Thursday, September 06, 2007

A Short (And Carefully Worded) Explanation

About yesterday's post. There have been rather nasty department politics brewing around here recently. Yesterday some of the grad students had a meeting, during which we "discussed" these politics. In general, people were in agreement as the grad student position on this particular topic (which I'm not going to go into, because it involves current grad students and it's really an internal matter which needs to stay internal at least for now). I however, thought that a degree of mob mentality was beginning to take and that people were starting to go too far in their calls to punish these particular grad students. And I agree that they need to be punished. What they've done is unacceptable as far as we're concerned. But, I feel that there are different degrees of "crime" here, and that there should be some reasonableness to their punishment.

In other words, I was trying to be the voice of reason in a situation where many people didn't want to be reasonable. And in a few cases, people equated reasonableness with acceptance or tolerance. That's most definitely not the case, here. Anyway, after the meeting I received a couple of emails in which their authors gave me both barrels. Not fun.

Luckily, today things seem to have calmed down some, and one of those email authors actually wrote again to apologize, which was greatly appreciated. Hopefully, from here we can proceed in a sane fashion and take care of this tastiness.

1 comment:

Journey said...

I'm glad things are easing up a little, handsome. Have fun tonight.