Eira Tansey @archivist@scholar.social

Working through some bylaws revision changes that require a 2/3 approval. The voting membership in question is 28 people. Does this mean we need 18 or 19 people to vote in favor for a change to take effect? All my searching is failing me regarding how normal parliamentary procedure deals with rounding up or down.

every few years I remember that Write or Die is an app that exists and wow it works great if you just need to start any kind of crappy first draft and to stop overthinking and start writing

related is something I recall from an interview with career teachers: that they hold the institutional knowledge of what schools *can be* because that's what it was like at the beginning of their careers, whereas the parents of their students turn over every year and have no idea what resources once existed. Thus making the teachers a much more formidable force for fighting back against austerity measures. No wonder education reformers want to break teachers unions - it also breaks that memory

had a 5 AM half-sleep half-waking thought that a key feature of neoliberalism is the hostility to institutional knowledge (e.g., reliance on contractors instead of permanent staff, the rhetoric of innovation, etc). As an archivist working at an institution replacing permanent staff members with 3-year temps, this also impacts my job in preserving the historical record considerably. Who's writing about this aspect of neoliberalism?

i refer to all of this updating of long overdue (or non-existent) bylaws/policies/procedures as the deferred maintenance of shared governance.

I am our library faculty executive committee chair and have never felt more seen by an article in CHE. I got tenure a few years ago and I'm deep in the process of revising our bylaws and policies and procedures. The least sexy work but some of the most important. That sense of all the necessary parts of academic administrivia being on you as the recently tenured person is so, so real. And worse because we have fewer faculty lines to share the burden. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-associate-professor-trap

I don't doubt for a moment that being a university president is an incredibly stressful job, but when adjuncts are on food stamps and staff are getting furloughed, this is a little bit of a clueless statement that doesn't engender a lot of sympathy for the top of the food chain (source: https://www.chronicle.com/article/college-presidents-need-help-lately-too)

(I can't believe I have to remind people of all of this, but here we are. Stop treating archivists this way. It's gross.)

A friendly reminder from an archivist:
1. If we ask you to wear a mask, WEAR IT.
2. Your failure to plan around your deadlines is not our problem
3. Sorry that our ability to pull things for you has slowed down. There is still a pandemic going on. There are no rush jobs or archival emergencies during a pandemic. Calm down.
4. I also know the editor of the journal you are writing for. Please stop assuming archivists don't also do their own scholarship.

Disciplined Minds (Jeff Schmidt) has only just entered my awareness as a book I should probably read, but I'm wondering why it doesn't seem more widely known/cited. Anyone have insights? Is there some massive controversy I missed since the book is now nearly 2 decades old?

Just realized other universities have COVID-19 dashboards for their universities and ours....... definitely does not. Everything is fine and normal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

thinking about the tremendous differences between faculty unions/professor worker identities and K-12 unions/teacher worker identities and how the latter seems to be able to create so much more solidarity because the distance between a STEM and humanities educator in high school is much less in high school than higher ed

WTF does this word vomit actually mean? i'm pretty sure we can at least verify that this guy doesn't understand the political conditions in which tenure became A Thing

it's wild to me that we've all been remote working for nearly 3 months and people still wander into meetings with loud NPR in the background and not muting their mics, WTF people

New CFP for records management and climate change for a forthcoming issue of Records Management Journal. 500-word abstracts are due soon, but actual article deadline is months away. More information here: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/rmj/records-management-anthropocene

The CHE data on executive compensation at universities is very useful (and demoralizing) https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensation#id=table_public_2018

I hope all higher ed faculty and staff being asked to go back to campus by high level administrators realize that we have far more in common with grocery store workers than previously thought, whose own CEOs are making decisions from the comfort of isolated offices and large salaries

it feels like every public university in Ohio has gone from 0-60 in shared governance nightmares in the last week and it's completely exhausting and we are only at the beginning of these cuts. Are any universities actually handling shared governance adequately right now?

I should know better by now but I'm continually amazed at how the Chronicle of Higher Ed is low key like the New York Times in how deeply sympathetic it is to the ruling class if you read it long enough and between the lines.