What I said

A colleague today told me he was turned down for a sabbatical. Not because of merit, but because some paper-pusher decided that there would be NO sabbaticals, because there is no budget.

Even though my colleague had actually gone to considerable effort to see his classes would be covered without us having to hire a one-year replacement. They didn't even READ his application, it turned out.

But he's still turned down.

And then, the admin who turned him down said, "weeeeeelll....you know, I have some funds in the budget, maybe we could hire an adjunct and you could get some release time."

WTF? You can't approve a sabbatical that calls for zero funding, and yet, your office has a big enough budget to have a slush fund?

This is why so many universities are so effed up these days. Giant administrations that behave more like the worst of the corporate world (or like Congress) instead of people who actually, might, you know, CARE about the well-being of their faculty and those faculty's ability to teach students.

I was scared my colleague was going to say he had handed in a resignation but I guess the economy is sufficiently bad that he didn't even consider it. I know I would have.

I'm also really scared for this fall; I'm anticipating us to have zero budget for student workers, which means a lot of the stuff they did, like monitoring the computer lab, will fall on our shoulders as unpaid overload. Plan on hearing me bitch a lot this fall.