[SolaceQuantum]

> Why did this effort require working "really hard"? Was it because of obstructionist, jealous, or stupid colleagues?

I was one of the students at UB while this took place. It took a lot of effort, partially because the rewriting involved a lot of student feedback and there was also a massive e-mail discussion (accidentally?) sent to the entire computer science undergraduate mailing list of one of the senior faculty chastizing a more junior faculty over how student feedback was used in remaking the program.

I can't say for anything else (including the dog situation, since I know other faculty in other departments also bring their pets to school), but I know there was some severe and public obstruction from senior faculty to more junior faculty going on during the remaking.

[kevhito]

I am very thankful to be in a department with almost zero nasty internal politics, and I've heard real horror stories from people I trust about how nasty things can get.

So thanks for providing more context. It's hard to tell from the post whether this person is the cause of or recipient of all this drama. From the way he tells it, it wasn't just the department, but pretty much everyone he interacted with across campus. It wouldn't surprise me if the entire university was poisoned by nasty politics, but it also wouldn't surprise me if a self-assessed superstar would see it that way even if it were not.

[SolaceQuantum]

Mind you I don't really know the rest of the "behind closed doors" stuff, so I can't tell if this is just a one-off chastizement or if this was a system-wide thing. I have heard of some broader school-wide drama associated with funding; in fact, more than one computer science professor had expressed concerns through personal blogs regarding the overhead taken from funding for research when I attended. So I don't think these concerns are necessarily unfounded or written by a wannabe superstar.