Am heading up to North Bay this morning, about four hours’ – you guessed it – north of here. I checked the weather of course – light snow falling, clearing later. Around minus 9, all day.
Then I looked out our kitchen window, for a sort of home-grown weather report – and there was our car, covered with a thin frosting of icing sugar, and more falling from the great big sugar-shaker in the sky.
So I expect a frosty reception, up in North Bay – apart from the chill, the university has just made redundant ten senior administrators. And what will I be doing? Running a pair of meetings to finalise the scoring of academic indicators, reflecting the ‘relevance’, amongst other things, of the university’s departments and programmes. Easy, eh?
So remind me – how did I get into this?
How did you get into this, you ask, foolishly? A weak mind and an empty wallet, of course. Just like the rest of us consultants,
I have spent the last two weeks tilting at windmills – Ivory Tower types – in the southeast corner of the state.
BTW, as someone still a recent arrival to North America, you must remember that, unlike in South Africa, going north means colder, not warmer. 😉
I needed a job, yes…. and thank you for the geographic, if not moral or conceptual, compass. Norther mean colder, of course!
Funny how the large scale redundancies seem to come with right-wing governments. This new lot of ours are going to remove the arrangements that make HE accessible to poor people, looks as if it is the end of inclusivity. Funny/odd how our work interests still seem to align. Mine are strongly focused on the first year in HE but the reading takes me into the places that you would have gone to prepare for the meetings wrt ‘relevance’, whatever that means?