During the summer, the University announced the retirement of Robert "Sideshow Bob" Migneault, dean of the General Library at UNM. This announcement was accompanied by glowing appraisals of the man and his accomplishments from Public Affairs, the Campus News and Provost Brian Foster.
In fact, were it not for the Daily Lobo, you would not have had the slightest inkling that, in reality, Migneault had just been fired for gross incompetence.
Of course, senior administrators are never fired; they "retire," typically offering as a reason the desire to spend more time with their families and/or explore new options, which is code for "this sucker just got canned."
Indeed, some people cannot even be "retired." One example several years ago was Orcilia Zuniga-Forbes, the vice president for Student Affairs, or was it Dean of Students? - the positions multiply and change their names so rapidly it is hard to keep track.
Zuniga-Forbes had a meaningless and harmless position created for her, vice president for Institutional Advancement, because although she was completely incompetent, the University could not afford to fire a Hispanic female.
This was confirmed by a current member of the administration, who assures me the position is now one of substance - yeah, right.
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For an administrator to be fired, however the process is labeled, is a rare event and thus an indication that the person in question was screwing up his job so seriously that it simply could no longer be ignored.
And that is certainly the case with Migneault, who managed to alienate even his fellow deans, who, it is rumored, gave him the lowest rating in living memory during a review of his performance.
The University was compelled to bring in outside reviewers, whose report, even in the sanitized version that was made public, provides, I am lead to believe, the worst evaluation of a UNM official, who had not actually committed a felony.
Under Migneault the morale of the library staff has collapsed completely, and it is widely believed - and accepted by the reviewers - that he has engaged in blatant favoritism, granting his cronies big raises (the salary of his private secretary almost doubled overnight) while hard-working staff got next to nothing.
When his own library planning committee criticized his bizarre plans for the library after a thorough study, he disbanded the committee and handpicked a new one.
Far more important, the man apparently believes that a library should contain anything but books, which he planned to start moving into storage.
In a rare burst of determination, the Faculty Senate demanded last spring that CAPS, a student tutorial program, be moved out of the library and the space used for books.
Migneault not only ignored this completely, but during the summer continued to spend precious library funds expanding CAPS office space in the library. All this from a man whose command of English is so bad that a humorous excerpt from one of his memos appeared in the Alibi. And they say I embarrass the University.
Well, after this year Migneault will no longer be dean and able to continue his program of destroying Zimmerman Library, but my sympathies go out to his successor and the library staff, since Migneault will continue on in the library as "faculty."
What he can possibly do to justify his $112,000 salary is beyond my comprehension, but then I cannot really fathom what most highly paid administrators are actually doing to earn all that money.
If it seems that I have particularly and frequently targeted Robert Migneault, it is because unlike other administrative figures, whose activities are for the most part trivial and of little meaning to the functioning of the institution, he has been in the process of ruining the library, the University's most important resource for students and faculty.
Wasting money on athletics, ignoring undergraduate education, admitting all the dross of APS is bad enough, but Migneault has been destroying the very heart of the University at which I have spent the last three decades. That makes it personal.
And finally, a salute to Provost Brian Foster, who in a memo to the entire faculty and staff invited us all to join him in thanking Bob for his many years of service to UNM.
Hands down, the provost wins the 2001 Hypocrite of the Year Award.
