|
|
| Don't have an account yet? Sign up as a New User
|
|
| Support uws |
 |
|
|
|
|
| Imprint's board extends EIC's contract beyond 13 months |
Contributed by: Jesse Helmer on Saturday, January 31 2004 @ 09:58 PM CST
|
At a closed board meeting on 14 January 2004, Imprint volunteer student directors decided to offer current Editor-in-Chief Christine Baker a
contract extension until March 2005. Baker began
her contract as Imprint's EIC almost eight months ago, on 4 June 2003, after the board dismissed previous EIC Rick Smit.
Imprint President Andrew Dilts disagreed that Baker had been offered a second term, calling it a contract extension. He wrote, "It is with great pleasure that Imprint's board of directors has offered to extend the contract of our current Editor-In-Chief, Christine Baker."
EIC Baker commented on the best and worst aspects of the job, "The volunteers here are great and I love working with them. The job is different every week. The hours are a little strange." Asked what she plans to do differently in her second term as EIC, Baker replied, "Just continue to work with the staff and
help them to achieve their goals for the paper."
Imprint's Policies and Procedures govern its operations. The procedure for hiring full-time staff is set out in Policy 10 of Imprint's Policies and Procedures. In Appendix C:
Full-Time Staff Job Descriptions, the EIC's contract is specified as 13
months:
The position of Editor-in-Chief is a thirteen-month contract position. No one person shall hold this position for more than thirteen months unless the Board of Directors deems it advantageous due to some extraordinary set of circumstances.
According to Dilts, the announcement of Baker's contract extension was applauded by
volunteer staff at a staff meeting.
At least one Imprint volunteer has complained about the decision, however. In an e-mail response to Kourtney Short, Dilts attempts to justify the board's decision. In his response, Dilts offers three definitions of extraordinary,
taken from the Oxford Canadian English Dictionary. He also lists reasons for re-hiring Baker, including her academic performance and extremely positive performance reviews.
He also praises Baker for her mastery of relationships in the Imprint office:
As you referenced in your letter, conditions at Imprint have been getting steadily worse in the past few years. There have been numerous
complaints and grievances reported to Imprint's board of directors concerning Editors-In-Chief of recent years, and I would not hesitate to guess that many more complaints remain unreported.
To have an Editor-In-Chief come into this environment and have not only NO complaints against her, but instead receive glowing performance reviews from all interviewed is, once again, "unusual," "remarkable" and out of what has become the regular course of order at Imprint. I wish to emphasize this point: it's not that Ms. Baker is 'popular' among the
volunteers, or 'gets along well' with them. This, as you duly note, should be expected of an Editor-In-Chief. It's that Ms. Baker has come
into a highly controversial environment and masterfully managed to develop and maintain extremely positive relationships with everyone with whom she works, that is above and beyond the ordinary.
In his response, Dilts also lists options that the board of directors faced:
As such, our board was faced with a number of options, including but not limited to the following: releasing Ms. Baker form her position at the end of approximately ten months; extend her contract to the end of thirteen months, and hire an EIC for ten months; extend her contract and thereby undesirably shift the EIC rotation schedule to mid-June; extend her contract until the end of the following March. Regardless of the
manner in which an EIC would have been chosen for April 2004 and beyond, the circumstances would have been "extraordinary." Policy changes would
have been necessary, regardless of the situation, further indicating the "extraordinariness" of the situation.
Dilts has not replied to uws' questions about why the board offered Baker a contract extension rather than forming a hiring committee and searching for a new EIC. The questions were sent on 26 January 2004.
|
| |
|
|
|
| Authored by: flip-flops... not just for feet on Saturday, January 31 2004 @ 11:08 PM CST |
Andrew Dilts, in the release of 3rd June 2003:
Her tenure in the driver's seat at Imprint will last for approximately ten months
Andrew Dilts, now:
our board was faced with a number of options, including but not limited to the following: releasing Ms. Baker form [sic] her position at the end of approximately ten months; extend her contract to the end of thirteen months, and hire an EIC for ten months; extend her contract and thereby undesirably shift the EIC rotation schedule to mid-June; extend her contract until the end of the following March blah blah blah blah blah... [ Parent ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Adina Gillian on Sunday, February 01 2004 @ 12:29 PM CST |
I think a reasonable solution may have been for the board to use the EIC hiring policies and procedures and suggest to Baker that she reapply for the position.
I think it's crazy that the board did not give an opportunity to other potential candidates.
I have heard great things about Baker and though she may be a wonderful employee and co-worker the hiring committee might have found someone even better. This is part of the reason that the EIC description specifies a contract length.[ Parent ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Ian Blechschmidt on Monday, February 02 2004 @ 05:19 PM CST |
From your post, and others on this thread, it seems to me that few people have a problem with Christine's rehiring, but rather with the fact that the normal procedure wasn't followed. Respectfully, that seems to me to be a case of following procedure simply for the sake of following procedure.
While I agree that procedure has a purpose, I would argue that it also has its time and place. As you said in your previous post, any hiring procedure is inherently unreliable without the aid of a psychic :). Experience, however, can be much more dependable. Experience shows that if the normal procedure is followed, we may end up with a mediocre (or very poor) performer. Given Imprint's EIC track record over the last couple of years, I would argue that there's a pretty good chance of that happening under the normal hiring process. So a lengthy process results in an unfavourable outcome: under the process, more input = less output, if you will. In that case, I would argue that, since following procedure is likely to result in an unfavourable outcome, not following procedure should be considered.
However, if Imprint sticks with Christine, they wind up with someone who has proven themselves to be an excellent performer. I can't imagine that many companies would let go of a high-performing employee at the of their contract to "take their chances in the market" rather than just renewing (or "extending," or whatever the official action was) their contract.
Even if, as has been suggested, Imprint goes through the whole process and Christine simply reapplies, either
a)Christine winds up being EIC again, in which case, one wonders what the point was of going through the whole process when the outcome was fairly predictable or
b)Imprint winds up with someone else who appeared to be better qualified to run the paper based on the interview process, which from past experience hasn't necessarily played out when it comes to actually putting the paper together (Rick got picked over Christine in the 2003-2004 hiring process, and hence appeared to be more qualified based on the interview).
If it comes down to a contest between faith in the system and faith in Christine, I'll put my money on Christine.
Never mind the advantages of having the same person in charge for more than a year at a time.
I say, if it's not broken, don't fix it. Hiring is a big pain, and if you already have exactly who you need exactly where you need them, why go through a lot of trouble looking for someone else? Following process for process's sake is, in my opinion, rarely wise - while process and procedures can be very helpful, one must always be willing to operate outside of their boundaries, as well as be able to tell when it is appropriate to do so.
I think this was one of those times.[ Parent ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous User on Monday, February 02 2004 @ 07:18 PM CST |
I have to admit, I'm a bit confused by why people care so passionately about the procedure that Imprint follows. It seems that there's never any discussion about the content, I can barely remember reading it.
But kudos to UWStudent.org, reading this, I wondered what the deal with this Smit guy was, and boom, there it is right beside the story.[ Parent ]
|
| |
|
|
|
