Some light reading for a short vacation.

Part Two, Chapter 9, Section 5, Subsection 1:

"Under established International Law, you are considered a belligerent until captured. As long as the national uniform is worn, soldiers are considered to be under orders to evade capture, and not to surrender voluntarily. This entitles you to commit acts of violence against legitimate military targets without the risk of prosecution after capture for violation of the local criminal law. For example, it would be permissible to kill, in the line of duty, any of the enemy who may impede your effort to evade capture. Such entitlement does not extend to you as an escapee. Such a killing by you as an escapee would be considered murder and you would be liable for trial and punishment."


I'm off to the woods until Monday. Have a great weekend!

Making the hard decisions.

Do I want an iPod, when all I really need is a digital AM/FM radio for the gym?

In which I ponder the budget.

Several years ago LSU moved to a business model budget. Under this model, each department has control over its own funds. We might choose, for example, to give everyone a big raise. Or, we might choose to hire new faculty. We might purchase equipment, or furniture.

As with all such schemes, the administration makes sure that they will get money from somewhere to sustain their bloated salaries. Each department pays a "tax" to the college, which is determined by enrollments and indirects as earned in "Year Zero" (the year before the new budget took effect). If the department fails to generate at least the enrollments and indirects earned in this year, the college will take the shortfall out of the departmental budget. We're not talking about that funny fake money that colleges usually shuffle around, but real dollars: my raises.

You can imagine what this has done to inter-departmental relationships. It was hard enough to get department chairs to sign off on interdisciplinary grant proposals before, and now it's almost impossible. Each chair wants the indirects to go exclusively to his/her department, or they quibble for weeks over who is getting the larger percentage. There is no incentive to establish research "centers," which have no budgets of their own and which funnel indirects away from the departments. We used to have really strong centers in Population Studies, Cognitive Science, etc., but they are now moribund.^*

Each department is now in direct competition with every other for undergraduate enrollments. Sexy majors are being trotted out every year, like "Visual Communication" and "Forensic Sociology." In the social sciences, every department is trying to offer statistics courses in house, so we now have about 8 courses titled "Introduction to Statistics in [insert department name here]." Because all new course offerings must be approved by a college level committee, many of these redundant courses are being offered under old course numbers and titles: "Applications of Industrial/Organizational Psychology" is now "Introduction to Statistics in Psychology," but you wouldn't know that by looking in the student handbook. The Engineering College is fighting to (wait for it!) offer all core curriculum classes in house, including the writing core, History, and foreign languages.

The new budget has erased some of the lines between pots of money that used to be sacrosanct. New construction and building renovation were once paid for from a "capital improvements" budget, but no more. One department in my college is responsible for several million dollars of the construction costs associated with their new building. My department and several others have taken advantage of the new model by "firing" the custodial staff provided by Physical Facilities and hiring a private contractor to keep the bathrooms looking spiffy. I must say, the bathroom has never looked cleaner, and my office carpet has been vacuumed for the first time in several years.

But shiny, fresh-smelling toilets will only go so far. I see nothing but disaster on the horizon. The strongest departments in the college are struggling to maintain the numbers established in Year Zero, and are starting to lose faculty members as a result.^* Since the new budget was established, we have not had one faculty meeting in which we discussed curricular issues from a teaching and training perspective; we have only discussed strategies for getting more butts in the lecture hall. Departments within the college are fighting with each other, rather than forging interdisciplinary programs. There is no hope at all for Humanities and Fine Arts.

Only two groups of people seem to be benefitting from this model: the deans and the marginal-at-best departments. The dean no longer has to make the hard decisions about which programs to support and which to cut. S/he no longer has to deliver bad news, but only sits back and watches the marketplace in action. The marginal departments, the ones with the lowest possible academic standards, are pulling in vast numbers of warm bodies and the tuition dollars associated with them.
The departments that formerly only provided degrees to the football players are now thriving.

The system can't possibly last much longer. Eventually LSU is going to drop so far in the national rankings that someone will realize that the business model must be scrapped. Someone in the administration must recognize that higher education can't be sold like burgers at McDonald's. Someone will have the guts to tell the trustees that a university is not supposed to make a lot of money, and that we should strive for academic excellence above all else. The provost who championed this system has left LSU to plunder some other university, and surely no one wants this to continue any longer than it has already.

Right? Right?

^*My best friend's husband had a chaired position in Political Science, and he established the Population Studies Center. The dean then refused him any budget from the indirect costs generated by the Center's own funding. He left to take a faculty position at a real university, and took my friend with him. Yeah, I'm a little bitter.

Guilt.

The Angry Kid found one of these beauties creeping across the sidewalk yesterday. She fell in love, and so I went to find a mason jar. I stuffed it full of damp Queen Anne's lace and popped in Mr. Caterpillar on a nice sturdy stick. Of course I nailed some holes in the lid before screwing it down. He crawled around inside the jar for a while and then settled down on a comfortable part of the stick.


The problem is that Mr. Caterpillar had kind of a rough time before we installed him safely in the jar. He was dropped from great caterpillar heights several (3) times. The Angry Kid learned that if you poked him, cool orange things would pop out of his head and he would squirt something foul-smelling.

Because he was fully mature and crawling around on the ground, I expected him to pupate. Sure enough, this morning he was still on the stick, and had pasted his tail down with a glob of silk. But he was strangely quiet, and seemed smaller somehow.

To make matters worse, I had promised the Angry Kid she could share Mr. Caterpillar with her preschool friends. We took him in this morning, and I left his jar on a table in the classroom.

I think I killed him.

Update. The Angry Kid's teacher must have convinced her that Mr. Caterpillar would be happier outside. So he was stuffed into a "hole in a bush" (AK's words). At least I don't have to throw a teeny tiny funeral.

Update 2. The Angry Kid's teacher told me today that the caterpillar was alive at the time of his release. Furthermore, the preschool class checked on him today and he was gone. I suspect he was transformed into bird food. The Angry Kid is convinced he transformed into a butterfly. Who am I to argue?

Blogging on the road: The final chapter.

I am now President of my society. (Pause modestly for applause.) This is not as impressive as it sounds. Members of the society are elected to the Executive Board for six years, two new board members every two years. The presidency is handed off to the board members who have been on the longest. Becoming society President is like being the last roll of toilet paper under the sink.

Nonetheless, being on the Executive Board and the Editorial Board of our journal means that I have to go to a lot of meetings while at the conference. Committees are formed, reports are made, budgets are examined. It's way more fun than hanging out in the hotel bar with the friends who were the real reason that I came to the conference in the first place.

Which brings me to my story. We have a relatively new member of the society; let's call him Dr. Bane. Is it possible for one person out of 150 to make us all so miserable that we are ready to disincorporate the entire society just to make him go away? I am here today to testify that yes, such noxious personalities exist, and yes, Dr. Bane is just such a person.

The society was incorporated about 40 years ago, and many of the original founders still regularly attend (and present). Dr. Bane, unknown to all of us, even our founders, arrived three years ago and has never introduced himself to anyone. I presume he believes that introductions are unnecessary for luminaries such as himself. Secure in the knowledge that we all know who he is, he asks us who we are, repeatedly. I have given my name three times. One of my colleagues has introduced himself to him five times. After my presidency was announced at the banquet, he greeted me with a jeering, "Hi, [not my first name]."

I didn't bother to correct him. I do not like Dr. Bane. I won't go into all the things Dr. Bane has said and done over the past three years. Suffice it to say he is offensive both in appearance and opinion, and his research is uninteresting. Topics of conversations with him are usually oriented around his own intelligence. He seems to be delusional: He regularly tells undergraduate and graduate students that he and he alone founded not only our society but our discipline itself. He "invented it," he says.

Since his first appearance three years ago, I've been complaining to the other members of the Executive Board about Dr. Bane. Our officers are, for the most part, absent-minded professors of the meek and mild variety. They dismissed my complaints as the rantings of a premenstrual woman. But everything changed this year: Dr. Bane crashed the board meetings.

Our board meetings are conducted over lunch. Dr. Bane has never seen food that he didn't eat, and when he saw the buffet table past the open door, he came right on in and sat down next to me. I told him that the seat was taken, by the journal Editor no less, but he sat there anyway. He filled a plate with food. The Editor tried to explain that this was the Editorial Board meeting. Dr. Bane started eating. We were helpless.

The meeting commenced, beginning with a report of number of manuscripts submitted, rejected, accepted, etc. The Editor had to stand, as there weren't enough seats. Dr. Bane mumbled, "Oh, I guess I shouldn't be here." Then he picked up the journal report documents (with "Confidential" printed across the page) and perused them carefully. We worked our way through the report. When Dr. Bane didn't understand something, he pressed for information. He offered his opinions. He had new business. He filled his plate with food three times.

The other officers of the society suddenly realized that Dr. Bane was a problem. The Executive Board meeting was over lunch on the following day, but in a different room. Even knowing that he hadn't been welcome at the Editorial Board meeting, he attempted to attend the Executive Board meeting as well. After turning him away once, we posted a hotel guard at the door. Despite successfully repelling him, by the time we held the General Business meeting later that afternoon (to which all society members are invited), he somehow had knowledge of the items on our agenda.

I suppose it is pure coincidence that last week I wrote a short piece on territoriality, and the ways that people can infringe on other people's territory: invasion, violation, or contamination.^* We've been invaded. Dr. Bane has entered our space for the purpose of controlling it. At least now I'm not the only one who knows it.

^*My research has nothing to do with territoriality.