Z Stands for Zanzibar

As Juli McGruder retires, "Rump Parliament" salutes a fighter and her fight.

The Faculty Senate resolved in December 2007 that Juli McGruder had been a boon to the university. I could not agree more. I add my own resolution below to complement the necessarily bland pronouncement of the senate.

First and most important, Dr. Juli McGruder for almost thirty years strove to deny students, faculty, and staff at the University of Puget Clowns what she demurely called “the luxury of ignorance.” By this she meant that discriminations against women, racial and ethinic minorities, and those who have less income and wealth proliferate in part because people claim not to realize what they want very much not to realize. Juli shook colleagues and pupils. She made them admit that they should have known what they claimed not to know. More, she made them admit that they now knew what they claimed not to have known. Like Neil Young in “Ohio,” Juli Mack asked, “How can you run when you know?”

Second and almost as important, Professor McGruder was credentialed in Occupational Therapy, Anthropology, and cognate disciplines or specialties, making her that rarest of UPS faculty: she possessed rather than merely professed interdisciplinary learning and expertise. Juli did not fake interdisciplinary. She earned interdisciplinary. On a campus where many faculty extol interdisciplinary research and teaching but exemplify dilettantism, Professor McGruder tantalized colleagues with what might not merely seem but be.

Third and not as important, Juli McGruder tried to make faculty governance more accountable and less corrupt. Her Sisyphean labors included service on the Faculty Senate and on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Many senators quietly contradicted decanal subtrefuges and presidential mendacity; Senator McGruder called bullshit in senate meetings and in plenary meetings of the faculty. Many toadies and tools were ensconced on the FAC despite garnering fewer votes from peers; Professor McGruder took being passed over as the compliment that it was and won election until finally a dean let her serve. Members of the senate and FAC alike often serve as if campaigning for promotion or other favors or as if they lusted after respectability. [And those are the relatively heroic. Lesser senators and FACers cannot recall authenticity or independence!] McGruder did not want to be a “reliable, responsible” member of the faculty or anything else that required major surgery on spine or gonads. Instead, McGruder committed candor, a habit disgusting to administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists alike.

As Dr. McGruder exits the University of Puget Clowns, she acknowledges honestly that students and faculty still walk and talk without acknowledging the privileges and patronage that they receive, without admitting that “interdiscplinary” is more shibboleth than modifier, and without concerning themselves about which “contract of depravity” [The Hustler, 1961] shapes them. Juli sees that the luxury of ignorance, the dilettantism, and the docility remain as she leaves. Nonetheless, Juli McGruder tried. She tried the patience of presidents and deans. She tried to induce faculty to stand and speak their truths. She tried to live up to intellectual ideals.

So here is my toast to Professor Juli McGruder: Like Randall P. McMurphy [Are the initials “R.P.M.” coincidental? I think not.], you tried to set other inmates free. Unlike Randall P. McMurphy, you leave the asylum with your frontal lobes connected. If you see Nurse Ratched on your way off campus, slap her for us, would you?

Year-End Review -- 2007

2007 brought the faculty and the university some welcome developments.



In 2007 the University of Puget Clowns gave some signs of improving on the master intellectual of our age, Yogi Berra. As we slouch toward 2008, let us remember some advances of the last year.

“You can observe a lot by watching,” Yogi is reputed to have said. At the University of Puget Clowns, “You can learn a bit by reading.” On 17 April 2007, a lawyer for the uni­ver­sity read the Faculty Code to assembled PhDs. She uncovered the startling truth that “personal and professional characteristics” [hereafter, P&PC] became an illicit criterion for tenure after the faculty and trustees banned P&PC from the criteria for tenure. [Please review “E is for Etiquette,” posted 20 April 2007 in this blog, for some details of the facul­ty meeting.] Many faculty who struggled to prevent removal of P&PC from the Faculty Code proceeded in the ensuing dozen years as if P&PC were still available. Now that faculty have been informed that they open the university to liability if they invoke P&PC obviously, we may expect them to hide their use of P&PC behind official criteria. Like Yogi, these recalcitrants remain convinced that the faculty didn’t really say every­thing they said.

Moroever, this year our own Professional Standards Committee [PSC] concluded that the text of the Faculty Code might be an excellent starting point for interpretation of the Faculty Code. This means that the current PSC, too, came to believe that one could learn a lot by reading, a proposition that would not seem very newsworthy at a liberal arts college. I take this for evidence that, as Yogi put it, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” A PSC read the code literally, and, having concluded that the literal words of the code disposed of an issue, told the Dean that she could not circumvent the code. No other reading of the code would have been plausible, but that did not stop the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004. [Please review “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007, and “Yo-Yo Motions,” posted 25 March 2007, to see how the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004 ginned up alternatives to following directives in the code.]


If 2007 brought us a PSC that would behave legitimately, might a licit Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] be not so far in our future? Yogi would counsel us that “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” The Faculty Senate, especially Senator Emerita Juli McGruder, have for years pestered the FAC to obey the bylaws, which require the appointment of a chair as the first order of business of every faculty senate committee. Deans loathe reminders that the FAC is formally a committee of the Faculty Senate and of the faculty. It’s so much more expedient to preserve the tradition that the FAC operates as it – and often as the Dean – pleases. Pessimists may insist that “It's deja vu all over again” in that the FAC has yet to appoint a chair as the bylaws demand. Let’s have some New Year cheer: some senators give every evidence of insisting that the FAC cannot flout the rules and ex­pect faculty to believe that the FAC follows rules when it does not care to. The Faculty Senate, long a “big clog” in the UPS machine [as Yogi said of Ted Williams and the Red Sox], has spoken simple, literal truth to the FAC. That’s progress!

In another sign of progress, last February the Faculty Senate by one vote acknowledged recent mal­feasance and nonfeasance by university decision-makers. Yogi explained the Yankees’ loss to Pittsburgh in the 1960 World Series: “We made too many wrong mistakes;” the Senate by the thinnest of margins acknowledged errors. Senator Ostrom framed a resolu­tion so minimized as to be laughable whereby the senate would take responsibility for mistakes made by a recumbent senate and a rogue committee in 2003-2004. No one expected even that too little to pass. Once a secret ballot was called for, however, seven senators con­ceded what every informed, honest member of the faculty knew: “Mistakes were made.” Acknowledging the undeniable seems negligible to those unfamiliar with more than three years of denials, rationalizations, and untruths by which decisions and processes were defended. Those in the know, however, are aware of just how hard it has been to get decision-makers and their apologists to concede the indisputable. Maybe future committees and senates will make fewer wrong mistakes. That could lead to accountability to the faculty.

Decades of deficient accountability have made 2007 seem like a continuation of faculty woes, but there is at least one more bit of good news. The faculty’s silent, unorganized, persistent boycott of plenary meetings may also signify that more and more faculty see through farce and judge themselves too busy to attend. Yogi famously opined, “If the people don't want to come out to the ballpark, nobody's going to stop them.” So too with faculty. If faculty do not want to come to faculty meetings, you can’t stop them. Now if we can just get faculty to stay away from Fall Faculty “Conversations,” we may free minds by the dozens!

X Stands for X-Rays

Institutional occlusion is the next best thing to transparency.



They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.

Robinson Jeffers wrote the line above as Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Jeffers’ line reminded me that reaccreditation looms. Among other horrors “the culture of evidence,” a shibboleth crafted by rascals in the 1990s to generate propaganda for the reaccreditation report and to surveil faculty and staff, will echo. “The culture of evidence” or some other reheated then over-heated argot will summon the credulous and the taskless to heap information without provenance or consequence onto the Logger version of a Texas A&M bonfire. This agglomeration will collapse before it can light academe but not before it secures reaccreditation. No one will be killed as a result, for reaccreditation reports are designed to implode neatly to bury unsightly truths.


Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but … men favorably
Representative of massed humanity.


The reaccreditation heap will fill some room where outside authorities will inspect exhibits before conversing with campus notables. Artifices, fabrications, and rationalizations that make up the heap will reveal images that institutional potentates think efficacious, which in turn will give the visitors something to gab about in their report. Ritual requirements met, the accreditation team will file a report, our school will be certified anew, and various ministries of truth will claim that all is well because a collage was warmly received.


Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant.


As Jeffers counsels us, we should not fulminate or ridicule what we might perceive and understand. The reaccreditation report will be an official narrative. As such it will emphasize the institution’s struggles, accomplishments, and dreams as well as the institution’s complacency, failures, and fears. Every major claim in the report will as much deny perceived shortcomings as affirm perceived strengths, so the few faculty who take what is on the surface and ask what the surface occludes will behold an institutional X-ray. Most faculty will contribute little to the report and will read less of the report.


Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.


Thanks, Robinson! I now feel better about reaccreditation than about blitzkrieg.

W Stands for Women against Women

If you would understand why women so often play important roles in firing women, cherchez les hommes.


When first I began to fathom promotion and tenure at Puget Clowns, I was sur­prised by the role of women in the firing of other women. In 1992 I observed that male sexists had difficulty attacking women because faculty females shredded women before the old boys could lumber over to the corpses. Were lionesses reducing pigs to scavenging through carrion? My seniors patiently explained how ingeniously the old boys had ar­ranged sanc­tions – negative as well as positive sanctions – to promote the appearance and the reality that women devoured women and that men merely came upon the carnage. The obvious killers, the “Women Against Women” [WAW], had adapted to the oldest old-boy imperative: a candidate for advancement must be “one of us.” Those who had pros­pered by making themselves unobjectionable to the men who then controlled the uni­ver­sity perpetuated the importance of such “personal and professional characteristics” as promised to stifle dissent and insure continuation of myths and rituals that routinized and legitimized control of the university. This control remained largely in the hands of the old boys.

My subsequent studies of WAW have confirmed the wisdom of the old hands who set me straight. A grown woman savaged sisters for the approval of an old boy to whom she had some twisted relationship resembling a school-girl crush. As females in his department tore apart evaluees centerstage, this old boy and his pals “reluctantly” put junior faculty females out of their [and his] misery behind the scenery. Another member of WAW seemed quite responsive to the will of males until females gained positions of power, at which time she was as ob­se­quious to fe­males as she had been to males. In instances of this second sort, at­trac­tion mattered less than self-advancement, although being flattered by old boys made the compliant fe­male feel more like lamb than the mutton she each day resembled more. A third but related class of women ravaging other women led in the 1990s to the “Crone Hypothesis,” whereby attractive females, especially blondes, were trashed in their depart­ments by sisters who had not attracted admiration from one or another sex for some time, if ever. Of course, Puget Clowns hosted a number of women who cherished their exclu­sive status enough to preserve it by leaving junior females to old boys who whispered what Justice McReynolds stated when he heard that a second Jew had been appointed to the Supreme Court: “Not another one.”

When the ravaged females escaped their departments, first-generation females [pro­fessors who had few or no female mentors or models when they were under 30] ap­pointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] were often more old-boyish than the old boys on the FAC, and thus camouflaged secondary victimization of self-admitted females. Once the university recruited and retained females who had had female models or mentors, self-described feminists assailed junior faculty women who were actual feminists. These second-generation females, too, legitimized the demise of women in the eyes of the credulous or the masculine or both. In my 22 years at Puget Clowns, pretenders to femininity and to feminism alike have masked sexism individual as well as institutional.

That first- or second-generation females trash their sisters was to be expected from the enduring misogyny of the institution and dependency of females on old boys for pa­tronage and permanence. Female instructors serving under a traditional chair often be­haved as “at will” employees or found themselves unemployed. Females who depended on potentates less for their jobs than for cherished classes, monetary advances, or collegial respect likewise tended to conform to the views of their betters, especially if those betters so lacked chivalry that they threatened overtly those whom they could not cow covertly.

Even women who were safely tenured or promoted to full professor behaved as if they were under some man’s gun. To be sure, some such cravenness followed from a decade or more of socialization at Puget Clowns. What once was calculation after a dozen years became rote, especially as security made it ever more imperative to deny how tenure had been achieved. Who once craved tenure and promotion came to crave respect, luxurious schedules, and time off. What once was done out of friendship or attraction or desire to hold onto one’s job soon enough became dirty deeds to ensure esteem from the FAC or the Professional Standards Cult [PSC] or some other source of sway. Indeed, to attain tenure and fullness, senior females sacrificed the moral to the mercenary so long ago that many could not re­call when they sold out. Soon enough, they no longer distinguished sell-outs from ship-outs lest they raise questions about how they themselves had managed to survive and to prosper. “Which trustee was your patron?”

Females who earned respect and spoils under the elder regime had to show that they could play like the boys, but they became more useful to the old boys than boys were because they were presumptively free from sexism. That meant that a woman had to be cruder and more thuggish than a man even to be suspected of being a self-loathing woman. If a colleague advanced herself by reminding concerned students and faculty that collegiate females could prey upon innocent male faculty, woe betide the colleague who observed that one might as well fixate on the perils that stam­peding lambs might trample sleeping lions. If a member of a power committee never managed to disagree with the dean, she nonetheless could coo agreeably when the special rigors of being a female in academia were inventoried because such lists made her survi­val all the more Homeric. It would have been uncivil or defamatory, of course, to ob­serve that some starlets and harlots resisted much more powerful men for far longer. Male fellows well met instead made a show of taking advancement of females for evi­dence of special merit, which amounted to a tacit admission of discrimination lost on most colleagues.

None of the above denies such usual dynamics as “the Queen Bee” who despises [female] rivals or jealousy over other attention to other women or “pulling up the ladder” after the first female clambers aboard the yacht. Indeed, the modal manner of success for females is the mode for males as well: lie low and do not be associated with losers. Nothing above lets women off the hook by attributing sole or overwhelming agency to men. Women who assail women are responsible for their Msdeeds whether they do so out of their own insecurity or from job insecurity wielded by men.

Still, promotion and tenure are to a large degree matters of whether an evaluee is “one of us,” and males continue to control the definition of “us.” As women assume more of the high offices on campus, the definition of “us” may benefit from women’s touches. It is more likely, however, that women at Puget Clowns will resemble Orwell’s pigs at the end of Animal Farm: would-be revolutionaries not easily distinguished except rhetorically from those against whom they revolted.

V Stands for Venial Venalities

Small ethical missteps accumulate quantitatively and qualitatively into corrupted character and corroded collegiality.



We begin from the last lines of “Judgment at Nuremberg:”

Judge Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster): “Judge Haywood... the reason I asked you to come … Those people, those millions of people ... I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it!

Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy): “Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.


Long I have snorted at that Liberal arithmetic. “Numbers two through six million might think that 5,999,999 repetitions made things worse.” Still, Judge Haywood had a point. Minor misconduct and petty corruption may erode character to make additional miscarriage of justice easier, hence greater qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

An important cause of the “Able was I ere I saw Elba” Syndrome [by which colleagues devolve the longer that they are at the University of Puget Clowns] is venality that starts minor but ramps up rapidly. One stifles one’s opinions to gain the affirmation of col­leagues until, so soon, one tailors one’s opinions to others and deprives them of critical consideration and sober second looks. In return, one is promoted or tenured or honored. One awakens like Richard Rich in “A Man for All Seasons:”


Richard Rich (John Hurt): “I've lost my innocence.”

Thomas Cromwell (Leo McKern): “Some time ago. Have you only just noticed?”


Then on the Faculty Advancement Committee one circumvents the Faculty Code or pretends that this welcome colleague has met criteria or that unwelcome colleague has not. Such is perhaps a venial sin, but “From small things, mama, big things one day come” (Bruce Springsteen).

Or one chairs the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] and bends the rules until one twists and breaks the rules, all the while protesting that one is behaving exactly as PSC chairs have long or always behaved.

Oh, chip chip,
You tell a little lie,
Chip chip,
You make your baby cry,
Chip chip,
You cheat a little bit,
Chip chip,
You quarrel over it.
One day you`re gonna discover,
One little wrong leads to another.
Chip chip,
Chipping away,
Chipping at your mansion of love.

Or one trims and truckles to get or to keep one of the minor appointments or titles or designations available. One looks the other way when women are being fired. One dodges faculty meetings. One otherwise becomes "institutionalized." In the case of the University of Puget Clowns, one becomes miniaturized:

Thomas More (Paul Scofield): “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?”

U Stands for Unchained Malady

Proponents of minimal time on campus profit from manifold cynicismS.


Many colleagues prefer to teach fewer than five days per week. Some have respectable reasons for shaving a day or two off their days on campus. Some travel to collections or laboratories and have papers and monographs to show for their exertions. Some prepare better or grade better over longer periods than in the interstices of advising appointments, committee meetings, and teaching sessions.

Colleagues with sincere, convincing reasons for reducing their days on campus serve as stalking horses for cynics who want more time to themselves for less worthy reasons. Slackers, scammers, shirkers, shuckers, and other cynics use a few outstanding faculty to camouflage headlong pursuit of time off. Every veteran knows some of the worst offen­ders. Most colleagues, however, do not want to offend the offenders or upend comity by committing candor. As a consequence, faculty of good will are played for saps and suckers, and faculty governance is degraded by chiselers and dissemblers.

Clearly it is time for a guide to the multiple plies of arguments that currently roil campus.


Ply One: Shirkers offer pedagogic premises for eighty-minute periods and a “work” "week" of two to three days. The few premises not risible apply to very few faculty, such as those who have great reasons for showing extended videos during sessions of a course. While a few delusional colleagues have come to believe what started out as sly lies, most cynical shirkers know that they are sacrificing the interests of students, the time of colleagues, the energies of staff, and the patience of administrators to secure longer weekends and less campus face time. Schedulers cannot arrange class times so that majors may graduate when almost an entire department goes Tuesday-Thursday, but shirkers save a Friday commute if they claim that their teaching “needs” fewer, longer periods. Committees cannot meet on certain days because moonlighters are not on campus two or three days per week, but the moonlighting is masked as professional growth. Malin­ger­ers’ sick days [tlansration: mental health days or really good Thursday rates at Orbitz] cost students 1/30th of a course but teach students self-reliance and independent learning.

Every member of the faculty should see through this folderol. With perhaps a dozen ex­cep­tions, any competent instructor can offer any course at fifty minutes or at eighty minutes. In fact, let’s stay on the Truth Train for at least one more stop: any com­petent professional could teach an ordinary course in fifteen-minute increments if she or he set her or his mind to it. The vast majority of claims to “need” eighty minutes are not be­lieva­ble. How do we know? Because Ivy League avatars and community-college arche­types and a host of academics in between make do with less than eighty minutes on campuses across the globe. Whatever self-serving specific the shirker summons is easily debunked by “If you wanted to, you could, so need is not at issue. You don’t want to.” Like Bartleby the scrivener, the shirker would prefer not to. Unlike Bartleby, the shirker will never be honest about the matter.

Ply Two: Shirkers beget slackers. Having marshaled their cynical stock of peda­go­gical premises, shirkers mobilize other faculty, thereby expending time that, put to better use, would advance whatever teaching or researching the shirkers claim to have too little time to pursue. Shirkers encourage colleagues to believe themselves ill-used by a simple job and more money than they had any reason to hope to make. “Souls undone undoing others” (Housman) breed slackers at great cost to the productivity of the slackers. People who actually had time for their pursuits before they started bitching now fritter away that time [and the time and patience of the rest of us] in demagogy and mendacity.

Ply Three: Nobody knows the troubles that shirkers, slackers, and shuckers have seen. Morale depleted, shirkers and slackers repair to salons, taverns, lounges, or the Faculty Club to commiserate with other under-worked, over-paid blowhards about how cruel and punishing is the intellectual life that they never have led but perhaps read about in a novel. Behold the threefold cynicism of shuck artists at great cost to sincerity and honesty! As noted supra, feeble-minded slackers come to believe what once were deliberate deceptions until fictions suffuse discourse and governance and spin displaces sense. Hustlers hustle themselves and others into participation in a curricular cargo cult.

Ply Four: Shirkers, slackers, and shuckers cultivate suckers and excoriate debun­kers. Any sentient being may call shirkers, slackers, and shuckers on their subterfuges but does so at some risk. As I wrote in “Who’s to Blame” [10 March 2007] and “S Stands for Scams and Slackers” [10 October 2007], most faculty recognize half-truths and whole lies but do not care to endure the blowback that debunking the buncombe will whip up. Since most arguments for lengthening weekends and reducing face time with students and campus are blowzy vacuities (Mencken), a reasonably skeptical colleague who innocently wonders at this or that self-serving assertion must be rebuked quickly. “It is insulting to suggest that a colleague from whom we have heard only self-serving proposals is insincere or deluded.” How true! Learning from experience is so uncouth. When colleagues make arguments that cannot be believed, that is when we must all pitch in to believe the unbe­lieva­ble – for fellowship and solidarity. Besides, white-washing is so much fun that it would be criminal if a few skeptics deprived suckers of an opportunity to cover up Tom Sawyer’s fence.

Thus, should anyone raise an objection about facts that are not factual or generalizations that are inapposite to Planet Earth, expect a chorus of shirkers, slackers, and shuckers to bray about "civility" and mewl that detractors are "getting personal." This is how institu­tions supposedly dedicated to truth and justice devolve into mutual prevarication pacts. Back-to-back-to-back-to-back cynicism, anyone?

Ply Five: Shirkers, slackers, and shuckers seldom deliver. Grant the shirkers' prem­ises but hold them to higher standards for performance and watch them erupt in um­brage. They'll never admit it explicitly, but slugabeds and scam artists who have not fallen for their own ploys know that their time away from campus will likely not issue in any measurable output. Even the minimally self-aware self-serving know that they cannot meet existing standards while maintaining their active social life, their day-trading, their moonlighting, their community service unknown to any community, their movie reviews for their podiatrist’s blog, their dacha in Yelm, and their affairs with imaginary lovers. At great cost to scheduling flexibility, to students' being able to graduate faster than Bluto Blutarsky, to equity among colleagues, and to straightforward decency and integrity, shirkers, slackers, and shuckers decry “administrative prerogative” and espouse the prerogatives of the Leisure Class. Evidence of productivity? We don’t need no evidence of stinking productivity!

Ply Six: Suckers! Among the better arguments for a minimized work “week” would be to enable probationary faculty to meet rising standards, especially expectations for pub­lication. Propose such a helping hand for faculty who could most use it and watch shirkers, slackers, shuckers, and spinners sag. The lightened workload they had in mind would reward sinecures and a few favored probationaries but not lowly instructors or the mass of tenure-lines. Let’s dragoon the untenured and the untenurable [along with a few senior suckers and people who teach labs and such] into teaching five days a week. If they publish, it will come out of their limited time, as it did for others before the three-day weekend was floated. Whether the untenured or untenurable publish or not, the shirkers, slackers, and shuckers will glory over them because they have tenure and promotion(s) that supplant accomplishments. Many or most of the shirkers, slackers, and shuckers will not have published much but will act as if they once did and will again once their demands to teach from their beds are met.

A few fellows will publish much. They who could not and thus did not get hired at a Research One will glory that they work at a place dedicated to personalized instruction “yet” they themselves possess such talent that they teach and publish [and find their way to campus unassisted and dress themselves and …].

***************************

Dr. Dew Fuss: “You know what makes me so terrific?”

Dr. Rue Fuss: “I have no knowledge of anything that makes you terrific.”

Dr. Dew Fuss: “I am terrific because I do the job I was hired to do.”

Dr. Rue Fuss: “Indeed. I’ll alert the media.”

Dr. Dew Fuss: “In fact, I am so great that I can do all of this and have four-day weekends as well.”

**************************

Ply Seven: More Suckers! The long-weekend brigade, I have noted, have wasted much of their own time pursuing more time to waste on themselves. Perhaps worse, brigadeers waste faculty meetings, senate meetings, and committee meetings with new scams. Shirkers shirk their responsibility to learn how to work faculty governance, so colleagues must perform the simplest tasks for the shirkers. Of course, that is what makes shirkers shirkers. Slackers leave it to suckers to create principles of scheduling that make slackers’ slacking possible. Shuckers run their spin past the productive faculty: “Are you too busy or too selfish to discuss at great length how we might secure more personal time for me?” Scam artists importune colleagues who are readily found on campus every day to hatch schemes whereby eighty-minute periods never fall near weekends. Spinners leave the hallways of their departments unpopulated on Fridays so that suckers can do their advising for them [which probably benefits both of their academic advisees].


Who pays for our preening poseurs? Only students, staff, untenured and untenurable instructors [and a few tenured suckers who don their hardhats, swing their lunch pails, and work without whining], and those who have sacrificed much to secure their progeny more than an empty credential must pay. Isn’t that a pittance to secure our glorious, indolent elite?

What is to be done to torment the shirkers, slackers, scammers, suckers, and slugabeds? I suggest two ploys.

Ploy One: Advocate that every member of the faculty with less than a five-day teaching schedule must publish on the school website his or her CV. Loose a “culture of evidence” on simulators and dissimulators alike. Make the long-weekend crowd maintain an up-to-date curriculum vitae on an accessible web site so that the entire university may see what we are getting for all this time off. Those who miraculously discover that they teach best when they confront students [and colleagues and committees and their offices] least must favor campus with accounts of what they accomplish once they have Fridays or Mondays free. Those who teach five days per week need not reveal what they have been able or unable to accomplish, but all who teach fewer that five days per week must reveal their accomplishments. This will not necessarily shame scammers, for many of them lack the self-awareness that is a prerequisite for shame. Those who have enjoyed a T Th schedule for a decade or more must point to the myriad ways in which students, tuition-payers, colleagues, the University, and Knowledge have profited from that time away from campus.

Ploy Two: Make eighty-minute sessions available in ascending order of seniority. No one actually needs weekends of three days or more, but newer faculty could put the time off to better use than, say, those who have proved over the last ten or fifteen years that they are incapable of publishing and disinclined to change their teaching. So direct the down time to those who can use it best. If there are eighty-minute periods left once the tyros have been accommodated, then associate professors and then full professors may sidle up to the trough.

T Stands for Tlansrations

Argot is found wherever people to be manipulated are found, but argot at the University of Puget Clowns bamboozles on many levels.


In my senior year of high school, I wrote an occasional column called “Tlansrations” wherein I commented on absurd communications. I had learned to expose absurdity from MAD Magazine’s “What They Say / What They Mean” features. Down a left column MAD would list banalities that seemed straightforward. To the right MAD would list ironic meanings often masked by the banalities. I adapted MAD methodology to Blanchet High. Classmates were amused. Teachers were less amused: “What we have here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t teach.” One reaction was pretty much the same as the other to a teenager who was usually playing "I'm Looking Through You" in his head.

In looking over some previous entries in my blog, it appears to me that I have retraced “Tlansrations” by discussing the latent usages of “responsible,” “civil,” “professional,” and “inter-disciplinary,” among other terms of art deployed about the campus. Although the movie Cool Hand Luke and the newspaper feature “Tlansrations” explain much about “The University of Puget Clowns,” administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices at our school use ironic expres­sions in a manner far more nuanced that my teachers at Blanchet or Luke's bosses. [Of course, the foregoing juxtaposition between my high school and a road prison was strictly unintentional. The prison did not teach theology, for example.]

“The Senate has raised a technical objection.” tlansrates to “To invoke explicit rules is in poor taste and perhaps malicious.”

When apologists for campus rule-breakers thus dismiss violations of the Faculty Code or Bylaws, they go beyond Harry Callahan’s beliefs that rights and rules are for prisses. They explicitly or implicitly claim that rule-breakers have pursued higher justice by any means necessary. [Stop laughing! They are serious!] What is more, this “mere technicality” trope subtly incorporates the Confiden­tiality Con: if confidentiality permitted decision-makers to explain their actions, faculty of good will would understand and applaud but, alas, such accountability is not per­mitted by custom. By a remarkable, pithy sentence, then, practices warranted by no explicit authority overpower mandated rules. What the Faculty Code states in so many words becomes the merest trifle; decanal self-aggrandizement and/or committees' evasions and delusions that contradict the explicit rules become controlling authority.

“This is getting personal.” tlansrates to “This may expose too much truth.”

In ordinary usage “personal” denotes what is private or individuated, but campus usage incorporates the connotation “inappropriately candid, open, or transparent.” When a person or side with whom a colleague identifies is being confronted by truths that hurt, the colleague may say that “this has gotten personal,” especially when the truths relate to governance and are vigorously being denied. “Personal issues” include matters elimi­nated from public discussion by decree or by confidentiality, no matter how crucial the matter to governance, understanding, or integrity. The variability of subtext that invoca­tions of “personal” permit boggles the mind, which is of course the political purpose be­hind the professed solicitude for feelings. “This is getting personal” tlansrates sometimes to “I do not care to answer,” sometimes to “I do not know what to say,” sometimes to “You are very rude to raise what I cannot plausibly deny,” sometimes to "I have a very small penis," and on occasion to “How un­kind of you to respond in kind to my attacks on you.” In governance, “pursuing per­sonal agenda” or “for personal reasons” connotes that actions or arguments are not consis­tent with the personal agendas or motives of the speaker who deploys “personal.”

Although “personal” might be used in a sincere attempt to elevate discussion or de­bate, I know of no instance in which that usage has been employed on campus.

“Are we being rigorous enough?” tlansrates to “Are you as exacting and severe as I claim to be?”

It is well known across campus that a moment before his death, Goethe uttered, “More rigor!” “Rigor” combines common, straightforward understandings of scholarly virtue or virtues with presumptions about the scholarly superiority of whoever wields the Sword Rigor. This or that peer may from time to time exemplify rigor, especially if the peer bought the first round or a recent autobiographic anecdote, but the campus Wigger Pat­wol – those so busy es­pous­ing rigor that they leave themselves little energy for practicing rigor – epitomize rigor in their febrile fantasies. Such self-glorification is a common symp­tom of inferiority complex, so academe teems with variants on this demand that col­leagues’ prowess measure up to one’s own. That persons of actual prowess so seldom make such demands underscores the insidiousness of Wiggerspeak: no one can measure up to rigor that cannot be detected.


The examples above do not exhaust my trove of tlansrations. I shall note more in future postings and highlight those that I have incorporated in past postings. Watch this blog for such campus favorites as “mandated confidentiality” [what a decision-maker would just as soon not explain], “personal and professional characteristics” [respectable camouflage for why we really don’t like you], and, of course, “interdisciplinary” [matters covered by an existing discipline in which one has no competence or credentials].


However, we must remember that some tlansrations are so common in academia that campus usage and users merely follow longstanding fashion:

“We have decided to be prospective, not retrospective.” on many campuses tlansrates to “We have decided to minimize accountability and maximize chances of recurrence.”

“Let’s be proactive on this matter.” on many campuses tlansrates to “Let’s make sure that this does not happen to me or mine, but otherwise let’s avert our eyes.”

“Civility” on many campuses tlansrates to “Use ineffective argumentation that reinforces existing elites or authorities.” All too often, civility is a proper synonym for servility.

“Collegial” or “collegiality” on many campuses tlansrates to “Serving [my/our] greater good.”

“Culture of evidence” on many campuses tlansrates to “A cult worshipping spin.”

“That matter has been addressed by the appropriate body.” on many campuses tlansrates to “We have covered that matter up and would appreciate its staying buried.”

S Stands for Scams and Slackers

Self-serving, self-indulgent colleagues induce supervision, surveillance, and sanctions that task innocent faculty alongside scammers and slackers.


In the 1990s various colleagues intoned that it was too bad that many male faculty were reluctant to touch or console female undergraduates lest they risk suspicions or charges of sexual harassment. Some such laments signaled the astonishing credulousness of enablers, who took infamous predators seriously that efforts to police illicit, unethical relations between faculty and students were compromising avuncular relations be­tween professors and their charges. It did little good to remind predators or their enablers that whatever excesses efforts to control sexual harassment and hostile environs had fomented, the harassers bore far more of the blame than policymakers and decision-makers trying to protect students.

As with sexual harassment in the 1990s, efforts to police faculty scams and shirking often seem excessive -- especially to known slackers and scammers -- because such exertions must be energetic to keep up with wily veterans bent on fraud or misprision. The few faculty who find paperwork for travel to or participation in conferences to be onerous seldom as­so­ciate requirements with laws or false claims or profi­teering. When sur­veil­lance of faculty is excessive few academics acknowl­edge that surveillance often springs from financial liability and ethical responsibility. No one got into academe to be regimented like an assembly-line worker or, more accurately, like stereotypes or vague notions of what someone who held a real job must go through. Still, when faculty cannot be trusted, they will not be trusted. Untrustworthy, self-serving colleagues necessitate supervision, surveillance, and sanctions that annoy the conscienti­ous.

To be certain, administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices go overboard. Administra­tors despair of winning arguments on the merits and instead impose their will on faculty because administrators know that apparatchiks and accomplices will go along and most faculty will acquiesce in almost any outrage. For example, when mul­ti­ple Academic Standards Committees showed little interest in the Rube Goldberg schedule that we currently use at Puget Sound and the Faculty Senate dismissed the idea as more trouble than it was worth, the Academic Vice President at the time proclaimed “administrative preroga­tive” and did as he [and perhaps the President] pleased. As usual, the coercion was ac­companied by liver-lipped professions of solicitude for cordial, collegial relations and faculty control of the curriculum. The faculty pissed and moaned like impotent jerks, then bent over and took it up the tailpipe [to mangle a Jim Carrey line from “Liar Liar”]. Because “the cul­ture of evidence” is a stratagem rather than a reality, faculty have never been able to ascer­tain what reasons impelled the current scheduling regime. Did administrators end up with too few classrooms after the bricks-and-mortar campaign of the last 10 years and so turned to pack­ing courses into Tuesdays and Thursdays? Who knows? The apparat­chiks and accomplices don’t want to know. The rank and file are too lazy and compla­cent to inquire. Cooptation and quiescence combine to allow administrators to do pretty much as they please, so excesses are to be expected.

Even amid cooptation and quiescence, faculty may speak out if they think the stakes worth the speaking. Those who speak out will be debilitated all too often by self-seeking scam artists and slackers. Faculty initiatives need not be self-serving for administrators and their thralls to portray reforms and reformers as self-serving.

Every slacker and every scam artist on the faculty provides administrators and accom­plices ready examples for opposing proposals. This colleague would like to free up more days per week in which to have time for research? Some opponent will allude to colleagues given to three- or four-day weekends. That colleague would like to offer classes in other than fifty-minute meetings? A detractor will mention instructors who opt for generous breaks in the midst of long meetings. A whole department wants to free up Fridays? Too many colleagues know about departments that are, shall we say, under­staffed every Friday as is.

For any change you might imagine, multiple colleagues have already been abusing leeways and loopholes in ways that call for more supervision, scrutiny, surveillance, and sanctions. We the faculty demand trust but seldom upbraid those who routinely abuse trust. Yet more silences, more quiescence, and more passivity render faculty incapable of governing themselves.

R Stands for Resistance and Rejection

Despite quiescence among lotus-eating colleagues, resistance is futile but fun, and rejection rewards the rejected.



If there are no problems except for faculty who see problems, why not be a problem?

Resistance is usually futile but often fun. Rejected by right-thinking colleagues, resisters may revel as the “born, bought, and beaten” don fezzes and mount mini-cycles around rings of the “University of Puget Clowns.”

Speaking of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC], we all should indulge in a still-legal drug: note what the PSC vaunts but cannot and will not defend. Ask colleagues where to find the confidentiality that the PSC conjures to fend off accountability. [See “Beyond the Confidentiality Con” and “Confidentiality Cons” to refresh your appreciation for how such confidentiality is concocted.] Once they confirm that such confidentiality is nowhere authorized, you will have stunned the new mullets until veteran suckers mouth anew that “Oooooopenness is oooooonerous.” Then invite tyros and veterans alike to explain why our scholarship de­pends on authority and transparency but our governance depends on subterfuge and secrecy. Sit back and revel in the rhapsodic stillness that will ensue as administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices reject such strange notions as that official accounts might correspond with empirical reality. Students do denial, but they do not do denial with dudgeon. Go for the dudgeon!

Challenge decisions or rationalizations of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] by reading the Faculty Code or the Bylaws aloud where such dissent ia still permitted. As you are castigated for raising mere technicalities or for being uncivil, secretly exult that on our campus literacy is not funda­mental but subversive of good order. Feeling puckish? Bring up what some file says in stark contrast to what the FAC has written about that file. Does your taste run to wacky? After the FAC announces honors, tell colleagues where to find public records that belie the honors. If nothing else, you will keep your schedule free from invitations to faculty birthday parties. Such rejection will thus pay dividends for years.

Watch an administrator seethe red as a colleague pierces confidentiality and points out how the administration is again playing fast and loose before the slow and regimented. Sure, the administrator will fall back on doubletalk and doublespeak to befuddle the majori­ty of colleagues who long to acquiesce and to believe, “… But, mama, that’s where the fun is!” [Bruce Springsteen, “Blinded by the Light”] Make administrators decloak! Make them reveal anew that they are strategic and insincere. When administrators lose battles that they thought they could win in faculty fora, they will proclaim themselves “shocked! shocked!” to discover that administrative prerogative authorized them to make all the decisions all along. What they cannot wrest from the faculty via suasion adminis­tra­tors rip from the faculty via authority and coercion, but make administrators reveal their inner despots, who lurk behind masks of civility and community. Administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices will whisper how disreputable, unreliable, and irresponsible you are. There are other benefits as well.

Faculty meetings parody intellectual life and governance so that one may avoid despair as early retirement is wrecked or the protections of the Faculty Code are gutted. Marvel as a committee chair urges faculty to pass a pernicious, muddled reform with the compelling argument that “We can always fix it later.” Reel as a president bestows “five minutes” on a colleague hawking a proposal and that five minutes turns into half an hour halted after the faculty’s greatest time-sinks ridicule the filibusterer. After parliamentary slapstick is over, recount simperers' greatest hits – "He sat on an infamous rogue committee, yet he inveighs against rogue committees?" – to make certain that the vast majority of colleagues who dodged the meeting know why they avoid faculty conclaves. Prepare to be rejected by those unmasked, but for the sake of comedy and sanity tell the truth. "If you tell people the truth, make them laugh or they'll kill you." [George Bernard Shaw]

Spit your Dr. Pepper on the back of a pal when a president asks for announcements and a colleague announces, “Is anyone else having trouble finding parking these days?” [Do not note that you get to campus before noon or that it is good that no colleague had a rectal itch when the president asked for announcements unless you are content to dine alone at Wheel-Lock.]

Mark a bingo card with faculty exordia in central squares. Try to get away with “As a …” in multiple squares. Don’t pin your card down unless you have to. If you must complete the exordium, opt for “As an ethicist, …” because that has been modal station identification in faculty meetings for years. Too bad we tenured the fellow who always identified himself with a passel of adjectives or nouns before moving to the alleged point of his speaking. That was entertainment! Maybe the President should emulate old-style political conventions – “The chair recognizes Kansas’s favorite daughter ... a pedagogue in the classroom and a demagogue in these meetings ... no shrinking violet she but a saguaro with not just one point but many ... a stalwart researcher undeterred by the absence of evidence because, boy, can she cook!” – to provide colleagues the content-free communications that represent our highest art form and potty breaks.

In the hallways and on the footpaths, practice everyday resistance. Compliment colleagues for the finery that they wear and watch hilarity ensue as they take you seriously: “That shiny saucepan adorns your pate, Dr. Cleaver!” Kid on the square how impressed you are with recent decisions by some committee on which a colleague sat – “I never would have thought that a Martin Nelson could resurrect the dead, so your committee really showed me something, Professor Lignified.” – then time the interval between your phony compliment and eventual realization. Note the hypocrisy of a campus progressive who believes in wholesale, abstract justice but participates in retail, concrete injustices and wait for threatened reprisals by email or gossip.

When a leader of a campus Borg cube repeatedly notes how her or his cube flouts the Faculty Code and recommends that others do the same, reminisce about others who have rocked depositions with psychoses and neuroses masked as principles and professional­ism. Of course, the damned legal system does not take a joke as well as campus toadies do.

The best advice for resistance amid rejection comes from Animal House:

Boon: I gotta work on my game.

Otter: No, no, no, don't think of it as work. The whole point is just to enjoy yourself.

Q Stands for Quiescence

Convenient as it is to blame the docility and conformity of faculty on their having been "born, bought, or beaten," faculty go along with injustice and unfairness because it is just too much trouble to insist on truth and propriety.



So far this blog has ascribed the quietude of the faculty amid corruptions and injus­tices to competing responsibilities to family, research, or life. That may seem too polite an explanation. Indeed, the last three entries may incline reader and blogger alike to reconsider that polite verdict. How many times has each of us heard that faculty go along with in­jus­tices and chicanery because they are “born, bought, or beaten” into silence and sub­mission? Maybe it's not our fault!

It is our own fault. Let's see why "born, bought, or beaten" excuses accomplices' languor.

One problem with “born, bought, or beaten” is that it phrases as alternatives what in practice are sequential complements. Passive, quiescent colleagues tend to be born [that is, created through recruitment and socialization] then to be bought [that is, tenured, promoted, honored, and well paid] but only to be beaten [that is, penalized, disciplined, or spurned] if the breeding and buying of inertia and resignation succeed too little or too seldom. Administrators and apparatchiks cannot do all the work! They require accomplices to form an approving audience.

Faculty are born and bred to regard meekly going along with half-truths as the essence of professionalism [see the immediately previous entry in this blog]. Once a rambunctious graduate student in hot pursuit of truth has been “raised” to assume the position of sober professional craving a good reputation among peers but especially among superiors, the seeker of truth commits suicide [perhaps via Flavor Aid – Rev. Jim Jones did not dispense Kool-Aid] and becomes born again in the wonders and beliefs of the Puget Sound congregation. The baptism of hiring leads to confirmation through tenure as colleagues decide that someone has the personal and professional characteristics to fit in – which is to say, lacks the personal and professional wherewithal to be reasonably skeptical, critical, or sentient – rather than to impede injustice, to expose deceit, or to indulge in other impieties.

A congregant, believer, and accomplice having been born and bred, positive and negative sanctions reinforce ortho­doxy and orthopraxy. The roles of administrators and apparatchiks are obvious. The FAC enables raises, bestows awards, recommends tenure, and promotes accomplices, although quiet agnostics may survive when noisy infidels would perish. No less important, administrators and apparatchiks may withhold favors, moneys, and reappointments.

Peers and departments sometimes play crucial roles in assisting or obstructing decision-makers “above” the departmental level. Peers and departments look for, among other positives, a reputation for responsible criticism [that is, discovering not yet articulated arguments for what departmental elites have advocated] and demonstrated reliability [that is, predictable responses that serve departmental elites] as well as collegiality [that is, a willingness to commit or condone injustice in return for rewards]. More dysfunctional departments operate in a more defensive manner, ever watchful lest truth-tellers or whistle-blowers be rewarded or anointed. Truly dismal departments are quite bristly: negative sanctions descend on those who “unprofessionally” deconstruct departmental misbehavior.

“Born, bought, AND beaten” may seem to explain quiescence, but that formula misses the sheer expense involved in sanctions and socialization if faculty are the least bit aware or incredulous. Sooner or later all faculty learn of some injustice done in their name, or a faction that helped fire “those” women are “shocked! shocked!” when “their” women are similarly mistreated. The suddenly attentive and alert colleagues are neither reborn nor re-bought nor re-beaten, for such practices take time and work best behind the scenes. Instead, once and future accomplices are re-educated.

As we have seen often in entries of this blog, proce­dures for appeals exist to reassure all who are utterly ignorant of the facts that fairness has prevailed and that decisions are justified. Administrators and apparatchiks assure the temporarily discombobulated that only confidentiality keeps the insiders from demonstrating just how right their decisions were. Veteran accomplices join this chorus of nonsense, resounding hymns such as “When We Have Fired Folks, They Invariably Go On to Do Nothing” or "A Mighty Fortress is Our FAC."

Colleagues accept soothing twaddle because to do otherwise would require great efforts that would ultimately be unavailing. Worse, to admit that the Faculty Advancement Committee or the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or an administrator is misleading the faculty would be unpleasant and would mark one as lacking in civility. Why did an ad hoc committee learn about multiple acts of malfeasance by the PSC but avoid public documentation of such missteps so something might be done about them in the future? Perhaps they stifled themselves because accountability and candor might alienate colleagues and endanger reputations for reliability and responsibility. The safer course was to praise “forward looking” policies [almost none of which, quite predictably, have been discussed in the Faculty Senate or passed by the faculty] and to divert colleagues from corruption, deception, and dereliction in their governance.

“ … I always knew what the right path was.

Without exception, I knew, but I never took it.

You know why?

It was too damn hard.”

Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman

It’s also not pleasant, not cordial, not collegial, and not proper to speak truth to power, so lazy and depraved or scared and depressed faculty choose silence and impotence and thereby make themselves accomplices after the fact. Awareness of and familiarity with the actual conditions of one’s employment imperils tenured professionals as much as union apprentices if either is inclined to articulate what he or she sees or hears. To make the most obvious observations or deductions is in extremely poor taste and indicates a rotten attitude and perhaps a self-destructive tendency. To utter such observations in a forum supposedly designed for faculty self-governance reveals some deeply personal shortcoming and is therefore utterly unprofessional.

To get along, go along. The Emperor is not naked. He is wearing loafers.

Relax! If you knew what your betters knew, you'd see that they're right, so really there is no reason for you to look into the matter. The confidants cannot tell you what they did to whom or why, but if they could you would swell with admiration for their wisdom, so why not just swell with admiration now and skip the intermediate fact-finding?

Everything is alright. Pretend you are at another Fall Faculty Conversation. Blather and shibboleth waft to the rafters. You are mesmerized by the majesty of intellectual discourse when you eschew disruptive reason and discordant reflection. There are no problems except faculty who identify problems.

Pay no attention to the apparatchik behind the curtain.

The winged monkeys are merely dispensing justice.

Sip some more Lotus Flavor Aid.

Ain't intellectual life grand!

P Stands for Professional

“Professional,” like other dialectical descriptors, depends for its meaning(s) on vices being denied more than virtues being affirmed.



When colleagues call themselves “professional,” they do so for varying reason(s). Positive reasons emphasize conformity to selected norms. Meliorative invocations of professionalism dramatize individual solidarity with the collective and sympathy for the ideals of the collective, especially when the self-praise may serve promotion or evalu­ation or some honor. “Professional” may be brandished for negative, defensive reasons as well. Colleagues em­pha­size conformity lest they expose themselves to disparagement or gossip for failing to be like others or, more commonly, like others demand that they be. Faculty direct atten­tion to professional conduct to deny one or more suspected short­comings or to distract attention from proved unprofessional conduct. And, of course, pos­i­tive and negative assignments of “professional” and “unprofessional” may be teamed to differentiate professional us from unprofessional them.

A dialectical adjective, “professional” varies with positives being affirmed and with negatives being denied. Affirmed positives form a public account crafted to be accepted if not quite believed. To understand the positive, however, one often must suss out nega­tive(s) being contradicted. When professions of professionalism are not harmless self-promotion, they mask fears that identity will be damaged. Col­leagues’ sins and terrors are often private until their self-praises and self-exculpations expose the private terrors and latent sins.

Professors who prey upon their students, for example, will stress their professional­ism in myriad ways to construct a positive persona accepted by a credulous majority to be in­con­sistent with abuse of students and trust. Worried that dalliances might become known or rumored, predators advertise the ways in which they are thoroughgoing pro­fessionals. They dramatize their punctiliousness and punctuality. They regale all who will listen about the high regard in which they are held by professional associates. Of course, they would be self-promoting even if they were not predators because self-promotion yields praises and raises. Because self-promotion is ubiquitous, especially among faculty who are not very accomplished, most colleagues will not ask what ulterior motives such self-promotion could serve. Rubes in robes will “gape at you in dull sur­prise” [Janice Ian, “Seventeen”] if they realize that a cover story was at best partially true.

Of course, professors prey upon colleagues as well and so require a concept of professionalism that hides their personal animus and tactical dishonesty. When a psychopath savages an evaluee – merely a hypothetical example until it happens to you – he or she will list a myriad of ways in which he or she struggled to find the evaluee worthy until diligence and love of truth compelled an honest evaluation. The psychopath will note that evaluee – the ingrate! – reacted against this open, sincere, professional evaluation with fury that only proved just how unworthy the evaluee was. As in sports in which the initial aggression goes undetected but the retaliation is noticed, the unprovoked assault is professional assessment but self-defense is unprofessional revenge against an honest servant of the university. All who perceive a stake in defending the procedural and substantive justice of evaluations irrespective of actualities will cluck at how un­pro­fessional, even personal, the victim of assault or assassination is being and will praise the psychopath for remaining above the fray. Any foibles or faults of the aggressor will be ignored. Whatever foibles or faults will transmogrify the victim into an unprofessional, unworthy pariah will be inventoried as they are invented.

For another common example, candor defines professionalism in both negative op­po­sition and in positive alliance. To seem professional one must be candid judiciously while emphasizing how brutally candid one is being. When Thomas More told Henry VIII that the latter’s musical composition was “frankly” splendid [Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”], even the ninth grader in the back row grasped that “frankly” af­firmed that More was not mincing words with his liege lord, which of course meant that More was lying like a convict to keep on the good side of Henry. [More’s genuine can­dor re­gar­ding the King’s second marriage affixed More’s head to Traitor’s Gate.] The genius of this usage on campus is that it makes one “unpro­fessional” to speak truth and another “professional” to obscure the truth. Any colleague who blows a whistle on shoddy aca­demic programs or fraudu­lent practices marks himself or herself as “unprofessional;” it being far more “profes­sional” in this usage to ignore, condone, or laud misconduct or men­dacity in anticipation that colleagues will recipro­cate when one’s own shortcomings be­come evident. In this usage, “professionals” a) conceal poor instructors, approve weak courses, and salute slapdash majors; b) dispense inadequate advice that may imperil ad­vi­sees but will keep one on the good side of incompetents and incompetence; and c) other­wise flaunt their integrity and probity in the very act of flouting those virtues. When poseurs preen and pretend, “professionals” at least avert their eyes and remain silent but sometimes attack those who deconstruct the pretenses for being “unprofessional.” These “pros” see no scams, admit no disappointments, and defer to any justifica­tions offered by their betters, all the while accentuating how costly their candor has been to their [usually unmerited] advancement.

Nothing gives away tactical use of “professional” more than passionate concern for one’s or one’s department’s reputation. Such fervent, febrile concern is almost always undue. It is undue because almost no one due a good reputation is denied one for long. Gossip, rumors, and yarns do not adhere to well-reputed colleagues, and well-reputed colleagues almost always laugh off this disparagement or that assertion. The ill-reputed usually have desperate concern for their reputations because they fear exposure. Desperation is also undue because well-established infamy is reinforced more than amplified when misdeeds are publicized. It may be ironic but it is assuredly true: those who most often tout high regard for their reputations do not possess such reputations but wish that they did and strive mightily to deny charac­teri­za­tions that would exacerbate their deserved bad names, even though in many cases their bad names could scarcely be worse.

What is true of individuals overwrought about their perceived “professionalism” is truer still of departments. I once met with two members of a department that has been viewed as a campus weak spot for only a few decades. They were concerned that some­thing that I had written members of my own department might defame their department [as if anything short of complicity in 9/11 could]. They defended their concern by obser­ving that, had anyone similarly disparaged my department, my depart­ment would like­wise protest. After I stopped chuckling at this flaccid riposte, I responded, “My depart­ment would neither say nor do anything. Who would believe that my department would do what your department did?” As I recollect, the two did not grasp the differences be­tween departments that made their contention risible.

So beware of those who excuse self-indulgent behavior because “my personal and pro­fessional reputation is at stake.” They almost always protest criticisms or observa­tions too close to a truth that they cannot handle. What was true in high school is if any­thing truer in academia: what individuals or departments protest that they resent, they all too often resemble or even represent. Those who behave in a truly professional manner do not have to tell others how professional they are any more than high school athletes who are truly accomplished have to tell their classmates what jocks they are. Mildly observant peo­ple already know or will not believe. If they do not know or do not believe, self-serving bloviation does not substitute well for the real thing but actually inclines savvy audiences to assume that some opposite is nearer to the truth of the matter. While high school chums or campus colleagues smile and nod amicably if absently, they are asking themselves what unprofessional act(s) this wretch must be denying.

O Stands for Orwellian

Orwell taught us how systems of irrationalizations denied vices whenever underlings relabel them virtues.


It follows from the immediately preceding entry [26 August 2007] that when we describe usage as Orwellian we invoke systems of “irrationalization.” By irrationaliza­tion I mean accounts or catch-phrases with great credence-value but little truth-value that, through repetition, make nonsense sound like sense. Through irrationalizations, account-givers and account-accepters mutually assent to equations between vices and virtues, goods and evils. Once formalized, organized, and routinized, irrationalization-systems reaffirm rational, honest, legitimate governance by means of groundless, misleading, illicit proclamations and practices. With misinformation and disinformation, leaders and followers alike se­duc­e themselves and traduce others. Methodically and inexorably, an Orwellian system corrupts the virtues it simulates and cele­brates. That corruption is a collective effort. [Review the entry “Who’s to Blame?” from 16 March 2007, please.]

To persist, such systems must comprise simultaneously individuals and masses and must redress through trite, rehearsed formulas particular insufficiencies real, imagined, or con­jured. Because they are stylized, even ritualized, the formulas do not so much over­come criticism as evade criticism. Colleagues given to empirical observation and logical inference must be socialized as new recruits or dismissed as old cranks lest the credulity and thoughtlessness essential to the survival of the system be corrupted. Thus, truly cri­ti­cal or audacious comments must be condemned as lacking in civility or sophistication and those given to such comments must be marginalized as enemies of the collective. Those who note that the faculty have been misinformed must be condemned as spreaders of calumnies. Through such system-defenses, irrationalizations transcend actualities and reach liturgical excellence when esteemed colleagues identify with cynical inventions and craven conventions as if they fulfilled collective or personal mission-statements.

Of course, no one expresses irrationalizations via equations as in 1984. Campus catch­­phrases must be subtler because our university lacks a formal Ministry of Truth to re-educate recalcitrant individuals to the collective consensus. Professor Winston Smith does not, for example, get sent to the rat lab. Still, only a deliberately obtuse or obsti­nate­ly deluded majority misses the Orwellian overtones in our “contract of depravity” [The Hustler, 1961].

CIVILITY ENTAILS SERVILITY ― Through how many Fall Faculty Conversations have veteran faculty languished in silence as administrators and shills – whom one of our colleagues calls “the born, the bought, or the beaten” – test-drove claims and slogans? Then, for a box lunch, professionals who may have syllabi to prepare and should have manuscripts that need attention coalesce into herds [again, the individual must be incorporated into the collective lest heterodox thoughts intrude] to troubleshoot formulas and to perfect irrationalizations. Thus do cynical inventions become craven conventions.

When an apparatchik or administrator, for example, asks how a member of the faculty attains the standing to raise an issue before the Faculty Senate, that incivil inquiry contradicts pretensions to openness in faculty governance. If a senator were to unmask the disdain for equality among faculty and the preference for hierarchy barely latent in such a query, the defender of open, egalitarian, liberal self-governance would be reckoned incivil.

AGREEABILITY SUBSTITUTES FOR DISTINCTION ― If a colleague known to lack a quality requisite for an honor or position nevertheless is awarded the honor or position, deficiency of merit has likely been over­come with superfluity of conformity, credulity, and utility. As long as some colleagues de­serve positions and honors, the deserving camou­flage the undeserving. Tenuring a rambunctious loudmouth dis­guises the firing of multiple colleagues for “personal or professional characteristics” such as candor, aware­ness, or honor.

When a peer is awarded a grant or a title that contradicts extant evidence – say some classroom slug becomes designated the “Scrooge McDuck Professor of Exemplary Peda­gogy” – the peer’s CV may not disclose contribu­tions to campus orthodoxy or orthopraxy that secured the honor. By contrast, when a member of the faculty has greatly outper­formed many who have received a distinction, it is latent treason to wonder which act of resis­tance, independence, or idiosyncrasy doomed the wretch. Likewise, when coworkers become more affable when up for awards or honors, a campus citizen does not link such behaviors to “merit” as implemented by those who grant honors. It is double-treason even to imagine that craven conformity on a Power Committee garners rewards. These are but a few examples of campus thought-crimes.

ACCOUNTABILITY AMOUNTS TO ANARCHY ― If Power Committees [the FAC and the PSC] must explain the inexplicable or defend the indefensible, the system of ir­ra­tionalizations cannot inspire confidence [etymologically, a mutuality of faith or trust]. Apparatchiks and administrators keep each other’s secrets and cover for each other via ac­counts that will not and therefore must not withstand scrutiny. If conspiracies of confi­dentiality are exposed, the hierarchy feels exposed. Exposure will not be tolerated.

For example, when colleagues who consider themselves critical thinkers, progressive scholars, and even radicals say that Power Committees need not answer to the Faculty Senate or that the Faculty Senate has too much sway, they extol deference to decision-making by the few because they identify with the decision-makers every bit as much as Winston Smith ended up identifying with Big Brother. True, shielding decision-makers from accountability often shields members of Power Commit­tees and other insiders, but insiders protest lesé majésty sincerely. They know not just that calls for accountability are futile but that they must be futile lest the Confidentiality Con Game be busted.

DEFICIENT QUANTITY SIGNIFIES SUPERABUNDANT QUALITY ― Not many aca­demics make it through graduate school without encountering a professor or graduate student who excuses his or her lack of productivity as evidence for his or her perfec­tionism. Such a cliché when I was in graduate school that such “de­fenses” elicited sardonic chuckles from second-year graduate students and derision from first-year faculty, such hollow pleas have greater currency the less research-oriented a faculty or the college in fact is.

What veteran cannot recall which colleague, renowned for a world-class writer’s block, argued repeatedly that those who publish should be docked salary to demonstrate that they valued their own publications enough to lose income? Who cannot remember the fellow who won multiple honors for erudition but managed perhaps two book reviews in his decades at our school? Behold our campus variant on the French saw that less is more!

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATION REFLECTS NEGLECT OF TEACHING ― On the self-serving canard that hard-working teachers have no time to publish, colleagues per­suade themselves and others that an absence of publication betokens strict attention to pedagogy rather than, say, lassitude or a lack of ability.

When campus grants are used as affirmative action for unproductive scholars, the com­pen­satory logic must never be admitted publicly lest the priority of patronage over pro­fessional growth be undeniable. When a member of the FAC approaches a recent evaluee to ask how he manages to be so productive in scholarship while attaining gaudy numbers on teaching evaluations, you may be certain of two things: 1) The evaluee has not published much; and 2) someone got on the FAC because he or she believes that few Puget Sound colleagues are capable of productivity in the classroom and in research simul­taneously.

TOP-DOWN SURVEILLANCE; BOTTOM-UP TRUST ― The system of irrationaliza­tions demands surveillance to ensure subservience. Surveillance is best sustained, of course, by informers who challenge deviations from prescribed behavior or speech. If necessary, how­ever, administrators may announce university policies depriving faculty or staff or students of rights or privacy so that right thinking and behavior may be enforced. When hierarchy becomes manifest, pretensions to self-governance and openness and liberty are imperiled, so those who identify strongly with elites redouble their denunciations of critical or skeptical questions as evidence of incivil distrust.

It would be too obvious were informers and denouncers publicly to declare that “Resistance is futile,” so circumlocutions are necessary. Thus, this colleague chides faculty for asking committees or administrators to explain what has been done in the name of the university: “Collegiality involves trust.” [“Trust your colleagues” sounds better than “Credulity is loyalty and citizenship is treason.”] Thus, that colleague de­clares that documented evidence of violations of the Faculty Code or the Bylaws repre­sents some personal problem rather than any flaw in governance. [After all, it will not do to proclaim, “No one noticed a problem until now, so those who note problems are the problem.”]

*****

In sum, whenever you hear an attractive phrase – “a culture of evidence” during the last reaccreditation, for example – know that each shibboleth has been invented and vetted to substitute a catch-phrase for a remedy, pretended virtue for chronic vice. But keep your knowledge to yourself and never admit that you see actualities behind the spin. Prepare yourself for encounters with those from off campus, lest you end up like a certain Senate Chair during our last reaccreditation:

OUTSIDE EVALUATOR: “Puget Sound’s self-study says that the general-education core is a unitary experience. Do you agree that that is true?”

SENATE CHAIR: “Well, the core does consist of units.”


Granted, I escaped via a lame pun, but at least I did not admit that I had read the reaccreditation report on the web and had warned the authors of that report that no one would believe that the core was unitary.

N Stands for 1984

George Orwell wrote about a confluence of consequences of everyday pusillanimity and mendacity.


I guess it makes sense to read Orwell’s 1984 as dystopic fantasy, but Orwell was writing about tendencies everpresent in every stratum of every society albeit hypertrophied in some. The University of Puget Sound illustrates those tendencies even if it never approaches Orwellian extremes. Let’s look at everyday Orwellian rhetorics and practices.

As each of us fails of expectations and hides our shortcomings behind accounts [Do not try to explain connections between such accounts and accountability to colleagues who cling to the Confidentiality Con -- the pretense that administrators and apparatchiks would be accountable if only confidential proceedings permitted -- lest they sputter and bluster!], we play our parts in a social system of deceptions. When governors [administrators, apparatchiks, and other decision-makers] dare not be honest, they spin and prevaricate so extensively that soon they can no longer tell deceptions from ascertainable realities. Such is the ending of Orwell’s Animal Farm: humans and pigs become indistinguishable as pigs consolidate their control of other animals. Our governed animals, colleagues who are equal to governing animals only less so, are fed a steady diet of propaganda and lies until they crave deceptions and depend on illusions to make everyday campus life understandable, predictable, and pleasant. Fantasies, fictions, folderol, factlets, and factoids each and all manifest underlying social systems of mutual deception.

So it was in 1984. Big Brother deceived the masses with their active complicity. Passivity no more sufficed in Oceania than it would at an Pentacostal tent-meeting. To be seduced by Big Brother or Jim Jones, members of the audience must actively seduce themselves. [Please re-read my earlier posting (“Who’s to Blame?”) on these points.]

When faculty play the passive victims of administrators and apparatchiks to excuse their impotence and debasement, their pretense is convenient but dishonest. If one cannot fight Jones Hall, then one need not fight Jones Hall. But one can fight Jones Hall. Even feckless faculty may resist, evade, decry, expose, and otherwise harry Jones Hall. Fighting Jones Hall and oppression or other faulty governance takes time and energy away from teaching, research, family, and other valued pursuits, but each faculty member can strike a blow for better governance or greater justice IF HE OR SHE IS WILLING TO EXPEND TIME AND ENERGY AND WILLING TO RISK HIS OR HER RESPECTABILITY. [Cf. “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable,” 4 March 2007 in this blog]

Most colleagues most of the time take an easy way out [Not the easy way out! Part of the problem is that so many paths offer escape that keeps the escapee in good with administrators and apparatchiks.] Absurdities to which faculty first silently accede sooner or later reputable, respectable faculty must loudly aver if they are to stay within the spotlight of favor and favors. Thus do otherwise rational intellectuals persuade themselves that standards that are impossible to fulfill have for the most part been fulfilled by the tenured and the promoted.

As noted, to accept misinformation meekly, is insufficient. Reliable, reputable, respectable faculty spread disinformation boldly and in front of monitors and patrons. Every passive self-betrayal becomes yet another reason to traduce others to betray their own better selves. Like Winston Smith, they betray what they once claimed they loved and embrace with stronger faith what they once loathed. Orwell closes his novel with the observation that Winston Smith now loves Big Brother. All too many faculty cling to campus leaders because all too many academics are followers who have bought the official story so long and so often that the story owns them even if administrators do not.

Craven, craving credulity is not the only symbiosis between administrators and faculty. Other faculty bury themselves in their work and ignore apparatchiks’ and administrators’ misleading. Like buying in, opting out permits Big Brother to rule and ruin with impunity and without much notice,

Winston Smith was the particular. Social entities and processes are more general instances of Orwellian processes and rhetorics. The Puget Sound community is not immune to Orwell’s horrors because Puget Sound faculty soon or late practice what Orwell preached against.

M Stands for Mediocrity

Fear faculty malevolence less than faculty mediocrity because many colleagues are trying to hide a lack of talent already widely perceived.



Every educational institution will have mediocre faculty. Any school that has not given up hope will make some efforts to improve its faculty so that the unavoidable mediocrity presently at their school surpasses the unavoidable mediocrity in the past. Of course, exaggerating the mediocrity of faculty no longer present is the easiest way to simulate “progress” without the trouble of achieving advancement.

The University of Puget Sound has elevated its mediocrity over the last decades. When President Phibbs and Dean Davis determined to turn a jock-and-party school in North Tacoma [remember that such a retroctive characterization is more than a little convenient to "measuring" Phibbs' and Davis's progress!] into a national liberal arts school, oral historians inform us, they had to replace sinecures with more productive faculty. Because Phibbs and Davis could raise the centroid of the faculty but a little in reality, top-down imagery and bottom-up fakery raced ahead of faculty capacity. Indeed, the University rewrote its Faculty Code to conjure a faculty beyond Lake Wobegon – not merely all above average, everyone tenured is declared excellent in teaching and excellent in professional growth. [If you immediately inferred that some colleagues got tenure without being excellent either at teaching or at professional growth, you have been paying attention.]

For many years since, administrators and apparatchiks have skillfully exploited public-relations multipliers to seek in flim-flam what they could not secure in fact. They could not counterfeit quality on their own, so patronage and clientage complemented public relations. Patronage had to be skillfully targeted toward would-be apparatchiks who would never flirt with critical or independent perspective and who would be unlikely to achieve or to merit glory or respect among faculty by other means. Thus, patronage flowed to mediocrities.

However, the sheer number of mediocre faculty outstripped the patronage available to administrators. This led to clientage: a reserve army of the undeployed eager to be used by the regime. Wannabe clients strive to head programs, departments, or schools so that they might demonstrate their loyalty to an entity greater than themselves. Wannabes parse mission statements and cosset legitimating myths to show how higher truths that “emerged” from some Fall Faculty “Conversation” are actually far more consistent with what this or that Great Leader had been saying all along than mere facility with English would have indicated.

Faculty too disorganized or scattered or daffy would not be promoted to the ranks of apparatchiks but might retain their jobs if they did not threaten the illusions or epigons of the regime [or if they already had tenure]. Faculty who truly were accomplished teachers and/or productive scholars would be allowed to remain but would be marginalized lest they question pedagogical or scholarly fads or otherwise make reference to realities.

Since the above is standard at many schools, why raise the matter? We must acknowledge these usual processes lest we conclude that many faculty who head schools or departments or programs, appointees to the Faculty Advancement Committee or to the Professional Standards Committee, and various other holders of key positions – the apparatchiks – are malevolent. They are often merely mediocre. They are colleagues trying to get respect to which their talents do not entitle them. All too often, apparatchiks are faculty with some gaping flaw(s) who imagine that being well thought of by administrators will camouflage their shortcomings and who discover too late that their being used by administrators magnifies their shortcomings.

In sum, do not let service at the University of Puget Sound lead you to loathe the apparatchiks. Pity them. Fear them but disguise your anxiety as respect. Do not provoke or annoy them, for many are desperate to disguise their weaknesses. Publicly acknowledge their authority and acuity, but do not believe them lest you become lost. Do not let their mediocrity become your mendacity.

Next – “N Stands for Nineteen Eighty-Four” – George Orwell wrote about a confluence of consequences of everyday mendacity.

L Stands for Lilliput

How much malfeasance at Puget Sound shall we attribute to its being a small school?

Does size matter? Many Puget Sound faculty explain malfeasance by noting that UPS is much smaller than the graduate institutions whence most faculty secured their degrees. Larger schools, they presume, have more experienced administrators selected from outside the institution via more rigorous vetting than that at UPS. Larger schools have more extensive staff to save faculty and administrators from missteps. Seattle’s large, state school has a suite of offices for the State Attorney General’s deputies, for example.

Confounding factors undermine confidence in “Size Matters” hypotheses. First, state schools are held to much higher standards for due process under U. S. and state constitutions, and as a consequence administrators and staff at state institutions have been professionalized and sensitized beyond the flaccid habits of non-state schools. Since many large institutions are state schools, size alone need not account for much.

Second, smaller institutions tend to be less visible, and anonymity of personnel and unawareness of institutional history may explain as much as smallness itself. A dust-up at some school somewhere creates too many unknowns for most academics to resolve, master, or monitor.

Third, some small places are more prestigious than others. The more that an academic institution depends on national or international recognition of faculty or on significant, refereed publications, the more that such merit will shape hiring and firing. More, the absence of professional reputation or of publications is far less likely to be remediable at the better small schools than it is at UPS. This implies that many “close calls” at UPS would at more intellectually imposing but small institutions be “no-brainers” in multiple senses. Size alone need not account for flaccid or malleable standards.

Size does matter. At places as small as UPS, for instance, faculty from this scientific discipline know much more about the average humanist than would be usual at a larger school and hence may be more tempted to hazard judgments. Socializing with colleagues in other departments breeds sympathy for one’s friends in those departments, and more inter-departmental socializing is likelier at smaller schools. When “administrative prerogative” rears its tyrannical head, far fewer faculty at smaller schools have the smarts, stamina, and courage to oppose depredations. At an “intimate” institution, smarmy veterans habituated to silence and servility will intone that administrators are colleagues due every consideration that one professor extends to another; at larger institutions, greater distance between colleagues encourages greater attention to disparate interests between administrators and teachers and to the myriad ways in which power and authority are masked behind civility and collegiality.

K Stands for Kyrie Eleison

Roman Catholic liturgy and Faculty Senate practices share some features.


Perhaps the most acute revelation of serving Roman Catholic mass was that liturgy mostly moves things along through mindless repetition. In the midst of the Latin Mass, the following rite was thought meaningful:

Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison

Congregation: Kyrie Eleison

Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison

Congregation: Christe Eleison

Priest-Celebrant: Christe Eleison

Congregation: Christe Eleison

Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison

Congregation: Kyrie Eleison

Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison


What about this rite reminds me of the rites of the Faculty Senate?

First, amid a Latin service the Church slips in a little Greek because most of the congregation does not know the difference. Understanding neither Greek nor Latin, the assembled repeat what they learned by rote. Drop a catchphrase before the Faculty Senate and you’ll get the same response, albeit not with the creedal passion of Catholic youth.

Second, the liturgy probably predates Christianity and, thus, represents an accommodation of presumption and prejudices by rulers. In the same way over decades, administrators have accommodated faculty shibboleths – e. g., the faculty control the curriculum – while using the conformist majority of the senate to legitimize decanal depredations.

Third, the stylized surrender to the mob followed by reassertion of control makes this rite almost Kabuki Theater. Content to ask mercy from the Lord, the priest then confronts deviance in the second round when the crowd demands not Barabbas but that Christ give mercy. The priest gives in to the call for a singular lord to grant mercy, gets an echo from the congregation, then reasserts the more general “Lord, have mercy.” To this direction the crowd meekly submits. The Faculty Senate could not have staged a perfectly safe exertion of autonomy followed by meek submission better, but then the Church has had more practice and better command of classical languages.

Fourth, the stunning emptiness of the issue – Shall we appeal to the Lord for mercy or to Christ specifically? – reminds one of countless Senate meetings in which much ado was lavished on nothing and little or no ado was wasted on something. Electronic voting does not comport with bylaws regarding elections because electronic voters have no envelopes to sign? Holy plebiscite, Batman! Let’s change the bylaws post haste! The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] has for more than a decade flouted the demand of the bylaws that every committee have a chair? Let’s not bother with mere technicalities that might cost the FAC a minute or two each September before any files have reached the committee.

Next – "L Stands for Lilliput" – How much malfeasance at Puget Sound shall we attribute to its being a small school?

J Stands for Jokers and Jokes

Evaluators all too often consist of jokers rather than colleagues whose judgments should be taken seriously.


The University of Puget Clowns – a label that President Pierce repeatedly justified before and after she uttered it at graduation – must consistently replenish its bag of tricks and its complement of tricksters. While the sources of jokes – the folderol, fictions, flim-flam, factoids, figments, and fabrications that I have discussed above and will cover anew in future entries – vary, jokers recruited by departments and evaluated by departments, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], and one or more administrators tend to resemble one another. Viewed as mordant self-parody, the output of such jokers would be infotainment if the jokers were better informed or dispensed more information.

Because the process by which we staff the FAC is farcical, all too often the jokers who climb thereon augur jokes that will issue therefrom. I have remarked in this blog about features or factors that select for false-positives, faculty who should never have been hired or tenured or promoted. To eke out tenure or promotion increases one’s odds of nomination and appointment to the FAC. Of course, faculty nominate false-positives more often relative to their proportion in the faculty than false-negatives because most false-negatives are being shown the exit. Perhaps faculty nominate false-positives more often than true-positives relative to their proportion in the faculty because colleagues hope that someone who has been subjected to savagery, fickleness, and unfairness might be especially sensitive to miscarriages of procedural or substantive justice. Perhaps this sensitivity to injustices inheres immediately after monkeys escape false-positives’ asses.

Of course, false-positives are usually more available for service on the FAC than faculty who are more talented and accomplished. Other service demands talent, efficiency, and effectiveness to a far greater extent than the FAC. The FAC functions more smoothly with faculty who will follow the choreography and mark stage directions. Critical, analytic, or intellectual faculties get in the way of scripts and foil hoaxes and pranks. You cannot have buffoons actually running into one another as they race around. Someone other than evaluees might get hurt. The buffoons must cooperate in operatic obtuseness and dramatized obliviousness. The FAC's routines can withstand only so much independence, intelligence, and integrity.

However recruited, jokers are socialized by the FAC in much the way that departmental jokers are indoctrinated by programs or schools. As this blog has shown, the FAC overlooks, circumvents, or flouts rules when it pleases to, so the Faculty Bylaws and the Faculty Code shape boilerplate more and more foten than they shape decision-making. In challenging cases, the FAC augments extant authority with figments and folderol. This provides members ample wiggle room, for they may invoke the letter or spirit of rules when the rules get them where they want to go but deviate when they feel a whim coming on or when they may court favor with administrators or colleagues. The process described in rules and procedures provides the set-up; absurd decisions deliver the punch line. Zaniness ensues.

FAC gags are inevitable because explicit flaws in procedures yield risible results irrespective of substantive merits. In any review during the third year of an assistant professor, for instance, the Faculty Code directs that the FAC recommend reappointment [or not] to the Academic Vice President [AVP]. The AVP then makes a decision that is not subject to any explicit criteria or standards.

One great flaw in this process is that the AVP sits with the FAC while the FAC is deciding what to recommend. The FAC considers the file and recommends to the AVP, who has been sitting in the room all along! Members of the FAC easily learn of the AVP’s concerns and orientation. The AVP automatically learns the issues and concerns lurking behind the official letter. The FAC releases to the evaluee and her or his department a rationalization of the committee’s recommendation(s), but a host of considerations, suspicions, and pretexts never make the FAC letter although they made the FAC’s decision.

The potential for groupthink to prevail and for other forms of cross-fertilization or cross-contamination to afflict decisions should be obvious to everyone except a practiced FAC apologist. The code nearly guarantees collusion in hackneyed [yet inadvertent] humor.

In third-year assistant reviews as in other momentous evaluations, FAC letters are redolent of stale shtick and practiced pratfalls from the moment that the diminutive FAC fire truck pulls into the center ring under the big top that is the University of Puget Clowns.

"Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am / ..."


Next -- "K stands for Kyrie eleison" --