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Pathway :: Home
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The glorious performance review |
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Contributed by John W. Warnock
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Tuesday, 27 November 2007 |
One of the issues in the labour dispute at our universities involves the insistence of the administration that our staff employees be subject to performance reviews in order to get regular pay increases. Putting aside the issue of whether or not this should apply to staff employees, let us look at how these performance reviews work in reality.
When I was a graduate student in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s I worked in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress as an archivist-historian. An opening came up in a higher classification, and my colleague applied for it. He had an undergraduate degree from North Carolina College and a masters degree from Howard University. He was well qualified for the job. But he did not get it.
A less qualified white man was given the job. The administration of the Manuscript Division consisted of white male Southerners. We appealed this through the system, but at the time there was no real union, only an employee association which had no right to strike and thus no power. The appeal process was a dead end. We all knew why he didn’t get the job.
In 1961 I finished my masters degree, passed all the exams and the security clearance for the U.S. Foreign Service, and was assigned to the Foreign Service Institute for language training and general orientation. In one session two men from the CIA came to explain the relationship between the CIA and State Department Embassies in the field. They also described some of the CIA’s covert operations. They bragged about having overthrown the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953 and the Arbenz government In Guatemala in 1954.
I seized the opportunity and asked why they so completely bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. I pointed out that this was a black mark against the United States and had greatly embarrassed President John F. Kennedy.
That started a good discussion. But when the director of the program came to present me with my first performance review, he gave me a low mark saying that I did not show respect for U.S. foreign policy. That report goes into your personnel file and stays with you the rest of your life.
I left the Foreign Service in 1963 and took a teaching position in the Department of Economics and Political Science at the University of Saskatchewan. There was a performance issue that made the local media. A woman had taken a position teaching in a department at the university which had only male faculty. After her two years of probation she was not rehired. But she felt that no good reason was given for this action.
Fearing that this would be a black mark on her career, she hired George Taylor, a Saskatoon labour Lawyer, and sued the university. The administration made an out of court settlement, and she moved on to teach somewhere else.
At the University of Saskatchewan I reached the top bracket
in the rank of Assistant Professor and was not promoted to Associate
Professor. At the time this decision was made by the associate
professors in the department. I went to the Chairman of the
department to discuss the problem. I pointed out that I had finished
my doctorate, revised my dissertation, had it published, and it got
good reviews and sold out in six months. I also had one of the
heaviest teaching loads in the department. I asked why they were not promoting me.
He replied that quite a few of the associate professors
did not like what I wrote. I then remarked that I knew George
Taylor - the same lawyer who had represented the female academic - and that he was a friend of mine, and if this happened again next
year I would talk to him about it. The next year I was promoted.I think everyone who has been in the work force knows similar cases. There are also those who get promoted, to heads of departments and even deans, who don’t have doctorates and who have published virtually no research. We all know how that happens. There are different career paths. Staff employees at the University of Regina have good reason to resist the demand of the administrators for performance reviews. We know what they are up to. They want to eliminate seniority rights and in the long run end the union shop. Hold the Fort.
John W. Warnock taught in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina between 1986 and 2003 and in the Department of Economics and Political Science at the University of Saskatchewan between 1963 and 1974. He is author of Saskatchewan: The Roots of Discontent and Protest (2004) and Afghanistan: Creating a Failed State (Spring 2008)
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