7/6/2011: That’s the rumor. He’s no longer in the UO Directory – not even as an Emeritus faculty.
New rumor is he’s been given a terminal contract, keeping his job as VP for Academic Affairs until next June. Should reappear in the directory shortly.
7/6/2011: That’s the rumor. He’s no longer in the UO Directory – not even as an Emeritus faculty.
New rumor is he’s been given a terminal contract, keeping his job as VP for Academic Affairs until next June. Should reappear in the directory shortly.
I know at least three people, including myself, who aren’t in the UO Directory any more. The contracts office is taking their own sweet time to process annual renewals for contracts that expired at the end of June.
maybe they are too busy working on all the salary increases that had to be processed first
If this is true, I hope Lariviere gives Russ a 600 hours job and some work to do. Face it, VP for Academic Affairs is not a job where you make a lot of faculty friends. I think Russ has done a lot more good than he gets credit for. Better than the Johnson Hall average, that’s for sure.
Dog barks
Russ is a fine intellectual and a true academic. He thinks deeply about issues. Unfortunately, he has no operational sense and his implementation becomes at best cumbersome, and at worse, impossible. The reality is that everything Russ took on during his appointment became more complicated and difficult than it needed to be. This left a lot of people frustrated and confused. Many thought Russ to be incompetent. What he needed was an implementation bulldog to convolve Tomlinisms with common sense. Of course, this is also what the general University needs at large – common sense ….
Russ has been Ac Aff VP for what, 6 years? In all that time there was no review for him. No procedures for input from other administrators, staff, or faculty on what was working and what needed work.
Lots of crap built up. Faculty and staff were afraid to tell Russ what he was not doing well, and his bosses didn’t really care so long as it didn’t interrupt their day.
So, lots of secret bitching, but no potential for the sort of constructive feedback for an administrator that is a normal part of a normal organization.
So when the faculty insisted on a review for Russ, and the administration finally agreed – 2 years later! – a lot of resentment came out. The sorts of things that normally would have been dealt with along the way, and the discussions that would have made Russ a better administrator, all came out at once in a big dump.
Good upper level administrators don’t let things get to this point.
The history is pretty much the same for Bean. Hired as interim after Brady left, appointed to the permanent job without a search. Hence no buy in from the faculty, OAs, or staff. People complain about him, but it gets dismissed as whining, and he doesn’t have to deal with the problems or change his behavior.
And soon Provost Bean will go through the same sort of review we just had for Tomlin.
Yes, the Dog very much agrees with this assessment. We have a structure that almost guarantees failure on every level because, as you say, crap builds up and constructive criticism and feedback go out the window and we then are
viewed as a bunch of alienated whiners.