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.