work, explained (in full...ha ha)

At work: ridiculous revolving sets of orders – use your department copy machine for all your needs and send nothing to the copy center, use your department copy machine only for single sheet copies and send anything longer to the copy center, use your department copy machine for half your copies, use your department copy machine for none of your copies, use your department copy machine everything in the world you want to copy, use your department copy machine for students to copy their papers, use your copy machine as a doorstop, use your copy machine to lure small animals into the office. Just one thing.

Workload requirements: you must teach 18.3 classes every semester. It doesn’t matter that you cannot technically teach three tenths of a class – you must teach three tenths regardless. Oh, but that’s not a precise enough way for us to measure how much you teach. You must have 47 students per class (860.1 students per semester), or…you must aggregate 47 students per class between all the faculty in your department. But…only courses taught by regular faculty count. No courses taught by adjuncts count toward your aggregate of 47 hundred students per class (or 860.1 students per faculty member per semester). You’re not allowed to hire more faculty because you’re not aggregating 47 thousand students per class. But you can’t aggregate 47 hundred thousand students per class because you don’t have enough faculty. And on and on and on.

Adjunct tautology thinking: You don’t have enough regular faculty to cover all the courses you offer. They won’t give you money to hire more regular faculty (because your regular faculty aren’t making their workload numbers). You can’t cover the courses you offer without hiring adjuncts. They want you to stop hiring adjuncts.

More workload theatre of the absurd: you are required to teach 18.3 classes every semester with 47 million students per class (that’s 860.1 students per faculty person per semester, remember). You can aggregate those students if you like. For instance, if you have 17 regular faculty, 14,621.7 students need to be in classes taught by regular faculty every semester (that’s 17 x 860.1 per semester). But say some of those faculty have decreased teaching loads for doing things like taking care of the department copier and attracting small animals. Even though they have decreased loads, the required aggregate still doesn’t change – they’re still (the department actually) responsible for their quota of 860.1 students per semester. This means that enrollments increase in other courses. So you might have an Advanced Chinese seminar, enrollment supposed to be 15, with 136.6 students to make up for that person with a reduced load because the copier requires petting.

The copier must be cared for and small animals attracted. If no one does that, the entire department falls to tiny pieces. It’s true. But rather than figure out how to make this work so that no one is overloaded with teaching or copier work, lower middle and upper middle management just tell departments to manage it. So they manage it by driving the faculty crazy and making them totally miserable. I won’t even go into the copier manager problems – it’s just a constant stream of betrayal.