Apology Not Accepted

So the recent events for me at Adelphi continue to get stranger and stranger. The good news is that I got promoted to Senior Adjunct…finally. The bad news, well lets just say the rest of this post is dedicated to that.

So here is the back story…

I was referred for promotion to Sr. Adjunct this past spring. It is a title and position created for tenured faculty that do no not want to retire fully, just teach part-time. It grants rights to classes ahead of all other part-time faculty. The loop-hole is that it is also open to Adjunct faculty to get promoted. There is a specific number of slots available, so even if qualified there needs to be an open slot. As a part-timer it is considered prestigious to be a senior as it grants first rights to classes available that have been taught in the past, ahead of all other adjuncts. It also pays a little more per class.

In the business school there has not been a senior role in over 3 decades and the last person to hold this was a faculty member who had spent their entire teaching career at Adelphi.

To make a long story a little shorter, the paperwork (which was excessive) was put in mid semester in the spring of last school year. It took me a couple of weeks and involved about 10 hours of work and about a dozen separate files, including every syllabus from every class I have taught at the university, examples of tests, student evals…well you get the idea. Then it sat with no action for close to 6 months. Of course I made multiple inquiries, to no avail. I honestly don’t know if it was apathy, lack of importance, dislike for me or what was being proposed, or maybe they just didn’t know how to proceed.

Then in the beginning of this semester there was a mad rush to evaluate and complete the process. Only no one had ever done a faculty peer review on me. So they did immediately (actually the same week requested).

Then there was a faculty retreat for the business school and a faculty mtg. all strung together the same day the following week (early September), which all the adjuncts were invited too. Except we weren’t…well I’m talking about the faculty meeting. Three of us were rudely asked to leave by the Dean. Lets just say that lack of professionalism is an understatement…Oh and I was also informed the Dean asked the dept. chairperson if I was qualified to be an adjunct at the school during the faculty meeting I was removed from. Are you kidding me? The scary thing is that I have more business experience in the C-suite then any full-time faculty member except for the 2 clinical Instructors promoted at the same time. Oh, I forgot to mention I have been teaching Grad classes for close to a decade too…

I know un-F’ing believable.

So we left the meeting abruptly as a couple of fellow faculty and staff asked why we were leaving and then received apologies from a couple of sincere administrators who didn’t know what to do as we exited the meeting room. We didn’t know what to do either, so we left instead of facing a potential verbal face-off with the Dean.

The follow-up was a series of communications to the Union, the Provost office, and even HR.  It’s now 6 weeks later and although told an apology is forthcoming…none has come as of my writing this post…

And here is the craziest part of this conversation. The by-laws of the university state all faculty are welcome at faculty meetings. Maybe the Dean is ignorant or can’t read. Or maybe he is shrewd and has gotten away with this for the past two years. a few of us attended the next mtg. without a formal invite too. It caused some looks from a few faculty and an abrupt statement welcoming us from the Dean after being chastised by the Director of the Union in the hallway 3 minutes earlier.

In any event there has been no apology…so this is my way of accepting the Non-Apology from the Dean…

Oh, and to top it off they made my promotion effective in 2019…that’s over 3 months after being officially notified.

In all my years in HR, I never saw a promotion with a 97 day delay effective date. I might contact the Guinness Book of World Records on that. But seriously, is that how you promote someone, with a 97 day delay…and the reason is???

Boy, talk about making me feel good about the whole thing….or not….you can’t make this stuff up.

Oh, I am still waiting for the Dean to apologize to the three of us for asking us to leave the meeting. I won’t bother with the apology for disrespecting me by questioning my background.

I will keep you informed on how this all turns out.

For those HR folks out there, this is food for thought. How would you react to an employee that was mistreated during a promotion process? A real life case study in Human Relations…