To the Dean:
I am writing this letter to tender my resignation from my position as administrative faculty member working at the Colorado Geological Survey, this, as of 01 September 2021. I am also writing as a Mines alumni (Geophysics ’82).
This turn of events comes about as the culmination of my five-year tenure and experience of the persistently toxic, largely detached, and overwhelmingly negative “management” of the CGS as embodied by the current SG.
Her ‘leadership’ is utterly vision-less and her ‘style’ as a manager is about as progressive as one rooted the 1970s extractives industry.
This attitude definitely was the root modus of ‘management’ at the CGS – a dislike for engagement, a tendency to autocratic decrees rather than sustained and respectful dialogue (and actual listening!) to staff.
The following observations illustrate some of the core issues:
I have come to understand that the ostensible leader of the organization has almost no concern for the people who make up the CGS nor for their well-being. Granted much of my working experience is in the Nordic countries where employee’s rights and well-being are central to the social order, the situation at the CGS has fostered widespread demoralization at minimum. The juxtaposition of a more socially progressive milieu to the CGS within Mines is sad. People are afraid to say anything critical to her as she typically responds with some punitive measures that bounce back on all staff or on specific people.
She has been labeled ‘AWOL’ by staff for being away from the office on ‘business,’ conferences, and meetings about 50% of the time before the pandemic (she was the head of AASG for a year and continues to be). I personally experienced an often last-minute cancellation rate on scheduled meetings with her around 65%. It was this absence that corresponded to a precipitous drop in the productivity of the organization, as an already crippled publication review process simply stalled most of our publications in her office for months at a time, only to be followed by the most cursory and substance-less reviews. This failure to be concerned with the review process led to the incident of plagiarism in 2019 that you are perhaps aware of. The outcome of that incident was never once resolved with the staff, so that the relations between affected staff and the offender are simply in limbo to this day.
The CGS has no effective standardized review process of its out-going publications, and, as I have so many tasks to do, I can only run interference on a fraction of the texts that are going out to the wider public: it’s quite something to see a publication about to go to print with “Denver”, Museum”, and “Tweto” misspelled. There is a serious lack of professional oversight or even interest on her part. And I get scolded for trying to take the time to fix what are often egregious lapses of spelling, grammar, formatting, meta-data-ing, and so on. People are suddenly told to get something out immediately when she abruptly thinks that something needs publishing.
My undergraduate interns will, in many cases turn out more professional reports than the CGS does. I get censured for making critical comments to that regard, although I offer to show the hard evidence of my contention.
I have been involved as an individual with various Mines community organizations, and I have mentored several current students as interns.
One of the reasons I asked the question of Dr. Johnson at the 2019 faculty plenary regarding working remotely was that Karen had flat-out told us that Mines did not allow remote work. Kirsten Volpi, who answered my query, said that Mines had no policy, was apparently developing one, and that remote work was being done. When this information came to light, and Berry was confronted by the fact that she had been letting certain favorites work remotely, she punitively responded by threatening that staff member that they should not complain or else. She seems to enjoy a toxic, negative atmosphere.
One colleague and I completely streamlined the CGS entire data-space over an 18-month period to optimize everyone’s work flows and preserve the legacy of the organization—this along the task of constructing and cataloging a physical archive set of the 120-year-plus output of the organization that was literally left rotting in the basement, or was actively being put in recycling without any review of whether the material was unique exemplars of our historical publications. While we received ample kudos from our colleagues, we have not once heard anything positive from the Director, and she poorly disguised her negative (or, let’s say, ‘meh‘) attitude about the whole effort.
Going in to my first annual review in early 2017 as a new employee, I was greeted with the statement “I hate managing people,” with no trace of irony or humor. That statement has certainly been borne out in the ensuing years. It took three rounds of annual review comments where I pointed out in writing that I had never (ever!) been thanked for the fundamental work I had accomplished for the organization before. At the most recent review I got a forced “thanks for your work on the website”: that comment after working 100 days straight, ten hours a day through the Christmas and New Years holidays.
And, on the subject of annual reviews I repeatedly had to rewrite her comments which were often simply copy-pasted from prior years or completely wrong in terms of the many tasks and support work I had undertaken in the previous year. Fortunately, both my workload and what I did get done was above and beyond what a single position would normally have covered, she was unable to minimize my contributions to the organization, although she often tried to trivialize tasks when writing them up: “I ‘helped’ do the website” versus the reality that, solo, I undertook what would in other circumstances be a year-long task for 3-5 people covering every detail of content and editorial production, back-end technical structuring and maintenance, and design work with little to no support from her.
She has off-hand declined my numerous requests for at least an introductory welcome paragraph (for the 1000-page highly-trafficked web space) and she has yet to write one word or do any productive work for it after promising many times to do such. The previous State Geologist, Vince Matthews, told me the scope of his personal efforts on building the site went on for two decades, and the current Director knew this. She shows almost no interest in the entire project.
An estimate for doing a complete re-tool of such a substantial web space (that was, like the rest of the data-space, in disarray) was about 10,000 hours. This would translate to five person-years. Some of that would go to the external design team, but the bulk of it, because of the contingencies of the technological platform and the nature of the content, would fall to an internal team of researchers, editors, writers. Except that there was no team facilitated and the need was never even acknowledged until it was basically too late. She threw a couple random remote editor leads at me, and I spent more time briefing them on the task than they actually got done before they simply gave up, overwhelmed by the scope of the project.
Yet another issue which has been brushed under the rug by the SG is the recent incident of plagiarism the details you are already privy to. Her first impulse was to basically ignore it, except that five of us were aware of it. The junior colleague who came across it (as co-author) came to me as I advise staff on their writing, and have decades of academic experience. As a friend, the former Dean of Research at Stanford phrased it to me in an email at the time: “plagiarism is *the* worst thing to happen in academia.” I have no worries of a career tainted by working in an organization that does not properly oversee the results of its research, but my junior colleagues who are just beginning their careers rightly do. The SG has made no followup efforts to lay the issue to rest among the staff as a whole. Nor did Mines seem to take it very seriously, it’s under a very lumpy rug, tripping up many of the staff.
I wish I could say that my tenure at Mines—after a 38-year hiatus spent in international tertiary education and the cultural sector, across 30 countries—has been uplifting, but alas, largely because of the vacuous, negative, and flaccid “leadership” of the [now-former] SG it has been a real let-down that colors my view of the entire institution. For one, there is no mechanism at Mines for the reasonable surfacing of review of supervisors by line personnel.
The lack of institutional oversight is complete (at least in the case of the CGS). The prior Dean cancelled every scheduled get-to-know-us staff meeting visit for his entire tenure as Dean!
On a wider scale, as an alumni, it has been especially disconcerting to see, close-up, how short-sighted the school is regarding employee retention issues, the attitude seemingly rooted in the early 70s extractives industry mentality: ‘might-is-right’ and let the proles be warned. I am reporting these issues to my own wide alumni network who are interested in the insider view I am offering them—some of whom are in their prime philanthropic years.
More importantly, on the issue of employee satisfaction is the absence of any effective and confidential services to staff and faculty for the airing of internal grievances. My extensive international academic experience has brought the poor standard here in that regard into sharp and, frankly, ugly relief. Where is a staff ombudsperson?
So it goes. Respectfully submitted, John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
