Tone Deaf: "Employment Recognition Strategy"

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This message today from our UVU Provost announcing a new "employee recognition strategy" reveals the ongoing sense that university administrators perceive members of the faculty as employees rather than colleages engaged in shared governance. Would they ever send a mass email to the university president, academic affairs officials, and deans referring to them as Dear Employees? Of course not. There is a clear hierarchy at work, one inimical to shared governance. And then the awards: not a single one for research or creative work. The message: we're a teaching university that brackets off all research and creative work as nice things that faculty insist on doing but that are completely isolated from teaching. To paraphrase a comment about badges from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madres": we don't need no stinking awards!

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