Oversight and Oversights

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?