Worst Case Scenario: A Top Ten List

The Worst Case Scenario Guide for CUNY Appointed Department Chairs:
A Top 10 List
Jason Smith, LAGCC

When your CUNY appointed chair begins to refer to students as “consumers,” course preparation as “the product,” and faculty as “content delivery personnel,” disguise your true feelings by suggesting all faculty wear name tags that say “Hi, my name is” and “Ask me about X-tra credit!”
If your new chair suggests that all course materials are the intellectual property of the college, make your classes as boring and worthless as possible so no one will want your materials anyway.
Your new chair will, sooner or later, try to divert attention away from pedagogical issues by focusing on faculty attire. Suggest all faculty wear lab coats: this will both hide their offensive retro-grad student look and remind students that faculty are all doctors.
When your chair hires new faculty based solely on how high up their degree granting institution is on the annual Newsweek poll, suggest the college use Scantron job application forms and fill-in-the-blank vitas to make them easier to read.
Remember that your new chair is a career administrator who probably thinks faculty are annoying whack-jobs who don’t understand the importance of capitalism to the world. Memorize the question, “But, how does this affect our FTEs?” and repeat as often as possible. The best part is, you don’t even need to understand what an FTE is!
When your new chair talks “budget cutbacks” and “downsizing” in his first week on the job, recommend faculty rent space on their lab coats to advertisers like Dell, McGraw-Hill, Paper-mate, and Sharpie.
Learn to render any argument in indecipherable percentages with large numbers. For example, the post-midterm exam retention rate of completing students who sat the exam in all quarters for the last 3 years was 92%.
Instead of phrases like “freedom of speech” and “academic freedom” practice saying “quality management” and “outcomes assessment.”
Remember that these matter to your new boss: Dressing well, walking purposefully, sending lots of lengthy memos about how great meetings went, quickly adding lines to the vita, student checks.
And these don’t: student and faculty enrichment, a culture of learning, dedication to a cause other than career advancement, faculty voice, and the level of academic rigor that comes with deep scholarship mediated with time.