Alice wrote:

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First post - be kind -

As Frank McCourt says "just teach man" - this university began as a "teacher's college" - it takes a long time to grow up. We need a teacher in the CISE chair position - we've got one who has some administrative experience as well - albeit not in higher ed.

Now someone teach me how to get the fancy picture under your name.

J J tell us when and where on the party.

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Dear Alice:

I'll be kind, but let me try to help you understand why a better decision could have been made with respect to the interim chair in CISE.

First of all, almost all of us profs (and mid level administrators) consider ourselves "teachers," and we work hard at that. But the interim chair of CISE is very new to higher ed--and running an academic department is not the same, or even close, to running a high school or school district. I have been an administrator in higher ed, but there is no way I could step in and run a high school on the fly. In addition, it takes years of being in a university environment, and being highly involved in various activities, to understand the culture and processes involved. I have seen several high school administrators try to transition to higher ed admin with little experience in the latter, and it has more often than not resulted in a rash of easily avoidable bad decisions. I could go into more details if you wish, but you may want to trust me on these points to save time.    

A perhaps more important issue is that the interim chair is an untenured (and has not even gone through third year review) assistant professor who will now have to weigh in on faculty evaluations, raises, tenure, promotion, and hires in some fashion (this is an important role for a chair). In addition to a lack of knowledge and experience in this area, this puts the person in the awful position of having to sacrifice the time they need to develop the credentials to be awarded tenure and promotion to do chair tasks, and to have to evaluate tenured professors of higher rank who will then vote on his tenure (can you see the problem here?). At the least, some complicated scheme will now have to be used to avoid all the conflicts of interest at play here (else there is the possibility that avoidable litigation can rear its ugly head sometime in the future). At any other comprehensive research university, what was done in CoEP twice this year would be considered nuts, and avoided at all costs. It would be like making a first year elementary ed teacher still on probation principal of a school when the principal is fired. Even if that person has some administration experience, say running a church or non-profit, that would not be a good idea.

Finally, there were other viable and sane options in the case of CISE.

Hope you enjoy the party! It has been a rough ride.       

I recommend that you choose a Simpsons avatar.

That does it.  Goodbye, Dr. VN.

I fear that this Board is too sensitive and too politically correct and I likely will be the next to be banned.  I will save you the effort.  This will be my last post.  That way, all of the posters who agree with each other can avoid having to see somthing they dislike.

I am requesting that the Moderator eliminate my log on information. 

LVN wrote:

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Another thing, why does the originator of the Website Which Shall Not Be Named, brag about his "hits"? This is a meaningless number, and the supposed list of places from which people are reading is also meaningless. Maybe he should find out about "spiders" and "bots." How do you think Google knows what's on your site? Those little things run all over the web gathering information for search engines, and they make your hit numbers go through the roof. Totally meaningless.

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This board has received 4,569,173 hits as of a few minutes ago.  Obviously many of those are bots.