then we can offer that, but not much more. Our dorms are not exactly awesome, and you know who else is recruiting students from China? Harvard. I'm sure we'll be able to compete with them so well.
[Added:]
*** It came. A summary of what happened with the no confidence vote can be found here.
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