Our Journey, Day 57

In addition to continuing the tuition waiver for my family for a year after my retrenchment and continuing to pay the employer contribution portion of my health insurance premiums, Bemidji State is contracting with an "Outplacement" firm to provide the retrenched faculty with some career counseling and placement services. I had to have a meeting with HR in order to ask to be put on the list but last week I was contacted by a rep from the company in the Twin Cities. It's a global HR "Consultancy" company that apparently serves business and industry everywhere but Africa and Antarctica. I wasn't able to find any references to Higher Ed on their corporate website and several search terms drew blanks. So I'm wondering exactly what types of services the BSU management team thinks they're buying for us? Help drafting a more attractive CV? Interviewing tips?

I'll probably respond to the person in the Twin Cities branch who emailed me. Maybe there's something I'm missing. I wasn't that impressed with the communication I received. I joked about the "stages of grief" in a previous post a week or so ago. This email packet I got included a description of these and a one-size-fits-all sort of presentation that seemed to make a lot of assumptions about how I might be feeling. I'm skeptical of talk therapy generally, I suppose. But this was to therapy what a hallmark card is to a personal letter.

I'm going to visit Mankato today and tomorrow, to run a couple of sessions on Open Ed and Z-Degrees for faculty, Librarians, and Administrators. I'll visit with my son a bit (he's an undergrad there now) and I'll have a chance, hopefully, to chat with my friend who invited me down there. I'm curious what the employment prospects really might look like for me, as a history professor in this state system. I've been told that if I complete an elaborate application process and get tenure, then I'll have some preferential "claiming" rights to history positions that might come open in the system. I'm not sure I believe there really are any in the near future, that I could shoot for. But I think an opinion from outside the campus where everything is in chaos might be helpful.