Who is Denise Bennett, you might ask?

Denise Bennett is a faculty member who lost her shit about grant administration at the University of Idaho. The university then placed her on leave. She retaliated by livestreaming as she opened and read through the terms of her leave. And, in top-tier episode of “that escalated quickly,” the UI administration responded by excluding her from campus and sending out an alert insinuating that she was going to shoot up the campus on a meth bender.

The whole situation is a mess. Both sides are behaving badly.

You can read more at the UI Argonaut if you want.

Backstory aside, I wanted to take a closer look at the email that Denise wrote that has since been published to the internet for all to see. From my vantagepoint, I’ve heard similar rants before but it’s rare that they make it into print. Most of the time, faculty know better than to commit this sort of thing to paper even though everybody knows.

People who are outside of the university system probably don’t know, tho.

This email demonstrates one of the fundamental problems that drives the strife in universities today: on the one hand, universities usually are a cobbled together series of outdated systems that don’t talk to each other or provide any sort of meaningful output or feedback, which are then exacerbated by employees who have no idea what things are like from the faculty side AND don’t have any conception of how a system works; on the other hand, faculty resent having to do any type of administrative work or having to interact with others who are trying to do administrative work on their behalf.

Yes, that is an extremely convoluted paragraph. A pickle, if you will.

Let’s try it again: Faculty resent administrative work, so they don’t do it, so the university has to hire administrators to do the work that faculty aren’t doing, which causes bloat and policy creep, which makes it more frustrating for faculty to try to do administrative work, so faculty end up resenting administrative work.

While I know absolutely nothing about administrative systems at the University of Idaho, I think it’s safe to say that they are outdated, convoluted, and incomprehensible.

So you get statement like this one:

I
AM
BEGGING
ANYONE
TO
PLEASE
come up with a god damned system where I can see how much actual money there is FOR ME TO SPEND ON THE PROJECTS I WROTE THE FUCKING GRANTS FOR! All year I get “the system is changing” and now, after the first of the year, “there’s money, but you can’t spend it.” WHY THE HELL DO I WRITE THESE GRANTS? WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS? SOMEBODY GIVE ME AN EXPLANATION AS TO WHY LAST YEAR MY REPORT TO NEH WAS DUE BEFORE OSP EVER GAVE ME THE FUNDS?

Makes sense. It’s hard to do your job as a teacher/creative when you can’t use the money that you won to do so—especially when you are judged by your ability to bring in grant money.

But Denise doesn’t stop there. Things snowball from “I can’t get my grant” to a complete refusal to participate in the systems that make a university run.

I WILL NEVER GO TO ANOTHER MEETING INVOLVING THE WORDS ASSESSMENT OR STRATEGIC PLAN, I WILL KEEP UP MY END OF THE BARGAIN AS DESCRIBED IN MY PD, THAT’S IT.

I get it. Really I do. Most faculty get into the professorial business because they want to do research, or teach, or do their creative work with no interruptions. Unfortunately for faculty, they want to do that without thinking about how their courses interact with everybody else’s courses. That’s where things like assessment and strategic plans come in—to try to bring some sense of coherency to a bunch of individual faculty interests.

Is that ideal? Of course not. Administrators don’t know what faculty in each discipline should be teaching, which is why they delegate that job back to the faculty.

On the other hand, administrators never let faculty delegate anything to them.

I NEVER ASK ANYONE TO COME TEACH MY CLASSES! HEY OSP, COME TEACH MY INTRO TO PRODUCTION COURSE ABOUT THE 180 WILL YA? FUCKING JOKE. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE!

And yet, at the end of the day, Denise is happy to have a permanent spot at the very institution that is doing her wrong.

THANK GOD I HAVE TENURE,

See what I mean about a pickle? (There’s no clear solution.)

Is anything really going to change? (Doubtful.)

I’ll be interested to see how this situation is resolved.