April 13, 2018 Brian P. Davis
Cleveland
Hts., Ohio 44121
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio 44106
I
am submitting my resume and background information for The
Director for Research Administration at the Mandel School of Applied Social
Sciences. I am pretty sure that no one at the school
reads these cover letters since I have applied for five jobs and have yet to be
dignified with any response. As an alum
of CWRU, I thought I would deserve at least a “we are moving forward with other
candidates” type of e-mail from the school that prepared failed me for
the workforce. I have spent 20 years as
an executive director of a charitable organization and I am a graduate of your
fine institution and did not even get a rejection letter for my application for
an administrative assistant and a custodial position at CWRU. This affords me the luxury of telling you the
truth about the school and the jobs that you have posted.
I
have spent the past 23 years administering the local homeless coalition and
working to keeping this small non-profit organization functioning. As
executive director of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, I have had
to perform nearly every function necessary to administer a non-profit
organization, including listening to people struggling with housing, interaction
with a volunteer board of trustees and preparing a yearly budget for the agency. You have an exalted opinion of your place in
society that does not match the current reality. The Trump-supporters do not trust anything
that you Brainiac’s say, and feel that academics are the source of many of our
problems. Liberals don’t use your
research because we know that we can get studies to say anything based on who
is paying the tab for the information. Policy
makers do not rely on research to pass tax cuts or change the rules for
receiving welfare. So, basically, you
are performing studies for other academics in what can only be described as a
research circle jerk. Besides, the
research you are doing is solving the problems of 10 years ago. Have you come up with any academic
recommendations for dealing with the crack epidemic yet? Society has moved on
without academic research.
I have worked to
solve problems facing real people without housing while you have been studying
the problems associated with poverty. You
act like the jobs that you have at CWRU or the Mandel School are so specialized
and complicated that it takes highly educated or decades of experience to
publish information that will be read by eight people. You
realize that Thomas Edison, Henry David Thoreau, Richard Branson, Charles
Goodyear and many others advanced our society without a college degree. The single mom trying to get her kids to
daycare and navigate the Food Stamp and voucher lottery is dealing with a high
stress environment, while you are fooling yourselves if you think anything you
do is as complicated as getting a day care voucher while sleeping in a shelter. I find it interesting that you exist in an
educational institution, but want to hire people who already have the
experience working with specific programs such as your demands for “utilizing
electronic research administration systems (SpartaPre, SpartaCOI, Spiderweb,
PADS, OSPARS,)” whatever that
means. It seems like your hiring practices only trust vocational education and
you do not believe that you can teach a person to use a research tool or
computer programs, which is odd for an institution of higher learning. Have you
thought about hiring talented people and teaching them the skills they need to
do jobs that they would enjoy?
Your primary
reason for existence is to educate our young people, and how is that going?
Well, I have a degree from your prestigious institution on my resume and have
not found a job after applying for 110 positions. Giant Eagle was not impressed with my degree
from Case Western Reserve University and did not hire me to stand at their door
to prevent shoplifting. From my
experience, you are sending our nation’s young people out into the world
saddled with so much debt that they have to take any job for any salary to pay
back your tuition. You are forcing our
young people to delay buying a house, finding a dream job or even getting
married because you have placed a boulder of debt on their backs. I don’t think that the ever escalating costs
for a university degree can be justified in our current society. My experience is that employers today care
less about the name of the institution as long as the applicant marks that they
have a college degree. This is again
your fault for not producing quality graduates with high moral authority and
allowing fake colleges like University of Phoenix to proliferate in our
society.
I
believe that I have demonstrated an ability to think critically and solve
problems, but that does not seem to matter.
I believe that I have the “ability to work collegially with
faculty in developing and submitting proposals, and possess the skills
necessary to work collaboratively with a number of external organizations,” but
I am not sure how anyone who has not worked at CWRU with your faculty could ever
demonstrate that skill. The next five
skills that you require:
- “Ability to make complex decisions with minimal background information;
- Ability to think entrepreneurially and engage creative solutions;
- Demonstrated understanding of steps in grant proposal development;
- Demonstrated knowledge of major federal (e.g., NSF, NIH, DOE) and state agency guidelines for proposal submission is essential;”
seem mutually exclusive. My experience is that creative types do not
want to waste their talents on completing grant proposals. Can you imagine Mark Cuban, Langston Hughes,
or Steve Jobs wasting their talents on writing stupid federal grant
proposals? It seems like you are looking
for the person who held this job in the past, so why don’t you just clone that
person? The next five skills that you require:
- “Skill in project budget development and forecasting, sound fiscal management skills relative to projects are necessary;
- Scientific proposal writing skills; experience in editing and proofreading grant applications and proposals;
- Must be highly motivated, driven to succeed, but with a focus on what is best for the organization;
- Ability to influence rather than dictate action utilizing strong interpersonal and leadership skills;
- Ability to manage and motivate professional staff in a high stress, rapid pace work environment – must be able to keep environment calm and staff focused on goals and objectives;”
seem to show that you are looking for a person who does
not exist. Think about it, who has all of
these skills to keep people calm, can work with budgets, fiscal management, good
writing skills, and forecasting ability, and wants to sit in an office all day
administering research in Cleveland, Ohio?
The person who meets all these qualifications is a liar if they say they
are “highly motivated” to use all these skills to direct research at the Mandel
School. The person that you have
described here should be nothing less than Governor of the State of Ohio or a frequent
visitor to the International Space Station.
Good luck with
your search. I guess you have to justify
a reason for having a human resources department by glorifying the university
with a claim that CWRU is “a high stress, rapid pace work
environment that must be able to keep environment calm and staff focused.” Have you visited the kitchen at a Bob Evans
on Sunday morning? Maybe you need to
re-evaluate your selection process to screen out law school deans who will seek
“threesomes” with students or police officers who cannot tell the difference
between a Cleveland City Council members and a toothless panhandlers or metallurgical science professor who steal trade secrets
or high profile professors who can’t keep their hands off the colleagues. I could go on, but you must be busy
interviewing the next Maya Angelou for your grant writing jobs.
Sincerely,
Brian Davis
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