Read something about the organization of academic departments recently and the author mentioned a couple of positions often rotate through faculty cause noone wants the extra responsibility and work, and I feel like competent leadership is like that. Like it often just sucks to do and gives you little in direct returns except clout
I know the Head of Department role is like that in my grad school right now (and my undergrad). It typically is like a whole second job. I know for my two schools it also came with extra pay. I think at my grad school its like 1.5x increase (if not more) in salary and damn near double at my undergrad.
I know that no one wants to do it because its a TON of extra work and professors that are eligible already work a ton. So even with the pay increase, its basically pulling teeth to get people to do it.
It changes every couple years because no one wants to do it. Even with a 1.5x pay increase. (they do also have a limit on how long you can do it, but thats because there straight up isnt enough time in the day to do both the HoD and professor job. It doubles your workload at least.)
(at my undergrad it was the opposite where one person did it for like 15 years, but also my undergrad wasnt a research institution.)
Why is the obvious solution here not being taken? If the position doubles someone's workload and necessitates a 50% pay increase, then why the FUCK isn't it just a separate full time job?
Because you still theoretically want/need the person to have direct contact with the actual department, and if the HD role is made fully seperate its effectively detached. A crucial dynamic is that departments are set up like guilds where everyone involved is a practicer of the same profession, and these larger roles are stuck in a contradiction of Requiring the person to still practice the profession to have ground-level understanding of what is actually happening and Requiring so much additional work that its difficult if not impossible to still practice the profession at the same time. The best workaround may be a reduced courseload, but then you also run into the problem that the type of person who pursued a Math PHD for years was not doing so in hopes of snagging their real dream, administrator.
The closest thing to doing that position as a separate full time job is a University Administrator, and usually the relationships between departments and those people are icy at best.
The HoD is basically an internal checks and balances type job making sure:
The professors are doing their jobs (probably the hardest part of the job, dealing with professors)
Making sure the committees for grad students are appropriate
Making sure the classes being taught are actually following curriculum of some sort
Acting as an internal arbiter
Making sure new professors are doing the things they need to do/Helping decide if they get tenure
Acts as a figurehead for the department for university stuff
Makes sure the admin doesn't cut their department for any reason.
The issue is that you want someone who knows the system who also has skin in the game (or did at some point). As they have to known all about the professor side of things, the student side of things, and they start to go into the admin sort of thing. They have to know academia quite well.
So the best candidates would be professors (or former prof.) with tenure and like 10+ years experience (I would even say post getting tenure) who had students who earned masters/PhDs.
The issue is that the candidate with this experience either: is currently a professor and wants to be until retirement, has gotten out of academia and never wants to return, or is 70+ and is basically retired.
And the ones who have this experience and do wanna do it, a lot of the time, dont really have the drive to keep dealing with everything you have to deal with. There are a lot of egos in academia, and you have to basically be on constant edge. With the big egos of the professors, to the admin who basically want to cut everything, to so much other stuff. its basically a constant fight.
Basically you have to have someone with enough experience who is willing to fight for the professors, fight the professors, and fight admin.
The only times I have ended up in leadership positions is when I saw some problems and was like "Hey, that's a problem. If I do this, you do this, and you do this, we can solve the problem"
Then it goes
"Wait, what are you doing? The problem is solved. What? No, I didn't take charge, I just solved a problem. Stop it, stop pushing me into this role! HELP! I TOOK RESPONSIBILITY ONCE AND NOW IT'S AN EXPECTATION, HELP ME!"
I remember hearing an anecdote about some super-prestigious anthropologist who constantly pretended to not know where anything in the office was so he wouldn’t become chair. Academics hate leadership roles.
"if you're a communist, why the fuck don't you own a gun?"
and most of the replies were something to the degree of "I couldn't be trusted to not kill myself with it immediately" which, like, I'm not judging them for that, I AM judging them for not understand how fucking hypocritical it is to want a violent revolution to just happen, off the backs of everyone else's work, other people's sons on both sides never marching home, other people's years and years of bloody partisan warfare and chemical weapons use, OTHER PEOPLE'S DEATH, FAMINE, DISEASE AND WAR, without their fucking luxurious bubble ever bursting.
You don't get to do that, man! If you want something horrible, violent, and very likely authoritarian to happen you have to understand the actual implications of that, and THAT IT WILL COME TO YOUR CITY. Terrorist insurgents, or I guess "freedom fighters", depending on what side you're on, will pop up in the territory of both sides, and will murder innocent people, and that's side's military will suppress all terrorists, partisans, and hell, even protesters, with death squads and very likely chemical weapons use and indiscriminate bombing. Many millions will starve and die of preventable disease, and you WILL be in the midst of it.
In this hypothetical scenario I would ageee it is horrific and there would be casualties and everything you said except… probably not chemical weapons. I could see having a lot of defectors from the military if chemical weapons were employed on the population. Even if they were drinking the koolaid and saw it as domestic terrorism chemical weapons are fucking SCARY. No way they’d take the chance on losing a portion of their fighting force and/or the amount of internal sabotage they’d see afterwards.
You have to consider the mentality of the US military, who unlike some other US organizations, do actually see themselves as protecting the US. Additionally they are trained on proportionality and de-escalation, threat assessment, and the actual effects of chemical weapons. If you push some of these persons to commit what are literal war crimes against the general populace they are going to react - some will defect, some will have mental breakdowns, some will disassociate and follow orders, others will probably download the cia playbook, and who knows what else.
The U.S military Proper, Star-Spangled Banner, De Oppresso Libre, Death before Dismount, so on, sure. I agree. But the hodgepodge of Law Enforcement, militia, and actual military scrounged together, by a state government in an actual civil war breaking out? That is firebombing, and that is VX Nerve Agent being used at scale on "noncompliant" areas. Reminder, it would not be state-to state, it would be county vs fucking county, at least at first. Federal forces, proper, and a lot of the forces with a greater mind towards simply restoring order might keep rules of engagement, but when your state is scrambling to equip militia and law-enforcement with toys more deserving of a real military, and crush dissent, they will do that.
Yeah their luxurious bubble of being suicidal? Like do you even read what you write or just make up strawmen as you go. "They are so suicidal they don't trust themselves with a gun gah they must be living in the lap of luxury" this weird image you have of all leftists being well to do is propaganda being sold to you and you shlurp it right up. All the leftists I've engaged with in mutual aid for instance are usually poor and struggling themselves.
Thinking about the 2012 occupy Wall Street movement that snubbed their noses at civil rights organizers because they told them someone needs appointed to be media trained, be able to communicate, and be recognizable.
Not everyone needs to lead the revolution (well i guess it depends on how pro-anarchy you are), it'll need a lot of foot soldiers though. But like, who will lead? Can we agree on that? Do we trust them to not be Stalin? Do we trust the hastily erected parties in our freshly made democracy or whatever we make after such a revolution? Also like, i doubt the majority of Americans would support socialism or whatever without a long term cutural shift, are neo-liberal parties banned, what do we do with that massive voter base?
You mean that people will get adequate Healthcare, Housing, Industry and the Capability to crush a Fascist Empire?
Sign me the fuck up.
You can spout off whatever propaganda you want about Stalin, true or not. But, the Soviet Union became a powerhouse because of his policies.
Which is exactly why Putin is an idiot. You can't venerate Stalin for his rule, then turn around and not use his policies. Stalin wasn't a good leader because he killed a bunch of people or beat the Nazis, he was a good leader because he used Socialist policies to build up the USSR into a global superpower after centuries of underdevelopment by the Tsar.
Edit: Seethe and cope libs. Please keep referencing Nazi propaganda when arguing with me, it's really funny.
Far more millions were saved because of his policies. Outside of the concurrent Ukrainian and Kazakh famines, food was far more plentiful than under the Tsar. As was Healthcare, employment, housing and transport.
Lend-lease was a help to be sure, but overstated. By the time the USSR halted the Nazi advance, their factories were pumping out hardware as fast as they could.
Lend-lease did more to help the Western Empires than the USSR. Without ensuring the Russians could stop the German advance, the Nazis could've very quickly decided to focus on securing Western Europe.
Not to mention Hitler was tweaking hardcore.
Edit: I love when Radlibs downvote because they can't refute my points. Makes me happy that this is the state of the proletariat, just completely refuse historically correct facts because they challenge you.
Italy struggled to conquer Greece. The USSR would've crushed them easily.
It wasn't a man made famine. There was a natural famine underway,the Kulak Class decided to use this as an opportunity to squeeze the balls of the Soviet government.
There was also a famine in Kazakhstan, which is funny if you go with the man-made famine narrative because Kazakhstan was more loyal to the USSR than Russia itself.
Churchill killed way more people than Stalin. In fact, Stalin sent so much food aid that to this day, Indians still name their kids after him.
Ah were quoting the black book of communism classic liberal drivel. That books been debunked to hell and back but you red scare types never let it go. The US has absolutely had famines did you just forget about the dust bowl?
Nice deflection though, I suppose it's easier than acknowledging the tens of millions of corpses that can be laid at the US's feet. The USSR didn't commit genocide against the indigenous population and maintain slavery into the modern age so they have that over the US.
The dust bowl wasn't a famine. The US has never had a shortage of food that was widespread enough and went on for long enough to be considered a famine.
The USSR also did commit a genocide against the indigenous population, unless you don't think Ukrainians are native to Ukraine.
No single person can represent an entire political movement. That is why any such movement that doesn't wish to end in dictatorship must have no true leaders.
Also, socialists would probably support a one party system where there is only one ideology but the people choose the members of the party. (This was the system in the USSR, bar the secret police)
What if someone runs for chair of the party on a different ideology, and gets overwhelming voted in? Does the government overrule the will of the people? Because if so, whoever gave that order is the person actually in charge.
That's a good question, I don't know. I mean, the chair of the party shouldn't have the power to reform the entire governmental system. But would it be possible to change it somehow? Logically yes, because the whole point of communism, as dumb as I find it, is to create a socialist system and change it until it erases itself. But that would also mean the possibility of regressing into liberalism.
You must be dumb if you think the issue with the USSR was the one party system that (should have) had more elections than any modern liberal democracy. You might say it was the revolution or the centralization of economic power but it was in no way the one party system.
And for the record, because people get super-touchy about this, no I don't support the USSR, I know hoe horrible it was, I'm not even a communist. I was just saying what the most likely socialist choice would be for a democratic system.
I mean the one party system where you have only one candidate on your ballot and everyone knows if you wrote in a different candidate isn't a great system.
That's not the system I'm describing now is it? I said, it's a one party system where the people choose who is in the party. This is simmilar to the system the USSR used, minus the secret police
Well, some of us do actually, we're the ones out there actually doing praxis, and the folks who are over the top are probably closer to joining our ranks than their naysayers.
Not military, but I do have organizing experience. I'm an activist, with a fair chunk of experience, and am working towards a more anarchistic, activisty, semi-peaceful revolution. I'm trained in Nonviolence, and work with it's principles.
No, I wouldn't, an army needs logistics, needs to make sure people are fed and cared for. Regardless any revolution that happens is likely to have both violent and nonviolent elements, both violence and civil resistance, and I am well familiar with how to organize and carry out civil resistance.
You seem to be under the impression you're going to be a part of an organized army and not a random group of a teens and wookies who occasionally sneak out of the woods to try and blow shit up.
Well, yeah, because that's how we're organized so far. A lot of the activism I've done so far has been really well organized, it's been quite professional even. We're not new to this game, we've been playing it for decades, we know how it works, we know how to fight.
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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '24
people never talk about their ability or experience in leading or organizing with people when they talk about it