Friday, November 11, 2005

Why Oh Why Are We Administered by These Idiots?

In a hat tip to Brad Delong's "Why Oh Why Are We Ruled By These Idiots?" blog updates, I want to start a "Why Oh Why Are We Administered by These Idiots?" column. The first entry is from our recently initiated Provost's Digest:

No Internal E-mail Day – November 30, 2005
Feeling the information overload? Wonder why there is still a phone in your office? Offices next to each other in your building? While email is an extraordinarily convenient way to communicate with individuals and groups (witness this digest!), it can occassionally be overwhelming. Provost Hitch invites you to join her, the deans, directors, and division heads in a voluntary e-mail free day on November 30, 2005 . Exceptions to this “No Internal Email Day” include essential emails, emails to students, and emails to people outside UW–L. Otherwise, faculty and staff are invited to step back into an email-free past for just one day and rediscover other modes of interaction and face-to-face communication!

I wonder how many meetings they had in order to come up with this idea? I'm torn about what to do in response. Should I organize a campaign to phone the provost? Should we all show up at her office asking to talk to her? The funny thing is that most of the exceptions are email I would use, what I think she is saying to faculty is, "please don't email me".

I'm going to push for a no talking day.

1 comment:

giddings said...

I'll just blog to you instead of walking down the hallway. OR emailing. . .