🚀 go-pugleaf

Jackson Browne wrote:

> Just goes to show, our campus may be great in capital improvements (College Park,
> a.k.a. Construction Park) but when it comes to the people that matter - students -
> we have a long way to go.  Step 1:  Remove the morons from the classified staff

As a classified staff member as well as a graduate student I just have to respond
to this.  There is nothing wrong with the classified staff.  They follow impossible
conflicting mandates, both explicit and implied, from a variety of empowered idiots
in the campus administration, the university system, and of course both the
bureaucracy and elected legislature in Annapolis.

The real decision makers are useless brothers-in-law of state senators or neer-do-
well cousins of politically powerful people who are "found a job" in the state govt.
Some of them come here to the University.  They are "found a job" in the libraries
or various computer operations.  Many of them are failed B-team academics who have
no ability or aptitude for administration.  And lets not even mention the practice
of "spouse placements" where husbands or wives of professors we really want to get
are "found a job" somewhere on campus.

The most egregious ones get bypassed almost immediately: workers learn who really
knows what they are doing, and simply ignore the others.  Sometimes they get
bypassed in the chain of command; submanagers unofficially "report" to supermanagers
and the person in the middle has an "office view" for the remainder of their time
before retirement.

To simply blame the rank-and-file worker, who has absolutely no discretion in any
of the important decision making, is just intellectual lazyness that is IMHO
quite unbecoming to an authentic student of higher learning.

Step 0: get off your lazy liberal intellectual butt long enough to take some
responsability for the utter incompetence and corruption of your own state
govt.  Beware, this might mean you actually have to read some campaign literature
and actually vote.

And when you have actually contributed money to a candidate for the state legislature
and you have carried petitions for third party candidates and you are making
regular trips to Annapolis to campaign for collective bargaining for state workers
THEN maybe you will have the standing to call me a moron.  But not before.

And BTW: the construction is a direct subsidy from Annapolis to the concrete
contractors, who then turn around and donate a small percentage back into the
campaign coffers of the politicians.  It really does not have much to do with
the University at all.  Just ask the Dean of Humanities who resigned when he
was told that he would have NO SAY AT ALL in the booking of acts into the new
performing arts center...

-- 
Charles B. (Ben) Cranston
mailto:zben@ni.umd.edu
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~zben