Bad News - got 3 of 4 art school classes pulled.

Oh man, I just got 2 emails, taking away 3 of my 4 art school classes for next year...

My one World Religions class was *awful* (bad combination of very difficult student group and first-time course design problems w/reading and assignments, was going to revamp a third of them), and I suspect that and a vindictive chairperson dragged me down...

The person who hired me in I thought was nice, but I later learned that he sometimes singles out people to punish.

Because I chose to serve on a committee, that put me in his crosshairs, and he used my fall term's polarized evals to put me on notice.

Then, this term, I got stellar evals for 2 of 3 courses, and mid-to-negative for my nightmare course.

Concurrently, papers to evaluate a departmental curricular sub-section were being collected, w/the very explicit notice that they would *not* be used to penalize anyone.

That particular assignment turned out to bring all sorts of weird religion-related issues out of the woodwork with students, and was compounded by the fact that many students never receive basic training in academic writing...

Though I know that at least one other faculty member was having students re-write papers 3 to 4 times before he felt comfortable turning them in, I took the departmental request at face value, and turned in the papers that I accepted for credit, since I figured that I could always justify myself based on student skill level and first-time course design issues.

So, I think what happened is:

1) the vindictive guy saw the papers and was appalled.

2) that led him to check out some (or all?) of my evals, at which point he decided to mention that b/c of low return rate (i.e. my 1 stellar eval for the freshman writing), he decided to check out another course (the nightmare one), without mentioning the insanely positive sex course evals (if he saw them at all).

3) he emailed the other (or both?) of the people who hired me in for my other courses, to try to get me to lose my job, and the one who hired me in for the nightmare course reviewed the evals and wrote me to drop me (interestingly, he CCed the vindictive guy, so I'm guessing the vindictive guy was the instigator).

I had already mentioned to 2 faculty members (including the guy who hired me in for the nightmare course) that I wanted to meet to get their perspective on some issues w/difficult students this past term, so I think I'm going to:

1) talk to the one who still has me hired for a course.

2) go from there, and perhaps then request a meeting w/the non-vindictive guy (to get his feedback on the student issues).

. . .

Dang, the guy who still has me hired in is going out of town, so I'm not sure what to do now... :/