My favorite remark from the first two weeks of Fall 2011: “I have not done anything on my research for weeks. You know, this is a pretty easy gig if all you're doing is teaching.”
For many colleagues who have not soiled their hands or minds with research or ― Gasp! ― publishing, this report is belated but welcome. Still another colleague has figured out the scam worked by so many faculty at so many schools that pretend to value the pursuit of knowledge. Indeed, our colleague need take but one more step to enhance her or his retirement in place. She or he must complain daily about having too little time for research.
The clowns who most often bewail the time that teaching and service and other duties divert them from their windpath-breaking research almost always do no research, almost never produce research, and would not know peer-review if they ever were asked to do it.
You cannot aptly say that these clowns long ago retired in place, for retirement implies something from which to retire or some shift from more to less activity. Many clowns have not since their dissertations had a research program to halt.
Truly impressive are clowns who, bereft of research programs and accomplishments, use research to justify their piling into the three- or four-day-weekend clown-car. These clowns need an exclusively Tuesday-Thursday schedule or a Monday-Thursday schedule so that they can secure another day with which to pursue the work that they never get done or started. Now that is a cushy berth!
So, beloved colleague, aim high. Get a Lantz to pursue an imaginary project. Secure the designation “Distinguished Professor” despite your having published no peer-reviewed research in the last five or ten years. Become a low-level administrator and lament its stunting of your research.
The University of Puget Clowns affords faculty many opportunities for leisure and lassitude.
This is a very easy job when you're not doing much of it.
It is an even easier job when you aren't doing any of it. The colleagues whose service is grudging and desultory and whose teaching is at best a rumor truly have easy gigs. Who are these colleagues? Listen for those who trumpet most their service or teaching. Those who are advertising most are producing least.
2 comments:
Wow! A major Wow! That is a very brazen comment for someone to make openly. I commend this person on a total lack of skills. If you plan to do nothing, why announce it? Why not go work for the federal government instead? When I worked for the feds, some of the employees read Tom Clancy novels all day long. Clancy novels? I mean, for real? Whiteperson, '88
Maybe not THE major disappointment of my time here, but certainly one of them. When I arrived, the place was pretty much a joke in terms of professional development. Many faculty "geniuses" were working on "projects"--that never came to fruition. Of course, they were already full professors. Some had published nothing. Foolishly, I expected the place to improve. Now there's a fresh new crop of people getting tenured who have published almost nothing, along with freshly minted full professors who publish almost nothing. That many of these folk position themselves as the police of rigor is, of course, classically Freudian and classic UPS. The place will not or cannot change--or both.
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