Faculty oversight exhibits more carelessness than vigilance.
“Oversight” is nearly an auto-antonym, it seems to me, for it can mean careless inattention or it can mean vigilant supervision, what one has overlooked or what one is overseeing.
Like most humans and institutions, the faculty and especially the Faculty Senate are more adept at overlooking than at overseeing. Out of expediency, collegiality, or civility, senators overlook whatever they can and oversee only what they must. If the Faculty Senate exercises genuine oversight, expect immediate, pathetic mewling and caterwauling from colleagues utterly unaccustomed to accountability or responsibility. Amid such protests, almost any evasion will be honored by most senators, who find overseeing so daunting that most evasive maneuvers are unnecessary.
As a rule, then, rigorous overseeing will be repulsed and timorous overlooking will be rewarded. A contrast between the reports of the first ad hoc committee of 2006 – the Ad Hoc Committee on Tenure [AHCT] – and the second – the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] – illustrates this general rule.
Restrained as the AHCT was in revealing the misconduct of committees, administrators, and other Puget Sound decision-makers, its dollop of candor and vigilance offended some faculty and led, among other things, a senator to mug a member of the first ad hoc committee. [Civility is, it appears, demanded more from critics than from apologists.] Members of at least ten programs, schools, or departments protested to the first ad hoc committee that they did not belong among the four chronic offending departments referred to but not named in the report. [Please notice that regarding six of the ten entities, protesters were revealing vices not attributed by the committee!]
The second ad hoc committee may have noticed how the first was treated, for the latter ad hoc report made no findings. The second committee proposed instead to reform practices and rules while overlooking the problems that reforms might remedy. For this discretion, the AHCPS's report was welcomed and its recommendations acted upon relatively promptly.
My point is not that the second committee’s overlooking was useless or unreasonable. Instead, I take AHCPS’S avoidance of specifics about missteps and misconduct in 2003-2004 to reflect the perils of stringent oversight and accountability in governance. Considering the hullabaloo when the Faculty Senate barely passed a motion to the effect that “mistakes were made,” one may imagine the reaction if anyone had undertaken serious oversight. Imagining that reaction, one may appreciate why accountability will seldom if ever be forthcoming.
Next – “Plagiarisms” – Does anyone remember what led to the formation of the AHCPS?
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Nescience
Perhaps most faculty know little about what goes on at most universities; however, many colleagues at Puget Sound take measures to make certain that what goes on cannot be known.
Ignorance and indifference are problems for faculty self-governance and for evaluation of faculty. Nescience, however, is even a greater problem. Faculty succumb to folklore, folderol, factoids, and fabrications when they believe that they can never know [nescience] more so than when they do not know but believe that they might learn [ignorance] if they could overcome their overwork and distractions [indifference].
Particular abuses of confidentiality trade on ignorance but need not lead to systematic nescience. The particularized Confidentiality Con goes, “You would be satisfied with what we insiders decided if only you were privy to matters that are confidential.” This “short con” expires as soon as faculty turn from some immediate injustice to the teaching, research, service, and other responsibilities that weigh more heavily. The faculty member still does not know the specifics of this matter but is assured that his betters knew and made their best judgment call.
A longer con, however, succeeds or fails by making systemic or chronic characteristics of evaluation or governance unknowable by the faculty. Braced by confidentiality actual or apparent, by narratives plausible or implausible, and by other devices valid or fraudulent, decision-makers inform the faculty that legal rights, administrative prerogative, university policies, and/or collegial decency command that information be so closely guarded that systemic, longitudinal information that would attest to the veracity of decision-makers and the validity of decisions “cannot” be distributed. The trustees and administrators, who have some access to such data, are well satisfied, so critical faculty [e. g., those who are not indifferent to ignorance] implicitly insult their betters. This long con makes the administrators and trustees victims of distrust and criticism that – more’s the pity – laws and policies do not permit them to dissipate.
Faculty ignorance is facilitated by specific con jobs, and faculty indifference by repeated short cons. However, lengthy, generalized confidence games are needed to inculcate nescience and impassivity among the mass of veterans.
Long cons in turn demand potent individual, social, and cultural inducements to keep insiders from reverting to the critical, skeptical, scholarly ways that might demystify decisions and activities. As individuals, members of Power Committees must accept folderol, folklore, factoids, and other fictions if they are to keep collective accounts straight and, more important, believe them. As social beings, decision-makers find collective responsibility easier to assume than individual accountability, for mutually reinforcing accounts, groupthink, and shared recollections enable many hands to make light work of otherwise onerous justification. The culture of Power Committees generates an enduring mindset in which insiders commune, a mindset that reinforces individual and social beliefs even as it displaces ambiguities and uncertainties. Groupthink in time begets group mind as members of Power Committees reconstruct processes and procedures to mask from others as well as from themselves those errors, inconsistencies, and injustices that would unmask decision-making and decisions.
When members of the 2003-2004 Professional Standards Committee [PSC] bristle at the slightest suggestion that they might have erred [even though the PSC confessed error explicitly] or when they deny that a member of that committee threatened a member of a hearing board or mocked another member of that hearing board [even though a member of the hearing board insists that he was mocked and another member threatened], please do not imagine the bristling or the denial to be insincere. Instead, understand that umbrage and disavowals follow from the very nescience that Power Committees have long abetted. Insiders do not merely recreate and reinforce useful fictions; they accept the fictions as elements of ideologies that integrate insiders’ personal and communal attachments both to the PSC and to the campus community. Once the circuit has been closed in this manner, faculty who cycle off Power Committees [PCs] in three years become such thralls that they no longer are capable of perceiving or conceiving other than in the approved mindset.
After all, what would it profit PCs if insiders recanted or recovered once they left the PC and rejoined the general population? If nescience is to be sustained, nescience must be sustainable. Factlets, factoids, folklore, folderol, and fabrications fend off exposure in the short run and in the longer run make it seem impossible.
Next – “Oversight and Oversights” – Faculty oversight is more careless than vigilant.
Ignorance and indifference are problems for faculty self-governance and for evaluation of faculty. Nescience, however, is even a greater problem. Faculty succumb to folklore, folderol, factoids, and fabrications when they believe that they can never know [nescience] more so than when they do not know but believe that they might learn [ignorance] if they could overcome their overwork and distractions [indifference].
Particular abuses of confidentiality trade on ignorance but need not lead to systematic nescience. The particularized Confidentiality Con goes, “You would be satisfied with what we insiders decided if only you were privy to matters that are confidential.” This “short con” expires as soon as faculty turn from some immediate injustice to the teaching, research, service, and other responsibilities that weigh more heavily. The faculty member still does not know the specifics of this matter but is assured that his betters knew and made their best judgment call.
A longer con, however, succeeds or fails by making systemic or chronic characteristics of evaluation or governance unknowable by the faculty. Braced by confidentiality actual or apparent, by narratives plausible or implausible, and by other devices valid or fraudulent, decision-makers inform the faculty that legal rights, administrative prerogative, university policies, and/or collegial decency command that information be so closely guarded that systemic, longitudinal information that would attest to the veracity of decision-makers and the validity of decisions “cannot” be distributed. The trustees and administrators, who have some access to such data, are well satisfied, so critical faculty [e. g., those who are not indifferent to ignorance] implicitly insult their betters. This long con makes the administrators and trustees victims of distrust and criticism that – more’s the pity – laws and policies do not permit them to dissipate.
Faculty ignorance is facilitated by specific con jobs, and faculty indifference by repeated short cons. However, lengthy, generalized confidence games are needed to inculcate nescience and impassivity among the mass of veterans.
Long cons in turn demand potent individual, social, and cultural inducements to keep insiders from reverting to the critical, skeptical, scholarly ways that might demystify decisions and activities. As individuals, members of Power Committees must accept folderol, folklore, factoids, and other fictions if they are to keep collective accounts straight and, more important, believe them. As social beings, decision-makers find collective responsibility easier to assume than individual accountability, for mutually reinforcing accounts, groupthink, and shared recollections enable many hands to make light work of otherwise onerous justification. The culture of Power Committees generates an enduring mindset in which insiders commune, a mindset that reinforces individual and social beliefs even as it displaces ambiguities and uncertainties. Groupthink in time begets group mind as members of Power Committees reconstruct processes and procedures to mask from others as well as from themselves those errors, inconsistencies, and injustices that would unmask decision-making and decisions.
When members of the 2003-2004 Professional Standards Committee [PSC] bristle at the slightest suggestion that they might have erred [even though the PSC confessed error explicitly] or when they deny that a member of that committee threatened a member of a hearing board or mocked another member of that hearing board [even though a member of the hearing board insists that he was mocked and another member threatened], please do not imagine the bristling or the denial to be insincere. Instead, understand that umbrage and disavowals follow from the very nescience that Power Committees have long abetted. Insiders do not merely recreate and reinforce useful fictions; they accept the fictions as elements of ideologies that integrate insiders’ personal and communal attachments both to the PSC and to the campus community. Once the circuit has been closed in this manner, faculty who cycle off Power Committees [PCs] in three years become such thralls that they no longer are capable of perceiving or conceiving other than in the approved mindset.
After all, what would it profit PCs if insiders recanted or recovered once they left the PC and rejoined the general population? If nescience is to be sustained, nescience must be sustainable. Factlets, factoids, folklore, folderol, and fabrications fend off exposure in the short run and in the longer run make it seem impossible.
Next – “Oversight and Oversights” – Faculty oversight is more careless than vigilant.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Multiple Narratives
The “multiple narratives” dodge is bad enough, but the nescience it portends or presumes is even more troubling.
When the Faculty Senate has attempted even minimal oversight of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] and other aspects of faculty governance, it has often confronted “multiple narratives.” Of late, colleagues who have never exhibited postmodern thinking have intoned gravely that one simply cannot understand decisions or disputes without appreciating the inside perspectives of Power Committees. When the “multiple narratives” gambit is combined with one or another confidentiality con that covers for those selfsame insiders, the inevitable result is that senators cannot know, cannot understand, and cannot oversee Power Committees. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it certainly is expedient for shielding Power Committees from accountability! Thank you, Multiple Narratives!
Colleagues never call up “multiple narratives” when an official narrative suits their ends or tastes. Administrators, propagandists, and committees disseminate definitive accounts. If an alternative interpretation surfaces publicly and even one detail of that alternative account may plausibly be contested, faculty eager to resume their belief in the system will presume “Wrong in one regard, wrong in all regards” without concern for just how insignificant an alleged error might be. At times, the merest claim that there might be details known to insiders but unknown to senators or other faculty may suffice to stifle alternatives to the official account. Since in every instance there will be some factlet or fabrication unknown to outsiders, this fallback is always available to shameless apologists.
When an official narrative or public document loses ground to alternative accounts and the alternative accounts cannot be denied or their authors discredited, apologists will proliferate accounts, allegedly from insiders who would love to show the wisdom and justice that guided their decision-making but – damn it all! – are barred by confidentiality real or [far more often] fabricated. Even under these dire circumstances, insider narratives to occlude or to distract faculty oversight work best when they may be left unstated. Hinting at the existence of some double-secret factlets that cannot be expressed will defeat half-hearted attempts at oversight. Since the Faculty Senate seldom ignites even half-hearted attempts at oversight, the flimsiest allusion to an intimation of some possibility that an insider might have had some impulse not yet fully appreciated that might account for this or that aspect of a decision that may or may not have figured in some way into the process … “Mr. Chair, I move the Senate adjourn before it finds out what is going on!”
Such “multiple narratives” maneuvers rely on an intellectual defeatism rejected in scholarly pursuits. When biologists are confronted with “Intelligent Design” as an alternative narrative, they do not declare that the existence of more than one account dooms their science. Indeed, biologists and other scientists often claim that the elimination of multiple accounts is central to their research. Scientists can be so pre-post-modern!
In campus politicking, by contrast, senators usually surrender to any whisper of multiple narratives, even if no alternative narrative is or could be proffered owing to the Confidentiality Con or some other dodge.
Disappointing as “multiple narratives” chicanery is, it works. It preempts discussion by encouraging faculty to believe that inquiry is useless and critical thought ineffectual. Such “encouragement” is not usually the mark of liberal arts.
With each surrender before multiple narratives, faculty become less and less able to govern their governors. Inexperienced faculty do not know. Experienced faculty cannot know or do not want to know. Thus do our leaders move the faculty from ignorance about specific personnel matters to systemic, systematic ignorance – nescience.
Next – “Nescience” – Most faculty know little about what goes on at most universities; however, many colleagues at Puget Sound take measures to make certain that what goes on cannot be known.
When the Faculty Senate has attempted even minimal oversight of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] and other aspects of faculty governance, it has often confronted “multiple narratives.” Of late, colleagues who have never exhibited postmodern thinking have intoned gravely that one simply cannot understand decisions or disputes without appreciating the inside perspectives of Power Committees. When the “multiple narratives” gambit is combined with one or another confidentiality con that covers for those selfsame insiders, the inevitable result is that senators cannot know, cannot understand, and cannot oversee Power Committees. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it certainly is expedient for shielding Power Committees from accountability! Thank you, Multiple Narratives!
Colleagues never call up “multiple narratives” when an official narrative suits their ends or tastes. Administrators, propagandists, and committees disseminate definitive accounts. If an alternative interpretation surfaces publicly and even one detail of that alternative account may plausibly be contested, faculty eager to resume their belief in the system will presume “Wrong in one regard, wrong in all regards” without concern for just how insignificant an alleged error might be. At times, the merest claim that there might be details known to insiders but unknown to senators or other faculty may suffice to stifle alternatives to the official account. Since in every instance there will be some factlet or fabrication unknown to outsiders, this fallback is always available to shameless apologists.
When an official narrative or public document loses ground to alternative accounts and the alternative accounts cannot be denied or their authors discredited, apologists will proliferate accounts, allegedly from insiders who would love to show the wisdom and justice that guided their decision-making but – damn it all! – are barred by confidentiality real or [far more often] fabricated. Even under these dire circumstances, insider narratives to occlude or to distract faculty oversight work best when they may be left unstated. Hinting at the existence of some double-secret factlets that cannot be expressed will defeat half-hearted attempts at oversight. Since the Faculty Senate seldom ignites even half-hearted attempts at oversight, the flimsiest allusion to an intimation of some possibility that an insider might have had some impulse not yet fully appreciated that might account for this or that aspect of a decision that may or may not have figured in some way into the process … “Mr. Chair, I move the Senate adjourn before it finds out what is going on!”
Such “multiple narratives” maneuvers rely on an intellectual defeatism rejected in scholarly pursuits. When biologists are confronted with “Intelligent Design” as an alternative narrative, they do not declare that the existence of more than one account dooms their science. Indeed, biologists and other scientists often claim that the elimination of multiple accounts is central to their research. Scientists can be so pre-post-modern!
In campus politicking, by contrast, senators usually surrender to any whisper of multiple narratives, even if no alternative narrative is or could be proffered owing to the Confidentiality Con or some other dodge.
Disappointing as “multiple narratives” chicanery is, it works. It preempts discussion by encouraging faculty to believe that inquiry is useless and critical thought ineffectual. Such “encouragement” is not usually the mark of liberal arts.
With each surrender before multiple narratives, faculty become less and less able to govern their governors. Inexperienced faculty do not know. Experienced faculty cannot know or do not want to know. Thus do our leaders move the faculty from ignorance about specific personnel matters to systemic, systematic ignorance – nescience.
Next – “Nescience” – Most faculty know little about what goes on at most universities; however, many colleagues at Puget Sound take measures to make certain that what goes on cannot be known.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Litigiousness
When substantive and procedural inequities propel faculty members to pursue their rights, such faculty are denounced as litigious. Would that litigiousness were rampant!
Administrators, trustees, and faculty may lament American litigiousness because multiple attorneys for plaintiffs have profited from our inability to follow even the simplest procedures. Despite costly legal reverses, faculty and administrators blunder along, courting more legal disasters, so fear of litigation seems to have made little difference. Perhaps campus elites understand that the university’s lawyers will almost always fend off substantive or procedural claims and that faculty win lawsuits against educational institutions far less often than myths of litigiousness have misled laypersons to believe.
If faculty had the access to litigation that such a myth suggests, power committees and administrators might be less prone to procedural injustices. Campus lore tells us that legal debacles in the mid-1990s for a while scared straight even doughty and dotty members of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC]. While memories of legal losses were fresh, old-timers claim, the PSC’s procedural punctiliousness peaked. As those memories have faded, this revisionism goes, PCs and administrators have “backslid.”
Nonsense! Our persistent procedural shortcomings do not result in more litigation because resort to court is actually far more circumscribed than lamenters presume and because appeals and other procedural provisions in the rules enable our university to cover up missteps.
Consider a woman who stood for tenure in the very year [1994] in which a former member of the faculty was awarded nearly $2,000,000 and the gender discrimination suit by a woman denied tenure two years before was settled. The evaluation in 1994 had been so botched procedurally that the President asked the evaluee to forego a formal hearing board and consent to be re-evaluated. [The President had in the interim assured herself that the evaluee would face more departmental resistance the second time around.] The evaluee decided that following the code might be a better idea and easily prevailed in the hearing board. When the evaluee was re-evaluated and denied more than a year after she originally submitted her file, an attorney told her he did not see how she could prevail despite myriad violations of the Faculty Code. This former colleague – who went on to tenure, a campus wide teaching award, and a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean – learned that even filing a lawsuit was far more difficult than the mythology of litigiousness instructs us.
As the next evaluation season dawned in Fall 1995, the President met with the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] to inform them that a dozen faculty were candidates for tenure and that the President was not about to recommend to the trustees that a dozen faculty be tenured. The President, apparently unchastened by her legal losses the previous year but perhaps emboldened by the denial of the embattled woman from 1994, also discussed her reluctance to accept a dozen affirmative recommendations with three faculty over lunch. Such presidential proclamations would seem to set an arbitrary [and self-serving] ceiling on the number or percentage of faculty recommended for tenure. I have no doubt, however, that apologists could make the repeated, explicit warning sound more like a forecast. I guess that is the beauty of multiple narratives, especially multiple revisionist narratives in service of seeming malefactors.
When the FAC forwarded twelve affirmative recommendations, the President balked at two women. [To the best of my recollection, that president said no to two women and no men in that president’s first tenure “season,” to one woman and no men in her third “season,” and two women and no men in her fourth “season,” but only radicals would detect any gendered pattern in that president’s decisions or in the decisions of the departments that trashed evaluees.] The President informed each woman that a member of the FAC had filed a minority report. That minority report – a sentence indicating disagreement with the recommendation of the five non-administrators on the FAC – issued from the Academic Vice President, who had not notified the rest of the FAC what he had done. [One member of the FAC later resigned over the actions of the President and the Academic Vice President.] Both women “won” hearing boards but were rejected for tenure after some of the procedural missteps at the departmental and FAC levels were corrected. One woman accepted money to move on before her terminal year. The other rejected the buyoff and sued. Her efforts were crushed by the new legal team. This litigant learned that the University’s losses in 1994 had taught administrators that litigators able to stymie resort to court and attempts at redress could free decision-makers from bothersome rules, proprieties, and due process.
These examples [and others that I might provide] reveal that, while faculty aware of their rights and willing to assert them may be derided as litigious louts, the ill-treated will surrender their rights in return for a modest sum or be steamrolled by a law firm in the unlikely event that they can interest a plaintiff’s attorney in rolling the dice to vindicate substantive or procedural rights.
The women above and other tenure aspirants also learned throughout the 1990s how Pyrrhic victories in hearing boards tend to be. Indeed, hearing boards usually give departments or the FAC an opportunity to polish up their acts. I should supply stunning examples of misbehaviors eliminated from files after which that president reached the same decision, but I participated in those hearing boards and so may be barred by the Faculty Code from specific references.
If administrators and their collaborators on power committees genuinely feared that faculty might assert their rights successfully, decision-makers might adhere to procedures more often. Litigiousness, were it more than mythical, might induce power committees and administrators to pursue procedural and perhaps even substantive justice.
Campus elites do not fear lawsuits. They fear exposure. They score litigiousness because litigation threatens to reveal arbitrariness and injustices. Were faculty able to litigate rights and justice with some hope of prevailing, campus elites might have to follow rules. Indeed, they might have to read the rules. What a nightmare that would be!
Next – “Multiple Narratives” –The “multiple narratives” dodge is bad enough, but the nescience it portends or presumes is even more troubling.
Administrators, trustees, and faculty may lament American litigiousness because multiple attorneys for plaintiffs have profited from our inability to follow even the simplest procedures. Despite costly legal reverses, faculty and administrators blunder along, courting more legal disasters, so fear of litigation seems to have made little difference. Perhaps campus elites understand that the university’s lawyers will almost always fend off substantive or procedural claims and that faculty win lawsuits against educational institutions far less often than myths of litigiousness have misled laypersons to believe.
If faculty had the access to litigation that such a myth suggests, power committees and administrators might be less prone to procedural injustices. Campus lore tells us that legal debacles in the mid-1990s for a while scared straight even doughty and dotty members of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC]. While memories of legal losses were fresh, old-timers claim, the PSC’s procedural punctiliousness peaked. As those memories have faded, this revisionism goes, PCs and administrators have “backslid.”
Nonsense! Our persistent procedural shortcomings do not result in more litigation because resort to court is actually far more circumscribed than lamenters presume and because appeals and other procedural provisions in the rules enable our university to cover up missteps.
Consider a woman who stood for tenure in the very year [1994] in which a former member of the faculty was awarded nearly $2,000,000 and the gender discrimination suit by a woman denied tenure two years before was settled. The evaluation in 1994 had been so botched procedurally that the President asked the evaluee to forego a formal hearing board and consent to be re-evaluated. [The President had in the interim assured herself that the evaluee would face more departmental resistance the second time around.] The evaluee decided that following the code might be a better idea and easily prevailed in the hearing board. When the evaluee was re-evaluated and denied more than a year after she originally submitted her file, an attorney told her he did not see how she could prevail despite myriad violations of the Faculty Code. This former colleague – who went on to tenure, a campus wide teaching award, and a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean – learned that even filing a lawsuit was far more difficult than the mythology of litigiousness instructs us.
As the next evaluation season dawned in Fall 1995, the President met with the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] to inform them that a dozen faculty were candidates for tenure and that the President was not about to recommend to the trustees that a dozen faculty be tenured. The President, apparently unchastened by her legal losses the previous year but perhaps emboldened by the denial of the embattled woman from 1994, also discussed her reluctance to accept a dozen affirmative recommendations with three faculty over lunch. Such presidential proclamations would seem to set an arbitrary [and self-serving] ceiling on the number or percentage of faculty recommended for tenure. I have no doubt, however, that apologists could make the repeated, explicit warning sound more like a forecast. I guess that is the beauty of multiple narratives, especially multiple revisionist narratives in service of seeming malefactors.
When the FAC forwarded twelve affirmative recommendations, the President balked at two women. [To the best of my recollection, that president said no to two women and no men in that president’s first tenure “season,” to one woman and no men in her third “season,” and two women and no men in her fourth “season,” but only radicals would detect any gendered pattern in that president’s decisions or in the decisions of the departments that trashed evaluees.] The President informed each woman that a member of the FAC had filed a minority report. That minority report – a sentence indicating disagreement with the recommendation of the five non-administrators on the FAC – issued from the Academic Vice President, who had not notified the rest of the FAC what he had done. [One member of the FAC later resigned over the actions of the President and the Academic Vice President.] Both women “won” hearing boards but were rejected for tenure after some of the procedural missteps at the departmental and FAC levels were corrected. One woman accepted money to move on before her terminal year. The other rejected the buyoff and sued. Her efforts were crushed by the new legal team. This litigant learned that the University’s losses in 1994 had taught administrators that litigators able to stymie resort to court and attempts at redress could free decision-makers from bothersome rules, proprieties, and due process.
These examples [and others that I might provide] reveal that, while faculty aware of their rights and willing to assert them may be derided as litigious louts, the ill-treated will surrender their rights in return for a modest sum or be steamrolled by a law firm in the unlikely event that they can interest a plaintiff’s attorney in rolling the dice to vindicate substantive or procedural rights.
The women above and other tenure aspirants also learned throughout the 1990s how Pyrrhic victories in hearing boards tend to be. Indeed, hearing boards usually give departments or the FAC an opportunity to polish up their acts. I should supply stunning examples of misbehaviors eliminated from files after which that president reached the same decision, but I participated in those hearing boards and so may be barred by the Faculty Code from specific references.
If administrators and their collaborators on power committees genuinely feared that faculty might assert their rights successfully, decision-makers might adhere to procedures more often. Litigiousness, were it more than mythical, might induce power committees and administrators to pursue procedural and perhaps even substantive justice.
Campus elites do not fear lawsuits. They fear exposure. They score litigiousness because litigation threatens to reveal arbitrariness and injustices. Were faculty able to litigate rights and justice with some hope of prevailing, campus elites might have to follow rules. Indeed, they might have to read the rules. What a nightmare that would be!
Next – “Multiple Narratives” –The “multiple narratives” dodge is bad enough, but the nescience it portends or presumes is even more troubling.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Kaleidoscope of Questions
A single tenure case raised questions about the Faculty Senate, a hearing board, and the Power Committees.
Why do most men value looks over brains in women? Because most men can see better than they can think.
Many Puget Sound faculty care more for beautiful form than for righteous substance because appearances are more attainable and accessible than actualities and because forms are more easily faked than essences. When procedures are too obviously flouted, our system provides for formal appeal to a hearing board and for rectification by the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. These entities usually tidy up proceedings more than they remedy substantive injustices. Indeed, folklore among the ancient faculty holds that hearing boards are not authorized to consider substantive miscarriages of justice but only violations of procedures. What aspirations! What aspirations?
The very first hearing board under the new Faculty Code raised questions about the ability of a hearing board, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC], the Faculty Senate, and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], among others, to meet procedural, let alone substantive, norms. If our colleagues usually do procedural justice better than they do substantive justice and if several colleagues did procedural justice so poorly in 2003-2004, how badly do they routinely bollix substantive justice?
Oh look outside the window,
There's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes
And now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.
Phil Ochs
An evaluee ambushed in her departmental deliberation by allegations and letters from students was informed by the Chair of the PSC that she could appeal informally or formally but not both. Guided by this misreading of the code, the evaluee elected a formal appeal to a hearing board. What can we do to get junior faculty better advice? Get the PSC to elect more competent chairs?
The hearing board held no hearing. Rather, it directed the department that allegations must be aired in a forum in which the accused would have a chance to answer. The department, if it wanted to prosecute the evaluee, would have to use an appropriate forum, the PSC. In other words, “grieve it or leave it.” What could go wrong with that?
The PSC, without authority and for reasons unknown to me, then took over the process. First, the PSC determined that the hearing board had ceased to exist once it issued its rulings about violations of the code and its recommendations for correcting those violations. Please re-read that last sentence. The official interpreters of the Faculty Code declared that a hearing board that had failed to hold a hearing had completed its work when it issued its recommendations. What time will such creative thinking save in future cases? Will the PSC resolve grievances without hearings, witnesses, or evidence? Will the President decide disputes without grievances or responses?
Although the hearing board did not authorize the PSC to do anything – a hearing board has no such authority to bestow – the PSC or its chair then began to collate and to reformulate allegations. Supplementing the original allegations and rewriting the charges in a manner that would offend due process as understood by students in eighth-grade civics, the PSC thanked the hearing board for its good work but snootily stated that implementation of the hearing board’s remedy was a matter for the PSC. Now what authority made implementation a matter for the PSC?
The hearing board protested the actions of the PSC via memorandum to the Chair of the Faculty Senate, which allegedly oversees its committees. That chair promptly deposited said letter in his desk without informing the senate of its existence. When will the Faculty Senate take oversight seriously?
After the department’s re-deliberation, the evaluee placed no faith in another formal appeal – If you wonder why, you are not paying attention – so she informally appealed. Despite the clear dictates of the Faculty Code, the departmental chair did not meet with the evaluee or attempt to reconcile differences. How did the FAC miss that violation of the new code?
The FAC then took months to deal with the matter, demanding submissions from the evaluee and sending materials back to the department without any authority that I can discern. I was a member of the FAC at this time, so I should be aware of such authority if it existed. Where did the FAC get the idea that it could demand anything from an evaluee?
My answers to the questions above? A rogue PSC, a slumbering Faculty Senate, an unresponsive FAC, and administrators either inept or insidious generated a perfect procedural storm of nonfeasance and malfeasance.
Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff
Thirteen cars are piled up, they're hanging on a cliff.
Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain
But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it's gonna rain
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.
Still Phil Ochs
Next – “Litigiousness” – When substantive and procedural inequities propel faculty members to pursue their rights, such faculty are denounced as litigious. Would that litigiousness were rampant!
Why do most men value looks over brains in women? Because most men can see better than they can think.
Many Puget Sound faculty care more for beautiful form than for righteous substance because appearances are more attainable and accessible than actualities and because forms are more easily faked than essences. When procedures are too obviously flouted, our system provides for formal appeal to a hearing board and for rectification by the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. These entities usually tidy up proceedings more than they remedy substantive injustices. Indeed, folklore among the ancient faculty holds that hearing boards are not authorized to consider substantive miscarriages of justice but only violations of procedures. What aspirations! What aspirations?
The very first hearing board under the new Faculty Code raised questions about the ability of a hearing board, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC], the Faculty Senate, and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], among others, to meet procedural, let alone substantive, norms. If our colleagues usually do procedural justice better than they do substantive justice and if several colleagues did procedural justice so poorly in 2003-2004, how badly do they routinely bollix substantive justice?
Oh look outside the window,
There's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes
And now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.
Phil Ochs
An evaluee ambushed in her departmental deliberation by allegations and letters from students was informed by the Chair of the PSC that she could appeal informally or formally but not both. Guided by this misreading of the code, the evaluee elected a formal appeal to a hearing board. What can we do to get junior faculty better advice? Get the PSC to elect more competent chairs?
The hearing board held no hearing. Rather, it directed the department that allegations must be aired in a forum in which the accused would have a chance to answer. The department, if it wanted to prosecute the evaluee, would have to use an appropriate forum, the PSC. In other words, “grieve it or leave it.” What could go wrong with that?
The PSC, without authority and for reasons unknown to me, then took over the process. First, the PSC determined that the hearing board had ceased to exist once it issued its rulings about violations of the code and its recommendations for correcting those violations. Please re-read that last sentence. The official interpreters of the Faculty Code declared that a hearing board that had failed to hold a hearing had completed its work when it issued its recommendations. What time will such creative thinking save in future cases? Will the PSC resolve grievances without hearings, witnesses, or evidence? Will the President decide disputes without grievances or responses?
Although the hearing board did not authorize the PSC to do anything – a hearing board has no such authority to bestow – the PSC or its chair then began to collate and to reformulate allegations. Supplementing the original allegations and rewriting the charges in a manner that would offend due process as understood by students in eighth-grade civics, the PSC thanked the hearing board for its good work but snootily stated that implementation of the hearing board’s remedy was a matter for the PSC. Now what authority made implementation a matter for the PSC?
The hearing board protested the actions of the PSC via memorandum to the Chair of the Faculty Senate, which allegedly oversees its committees. That chair promptly deposited said letter in his desk without informing the senate of its existence. When will the Faculty Senate take oversight seriously?
After the department’s re-deliberation, the evaluee placed no faith in another formal appeal – If you wonder why, you are not paying attention – so she informally appealed. Despite the clear dictates of the Faculty Code, the departmental chair did not meet with the evaluee or attempt to reconcile differences. How did the FAC miss that violation of the new code?
The FAC then took months to deal with the matter, demanding submissions from the evaluee and sending materials back to the department without any authority that I can discern. I was a member of the FAC at this time, so I should be aware of such authority if it existed. Where did the FAC get the idea that it could demand anything from an evaluee?
My answers to the questions above? A rogue PSC, a slumbering Faculty Senate, an unresponsive FAC, and administrators either inept or insidious generated a perfect procedural storm of nonfeasance and malfeasance.
Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff
Thirteen cars are piled up, they're hanging on a cliff.
Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain
But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it's gonna rain
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.
Still Phil Ochs
Next – “Litigiousness” – When substantive and procedural inequities propel faculty members to pursue their rights, such faculty are denounced as litigious. Would that litigiousness were rampant!
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Justice, Fairness, and Other Argot
Code and colleagues invoke procedural regularities that are usually followed; neither code nor colleagues even pretend to substantive justice.
In unintentionally droll remarks in a recent meeting of the Faculty Senate, a senator wondered why the Faculty Code enjoyed its high status and why senators would not consider the possibility that the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] in 2003-2004 acted in a quest for a fairness or justice higher than the code. The minutes of that meeting did not record eye-rolling or snickering.
What would make such a “higher law” argument risible? Well, other than the desperation of the argument and its tacit admission that the PSC rode roughshod over the code, what's so funny?
Perhaps appeals to justice’s trumping the code [and, hence, our contracts with the University] are laughable because, even in theory, substantive justice is so seldom a concern. In practice, evaluatiors avoid violating any procedure in a manner that cannot be hidden from the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or a hearing board. Both in theory and in practice, faculty evaluation at most aspires to procedural sufficiency [and often attains it]. Minimal procedural sufficiency keeps us out of courts. Polishing procedural appearances a bit more secures faculty quiescence.
Concerns for actual fairness? That’s rich!
Maybe false negatives [evaluees who merit tenure or promotion but do not obtain tenure or promotion] and false positives [evaluees who get promoted or tenured despite their not meeting standards or criteria] make the senator's remarks ludicrous. Such substantive injustices do not concern most faculty most of the time because most colleagues most of the time do not know the victims of injustice well or do not know in detail what happened or fear admitting that the system errs. Indeed, many of our colleagues work devilishly hard not to learn what was done to this or that unfortunate.
References to the following of procedures largely exhaust the responsibilities of evaluators and may exceed the capacities of many. Such folks, when appointed to the Professional Standards Committee, suddenly become avatars of substantive fairness fit to overrule the code they claim to interpret?
Stop the routine, senator! You’re killing us!
Committees that often cannot read and apply simple directives are to be trusted to overrule the code that is subsumed in our faculty contracts? Why not? We have the ever-vigilant Faculty Senate to correct such committees should they stray – unless of course those very committees decide that transcendent exigencies demand that senators be snowed or stonewalled or senators shirk their responsibility to oversee committees. But – hell! – what are the odds that something like that could happen? OK, but what are the odds that something like that could happen again?
Next – “Kaleidoscope of Questions” – A single tenure case exposed questions about the feasance of a hearing board, the Faculty Senate, and the Power Committees.
In unintentionally droll remarks in a recent meeting of the Faculty Senate, a senator wondered why the Faculty Code enjoyed its high status and why senators would not consider the possibility that the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] in 2003-2004 acted in a quest for a fairness or justice higher than the code. The minutes of that meeting did not record eye-rolling or snickering.
What would make such a “higher law” argument risible? Well, other than the desperation of the argument and its tacit admission that the PSC rode roughshod over the code, what's so funny?
Perhaps appeals to justice’s trumping the code [and, hence, our contracts with the University] are laughable because, even in theory, substantive justice is so seldom a concern. In practice, evaluatiors avoid violating any procedure in a manner that cannot be hidden from the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or a hearing board. Both in theory and in practice, faculty evaluation at most aspires to procedural sufficiency [and often attains it]. Minimal procedural sufficiency keeps us out of courts. Polishing procedural appearances a bit more secures faculty quiescence.
Concerns for actual fairness? That’s rich!
Maybe false negatives [evaluees who merit tenure or promotion but do not obtain tenure or promotion] and false positives [evaluees who get promoted or tenured despite their not meeting standards or criteria] make the senator's remarks ludicrous. Such substantive injustices do not concern most faculty most of the time because most colleagues most of the time do not know the victims of injustice well or do not know in detail what happened or fear admitting that the system errs. Indeed, many of our colleagues work devilishly hard not to learn what was done to this or that unfortunate.
A Power Committee in headlong pursuit of substantive justice mowing down procedures? Hey! That could happen! Alright, except for the part about substantive justice, that could happen.
References to the following of procedures largely exhaust the responsibilities of evaluators and may exceed the capacities of many. Such folks, when appointed to the Professional Standards Committee, suddenly become avatars of substantive fairness fit to overrule the code they claim to interpret?
Stop the routine, senator! You’re killing us!
Committees that often cannot read and apply simple directives are to be trusted to overrule the code that is subsumed in our faculty contracts? Why not? We have the ever-vigilant Faculty Senate to correct such committees should they stray – unless of course those very committees decide that transcendent exigencies demand that senators be snowed or stonewalled or senators shirk their responsibility to oversee committees. But – hell! – what are the odds that something like that could happen? OK, but what are the odds that something like that could happen again?
Next – “Kaleidoscope of Questions” – A single tenure case exposed questions about the feasance of a hearing board, the Faculty Senate, and the Power Committees.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Interpretations, Intentions, and Other Misnomers
Invocations of the intentions and interpretations of texts are common legerdemain practiced by committees.
The Professional Standards Committee [PSC] cites intentions without knowing who framed the words. The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] interprets away rules for which it does not care. An ad hoc committee interprets intentions behind text without a scintilla of valid evidence. Do not mock these foibles of committees. Rather note the inequities and improprieties that such bad habits undergird and hide.
For instance, the Faculty Senate has repeatedly reminded the FAC that the bylaws direct all Faculty Senate committees to elect a chair at the beginning of each academic year. At least one member of the FAC concocted an exception to the bylaws for the FAC that might euphemistically be called fanciful. When the Faculty Senate reiterated in Fall 2006 the radical proposition that the bylaws should be followed, the senators were regaled with factlets and folderol. The fanciful interpretations, the inconsequent factlets, and the other folderol exemplify the willingness of the FAC [or one or more of its members – how can one tell?] to ignore published authority in favor of FAC practices and preferences, all the while vaunting the FAC’s fidelity to authority. Don’t you love vaudeville?
The Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS], for a second example, combined bogus interpretation with hokey intent in a single sentence of its report in Fall 2006! Noting that at three places Chapter Six of the Faculty Code directed the Academic Vice President or the PSC to handle grievances within days rather than “working days,” the AHCPS stated that “working” had been inadvertently omitted in those three places. This combo of intent and interpretation was invented by the PSC to reduce its violation of the code when it got around to hearing a grievance weeks after the deadline(s) in the Faculty Code. How replacing a fifteen-day deadline with a limit of fifteen working days was interpretation rather than substitution the PSC did not say. Neither the AHCPS nor the PSC favored the faculty with the source(s) whose intentions had been intuited. Clairvoyants who traduce unknown incorporeals are usually reckoned fakers, not fakirs.
Whatever one may think of the AHCPS’s non sequitur, at least the AHCPS did not engage in such wordplay at the expense of a grievant, a respondent, or an evaluee. The AHCPS proposed to edit the existing language; the PSC pretended that such was what the existing language said or meant because the PSC did not care for what the code demanded. The PSC and the AHCPS loose their interpretations and intuitions under circumstances that expose their machinations; the FAC hides inferences and insinuations behind sly verbal subterfuges and, of course, the Confidentiality Con.
Every colleague should object to expedient, disingenuous interpretations of authority and to attributions of intentions to anonymous persons but should not thereby be distracted from the greater iniquities worked and insulated when standing committees or ad hoc committees dodge unequivocal authority. Mere "technical violations" of the code or bylaws evince what confidentiality gambits and other cover-ups are least likely to be able to bury.
Vigilance, vigilants!
Next – “Justice, Fairness, and Other Argot” – Code and colleagues invoke procedural regularities that are usually followed; neither code nor colleagues even pretend to substantive justice.
The Professional Standards Committee [PSC] cites intentions without knowing who framed the words. The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] interprets away rules for which it does not care. An ad hoc committee interprets intentions behind text without a scintilla of valid evidence. Do not mock these foibles of committees. Rather note the inequities and improprieties that such bad habits undergird and hide.
For instance, the Faculty Senate has repeatedly reminded the FAC that the bylaws direct all Faculty Senate committees to elect a chair at the beginning of each academic year. At least one member of the FAC concocted an exception to the bylaws for the FAC that might euphemistically be called fanciful. When the Faculty Senate reiterated in Fall 2006 the radical proposition that the bylaws should be followed, the senators were regaled with factlets and folderol. The fanciful interpretations, the inconsequent factlets, and the other folderol exemplify the willingness of the FAC [or one or more of its members – how can one tell?] to ignore published authority in favor of FAC practices and preferences, all the while vaunting the FAC’s fidelity to authority. Don’t you love vaudeville?
The Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS], for a second example, combined bogus interpretation with hokey intent in a single sentence of its report in Fall 2006! Noting that at three places Chapter Six of the Faculty Code directed the Academic Vice President or the PSC to handle grievances within days rather than “working days,” the AHCPS stated that “working” had been inadvertently omitted in those three places. This combo of intent and interpretation was invented by the PSC to reduce its violation of the code when it got around to hearing a grievance weeks after the deadline(s) in the Faculty Code. How replacing a fifteen-day deadline with a limit of fifteen working days was interpretation rather than substitution the PSC did not say. Neither the AHCPS nor the PSC favored the faculty with the source(s) whose intentions had been intuited. Clairvoyants who traduce unknown incorporeals are usually reckoned fakers, not fakirs.
Whatever one may think of the AHCPS’s non sequitur, at least the AHCPS did not engage in such wordplay at the expense of a grievant, a respondent, or an evaluee. The AHCPS proposed to edit the existing language; the PSC pretended that such was what the existing language said or meant because the PSC did not care for what the code demanded. The PSC and the AHCPS loose their interpretations and intuitions under circumstances that expose their machinations; the FAC hides inferences and insinuations behind sly verbal subterfuges and, of course, the Confidentiality Con.
Every colleague should object to expedient, disingenuous interpretations of authority and to attributions of intentions to anonymous persons but should not thereby be distracted from the greater iniquities worked and insulated when standing committees or ad hoc committees dodge unequivocal authority. Mere "technical violations" of the code or bylaws evince what confidentiality gambits and other cover-ups are least likely to be able to bury.
Vigilance, vigilants!
Next – “Justice, Fairness, and Other Argot” – Code and colleagues invoke procedural regularities that are usually followed; neither code nor colleagues even pretend to substantive justice.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Haughty Culture
When Power Committees deign to speak beyond official communications, they condescend while counseling colleagues to remain civil.
In May 2004 a member of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] wrote to the Chair of the Faculty Senate that the PSC did not answer to the senate. This PSC colleague seemed mistaken as well as condescending, for the bylaws assign the senate a duty to oversee faculty committees. The senate charges faculty committees at the beginning of each academic year and receives reports from committees at the end of each academic year, so the senate’s oversight role could scarcely be clearer.
Still, no Puget Sound veteran would deny that the PSC and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] often act as if they transcend faculty oversight, control, or even input. As if the arrogations and arrogance of the Power Committees [PCs] were not problem enough, members of the PCs often compound their haughty ways with admonitions to common faculty to keep a civil tongue should misbehaviors be detected. Power Committees do not answer to faculty any more than they answer to the Faculty Senate.
The power and the majesty of the PCs usually remain latent if not dormant, especially in public documents. When PCs’ autonomy or authority is questioned, however, members of either power committee may brandish their presumptions and presumptuousness. When, for a peculiar example, I suggested in the Faculty Senate that the PSC ought to make even minor interpretations of the Faculty Code available for senators to review, the then Dean objected that the senate does not get to review or reverse PSC interpretations. The Bylaws state that the senators do, but faculty should not embrace such mere technicalities as a code that is included in faculty contracts or bylaws that define faculty governance. Now if the PSC claimed to abide by the code or the bylaws, that might be a different matter.
Except on rare occasions, the FAC and the PSC operate independently of the faculty. The code states that the FAC is to judge its cases independently. The FAC almost always does. Most PSC reflections on departmental procedures or the meaning of problematic passages in the code are not hidden but fly beneath the radar of busy colleagues. Because almost all of the work of these two PCs is meticulous and tedious, committee workers get used to isolation from outside advice or assistance. These isolated labors encourage comaraderie among committee members who have access to inside information and inside insights. Independence, isolation, and insulation sooner or later breed groupthink, especially if the independent committees are not blessed or burdened with independent members.
Nonetheless, critical commentary will arise from time to time, especially among colleagues who believe that a PC has wronged them. PCs and especially the administrators on them characteristically react to incredulity with a mélange of all-embracing confidentiality, unyielding obscurantism, obdurate groupthink, bad-faith interpretations of authority, and condescension. But for condescension, the other elements of the mélange might be ameliorated. Once a Power Committee takes umbrage at oversight or attention, self-aggrandizing brio exacerbates the other elements into breathtaking superciliousness. It does not do to arouse the wrath of the Great and Powerful Oz!
We have seen that the first resort of those who hold themselves above criticism, the Confidentiality Con, is mostly groundless. A committee that greatly esteems itself yet knows that its decisions and reasoning cannot withstand scrutiny will soon expand secrecy into a magnificent fabrication in support of the proclaimed importance of the oh-so-independent committee [and, of course, of the elite status of the less independent thinkers on the committee]. The more dubious the decision-making and the authority, the more persuaded of their own greatness and infallibility we should expect members to act and the more barriers to discovery and deconstruction we should expect PCs to erect. After all, critical colleagues affront the dignity of the PC.
What the Confidentiality Con does not cover up, other maneuvers must mask. Administrators may cut deals that include gag clauses. Committees may profess their own unanimity or solidarity or resolve. PCs will cover the Golden Oldie “If We Were Not Barred by Confidentiality from Disclosing Details, Everyone Would See that Questions Are Baseless” [to be followed by a new release of “Resistance Is Futile” by Dick Cheney and the Borg]. The PSC, especially authorized to interpret the code, will be especially tempted to legislate under the guise of interpretation.
As each defensive stratagem entrenches a Power Committee in this or that defense, the committee reiterates its august independence and subservience to authority, its humble service and unstinting noblesse oblige, its serene indifference to position or personality and its special relationship to administrators, its many burdens and its stoic shouldering of unauthorized discretion for the good of the order, and other signs, symbols, mysteries, and paradoxes of its transcendence of mundane faculty. Too important [especially in the view of committee insiders] to be allowed to admit error, PCs compound their errors with flim-flam, disingenuousness, self-serving ignorance, distortions of evidence, anarchy, stone-walling, and – if exigencies necessitate – willful half-truths. Charming as it is to see liberal educators encounter Machiavelli and Orwell, one might prefer that PCs adopt other classics. Maybe something by Thomas More? [On second thought, they would probably go with “A Defence of the Seven Sacraments” or some other papist bull.]
The crowning achievement of PCs, however, is to feign surprise that faculty might so lack civility as to ask PCs to abide by authorized procedures and criteria. The further outside the rules that the PC strays, the more that its members act hurt that anyone could think that the PC might flout rules. Even as they craft letters to hide their willful deviance from the Faculty Code, members of the FAC proclaim their fidelity to the code’s criteria and standards and protest the infidelity of colleagues to campus dogmatics. Defenders of the PSC warn that if colleagues are going to be critical or attentive, good faculty will not consent to serve on the PSC. “Civility,” always a term of art, comes to comprise credulity, incuriosity, docility, and servility.
Our colleague was correct, even prescient: the PSC does not answer to the Faculty Senate. Privileged faculty committees are almost always unaccountable to faculty.
Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Hauteur and calls for civility form the wall that pretended virtue raises around detected vices. Do not look for Mr. Gorbachev or the Faculty Senate to tear down that wall.
In May 2004 a member of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] wrote to the Chair of the Faculty Senate that the PSC did not answer to the senate. This PSC colleague seemed mistaken as well as condescending, for the bylaws assign the senate a duty to oversee faculty committees. The senate charges faculty committees at the beginning of each academic year and receives reports from committees at the end of each academic year, so the senate’s oversight role could scarcely be clearer.
Still, no Puget Sound veteran would deny that the PSC and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] often act as if they transcend faculty oversight, control, or even input. As if the arrogations and arrogance of the Power Committees [PCs] were not problem enough, members of the PCs often compound their haughty ways with admonitions to common faculty to keep a civil tongue should misbehaviors be detected. Power Committees do not answer to faculty any more than they answer to the Faculty Senate.
The power and the majesty of the PCs usually remain latent if not dormant, especially in public documents. When PCs’ autonomy or authority is questioned, however, members of either power committee may brandish their presumptions and presumptuousness. When, for a peculiar example, I suggested in the Faculty Senate that the PSC ought to make even minor interpretations of the Faculty Code available for senators to review, the then Dean objected that the senate does not get to review or reverse PSC interpretations. The Bylaws state that the senators do, but faculty should not embrace such mere technicalities as a code that is included in faculty contracts or bylaws that define faculty governance. Now if the PSC claimed to abide by the code or the bylaws, that might be a different matter.
Except on rare occasions, the FAC and the PSC operate independently of the faculty. The code states that the FAC is to judge its cases independently. The FAC almost always does. Most PSC reflections on departmental procedures or the meaning of problematic passages in the code are not hidden but fly beneath the radar of busy colleagues. Because almost all of the work of these two PCs is meticulous and tedious, committee workers get used to isolation from outside advice or assistance. These isolated labors encourage comaraderie among committee members who have access to inside information and inside insights. Independence, isolation, and insulation sooner or later breed groupthink, especially if the independent committees are not blessed or burdened with independent members.
Nonetheless, critical commentary will arise from time to time, especially among colleagues who believe that a PC has wronged them. PCs and especially the administrators on them characteristically react to incredulity with a mélange of all-embracing confidentiality, unyielding obscurantism, obdurate groupthink, bad-faith interpretations of authority, and condescension. But for condescension, the other elements of the mélange might be ameliorated. Once a Power Committee takes umbrage at oversight or attention, self-aggrandizing brio exacerbates the other elements into breathtaking superciliousness. It does not do to arouse the wrath of the Great and Powerful Oz!
We have seen that the first resort of those who hold themselves above criticism, the Confidentiality Con, is mostly groundless. A committee that greatly esteems itself yet knows that its decisions and reasoning cannot withstand scrutiny will soon expand secrecy into a magnificent fabrication in support of the proclaimed importance of the oh-so-independent committee [and, of course, of the elite status of the less independent thinkers on the committee]. The more dubious the decision-making and the authority, the more persuaded of their own greatness and infallibility we should expect members to act and the more barriers to discovery and deconstruction we should expect PCs to erect. After all, critical colleagues affront the dignity of the PC.
What the Confidentiality Con does not cover up, other maneuvers must mask. Administrators may cut deals that include gag clauses. Committees may profess their own unanimity or solidarity or resolve. PCs will cover the Golden Oldie “If We Were Not Barred by Confidentiality from Disclosing Details, Everyone Would See that Questions Are Baseless” [to be followed by a new release of “Resistance Is Futile” by Dick Cheney and the Borg]. The PSC, especially authorized to interpret the code, will be especially tempted to legislate under the guise of interpretation.
As each defensive stratagem entrenches a Power Committee in this or that defense, the committee reiterates its august independence and subservience to authority, its humble service and unstinting noblesse oblige, its serene indifference to position or personality and its special relationship to administrators, its many burdens and its stoic shouldering of unauthorized discretion for the good of the order, and other signs, symbols, mysteries, and paradoxes of its transcendence of mundane faculty. Too important [especially in the view of committee insiders] to be allowed to admit error, PCs compound their errors with flim-flam, disingenuousness, self-serving ignorance, distortions of evidence, anarchy, stone-walling, and – if exigencies necessitate – willful half-truths. Charming as it is to see liberal educators encounter Machiavelli and Orwell, one might prefer that PCs adopt other classics. Maybe something by Thomas More? [On second thought, they would probably go with “A Defence of the Seven Sacraments” or some other papist bull.]
The crowning achievement of PCs, however, is to feign surprise that faculty might so lack civility as to ask PCs to abide by authorized procedures and criteria. The further outside the rules that the PC strays, the more that its members act hurt that anyone could think that the PC might flout rules. Even as they craft letters to hide their willful deviance from the Faculty Code, members of the FAC proclaim their fidelity to the code’s criteria and standards and protest the infidelity of colleagues to campus dogmatics. Defenders of the PSC warn that if colleagues are going to be critical or attentive, good faculty will not consent to serve on the PSC. “Civility,” always a term of art, comes to comprise credulity, incuriosity, docility, and servility.
Our colleague was correct, even prescient: the PSC does not answer to the Faculty Senate. Privileged faculty committees are almost always unaccountable to faculty.
Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Hauteur and calls for civility form the wall that pretended virtue raises around detected vices. Do not look for Mr. Gorbachev or the Faculty Senate to tear down that wall.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Gripped by Groupthink
The Confidentiality Con exacerbates the tendency of small groups to echo internal communications and to resist external communications.
The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] are each Petri dishes for groupthink. When small, cohesive, and insulated groups attribute to their decisions empirical validity and normative superiority that outsiders cannot see, groupthink defeats skepticism and sober second thoughts that might allow groups to correct themselves. Gripped by groupthink, the FAC or the PSC rations or rationalizes away information that might contradict announced or anticipated decisions, preferring communications that reinforce the committee’s rectitude to those that raise alternative decisions or perspectives. Whatever “multiple narratives” apologists for such committees may eventually concoct, insiders strive for a singular narrative around which they all may rally.
All groups press toward consensus, cohesion, and cooperation, but outsiders’ views may save a committee from conformity, obstinacy, or collusion. Conformity and loyalty afflict the FAC and the PSC because Confidentiality Cons [and other dodges] deny insiders alternative perspectives that might change their minds. Private doubts may be expressed within the committee while communications still flow freely, but once the committee has taken its decision, private doubts are less welcome and, for some who have served on the committees, may not even be acknowledged within the committee or, even more frightening, in private reflection. Even members of a committee who have submitted their scholarly work to referees and have thereby been saved from errors or less than their best work have preferred loyalty to a committee and conformity to a majority to admitting outside perspectives. Power committees do not believe in "multiple narratives." They craft a singular story and stick to it.
When enlargements of confidentiality beyond authorized rules have transmogrified restrictions on the free flow of personnel information [that is, confidentiality narrowly and properly understood] into protection of committees from alternative perspectives and from accountability [that is, confidentiality improperly extended], the FAC and the PSC have been able to close colleagues out of insiders’ circles. This is how Confidentiality Cons [and subsequent cover-ups, buyouts, and other defenses against faculty’s or trustees’ learning what happens on campus] virtually guarantee groupthink.
Groupthink in turn virtually guarantees that power committees will be given in even slightly challenging cases to defensiveness rather than openness, to communications more tactical than sincere, and to superciliousness.
The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] are each Petri dishes for groupthink. When small, cohesive, and insulated groups attribute to their decisions empirical validity and normative superiority that outsiders cannot see, groupthink defeats skepticism and sober second thoughts that might allow groups to correct themselves. Gripped by groupthink, the FAC or the PSC rations or rationalizes away information that might contradict announced or anticipated decisions, preferring communications that reinforce the committee’s rectitude to those that raise alternative decisions or perspectives. Whatever “multiple narratives” apologists for such committees may eventually concoct, insiders strive for a singular narrative around which they all may rally.
All groups press toward consensus, cohesion, and cooperation, but outsiders’ views may save a committee from conformity, obstinacy, or collusion. Conformity and loyalty afflict the FAC and the PSC because Confidentiality Cons [and other dodges] deny insiders alternative perspectives that might change their minds. Private doubts may be expressed within the committee while communications still flow freely, but once the committee has taken its decision, private doubts are less welcome and, for some who have served on the committees, may not even be acknowledged within the committee or, even more frightening, in private reflection. Even members of a committee who have submitted their scholarly work to referees and have thereby been saved from errors or less than their best work have preferred loyalty to a committee and conformity to a majority to admitting outside perspectives. Power committees do not believe in "multiple narratives." They craft a singular story and stick to it.
When enlargements of confidentiality beyond authorized rules have transmogrified restrictions on the free flow of personnel information [that is, confidentiality narrowly and properly understood] into protection of committees from alternative perspectives and from accountability [that is, confidentiality improperly extended], the FAC and the PSC have been able to close colleagues out of insiders’ circles. This is how Confidentiality Cons [and subsequent cover-ups, buyouts, and other defenses against faculty’s or trustees’ learning what happens on campus] virtually guarantee groupthink.
Groupthink in turn virtually guarantees that power committees will be given in even slightly challenging cases to defensiveness rather than openness, to communications more tactical than sincere, and to superciliousness.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Factlets, Factoids, Folderol, Folklore, and Fabrications
Fabrications are the last refuge of “Power Committees;” usually, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore do the trick.
Please do not imagine that the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] manipulate most colleagues most of the time. Expedient or bad-faith fabrications are such risky tactics that they are to be invoked only in emergencies. Most of the time, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore are means by which respectable faculty rationalize unauthorized discretion and acquiesce in injustices. Committees mislead faculty only when faculty will not deceive themselves.
Faculty most often deceive themselves by accepting factlets.* Factlets are inconsequent tidbits of information. Take the tidbit that the FAC “addressed” an evaluee’s serial plagiarism, for example. How much or how little did the FAC know about the plagiarisms? Ordinary faculty cannot know, for the very selection of “address” occludes understanding. Thus did a vague or ambiguous factlet supplant information. Campus “civility” cannot long abide skepticism, so inquiring colleagues risk being thought as ill-mannered as credulous colleagues are ill-informed.
Faculty are also suckers for factoids.** Factoids are presumptions believed because they are published. [Once the tidbit about the FAC’s addressing plagiarism made The Trail, a factlet became a factoid.] Likewise, misapprehensions about the code grow from confident, often comforting, proclamations of half-truths or misinformation in faculty meetings or faculty minutes. Factoids, being publicized, outstrip and outlast facts not publicized or covered up. Perhaps it is needless to add that factoids that encourage quiescence among faculty and staff will be disseminated ritually and routinely from committees, while facts that call widespread beliefs into question will be routinely and ritually obscured.
Worse, there is no folderol so preposterous that most colleagues will disbelieve it. Folderol is the campus equivalent of urban legend. Folderol may have originated in fabrications, factoids, or factlets, but its etiology cannot be traced. Around Puget Sound, one should not be surprised to hear folderol 170 degrees removed from even the official record. For instance, minutes of faculty meetings in 1994-1995 make it unmistakable that the faculty, with the support of President Pierce and the university’s attorneys, tried to eliminate “personal and professional characteristics” as a category for evaluations for tenure. Nonetheless, some on the losing side of that fight now claim that all that the faculty decided was that assessments of personal and professional characteristics were no longer mandatory. Many of these veterans evince failing memories in their scholarship and teaching, so we should not doubt the sincerity with which they cling to this folderol. By contrast, those who recall the meetings accurately and adequately must denounce the folderol as a subversion of faculty governance. The most important point is that folderol enshrines a frustration of the will of the majority to masquerade for majority will.
Why read the code or the bylaws, which may not support your own position, when you may invoke folklore that you select for its utility? Folklore consists of precedents and traditions – real and imagined – that veterans believe to be valid authority. I have heard dozens of colleagues who have been here for many years state that one who appeals a departmental denial of tenure, for example, must stick to procedural defects and cannot raise substantive violations. A glance at the code instantly disproves this canard, yet multiple hearing boards have dismissed appeals based on a misconception that reading the code would remedy. Folklore spares our colleagues from reading actual authorities, a shortcut that most colleagues deny their students. Recall that the very first folklore raised in "Rump Parliament" was the Confidentiality Con.
Fabrications, by contrast, fester when rogue committees are cornered. Sometimes, they have imprudently relied on factlets, factoids, folderol, or folklore that some bounder exposes as bogus. In other instances, they have improvidently presumed that no one will read the rules or raise a ruckus. Once a committee realizes that sins of omission or commission have been detected, fabrications flow. Usually fabrications are utterly implausible renderings of explicit, unequivocal authorities [implicit or ambiguous authority would have provided the committee plausible deniability already].
Absent plausible deniability, committees deny or affirm implausibly through risible interpre-tations. In 2003-2004, for example, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] postponed a grievance hearing beyond the fifteen days provided for by the Faculty Code. They “interpreted” the utterly unambiguous “fifteen days” to mean “fifteen working days.” When the PSC then blew past fifteen working days, the committee “interpreted” as a “hearing” a meeting of the PSC to which neither grievant nor respondent was invited. How was this contradiction of the express direction of the code justified? It wasn’t. A fabrication was merely asserted to cover the PSC’s delinquencies and a hearing to which grievant and respondent were invited occurred more than two months after the grievance reached the Dean [the code allows 20 days total]. Little wonder, then, that the PSC of 2003-2004 has been dubbed by some faculty "the Professional Standards Cult."
Only a few faculty, however, have the knowledge and courage to denounce even such obvious fabrications. When those few try to raise such issues, they are met with the Confidentiality Con, with disinformation and misinformation, and with suggestions that faculty should be prospective and civil. Insistence on honesty, integrity, and accountability in the presence of fabrications lacks civility, of course.
Outright fabrications are rare but reveal so much. Fabrications reveal the PSC to be at best lackadaisical about the very authority that apologists routinely invoke to justify PSC Confidentiality Cons. Fabrications also reveal the PSC’s contempt for the faculty that the PSC is supposed to serve. When exigencies loom, the PSC treats colleagues as marks, as rubes ripe for the taking. And woe betide anyone entangled with the PSC should he or she dare to invoke actual authority against fabricated authority. The PSC and FAC are called “the Power Committees” [PCs] both because they have the means by which to silence or to sanction the recalcitrant and because the Academic Vice President has, to say the least, been a member of both committees.
Usually, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore will spare the PSC or the FAC from revealing insiders’ disrespect for the faculty and facukty rules and will save administrators from broadcasting their disregard for citizenly virtues. Pseudo-authority, cover-ups, and buyouts usually manage acquiescence from colleagues busy with teaching, research, service, and family. The few faculty who learn what the PCs do will then easily be marginalized by the Confidentiality Con, by cover-ups, and by groupthink.
*I have borrowed this usage of "factlet" from Professor Michael Saks' 1992 University of Pennsylvania Law Review article.
**Norman Mailer invented this usage of factoid in his book on Marilyn Monroe.
Please do not imagine that the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] manipulate most colleagues most of the time. Expedient or bad-faith fabrications are such risky tactics that they are to be invoked only in emergencies. Most of the time, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore are means by which respectable faculty rationalize unauthorized discretion and acquiesce in injustices. Committees mislead faculty only when faculty will not deceive themselves.
Faculty most often deceive themselves by accepting factlets.* Factlets are inconsequent tidbits of information. Take the tidbit that the FAC “addressed” an evaluee’s serial plagiarism, for example. How much or how little did the FAC know about the plagiarisms? Ordinary faculty cannot know, for the very selection of “address” occludes understanding. Thus did a vague or ambiguous factlet supplant information. Campus “civility” cannot long abide skepticism, so inquiring colleagues risk being thought as ill-mannered as credulous colleagues are ill-informed.
Faculty are also suckers for factoids.** Factoids are presumptions believed because they are published. [Once the tidbit about the FAC’s addressing plagiarism made The Trail, a factlet became a factoid.] Likewise, misapprehensions about the code grow from confident, often comforting, proclamations of half-truths or misinformation in faculty meetings or faculty minutes. Factoids, being publicized, outstrip and outlast facts not publicized or covered up. Perhaps it is needless to add that factoids that encourage quiescence among faculty and staff will be disseminated ritually and routinely from committees, while facts that call widespread beliefs into question will be routinely and ritually obscured.
Worse, there is no folderol so preposterous that most colleagues will disbelieve it. Folderol is the campus equivalent of urban legend. Folderol may have originated in fabrications, factoids, or factlets, but its etiology cannot be traced. Around Puget Sound, one should not be surprised to hear folderol 170 degrees removed from even the official record. For instance, minutes of faculty meetings in 1994-1995 make it unmistakable that the faculty, with the support of President Pierce and the university’s attorneys, tried to eliminate “personal and professional characteristics” as a category for evaluations for tenure. Nonetheless, some on the losing side of that fight now claim that all that the faculty decided was that assessments of personal and professional characteristics were no longer mandatory. Many of these veterans evince failing memories in their scholarship and teaching, so we should not doubt the sincerity with which they cling to this folderol. By contrast, those who recall the meetings accurately and adequately must denounce the folderol as a subversion of faculty governance. The most important point is that folderol enshrines a frustration of the will of the majority to masquerade for majority will.
Why read the code or the bylaws, which may not support your own position, when you may invoke folklore that you select for its utility? Folklore consists of precedents and traditions – real and imagined – that veterans believe to be valid authority. I have heard dozens of colleagues who have been here for many years state that one who appeals a departmental denial of tenure, for example, must stick to procedural defects and cannot raise substantive violations. A glance at the code instantly disproves this canard, yet multiple hearing boards have dismissed appeals based on a misconception that reading the code would remedy. Folklore spares our colleagues from reading actual authorities, a shortcut that most colleagues deny their students. Recall that the very first folklore raised in "Rump Parliament" was the Confidentiality Con.
Fabrications, by contrast, fester when rogue committees are cornered. Sometimes, they have imprudently relied on factlets, factoids, folderol, or folklore that some bounder exposes as bogus. In other instances, they have improvidently presumed that no one will read the rules or raise a ruckus. Once a committee realizes that sins of omission or commission have been detected, fabrications flow. Usually fabrications are utterly implausible renderings of explicit, unequivocal authorities [implicit or ambiguous authority would have provided the committee plausible deniability already].
Absent plausible deniability, committees deny or affirm implausibly through risible interpre-tations. In 2003-2004, for example, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] postponed a grievance hearing beyond the fifteen days provided for by the Faculty Code. They “interpreted” the utterly unambiguous “fifteen days” to mean “fifteen working days.” When the PSC then blew past fifteen working days, the committee “interpreted” as a “hearing” a meeting of the PSC to which neither grievant nor respondent was invited. How was this contradiction of the express direction of the code justified? It wasn’t. A fabrication was merely asserted to cover the PSC’s delinquencies and a hearing to which grievant and respondent were invited occurred more than two months after the grievance reached the Dean [the code allows 20 days total]. Little wonder, then, that the PSC of 2003-2004 has been dubbed by some faculty "the Professional Standards Cult."
Only a few faculty, however, have the knowledge and courage to denounce even such obvious fabrications. When those few try to raise such issues, they are met with the Confidentiality Con, with disinformation and misinformation, and with suggestions that faculty should be prospective and civil. Insistence on honesty, integrity, and accountability in the presence of fabrications lacks civility, of course.
Outright fabrications are rare but reveal so much. Fabrications reveal the PSC to be at best lackadaisical about the very authority that apologists routinely invoke to justify PSC Confidentiality Cons. Fabrications also reveal the PSC’s contempt for the faculty that the PSC is supposed to serve. When exigencies loom, the PSC treats colleagues as marks, as rubes ripe for the taking. And woe betide anyone entangled with the PSC should he or she dare to invoke actual authority against fabricated authority. The PSC and FAC are called “the Power Committees” [PCs] both because they have the means by which to silence or to sanction the recalcitrant and because the Academic Vice President has, to say the least, been a member of both committees.
Usually, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore will spare the PSC or the FAC from revealing insiders’ disrespect for the faculty and facukty rules and will save administrators from broadcasting their disregard for citizenly virtues. Pseudo-authority, cover-ups, and buyouts usually manage acquiescence from colleagues busy with teaching, research, service, and family. The few faculty who learn what the PCs do will then easily be marginalized by the Confidentiality Con, by cover-ups, and by groupthink.
*I have borrowed this usage of "factlet" from Professor Michael Saks' 1992 University of Pennsylvania Law Review article.
**Norman Mailer invented this usage of factoid in his book on Marilyn Monroe.
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