[jlangemeier]

This whole piece reminds me of those classmates in college that had no clue what they were talking about, so they used big words and overly effusive language to sound smarter than they actually are.

And while a pure meritocracy is what we're looking for in higher ed, at this moment we haven't found a way to separate the people from the process; we haven't found our orchestral blind auditions. Most tenured faculty positions are garnered through years of work at a university, and those years of work means years of human interactions and politicking. So, those "mandatory workshops" are necessary, because there's still very much a human element to the whole damn thing; and until we can remove the humans from the process, we'll need ways to learn how to better interact.