According to an oral agreement reached today by myself and the Superior Professor, my last day at my current job will be Dec 31, 2003. Of course, she has to check with the authorities to see if this is all above-board, but my research and my intuition tell me it’s up to her discretion and sense of fairness, vestigial as that may be.
This marks the third time I have made the offer to leave while still allowing them — the Superior Professor and the Subordinate Professor — to find the right person for the job and me to find a new position. I made the offer in June, realizing that this was not a long-term situation, but that wasn’t what was heard (hey, classes were out for the summer and European teaching assignments were more appealing to think about).
After this contractually-specified corrective process came about, I reiterated the offer, still no sale. Today, after several minutes of conversation, I laid the idea on the table again and it was accepted, with the admission that my previous attempts had not registered at all. When I explained, with stunned amazement, that this was the same offer I had made previously, I was told that wasn’t what she heard at all. (I related this story to a high-ranking member of the administration and after he expressed relief that things would be resolved without any prejudicial information in my record, he made it clear that his experience — what you say isn’t what they hear — is consistent with mine, for both the Superior and the Subordinate Professors.) The prejudicial information is very important: if this process gets to the next stage — again, purely at her discretion — I lose any oportunity to work at the University.
Is it any surprise this has been such a struggle? If you can’t communicate something as fundamental as that — especially to someone who claims to have the interests of their research and policy center first and foremost in the mind — what do you have?
So that’s a relief. I had to then listen to a litany of gripes about how the Superior Professor comes to work after dinner to write and research and her family is suffering as a result. But working at her office rather than at home is her choice, by her own admission: her children are, in her words, “an attractive nuisance.” And the things she is working on are her choice: one doesn’t assign tasks to full professors, after all. So if she has chosen to work on law review articles and programs to raise the profile of her center, that’s her choice.
And of course I had to hear a torrent of abuse and revisionist history directed at her predecessor, who to hear it all was inept in every way but is in fact a senior assistant attorney general for this state and the chair of the Consumers Union board. Not a lightweight, in other words.
And then the Subordinate Professor gripes about how underpaid she is and never had any money: I have learned never to go to coffee with her, unless I’m prepared to buy. Two full-time professor salaries, no kids, no hobbies that I can discern, and still no money. Granted, there may be loans to pay off, but those can be refinanced to 2% notes these days. I think it’s just too much dining out and Living the Life. And that recently arrived shipment of furniture and art from central Europe, bought during the summer while over there, probably doesn’t help.
This all seems so surreal, but I have never understood surrealism to involve pain . . . .
I’m just glad it will finally come to an end, by the end of December if not sooner.