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.