Looking for Lou and Still Whining: Reprise

Some of you may have been so desperate to procrastinate that you stumbled across this blog and my series on favoritism in hiring at UF Law. Of course, having been beneficiaries of favoritism their whole lives, many law professors think it is as natural as pissing on a poor person.

You know the story. UF Law was told to hire the spouse of someone another department and Bernie Machen evidently decided had "vision." When he told the faculty to jump, they obliged by saying "how high."

I actually went for the head fake when  Bernie said he wanted excellence for the law school. That is until in virtually the same breath he told the Law School to carry the luggage for another College. I was  pretty ashamed of my own Dean and fellow faculty for have not a shred of the "question authority" gene. (Tenured faculty remember, who need tenure because of all the courageous positions they take.)

But just when your feelings about this hit rock bottom you find something else out.  This gets a little complicated. The very day Bernie was telling us he and the other department would foot the bill for the new new hire who teaches in a very narrow area and who was to be hired at a very specific rank, up pops a public job opening announcement for someone teaching that very specific area and at that very specific rank. If you blinked you might have missed it.

Yes, a public announcement  that a reasonable person might actually think meant there was a job opening when in fact there was none. Think of it this way:  A car dealership advertises it has the perfect car you have been looking for. You show up to buy it and not only is it not there but it was never there.  This is a better analogy than you might think since it appears the morals of many of  those in higher education are a few notches below those of car dealers. Enronesque, to put it mildly.

So, yes, those of you who did not have a rich mommy and daddy, no legacy admission, aren't sleeping with the right person, did not have a string to pull of any kind,  welcome to the world of white collar academic duplicity where trickle up economics is the theme.  Where is Lou Reed when you need him to write the academic version of Dirty Boulevard? because this is the velvet glove version of Pedro's dad.