Evaluating Committees

Problems often lie less with administrators than with committee members.


Faculty ignorant of the written code and written bylaws but informed by folklore are often bamboozled by rogue committees or cunning members thereof. What John Mitchell said of the Nixon Administration applies as well to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC]: “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

As one watches what such Power Committees [PCs] do, one should keep in mind the lesson imparted by the late Erving Goffman. A social setting that appears to be exactly what one would expect may be what it seems; however, the next most likely possibility is that one beholds a perfect fake. Sloppy fakes or inadvertent mistakes would be unmasked quickly. For deviance to escape attention, fakery must be completed persuasively.

If, for example, the FAC denied a promotion on the basis of the very personal characteristics that faculty in 1994 eliminated from the Faculty Code, the Committee would doubtless hide its actual motives and procedures behind professed motives that concerned teaching or professional growth. As the cliché goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays virtue. Vulnerable faculty must pretend to believe the logic of justification in communications from the FAC, but they should privately expect more than a few committee judgments to hinge on the not-very-secret “Hail fellow well met” criterion.

If veterans of the FAC would dispute my claims above, they would have The Confidentiality Con to shield them: they can say anything they like in the cynical confi­dence that I dare not reveal what happened in the committee-room. That the FAC insisted on such a vow should suggest exactly how much credence such FAC vets should enjoy.

Is there no way to unmask FAC con men and con women through documents that are not secret? Suppose an evaluee made her or his letter from the FAC available to facul­ty. Faculty might then see how the FAC departed from authority at least in that instance. If the FAC or PSC interfered, such resistance to oversight and civil discussion would erode the credibility of confidentiality still further.

Please do not misunderstand my claims above. Most FAC outputs will conform to the Faculty Code because most evaluees will not run afoul of their departments. When the FAC departs from proper procedures or written authorities, astute members of the faculty must pay more attention to what the FAC has done than to what the FAC has said – or to what the code or bylaws say.

Still, if colleagues ask the PCs what they were up to, expect The Confidentiality Con and threats and reprisals. Some veterans of the PSC or of the FAC do not know enough about actual authority to fold their con. Some apparatchiks [members of campus elites beneath the President or Vice President] consider themselves and their committee authority higher than the code or the bylaws.

Pay attention and you may identify the enemy that is us.