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.