Lessons

I just have to get this off my chest so I feel better. I got a call today from a coworker telling me my supervisor has been promoted. On the way home from teaching this morning, I was just thinking about how I could effectively communicate to the administration what a manipulative, unethical and poor manager she is.

This is a hard place for me. I hate that I feel almost obsessively angry at her and wish with my whole being that she would retire or be let go or just stop working. It sounds awful on my part to dislike someone so much and yet, every day that goes by and the more things she does and says make me angrier and angrier.

One of the biggest things that bothers me about working for her is that she is manipulative. She will tell me to start a project like a bridge program for international students. I will present my idea. She will change it and distort it to make it something completely different that I don't agree with or understand. Then, if it works, she will take credit and if it doesn't, she will blame me.

She is also so selfish. She builds a gigantic office for herself and crams the rest of her staff into little cubicles. She wouln't even let them decorate their cubicles the way they wanted. She had to approve all the decorations for everybody.

And she is hypocritical. She says she is not a micromanager (and she is). She says she wants to advocate for us (and she doesn't). She says she wants more sustainable international relationships and yet she doesn't give any of her staff the opportunity to meet our partners and she continues to create relationships that we only find out about after the fact so she's the only one who knows anything about them. She says she values professional development but she won't support a staff retreat which the director and I have been trying to have for several years. When I held a faculty retreat she scheduled another meeting during that time so she couldn't go. Since we are never allowed to go to professional conferences, we decided to do workshops amongst ourselves for professional development and she not only scheduled things for herself during the times of the workshops, she scheduled things for other staff members, so we had to cancel and reschedule several times. She won't write anything down because she doesn't want to be held accountable for it later. She wouldn't even let me write things down when I had meetings with her, saying I should be able to remember it.

Another thing I hate doesn't have to do with her really but rather the structure of the university. There is absolutely no accountability. There is no questioning, no second guessing, no "other" opinion about how things will go. It is her way or the highway. She can take 5 trips to China for no reason and then say we have no money for professional development. She can expect her staff to work 60-70 hour weeks during the summer for $30,000 a year because we are "exempt" She can say that I did not meet minimum expectations for my job because I did not do "enough" activites with international students, even though she never talked to me about it before, I have 20 other things under my job description to accomplish, and I did do activities with them, just not what she would consider "enough" She can continue to have sketchy, seemingly unethical relationships with powerhouse women in China and nobody blinks an eye. She can fire people at will who question her practices or her authority (multiple examples). She can move the entire office to a new location even though everyone who works for her was against it and the adminisration never bothered to talk to us about our concerns. And she can get promoted in spite of the fact her entire staff has quit under her about 5 times in the last 10 years and her entire current staff and faculty has gone to talk to HR about her problematic management style.

I know it doesn't really compare but it is disturbingly similar to how I imagine a totalitarian government would be. We are voiceless and vulnerable. And we have all been searching for, applying for and interviewing for other jobs for years but none of us can seem to get out. We are trapped.

The people that have worked with her for a couple months think she is either crazy or stupid and the people that have worked with her the longest (25 + years) think she is abusive and manipulative.

The only ones who seem to have a high opinion of her are her superiors- I guess she knows who and how to impress.

I am just so frustrated that a Catholic, Benedictine university would allow this to continue... I am so frustrated being on the "little people" side of things and vow to myself that if God ever grants me the privilege of being a "higher up" in my career, I will never forget to talk to the "little people"- the people involved in the day to day tasks and affected so profoundly by the decisions of the "higher-ups"

The part of me obsessed with some kind of "fairness" and "justice" just wants to scream and can't stop thinking about some way to overthrow this regime for the good of the wonderful people who work there.

But another part of me wonders if God has given me this challenge to learn a profound lesson in humility and forgiveness. Do I just let it go? If she wants to put my name on stupid programs and blame me for everything that goes wrong, should I just let her and thank God for my cross? Can I be that humble?

Or is this an opportunity to fight "wrong" and fight on behalf of the students for more ethical, consistent programming that does not exploit and fair treatment of staff and respect in the workplace?

Again, the serenity prayer comes to mind: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Oh, how I need that wisdom now, dear Lord. What are you calling me to do? What is the right thing? Where do you need me?