<p>marite (re the last line of post 596), one of my sisters lost her corporate job with absolutely no notice a couple of months ago. She got off a plane after a successful business trip to Europe, went to the office to find a note that said Come to the Conference Room immediately. When she walked in, they said ‘Give us your phone and laptop. We have decided to eliminate six vice-presidents. You are one of them. Leave by the back door. Come in over the weekend to clean out your desk.’ They wouldn’t even let her tell her husband, who works at the same company! No time for immediate revenge, including copying documents off the laptop.</p>
<p>Here’s her motive – seriously:</p>
<p>She’s got four kids to send to college. If she had tenure at UAH, they’d get free tuition. Now, she has no idea where she’ll wind up, and her oldest child is about to start college next Fall. The parents are going to have to pay real tuition for this child.</p>
<p>It’s really a motive worth about $900,000 – four tuitions, rooms & boards.</p>
<p>midmo and marite - midmo’s description is exactly how most corporate people I know are told they are out. H was given a cardboard box, and escorted from boss’s office to his own and then to the street by two security guards. Would NEVER be allowed back in, not for revenge threats but to avoid collecting files, clients contacts, software, etc.</p>
<p>That’s a motive for being angry, but I can’t see how shooting people is going to get her free tuition.</p>
<p>I find the blog description of her interesting. Most “vacant” personalities like her do not have four children. I suspect she did not physically abuse her kids, I suspect she often paid them little attention. Unless they were in their “lab” and taking an interest in her work. She probably vacillated between anger management issues and yelling at the kids, and being aloof and not interacting with them much.</p>
<p>@Woody
That is why you keep a “Pearl Harbor File” at home. But in academia, being given a year after denial of tenure to leave is the norm. If you screw up during that time, other schools will know it and you will never get hired anywhere.</p>
<p>midmo:</p>
<p>My H had a colleague who was exactly in that situation. Escorted to the bathroom, not even compensated for the airfare he’d paid to attend a conference on behalf of the company, etc… But in other instances, the company (not the same) did give a one-month notice.</p>
<p>Veryhappy:</p>
<p>The fact is that she had a whole year to think over her denial of tenure and secure another job–that’s the good thing about the way tenure reviews work. It’s not as if she was being terminated by a company with one month’s notice, or no notice at all, and kids about to go to college.</p>
<p>It is true that companies abruptly let people go but companies also usually give severance plan. In my line of work, usually one or two months plus a week for every year of service.</p>
<p>Tom - Well, I didn’t really want to admit to that…</p>
<p>^^^College would be even more expensive than it already is if they gave severance to faculty who are denied tenure. They would have to pay for a replacement to teach classes AND pay for the now-departed faculty member.</p>
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<p>Isn’t this similar to how it works in the military? I have a friend whose army husband came up for promotion to major from captain. He wasn’t promoted after the nth time (meaning I don’t remember how many times he came up for promotion), and after that last time the ball began rolling for discharge. He essentially had no option to remain, from what she told me, and there was an uncomfortable period of time for him between his promotion denial and discharge. I might have the details wrong, however, as this happened at least 15 or 20 years ago.</p>
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<p>Not always. I’ve been “fired” (you know, laid off) twice, both times by fairly large ($1 billion or so) companies.</p>
<p>Once they gave me four weeks’ notice, put out a nice announcement about my contributions during my tenure with the company, had a going-away get-together, and gave me a little contract work to help me get by until my next full-time gig. I was even the last one to leave my department on my last day, which struck as weird but nice that they trusted me.</p>
<p>The other time they gave me no advance notice and did ask me to leave immediately, but very politely in a closed-door meeting with my VP and the HR manager. (They did the same for the other dozen or so employees who were let go the same day.) My direct boss met me outside the meeting room, apologized for my trouble, and walked me to the door. I came back a few days later, during business hours, to get my belongings and say goodbye to everyone.</p>
<p>In both cases I felt that they made it much less likely that I, had I been a nut, would commit some kind of vengeful rampage. But then again, maybe if they thought I was a nut, they would have just swept me away quickly rather than being polite and accommodating.</p>
<p>Is there any research on the best way to fire people in order to keep them from becoming violent? If there is, I’m guessing it supports the dignified approach, but I don’t know.</p>
<p>one of my sisters lost her corporate job with absolutely no notice a couple of months ago. She got off a plane after a successful business trip to Europe, went to the office to find a note that said Come to the Conference Room immediately. When she walked in, they said ‘Give us your phone and laptop. We have decided to eliminate six vice-presidents. You are one of them. Leave by the back door. Come in over the weekend to clean out your desk.’ They wouldn’t even let her tell her husband, who works at the same company! No time for immediate revenge, including copying documents off the laptop.</p>
<p>Exactly!</p>
<p>Some companies offer an “off-site” support service for employment counseling and assistance. but, often the employee cannot access their old building/office again.</p>
<p>*
Is there any research on the best way to fire people in order to keep them from becoming violent? If there is, I’m guessing it supports the dignified approach, but I don’t know. *</p>
<p>I agree that a dignified approach is always better, but for someone who might be facing long unemployment, home foreclosure, etc, there could still be some violence.</p>
<p>*is true that companies abruptly let people go but companies also usually give severance plan. In my line of work, usually one or two months plus a week for every year of service. *</p>
<p>Yes, a generous severance package is a very good idea.</p>
<p>I am not advocating that College gives severance. What I am pointing out is that while College can give long notice, companies, instead give severance. Different dynamics are in play, and in the case of companies, securing company secrets and competitive information is very important.</p>
<p>I think the blog reference to her not feeling “good enough” again is what did it. </p>
<p>As her parents’ sole remaining child, she probably had a lot to live up to. Being a Harvard grad and being fired from a good but not top school had to demoralizing.</p>
<p>I’ve been laid off twice from architecture firms. Once in Germany labor law meant we all hung around for quite a while with nothing to do. (We’d been laid off because a huge project got put on hold.) We spent a good part of the summer taking two hour lunch breaks at the pool. They eventually hired me back full time. The other firm was in the US. As I recall I stayed on till the end of the month. They also ended up hiring me back - though only part time in that case. It was actually great for me, because it wasn’t a good fit and I was able to pay the rent while looking for something more like what I wanted to do anyway.</p>
<p>I think layoffs are so common in my field, people are generally nice about it. Especially since there’s a lot of rehiring.</p>
<p>“BTW…what kind of crazy system is it that “fires” someone mid-semester, and then expects them to happily continue teaching and attending faculty meetings for at least 3 more months?”</p>
<p>She found out about not getting tenure last spring. She had the choice of leaving then or returning and teaching another year while job hunting.</p>
<p>In big law firms, unless the firing is for doing something illegal or unethical (in which case they do the escorting out the door thing), the tradition has always been to give people a few months, at least (depending on seniority) to look for a new position, and to continue to pay them (sometimes at a reduced amount) for that time. Years ago, I knew people who were given as long as a year or more to find work, although by the end of that time they weren’t being paid anything, but still had use of an office so they could pretend while looking for work that they were still employed.</p>
<p>I suspect things aren’t handled in quite so civilized a fashion anymore.</p>
<p>Wow. Wow to the fact that she could shoot and kill her brother, wave a gun in people’s faces w/o punishment. I would hope that department would review the case.</p>
<p>Her Rate My Prof Reviews are really bi-polar. I wonder why? (some quite good, some bad). In a way though, they don’t read much differently than many other reviews there. They just seem more polarized to me.</p>
<p>Prayers to the victims.</p>