To Whom it May Concern in the Lofty Halls of Academia

"Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be."

George Santayana (1863 - 1952),

I am writing to you to submit my resignation from “omit university name here for fear of liable” and from my position as Academic Coordinator and Coordinator of New Student Programming effective May 19th 2007.

I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent both students and faculty in a satisfactory manner under the constraints of this administration.

Service at this university should have been a dream job, and when I accepted this position I was pleased to be paid to understand the needs of American collegiate students studying in other cultures. Working with others and developing new initiatives has always been my forte. To be able to seek out potential academic projects, develop them and then watch them prosper sounded like the ideal job to me. With a glad heart, I started this position thinking that while it wouldn’t make me rich, it would cement my position in the Italian community and give me a broader knowledge of its academia and institutional business models. I thought it would also give me the opportunity to broaden my writing styles, the most powerful weapon in my professional arsenal.

As only my second opportunity to work in academia, and the first under an Italian business model, it was perhaps naive (and inevitable) that during the initial months that passed I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and misguided bureaucratic motives institutions sometimes draw upon to shape academic and administrative policies. Human nature is what it is, and I while in previous positions I have been promoted for understanding human nature and harnessing it to motivate people to work with synergy together, here I was too often bluntly told “sit down, do your job, and keep your mouth closed”.

The decisions that I have been ordered to advance are incompatible not only with my own personal integrity but all to frequently with western academic standards in general and as a consequence, I have been unable to protect the very professors and students I was ultimately tasked to serve.

In our fervent pursuit of opening two new campus utilizing too few and often underpaid, underqualified and overworked staff, we have risked to squander our most valuable resource (quality educators) and to eventually lose the very students which are the university’s lifeblood and key to our financial and educational success. Quality education and competent management of academics should be the core foundation of a university’s operating plan, but with the current administrative model in place, we have risked to dismantle brick by brick, the very programs we claim we are trying to build . In doing so, we may also irreparably damage an international reputation that took the founder thirty years to create.

And while I am not so idealistic as to think that the sacrifice of trusted competent faculty and staff never occurs or is never administratively unavoidable, the level of self interest at the expense of academics has often times left me speechless. I realize that bureaucracy and misguided but well intentioned policymaking is nothing new, and certainly not unique to study-abroad institutions of this size and organizational layout, but rather than take responsibility for the difficulties created, we continue to burn through human resources or apply them inappropriately in a disorderly way that breeds low moral and disharmony.

In twenty years of employment I have not seen such systematic distortion of staff resource management or an institution of this size founder in its own self inflicted morass.

For this reason, I think its time that I step aside….better to see if someone else is able to enact the positive change that as much as I wanted and tried, I have been unable to do…