Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.
The “Zone of Caprice” may be defined as the distance between the qualifications of the finest person denied tenure [called a “false negative” below] and the qualifications of the worst person granted tenure [that is, a “false positive” infra]. The polar false positive is less meritorious than the polar false negative, creating a gap. At least one false negative was a better teacher and a better scholar than the worst false positive was or is, which means that other factors account for the dismissal of the better and the retention of the worse.
Firings of false negatives probably occasion more outcry, but the tenure of the false positives did the University more damage. The opportunity costs of dismissing great teachers and terrific scholars are difficult to calculate. The net costs of keeping incompetents on staff for decades seem more readily apparent over time.
Those costs, however, are particularized and minuscule relative to the institutional price exacted when processes belie procedures and when standards in theory are superseded by standards as practiced. I am not, of course, referring to fathomable differences of opinion. I write of flouting of rules abetted by the cynical confidence that most colleagues won’t notice and that the few who do notice won’t protest loudly or long.
If some louts do protest, the Confidentiality Con, some doubletalk and doublethink, Rovian denials, and high dudgeon worthy of Bill O’Reilly will be aimed at the hooligans. Bereft of allies in the Faculty Senate or elsewhere, the hooligans howl in vain amid indifference and obliviousness as the departed slip away from almost all faculty.
The false positives have nowhere else to go. They stick around to remind us of the gulf between those wrongly rewarded and most of the faculty. That part of the zone of caprice every faculty member may see if she or he wants to see. [Most do not want to see and do not acknowledge the false positives except if a false positive offends.] The other part of the zone of caprice – the myriad resemblances between the rejected and the mass of the tenured and all too often the manifest superiority of the rejected to the mass of those accepted – is usually hidden by lapsing memory and fatigue, by apologetics and secrecy, and by perfidy and stupidity.
Even worse, colleagues whose tenure or promotion or promotions are inexplicable are disproportionately likely to end up on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Because many faculty expect that colleagues who barely scraped by or were saved from just deserts will be flaccid, forgiving decision-makers, folks who never truly met standards for tenure or promotion(s) will stand better odds of making the FAC than those who truly merited tenure or promotion(s). Need I add that expectations of laxity are often dashed when the unworthy retaliate for their being undeserving by punishing the worthy for outstripping the unworthy; or when some feeb saved by an administrator pays his or her debt to the administrator by becoming a very reliable vote [which often is what saved the feeb in the first place]; or when the very vices that made the improvidently rewarded fall short of standards also impair performance on the FAC; or when the patronized would like to impress their patrons to secure other patronage?
The zone and the caprice are systemic features of our community. Arbitrariness and patronage not only accumulate but proliferate. If false negatives occasionally fail upwards, the false positives consistently make our university less than it might have been.
Next – “Advanced Accounting” – How the FAC actually works.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Yo-Yo Motions
If you would discern what Power Committees are up to, watch for contradictory rulings in identical instances or for initiatives that contradict interpretations.
The immediately previous blog – “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007 – argued that the very vehemence of proclaimed authority indicates a consciousness of culpability. But how does one detect deviance when Power Committees [PC] claim quietly that they were only following orders?
One method to detect misbehaviors behind pseudo-authority is to look for irreconcilable rulings on identical or nearly identical matters. Even the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] have difficulty claiming both that they assiduously followed authority and that they arrived at diametrical results in indistinguishable instances. [Be forewarned, however! PCs will quibble that the results are not really opposed diametrically – as if deciding identical issues in ways that are just, say, 160° removed from one another is a defense – or that instances may be distinguished due to factors that are confidential.]
For example, in the 2003-2004 academic year the PSC – Yes! That PSC again! – formally heard two grievances. Having resolved the first grievance, the PSC sent the grievant [a faculty member] and the respondent [the then Academic Vice President] copies of their report at the same time as they sent their report to the President. Less than six months later, the same members informed another grievant and another respondent [neither an administrator] that the Faculty Code authorized the PSC only to send its report to the President [that is true] and thus prohibited the PSC from doing what it had done months before [that is not true]. If the President wished, he might share the report with the parties to the grievance.
Since the PSC favored its member [the Academic Vice President serves on the PSC] with a simultaneous release and withheld its report from two faculty who were not members of the PSC, a double standard seemed afoot. Moreover, the respondent in the second grievance was not an administrator [a venial sin of omission] and had challenged multiple departures from the Faculty Code by that selfsame PSC and especially its chair [a mortal sin of commission]. What a coincidence that a respondent who had vigorously protested that rulings internally inconsistent with other PSC decisions or externally inconsistent with applicable authority had seriously disadvantaged him would be treated worse than the dean permanently on the committee!
The double standard notwithstanding, these protean procedures make patent what PCs normally keep latent. Usually, the vacillations or the favoritism of a PC may be hidden behind confidentiality or denial so that a PC’s inconsistencies cannot be demonstrated. When the 2003-2004 PSC was of two minds, however, its public acts went on display. This provided that rare opportunity: a departure from the Faculty Code that the PSC could not deny.
The most that the PSC could claim was that one or more of their members [at a weekend PC retreat?] read the Faculty Code between the first grievance and the second grievance. That is not a very flattering claim, but a flat-out contradiction is hard to explain away even for master dissimulators. The claim is more flattering than telling the parties that the PSC made a special concession for one of its members. [That was the first “explanation” that the PSC chair gave the respondent in the second grievance. Imagine that a PC lurched into candor – “We favored a member of our committee who is also a powerful administrator.” – before settling for a different tale: “In Fall Semester we did not know what the Faculty Code ‘required,’ but by Spring Semester we conveniently discovered another way to abuse a second-year colleague who had the audacity to grieve faculty plagiarism and the temerity to point out that the PSC does as it pleases when it is not a Star Chamber at the service of the dean.” Each quotation is an expository device—the PSC is never that candid!]
[Even worse, the Faculty Code neither authorizes the PSC to provide the parties the report nor forbids the PSC from doing so. The PSC’s “improved” reading is a misreading! Can anyone around here play this game?]
Our first lesson at detecting PC artifice and fabrication, then, is what Izzy Stone long ago told us: any modern government publishes so many decisions and rulings that sooner or later it will betray its misdeeds if one pays attention. Too bad we do not have an Izzy Stone to help out our easily misdirected, easily distracted, and easily acquiescent faculty.
Such flat-out contradictions rarely surface, so we need to be vigilant about other PC “tells.” A second device is to ask questions to reveal inconsistencies that have not surfaced on their own. For example, when the 2005-2006 PSC proposed that the 15 days within which the PSC must schedule a grievance hearing be amended to be 15 working days, all ten faculty in the know should have inquired [aloud, if they are tenured] why that had not already been done. After all, the authoritative interpreters of the code [the aforementioned PSC] declared it so for two grievances in December 2003. Does the PSC fear another yo-yo? What if a future PSC looks at the Faculty Code and" discovers" that “working” days was neither intended nor implied? How would the expedient delays of December 2003 then appear?
Confronted concerning such yo-yoing, the 2003-2004 PSC wrote to the Faculty Senate that their consciences were clear and that they made no apologies. As one senator responded, “That’s the problem!”
It was a problem. It is a problem. Cult-like decision-making will be a problem again and again. All that good citizens of the University of Puget Sound can do about PC cults is to catch them out when they are compelled to release materials. If a PC yo-yos and no one notices, con games and cant will frustrate faculty oversight and neuter faculty governance.
Next – Zone of Caprice – Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.
The immediately previous blog – “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007 – argued that the very vehemence of proclaimed authority indicates a consciousness of culpability. But how does one detect deviance when Power Committees [PC] claim quietly that they were only following orders?
One method to detect misbehaviors behind pseudo-authority is to look for irreconcilable rulings on identical or nearly identical matters. Even the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] have difficulty claiming both that they assiduously followed authority and that they arrived at diametrical results in indistinguishable instances. [Be forewarned, however! PCs will quibble that the results are not really opposed diametrically – as if deciding identical issues in ways that are just, say, 160° removed from one another is a defense – or that instances may be distinguished due to factors that are confidential.]
For example, in the 2003-2004 academic year the PSC – Yes! That PSC again! – formally heard two grievances. Having resolved the first grievance, the PSC sent the grievant [a faculty member] and the respondent [the then Academic Vice President] copies of their report at the same time as they sent their report to the President. Less than six months later, the same members informed another grievant and another respondent [neither an administrator] that the Faculty Code authorized the PSC only to send its report to the President [that is true] and thus prohibited the PSC from doing what it had done months before [that is not true]. If the President wished, he might share the report with the parties to the grievance.
Since the PSC favored its member [the Academic Vice President serves on the PSC] with a simultaneous release and withheld its report from two faculty who were not members of the PSC, a double standard seemed afoot. Moreover, the respondent in the second grievance was not an administrator [a venial sin of omission] and had challenged multiple departures from the Faculty Code by that selfsame PSC and especially its chair [a mortal sin of commission]. What a coincidence that a respondent who had vigorously protested that rulings internally inconsistent with other PSC decisions or externally inconsistent with applicable authority had seriously disadvantaged him would be treated worse than the dean permanently on the committee!
The double standard notwithstanding, these protean procedures make patent what PCs normally keep latent. Usually, the vacillations or the favoritism of a PC may be hidden behind confidentiality or denial so that a PC’s inconsistencies cannot be demonstrated. When the 2003-2004 PSC was of two minds, however, its public acts went on display. This provided that rare opportunity: a departure from the Faculty Code that the PSC could not deny.
The most that the PSC could claim was that one or more of their members [at a weekend PC retreat?] read the Faculty Code between the first grievance and the second grievance. That is not a very flattering claim, but a flat-out contradiction is hard to explain away even for master dissimulators. The claim is more flattering than telling the parties that the PSC made a special concession for one of its members. [That was the first “explanation” that the PSC chair gave the respondent in the second grievance. Imagine that a PC lurched into candor – “We favored a member of our committee who is also a powerful administrator.” – before settling for a different tale: “In Fall Semester we did not know what the Faculty Code ‘required,’ but by Spring Semester we conveniently discovered another way to abuse a second-year colleague who had the audacity to grieve faculty plagiarism and the temerity to point out that the PSC does as it pleases when it is not a Star Chamber at the service of the dean.” Each quotation is an expository device—the PSC is never that candid!]
[Even worse, the Faculty Code neither authorizes the PSC to provide the parties the report nor forbids the PSC from doing so. The PSC’s “improved” reading is a misreading! Can anyone around here play this game?]
Our first lesson at detecting PC artifice and fabrication, then, is what Izzy Stone long ago told us: any modern government publishes so many decisions and rulings that sooner or later it will betray its misdeeds if one pays attention. Too bad we do not have an Izzy Stone to help out our easily misdirected, easily distracted, and easily acquiescent faculty.
Such flat-out contradictions rarely surface, so we need to be vigilant about other PC “tells.” A second device is to ask questions to reveal inconsistencies that have not surfaced on their own. For example, when the 2005-2006 PSC proposed that the 15 days within which the PSC must schedule a grievance hearing be amended to be 15 working days, all ten faculty in the know should have inquired [aloud, if they are tenured] why that had not already been done. After all, the authoritative interpreters of the code [the aforementioned PSC] declared it so for two grievances in December 2003. Does the PSC fear another yo-yo? What if a future PSC looks at the Faculty Code and" discovers" that “working” days was neither intended nor implied? How would the expedient delays of December 2003 then appear?
Confronted concerning such yo-yoing, the 2003-2004 PSC wrote to the Faculty Senate that their consciences were clear and that they made no apologies. As one senator responded, “That’s the problem!”
It was a problem. It is a problem. Cult-like decision-making will be a problem again and again. All that good citizens of the University of Puget Sound can do about PC cults is to catch them out when they are compelled to release materials. If a PC yo-yos and no one notices, con games and cant will frustrate faculty oversight and neuter faculty governance.
Next – Zone of Caprice – Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
X Marks the Spot
Every cover-up or con game depends on a verbal stratagem that stresses most forcefully crucial misinformation.
Bunko artists entice marks via tales (cf. “The Sting” or “The Flim-Flam Man”). Cover-ups use cover stories to transform the unconscionable into new evidence of good faith and good work. Tales and cover stories focus attention on laudable actors, actions, and motives. They also distract marks and gulls from features that might undermine credibility.
Every oral or written account withholds information. The more crucial the information withheld, however, the more vulnerable the account to disconfirmation. The account’s greatest vulnerability will lie beneath the authority that the account-giver stresses most forcefully. Because most faculty accede uncritically to almost any authority, and because almost all faculty take the Faculty Code, Bylaws, and policies to say whatever an administrator or apparatchik or apologist claims, an account’s vulnerability will go undetected by all but the few faculty who have learned where to look.
Sometimes account-givers cite authority very quietly to give the impression that nothing is amiss and authority is ample. Consider the outcome of the faculty’s last nominations to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. The Academic Vice President [AVP] announced her appointments to the FAC and accounted for skipping over someone who had gotten more votes than one or more appointees by noting that the code says that, normally, no more than one member of a department serves on the FAC at a time.
Let us work from the general to the particular. Any member of the faculty ought to appreciate that the “Normally” that begins the passage generally gives the AVP wide discretion, for every selection for the FAC is to some extent abnormal. This means that when the AVP pleases, she may “double up.” In this instance, one candidate who garnered votes was not really a candidate because she was up for promotion and could not serve on the FAC. Indeed, an existing member of the FAC whose departmental affiliation bumped two nominees from the faculty’s list should have stood for promotion in 2006-2007 but postponed for one year so that the FAC would not lose more than three experienced members. For that reason, the candidate who was passed over despite securing a greater number of votes would overlap with his departmental colleague for but one year due to a decidedly abnormal but not necessarily rare situation.
Once these considerations are taken into account, it becomes evident that the language cited by the AVP neither prescribed nor proscribed. The AVP made her choices. Then she quietly invoked inconsequent authority. Who caught her out? Only those who wanted to catch her out.
Quiet, subtle flim-flam is often hard to distinguish from confident, valid authority, so I cannot offer a sure-fire means for detecting pseudo-authority.
In contrast, when account-givers pound the table while citing authority, one may be certain that a trove of flim-flam lies not far beneath. An example of trumpeting of nonexistent authority should show what I mean.
Once the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] had commandeered a remedy prescribed by a hearing board – see “Kaleidoscope of Questions,” posted on this blog 20 February 2007 – it was nearly foreordained that the PSC would claim to be only following orders. In a communiqué to the Hearing Board, the PSC showed how it had adhered to the directives of the Hearing Board. The PSC knew from the chair of that hearing board that the board had protested that its remedy was not being applied, so language denying the devition was imperative.
Indeed, one need not have known any specifics of the matter to know that, if the PSC were merely fulfilling the recommendation of the Hearing Board, the PSC would not memorandize the Hearing Board that it was complying. The Hearing Board would recognize compliance. Because, instead, the PSC was not complying with the Hearing Board and knew that the Hearing Board knew that the PSC was not complying, the PSC had to camouflage its noncompliance.
This cover story did not confuse the Hearing Board, all five members of which promptly protested the PSC's subtrefuges. Fooling the Hearing Board did not concern the PSC. The cover story existed to fool the PSC itself and to fool anyone who might inquire into the matter thereafter.
Between nuanced chicanery [like the account of the selection of the members of the FAC in 2006] and bombastic deceptions [like the claim that the PSC followed the Hearing Board in 2003] lies trickery that ordinary faculty should be able to detect when they want to. Consider this sentence in a recent communication from the PSC to the Faculty Senate about PSC malfeasance and nonfeasance in 2003-2004:
"Throughout it all, we drew upon our familiarity with the Code and our sense of fairness to provide, as best we could, impartial and reasonable processes for all parties."
The trick in decontructing this sentence, of course, is to recognize what the PSC did not state. The PSC did not even claim to have followed or obeyed the Faculty Code, the contract between faculty and the university. Rather, the 2003-2004 PSC felt compelled to dilute their account to "drawing on" their "familiarity" with the code. Moreover, the PSC did not state that the PSC substituted its will for the command of the code or the recommendation of a hearing board. Instead, we read that the PSC parlayed its familiarity with the code and its "sense of fairness" to provide "impartial and reasonable processes for all parties." Please note the peculiar word order in that last-quoted phrase. The PSC claimed that the processes were impartial and reasonable – they were not but the whole point of deceptive rhetoric is to hide inconvenient truth – but could not even bring itself to say that the processes were fair to all parties.
I suppose it would be gratuitous for me to note that, if the processes in 2003-2004 actually were as fair, impartial, and reasonable as the members of the PSC could manage, senators who have excoriated the PSC's decision-making may rest their case, for the members of that PSC have admitted their incompetence.
Next – Yo-Yo Motions – If you would discern what Power Committees are up to, watch for contradictory rulings in identical instances or for initiatives that contradict interpretations.
Bunko artists entice marks via tales (cf. “The Sting” or “The Flim-Flam Man”). Cover-ups use cover stories to transform the unconscionable into new evidence of good faith and good work. Tales and cover stories focus attention on laudable actors, actions, and motives. They also distract marks and gulls from features that might undermine credibility.
Every oral or written account withholds information. The more crucial the information withheld, however, the more vulnerable the account to disconfirmation. The account’s greatest vulnerability will lie beneath the authority that the account-giver stresses most forcefully. Because most faculty accede uncritically to almost any authority, and because almost all faculty take the Faculty Code, Bylaws, and policies to say whatever an administrator or apparatchik or apologist claims, an account’s vulnerability will go undetected by all but the few faculty who have learned where to look.
Sometimes account-givers cite authority very quietly to give the impression that nothing is amiss and authority is ample. Consider the outcome of the faculty’s last nominations to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. The Academic Vice President [AVP] announced her appointments to the FAC and accounted for skipping over someone who had gotten more votes than one or more appointees by noting that the code says that, normally, no more than one member of a department serves on the FAC at a time.
Let us work from the general to the particular. Any member of the faculty ought to appreciate that the “Normally” that begins the passage generally gives the AVP wide discretion, for every selection for the FAC is to some extent abnormal. This means that when the AVP pleases, she may “double up.” In this instance, one candidate who garnered votes was not really a candidate because she was up for promotion and could not serve on the FAC. Indeed, an existing member of the FAC whose departmental affiliation bumped two nominees from the faculty’s list should have stood for promotion in 2006-2007 but postponed for one year so that the FAC would not lose more than three experienced members. For that reason, the candidate who was passed over despite securing a greater number of votes would overlap with his departmental colleague for but one year due to a decidedly abnormal but not necessarily rare situation.
Once these considerations are taken into account, it becomes evident that the language cited by the AVP neither prescribed nor proscribed. The AVP made her choices. Then she quietly invoked inconsequent authority. Who caught her out? Only those who wanted to catch her out.
Quiet, subtle flim-flam is often hard to distinguish from confident, valid authority, so I cannot offer a sure-fire means for detecting pseudo-authority.
In contrast, when account-givers pound the table while citing authority, one may be certain that a trove of flim-flam lies not far beneath. An example of trumpeting of nonexistent authority should show what I mean.
Once the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] had commandeered a remedy prescribed by a hearing board – see “Kaleidoscope of Questions,” posted on this blog 20 February 2007 – it was nearly foreordained that the PSC would claim to be only following orders. In a communiqué to the Hearing Board, the PSC showed how it had adhered to the directives of the Hearing Board. The PSC knew from the chair of that hearing board that the board had protested that its remedy was not being applied, so language denying the devition was imperative.
Indeed, one need not have known any specifics of the matter to know that, if the PSC were merely fulfilling the recommendation of the Hearing Board, the PSC would not memorandize the Hearing Board that it was complying. The Hearing Board would recognize compliance. Because, instead, the PSC was not complying with the Hearing Board and knew that the Hearing Board knew that the PSC was not complying, the PSC had to camouflage its noncompliance.
This cover story did not confuse the Hearing Board, all five members of which promptly protested the PSC's subtrefuges. Fooling the Hearing Board did not concern the PSC. The cover story existed to fool the PSC itself and to fool anyone who might inquire into the matter thereafter.
Between nuanced chicanery [like the account of the selection of the members of the FAC in 2006] and bombastic deceptions [like the claim that the PSC followed the Hearing Board in 2003] lies trickery that ordinary faculty should be able to detect when they want to. Consider this sentence in a recent communication from the PSC to the Faculty Senate about PSC malfeasance and nonfeasance in 2003-2004:
"Throughout it all, we drew upon our familiarity with the Code and our sense of fairness to provide, as best we could, impartial and reasonable processes for all parties."
The trick in decontructing this sentence, of course, is to recognize what the PSC did not state. The PSC did not even claim to have followed or obeyed the Faculty Code, the contract between faculty and the university. Rather, the 2003-2004 PSC felt compelled to dilute their account to "drawing on" their "familiarity" with the code. Moreover, the PSC did not state that the PSC substituted its will for the command of the code or the recommendation of a hearing board. Instead, we read that the PSC parlayed its familiarity with the code and its "sense of fairness" to provide "impartial and reasonable processes for all parties." Please note the peculiar word order in that last-quoted phrase. The PSC claimed that the processes were impartial and reasonable – they were not but the whole point of deceptive rhetoric is to hide inconvenient truth – but could not even bring itself to say that the processes were fair to all parties.
I suppose it would be gratuitous for me to note that, if the processes in 2003-2004 actually were as fair, impartial, and reasonable as the members of the PSC could manage, senators who have excoriated the PSC's decision-making may rest their case, for the members of that PSC have admitted their incompetence.
Next – Yo-Yo Motions – If you would discern what Power Committees are up to, watch for contradictory rulings in identical instances or for initiatives that contradict interpretations.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Who’s to Blame?
We’re the universal soldiers, and we really are to blame.
In her “Universal Soldier,” Buffy Sainte-Marie < http://www.creative-native.com/lyrics/univelyr.htm> helps us to fix blame for the concert of depravity that faculty governance has become and long been.
Sainte-Marie explains why members of Power Committees [PCs] mutually pledge confidentiality to defeat oversight, to promote unawareness, and to encourage apathy: “… he knows he shouldn't kill, and he knows he always will, kill you for me my friend and me for you.” PC insiders would just as soon not have to account for the indefensible. The Confidentiality Con means that they never have to.
Sainte-Marie accounts as well for how and why faculty allow themselves to shirk self-governance in favor of ignorance and equanimity amid injustices: “ … he says it's for the peace of all. He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die, and he never sees the writing on the walls.”
Apparatchiks, apologists, and administrators protest that they do not relish their decisions or duties and that they are only following orders, but “… without him, … Caesar would have stood alone. He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war, and without him all this killing can’t go on.”
All who believe in faculty governance rather than administrative prerogative should remember Ms. Sainte-Marie’s conclusion:
He's the universal soldier and he really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.
Whoever would exploit faculty expects faculty to be credulous, complacent, cooperative, and – above all! – civil. Whenever we trust administrators, apparatchiks, apologists, or their associates, we become accessories after the fact. Whenever our civility, credulity, complacency, and cooperation assure decision-makers that we will go along with almost any injustice or outrage, we become accessories before the fact for the next disappeared colleague.
If you do not care to be part of the problem, try a little civil disobedience. When you are told that a situation has been “addressed” by a power committee or “handled” by an administrator, regard that communiqué as itself lacking in civility.
Treat releases from the Office of Communications as if they were appeals for you to donate your child to the latest schemes of some neocon death cult.
And the next time some mouthpiece claims that the University of Puget Sound takes “academic honesty” seriously, screw up your courage and ask “And is the school for or against?”
Next – “X Marks the Spot” – Every communication stresses its misinformation most forcefully.
In her “Universal Soldier,” Buffy Sainte-Marie < http://www.creative-native.com/lyrics/univelyr.htm> helps us to fix blame for the concert of depravity that faculty governance has become and long been.
Sainte-Marie explains why members of Power Committees [PCs] mutually pledge confidentiality to defeat oversight, to promote unawareness, and to encourage apathy: “… he knows he shouldn't kill, and he knows he always will, kill you for me my friend and me for you.” PC insiders would just as soon not have to account for the indefensible. The Confidentiality Con means that they never have to.
Sainte-Marie accounts as well for how and why faculty allow themselves to shirk self-governance in favor of ignorance and equanimity amid injustices: “ … he says it's for the peace of all. He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die, and he never sees the writing on the walls.”
Apparatchiks, apologists, and administrators protest that they do not relish their decisions or duties and that they are only following orders, but “… without him, … Caesar would have stood alone. He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war, and without him all this killing can’t go on.”
All who believe in faculty governance rather than administrative prerogative should remember Ms. Sainte-Marie’s conclusion:
He's the universal soldier and he really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.
Whoever would exploit faculty expects faculty to be credulous, complacent, cooperative, and – above all! – civil. Whenever we trust administrators, apparatchiks, apologists, or their associates, we become accessories after the fact. Whenever our civility, credulity, complacency, and cooperation assure decision-makers that we will go along with almost any injustice or outrage, we become accessories before the fact for the next disappeared colleague.
If you do not care to be part of the problem, try a little civil disobedience. When you are told that a situation has been “addressed” by a power committee or “handled” by an administrator, regard that communiqué as itself lacking in civility.
Treat releases from the Office of Communications as if they were appeals for you to donate your child to the latest schemes of some neocon death cult.
And the next time some mouthpiece claims that the University of Puget Sound takes “academic honesty” seriously, screw up your courage and ask “And is the school for or against?”
Next – “X Marks the Spot” – Every communication stresses its misinformation most forcefully.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Verisimilitude
FAC fakery depends on faculty flackery.
Walking away from Jones Hall after a meeting with the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], my colleague was still stunned. The FAC was disagreeing with our department, which had unanimously recommended tenure, and so had invited us for the discussion mandated by the Faculty Code. After that debacle, my colleague asked me whether the members of the FAC had managed to make even one statement factual enough to count as evidence. I told him I could not recall one. I joked lamely that he should remember that most members followed the “it would be convenient for my argument if A were true, so I shall presume A is true” school of factoid-fabrication even if they were not technically humanists.
I did a content analysis of the evaluee’s teaching evaluations to establish that the FAC’s mouthpiece [a self-admitted humanist] had been as factually challenged as we in the department had presumed. Others in the department corrected [in writing] other mischaracterizations of our colleague's record. All of our protests were to no avail, of course. The facts of the case mattered little because the judgment of the FAC was not based on facts.
Facts matter little in too many evaluations because departmental and FAC recommendations issue from holistic, summative judgments at some remove from official documents issued to evaluees. Official documents must resemble the rules and so must distort the process by which decisions are reached. The legally discoverable documents provide more or less credible justifications for decisions often reached on very different grounds.
Consider the process that the FAC follows. The FAC “discovers” its collective conclusions via a vote after bulling about various aspects of the file. After the vote, a member of the FAC constructs an argument that conforms to the rules, standards, and criteria. Like the Bush Administration and Iraq, the FAC often determines what it wants to do, then fixes the facts around that predetermined end.
Even if a departmental or FAC recommendation lacks verisimilitude, departments or colleagues will seldom be able to supplant any official account. Factoids [apparently empirical statements taken to be true because published], factlets [tidbits that are true but inconsequent], and folderol [misinterpretations, misstatements, and mendacity] will almost always outnumber facts in any case. Once the FAC is done with the file, most disconfirming information will have been secreted behind an official cover story.
The foregoing explains why sly departments and wily FACs will avoid facts in favor of factoids, factlets, and folderol. When a later FAC utterly misstated the facts of another colleague’s file, two members of our department met with the FAC to correct the record. The FAC retreated. The members of that FAC, I have no doubt, learned a valuable lesson: avoid facts in favor of the seemingly factual. Reach whatever decisions by whatever means, but do not open the FAC to accountability!
Next – “Who’s to Blame?” – He’s the Universal Soldier, and he really is to blame.
Walking away from Jones Hall after a meeting with the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], my colleague was still stunned. The FAC was disagreeing with our department, which had unanimously recommended tenure, and so had invited us for the discussion mandated by the Faculty Code. After that debacle, my colleague asked me whether the members of the FAC had managed to make even one statement factual enough to count as evidence. I told him I could not recall one. I joked lamely that he should remember that most members followed the “it would be convenient for my argument if A were true, so I shall presume A is true” school of factoid-fabrication even if they were not technically humanists.
I did a content analysis of the evaluee’s teaching evaluations to establish that the FAC’s mouthpiece [a self-admitted humanist] had been as factually challenged as we in the department had presumed. Others in the department corrected [in writing] other mischaracterizations of our colleague's record. All of our protests were to no avail, of course. The facts of the case mattered little because the judgment of the FAC was not based on facts.
Facts matter little in too many evaluations because departmental and FAC recommendations issue from holistic, summative judgments at some remove from official documents issued to evaluees. Official documents must resemble the rules and so must distort the process by which decisions are reached. The legally discoverable documents provide more or less credible justifications for decisions often reached on very different grounds.
Consider the process that the FAC follows. The FAC “discovers” its collective conclusions via a vote after bulling about various aspects of the file. After the vote, a member of the FAC constructs an argument that conforms to the rules, standards, and criteria. Like the Bush Administration and Iraq, the FAC often determines what it wants to do, then fixes the facts around that predetermined end.
Even if a departmental or FAC recommendation lacks verisimilitude, departments or colleagues will seldom be able to supplant any official account. Factoids [apparently empirical statements taken to be true because published], factlets [tidbits that are true but inconsequent], and folderol [misinterpretations, misstatements, and mendacity] will almost always outnumber facts in any case. Once the FAC is done with the file, most disconfirming information will have been secreted behind an official cover story.
The foregoing explains why sly departments and wily FACs will avoid facts in favor of factoids, factlets, and folderol. When a later FAC utterly misstated the facts of another colleague’s file, two members of our department met with the FAC to correct the record. The FAC retreated. The members of that FAC, I have no doubt, learned a valuable lesson: avoid facts in favor of the seemingly factual. Reach whatever decisions by whatever means, but do not open the FAC to accountability!
Next – “Who’s to Blame?” – He’s the Universal Soldier, and he really is to blame.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Unpersons
Once a colleague’s tenure becomes contested, most faculty begin to treat the colleague as if he or [more often] she were already gone.
A colleague who longs to disappear need only spread the rumor that she or he has detractors in a department or in the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Friends and supporters will express some sympathy before they begin to avoid the evaluee-in-trouble. Colleagues who do not know the vanishing evaluee or whose default position is deference often will not even be pleasant but will regard the not-yet-dead with all the courtesy that Ebeneezer Scrooge extended to Jacob Marley when he beheld him anew. Apparatchiks and apologists will disparage apparitions’ efforts to inform faculty: “Thrashing about while being erased is in such bad taste!” Of all the ways in which academic obliviousness hides processes and deviance, precipitous invisibility may be the most hurtful to the evaluee. Over time, it impairs governance, oversight, and memory among the UPS “community” by making all or almost all colleagues complicitous saps.
Almost all faculty are busy. Most messy evaluations are complex. Facts, especially regarding closed files, are hard to establish. Communications from the FAC can be Delphic. The fading of doomed colleagues, like so many other unfortunate campus developments, follows from sensitivity about being insensitive, from aversion to the suffering and shaming of valued colleagues, from embarrassment at colleagues’ misbehaviors and committees’ malfeasances that are rare but still too common, from credulity and innocence, from intimidation and vulnerability, and from everyday exigencies of families and jobs. Most colleagues do not mean to be mean or indifferent just as they do not intend to be marks or saps.
What may be worse, colleagues who act as if a negative recommendation from a department, school, or program or from the FAC is a death sentence rightly guess their colleague’s fate in almost all cases. Why request a hearing to set aright the FAC’s misjudgment when a successful appeal will avail the colleague about as much as laetrile would address a cancer? Why write to the President to right wrongs when chanting would work about as well? If decision-makers have abandoned or evaded the Faculty Code, keep it to yourself lest you become an unperson. Faculty designated responsible, reputable, and reliable do not point out circumvention of the code or other malfeasance. We have no problems at Puget Sound except for problems that irresponsible, disreputable, and unreliable malcontents raise.
Once a colleague is in trouble, no matter how specious the reasons or asinine the deliberations, the condemned is expected to play her or his part in degradation rituals so that her or his fading away will vindicate certain shared myths. If the condemned struggles or is less than gracious about being disappeared, she or he attests anew that she or he was “not one of us.” We the responsible, reliable, reputable faculty would have drunk the hemlock or the kool aid with gusto, so great is our loyalty and faith!
Busy [therefore gullible] Professors Pollyanna will quickly assume that whatever rumors or leaks defend the outcome have some merit, especially when such rumors or leaks are selected for their surreality. Tautologies will reign and rain. Baseless inferences will rule: “Well, if she or [less often] he had put her or [less often] his file together better [or differently or in iambic pentameter or on the back of a check for $10,000], she or [less often] he might have gotten tenure [or renewed or promoted or a positive review].” The only incantations reckoned unreliable will be heterodoxies such as “due process” or fairness. If the Faculty Code often fails as prediction or direction, it almost always serves as shibboleth.
So when a colleague begins to be denounced, most colleagues drive the spectacle from their minds by rite mind and rite action. They pour themselves strong drink. They review their own status to ascertain their ritual role. If an accomplished or aspiring apparatchik or apologist, the apparent survivor salutes those who have denounced for whatever virtue the denouncers most lack. If a workaday sap, the apparent survivor accepts without question or thought whatever reasons the department, school, program, or FAC might utter. Apparatchik, apologist, and sap alike avert their eyes from the corpse to the transcendent meaning of the sacrifice. Then they inure themselves to their own complicity in unfairness and indecency by returning to laments about injustice and inhumanity in the larger community in which they are even more impotent.
Should you, longsuffering reader, scorn such ritual, Jesuitical John offers an alternative liturgy:
… he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; …
… Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, …
John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions XVII (1623) “Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris” [Now, slowly sounding, {the bells} tell you that you will die]
Next – “Verisimilitude” – FAC fakery relies on faculty flackery.
A colleague who longs to disappear need only spread the rumor that she or he has detractors in a department or in the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Friends and supporters will express some sympathy before they begin to avoid the evaluee-in-trouble. Colleagues who do not know the vanishing evaluee or whose default position is deference often will not even be pleasant but will regard the not-yet-dead with all the courtesy that Ebeneezer Scrooge extended to Jacob Marley when he beheld him anew. Apparatchiks and apologists will disparage apparitions’ efforts to inform faculty: “Thrashing about while being erased is in such bad taste!” Of all the ways in which academic obliviousness hides processes and deviance, precipitous invisibility may be the most hurtful to the evaluee. Over time, it impairs governance, oversight, and memory among the UPS “community” by making all or almost all colleagues complicitous saps.
Almost all faculty are busy. Most messy evaluations are complex. Facts, especially regarding closed files, are hard to establish. Communications from the FAC can be Delphic. The fading of doomed colleagues, like so many other unfortunate campus developments, follows from sensitivity about being insensitive, from aversion to the suffering and shaming of valued colleagues, from embarrassment at colleagues’ misbehaviors and committees’ malfeasances that are rare but still too common, from credulity and innocence, from intimidation and vulnerability, and from everyday exigencies of families and jobs. Most colleagues do not mean to be mean or indifferent just as they do not intend to be marks or saps.
What may be worse, colleagues who act as if a negative recommendation from a department, school, or program or from the FAC is a death sentence rightly guess their colleague’s fate in almost all cases. Why request a hearing to set aright the FAC’s misjudgment when a successful appeal will avail the colleague about as much as laetrile would address a cancer? Why write to the President to right wrongs when chanting would work about as well? If decision-makers have abandoned or evaded the Faculty Code, keep it to yourself lest you become an unperson. Faculty designated responsible, reputable, and reliable do not point out circumvention of the code or other malfeasance. We have no problems at Puget Sound except for problems that irresponsible, disreputable, and unreliable malcontents raise.
Once a colleague is in trouble, no matter how specious the reasons or asinine the deliberations, the condemned is expected to play her or his part in degradation rituals so that her or his fading away will vindicate certain shared myths. If the condemned struggles or is less than gracious about being disappeared, she or he attests anew that she or he was “not one of us.” We the responsible, reliable, reputable faculty would have drunk the hemlock or the kool aid with gusto, so great is our loyalty and faith!
Busy [therefore gullible] Professors Pollyanna will quickly assume that whatever rumors or leaks defend the outcome have some merit, especially when such rumors or leaks are selected for their surreality. Tautologies will reign and rain. Baseless inferences will rule: “Well, if she or [less often] he had put her or [less often] his file together better [or differently or in iambic pentameter or on the back of a check for $10,000], she or [less often] he might have gotten tenure [or renewed or promoted or a positive review].” The only incantations reckoned unreliable will be heterodoxies such as “due process” or fairness. If the Faculty Code often fails as prediction or direction, it almost always serves as shibboleth.
So when a colleague begins to be denounced, most colleagues drive the spectacle from their minds by rite mind and rite action. They pour themselves strong drink. They review their own status to ascertain their ritual role. If an accomplished or aspiring apparatchik or apologist, the apparent survivor salutes those who have denounced for whatever virtue the denouncers most lack. If a workaday sap, the apparent survivor accepts without question or thought whatever reasons the department, school, program, or FAC might utter. Apparatchik, apologist, and sap alike avert their eyes from the corpse to the transcendent meaning of the sacrifice. Then they inure themselves to their own complicity in unfairness and indecency by returning to laments about injustice and inhumanity in the larger community in which they are even more impotent.
Should you, longsuffering reader, scorn such ritual, Jesuitical John offers an alternative liturgy:
… he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; …
… Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, …
John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions XVII (1623) “Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris” [Now, slowly sounding, {the bells} tell you that you will die]
Next – “Verisimilitude” – FAC fakery relies on faculty flackery.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Taking the Fifth
Those who hide behind confidentiality that they have contrived do not get to play the victim when faculty call for genuine oversight.
Usually, the fearful may not assert 5th Amendment privileges selectively. Within limits, to waive protection against self-incrimination once is to waive that protection for all matters related to the intial waiver.
I do not know how many Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or Professional Standards Committee [PSC] veterans know this aspect of constitutional law, but several seem from time to time to appreciate the “once is for all” principle with respect to confidentiality. Once the FAC or PSC invent some confidentiality and assert it to shield themselves from inquiry [let alone oversight], the asserted confidentiality cannot be too selective lest the invention too obviously be seen as a contrivance. Once individuals on a Power Committee [PC] elect to stonewall faculty, they force their committee to collude on a confidentiality con or to devastate committee solidarity. Rather than to hang separately, individuals usually elect to hang together.
However ridiculous members of PCs make themselves when they protest that confidentiality prevents their answering critics, most faculty have no idea how contrived and cunning such confidentiality cons are. Even members of PCs understand that denying colleagues information need not make criticism unfair but less informed; however, PC poobahs also understand that most colleagues will mistake an absence of some evidence for evidence of absence. Because PCs collectively or individually will always be able to claim that some factlet, fabrication, or folderol remains unknown, PCs will always be able to scam gullible faculty by claiming that a) not all the facts are available; b) multiple narratives may recast facts in some way; c) civility requires faculty credulity; or some such nonresponsive responses that are trivially true but substantially specious.
I admit that the blowback is a bitch. When veterans of PCs confront even minimally critical colleagues, the veterans summon dudgeon as high as they are able to crawl. If this seems truculent, focus on the experiences of PC regulars.
Superannuated apparatchiks long ago got used to a routine: members of the PCs do as they or their masters please; colleagues almost never notice or protest; upon a rare protest, PCs profess to be eager to answer but prevented from answering by contrived confidentiality or other scams; transiently sapient colleagues give up, shut up, and reprise their roles as saps.
Given that routine, it’s shocking when some bounder says, “If you deny me the information, I shall go as far as I can in the absence of information. I shall not presume that elites are behaving well in the absence of the oversight that elites fend off.” What would become of faculty governance or animal husbandry if the governed routinely behaved critically, independently, or skeptically? Faculty governance presumes that only a few faculty will ask, "If everything is on the up and up, why can't committees account for their virtue?" [For blog readers who are puzzled, the answer to this seldom-asked, never-answered query is to reverse the order of the clauses: "Because committees cannot account for their virtue, they must assert that everything is on the up and up."]
Now, if you build a bunker and hide in the bunker, you know that colleagues get to assert that they dislike decisions that issue from the bunker. Still, bunker-dwelling elites know that hypocritical bellyaching about the disadvantages of hiding usually suffices to avoid owning up to vicious practices or unjust decisions. Dogs lick their balls because they can; Power Committees use subterfuges because they work.
No good con man blames the mark for seeing through the con. The good con man isolates the would-have-been mark, improvises new ways to use trust against the trusting, and moves on to the next mark.
Next – “Unpersons” – Once a colleague is denied tenure, most faculty begin to treat her or him as if she or he were already gone.
Usually, the fearful may not assert 5th Amendment privileges selectively. Within limits, to waive protection against self-incrimination once is to waive that protection for all matters related to the intial waiver.
I do not know how many Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or Professional Standards Committee [PSC] veterans know this aspect of constitutional law, but several seem from time to time to appreciate the “once is for all” principle with respect to confidentiality. Once the FAC or PSC invent some confidentiality and assert it to shield themselves from inquiry [let alone oversight], the asserted confidentiality cannot be too selective lest the invention too obviously be seen as a contrivance. Once individuals on a Power Committee [PC] elect to stonewall faculty, they force their committee to collude on a confidentiality con or to devastate committee solidarity. Rather than to hang separately, individuals usually elect to hang together.
However ridiculous members of PCs make themselves when they protest that confidentiality prevents their answering critics, most faculty have no idea how contrived and cunning such confidentiality cons are. Even members of PCs understand that denying colleagues information need not make criticism unfair but less informed; however, PC poobahs also understand that most colleagues will mistake an absence of some evidence for evidence of absence. Because PCs collectively or individually will always be able to claim that some factlet, fabrication, or folderol remains unknown, PCs will always be able to scam gullible faculty by claiming that a) not all the facts are available; b) multiple narratives may recast facts in some way; c) civility requires faculty credulity; or some such nonresponsive responses that are trivially true but substantially specious.
I admit that the blowback is a bitch. When veterans of PCs confront even minimally critical colleagues, the veterans summon dudgeon as high as they are able to crawl. If this seems truculent, focus on the experiences of PC regulars.
Superannuated apparatchiks long ago got used to a routine: members of the PCs do as they or their masters please; colleagues almost never notice or protest; upon a rare protest, PCs profess to be eager to answer but prevented from answering by contrived confidentiality or other scams; transiently sapient colleagues give up, shut up, and reprise their roles as saps.
Given that routine, it’s shocking when some bounder says, “If you deny me the information, I shall go as far as I can in the absence of information. I shall not presume that elites are behaving well in the absence of the oversight that elites fend off.” What would become of faculty governance or animal husbandry if the governed routinely behaved critically, independently, or skeptically? Faculty governance presumes that only a few faculty will ask, "If everything is on the up and up, why can't committees account for their virtue?" [For blog readers who are puzzled, the answer to this seldom-asked, never-answered query is to reverse the order of the clauses: "Because committees cannot account for their virtue, they must assert that everything is on the up and up."]
Now, if you build a bunker and hide in the bunker, you know that colleagues get to assert that they dislike decisions that issue from the bunker. Still, bunker-dwelling elites know that hypocritical bellyaching about the disadvantages of hiding usually suffices to avoid owning up to vicious practices or unjust decisions. Dogs lick their balls because they can; Power Committees use subterfuges because they work.
No good con man blames the mark for seeing through the con. The good con man isolates the would-have-been mark, improvises new ways to use trust against the trusting, and moves on to the next mark.
Next – “Unpersons” – Once a colleague is denied tenure, most faculty begin to treat her or him as if she or he were already gone.
Monday, March 5, 2007
Standards are Performative and Adjustable
Most faculty cannot meet the literal standards for tenure and promotion, which makes subterfuges and “terms of art” indispensable.
Try this thought experiment. Posit a system in which faculty, to keep their jobs, must be superior teachers while achieving superior growth professionally. If 80% of faculty do keep their jobs, to what exactly must such faculty be “superior?”
The 80% must be superior to the 20% rejected! Beyond that trivium, however, we may say little. The 20% might have been rejected for being in the lowest quintile of teaching. Some of the 20% rejected may have manifest an insufficient quantity or quality of professional growth. Maybe a few rejects were grossly deficient in both teaching and professional growth.
Trivial as our inference may be, it matches results better than published standards. The code and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] inform us that tenure is conditioned on “excellence” in teaching and professional growth, yet at no educational institution on this planet are 80% of the faculty excellent both at teaching and at professional growth. [Don’t you just hate it when the obvious clashes with factoids, folklore, fabrications, and other fantasies?] Clearly, “excellence” in the Faculty Code has little to do with “excellence” in a dictionary of English.
Faculty who receive tenure at Puget Sound become excellent by definition. Tenured faculty are excellent performatively – that is, because official declarers have declared them excellent. No other inferences are warranted.
Beyond this performative wordplay, evaluators to some extent follow the criteria in the code – excellent teaching, excellent professional growth, a record of service, and departmental and university need – but not one criterion can be applied literally and affirmatively to most evaluees. If 80% of all faculty are adjudged “excellent” in teaching and in professional growth, then those doing the judging must not be using “excellent” literally or rigorously. Every evaluee has a record of service; the code does not state any minimal service that the evaluee’s record must exceed. Taking “need” in any strong sense of the word would doom almost every evaluee. [Many faculty admit that they have no idea what “departmental need” means: The department will expire absent the evaluee’s courses, if not the evaluee? This evaluee is indispensable to the continued existence of the department? …]
In practice, standards are not literal but adjustable. The four official criteria figure prominently, but other factors condition how stringently or flaccidly the four will be employed. An evaluee insufficiently deferential to powers that be in a school, department, or program will have to survive heightened scrutiny if not flat-out reprisals. An administration favorite will, by contrast, be forgiven this or that shortfall, especially a shortfall of scholarly production, especially if members of the FAC have little recent, personal experience with publication. A paucity, even an absence, of published work can be pronounced excellent professional growth. [Over whom does the unpublished evaluee excel? Some graduate students? Most undergraduates? The man in the street?] Those who have served only themselves will be lauded for position rather than performance [“Even if he never attended committee meetings, could he have shirked had he not accepted appointment to the committee in the first place?”] provided evaluators consider the artful dodger useful or at least docile. As already noted, no department, school, program, or university literally needs anyone except donors, which makes judgments of “need” nearly infinitely elastic.
All of the foregoing should be evident to every faculty member, yet standards that are at once factoids [that is, taken for fact because they are published in the code], folklore [that is, shibboleths selected for solidarity more than for accuracy], and fabrications [that is, "responsible” and “reliable” faculty vouch that the FAC assiduously applies the official criteria] will hide deviance. The Confidentiality Con, the usual cover-ups, and other folderol will not hide all of the record from those few faculty who want to know and to acknowledge what is going on but will, I concede, continue to distract the busy faculty who are the large majority of our colleagues.
Among the few cognoscenti, base colleagues embrace the malleability of the standards. The chief virtue of sliding standards, these candid connivers aver, is that departments and universities may rid themselves of “the wrong sort” while flaunting the rigor of their standards. Having never been the excellent teachers or excellent scholars that they might have become but having often been excellent tools and sycophants, our tenured and promoted sharp operators mock credulous colleagues and exult in how much smarter and more successful their corrupt cynicism has made them. This is yet another way in which a member of the tenured and promoted 80% may be said to be superior.
Meanwhile this truly excellent teacher or that truly excellent scholar is dismissed for refusal to swell the ranks of genial frauds.
Next – “Taking the Fifth” – Those who hide behind confidentiality that they have contrived do not get to play the victim when faculty call for genuine oversight.
Try this thought experiment. Posit a system in which faculty, to keep their jobs, must be superior teachers while achieving superior growth professionally. If 80% of faculty do keep their jobs, to what exactly must such faculty be “superior?”
The 80% must be superior to the 20% rejected! Beyond that trivium, however, we may say little. The 20% might have been rejected for being in the lowest quintile of teaching. Some of the 20% rejected may have manifest an insufficient quantity or quality of professional growth. Maybe a few rejects were grossly deficient in both teaching and professional growth.
Trivial as our inference may be, it matches results better than published standards. The code and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] inform us that tenure is conditioned on “excellence” in teaching and professional growth, yet at no educational institution on this planet are 80% of the faculty excellent both at teaching and at professional growth. [Don’t you just hate it when the obvious clashes with factoids, folklore, fabrications, and other fantasies?] Clearly, “excellence” in the Faculty Code has little to do with “excellence” in a dictionary of English.
Faculty who receive tenure at Puget Sound become excellent by definition. Tenured faculty are excellent performatively – that is, because official declarers have declared them excellent. No other inferences are warranted.
Beyond this performative wordplay, evaluators to some extent follow the criteria in the code – excellent teaching, excellent professional growth, a record of service, and departmental and university need – but not one criterion can be applied literally and affirmatively to most evaluees. If 80% of all faculty are adjudged “excellent” in teaching and in professional growth, then those doing the judging must not be using “excellent” literally or rigorously. Every evaluee has a record of service; the code does not state any minimal service that the evaluee’s record must exceed. Taking “need” in any strong sense of the word would doom almost every evaluee. [Many faculty admit that they have no idea what “departmental need” means: The department will expire absent the evaluee’s courses, if not the evaluee? This evaluee is indispensable to the continued existence of the department? …]
In practice, standards are not literal but adjustable. The four official criteria figure prominently, but other factors condition how stringently or flaccidly the four will be employed. An evaluee insufficiently deferential to powers that be in a school, department, or program will have to survive heightened scrutiny if not flat-out reprisals. An administration favorite will, by contrast, be forgiven this or that shortfall, especially a shortfall of scholarly production, especially if members of the FAC have little recent, personal experience with publication. A paucity, even an absence, of published work can be pronounced excellent professional growth. [Over whom does the unpublished evaluee excel? Some graduate students? Most undergraduates? The man in the street?] Those who have served only themselves will be lauded for position rather than performance [“Even if he never attended committee meetings, could he have shirked had he not accepted appointment to the committee in the first place?”] provided evaluators consider the artful dodger useful or at least docile. As already noted, no department, school, program, or university literally needs anyone except donors, which makes judgments of “need” nearly infinitely elastic.
All of the foregoing should be evident to every faculty member, yet standards that are at once factoids [that is, taken for fact because they are published in the code], folklore [that is, shibboleths selected for solidarity more than for accuracy], and fabrications [that is, "responsible” and “reliable” faculty vouch that the FAC assiduously applies the official criteria] will hide deviance. The Confidentiality Con, the usual cover-ups, and other folderol will not hide all of the record from those few faculty who want to know and to acknowledge what is going on but will, I concede, continue to distract the busy faculty who are the large majority of our colleagues.
Among the few cognoscenti, base colleagues embrace the malleability of the standards. The chief virtue of sliding standards, these candid connivers aver, is that departments and universities may rid themselves of “the wrong sort” while flaunting the rigor of their standards. Having never been the excellent teachers or excellent scholars that they might have become but having often been excellent tools and sycophants, our tenured and promoted sharp operators mock credulous colleagues and exult in how much smarter and more successful their corrupt cynicism has made them. This is yet another way in which a member of the tenured and promoted 80% may be said to be superior.
Meanwhile this truly excellent teacher or that truly excellent scholar is dismissed for refusal to swell the ranks of genial frauds.
Next – “Taking the Fifth” – Those who hide behind confidentiality that they have contrived do not get to play the victim when faculty call for genuine oversight.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Respectable, Reliable, Reputable
When reputations and rewards issue from administrators and apparatchiks rather than from critical faculty, respectability corrodes integrity.
Plaudits and patronage cloud judgment and erode principle in every institution. Indeed, elites do not so much bestow prizes and praises as invest them in exemplary behavior and withhold them from conduct that displeases elites. Because approval is usually more plentiful than other rewards, elites will use approbation rather than treats to train faculty to be cooperative, civil, perhaps even cheerful. Seldom will administrators or apparatchiks [i.e., those beneath the level of Vice President who collaborate with administrators] interest themselves in a critical faculty. Skeptical, thoughtful, and analytical colleagues are harder to domesticate, and elites have much more interest in extolling the virtues of critical thinking than in putting up with it.
Campus leaders tend to prefer dogs to cats as colleagues. Cats like treats as much as dogs, but treats cost more than kind words. More, even treats will not induce cats to degrade themselves to the depths to which dogs will go simply for praise. Thus, administrators and apparatchiks search the faculty pack for dogs who will for cheap praise do what the cats would not do even for scarce catnip. Colleagues routinely tapped to fetch for Jones Hall will routinely be called reputable, responsible, and respectable because “Good dog!” seems a bit demeaning.
When they acutely crave treats, even some faculty cats will degrade themselves. Those who are not particularly good instructors will want to be pronounced “excellent” come tenure-time, so they throw themselves into whatever fad or fetish those who confer tenure happen upon. Those who aspire to an “excellence” in professional growth that they suspect that they will not achieve will gladly perform service that their masters will insinuate under “Professional Growth” in the tenure-letter. Once sated, faculty cats resume their indifference to authority. Indeed, in faculty meetings and in committees feline colleagues will lick away the traces of their immediate past and preen and pose as faculty lions. Hey! It works better than proclaiming, “I can be rented but not bought!”
Cats or dogs, few pets demand treats such as tenure or promotion. Some hope that their occasional solidity and routine stolidity will net them the Piggly Wiggly Chair or a Thriftway Professorship or some such. Others perform dirty deeds to seem respectable and reliable to their betters and to peers. Seldom skeptical, suspicious, or searching about directions or communications from masters, they fetch help when their masters, like Lassie’s Timmy, need assistance. They eagerly roll over before “administrative prerogative” and wag their tails amid administrative apocrypha and travelogues.
And, of course, when attack dogs hear “personal and professional characteristics,” woe to the faculty cat or dog on whom the pack are sicced. Faculty who will do not cooperate or collaborate on command will be disciplined until they do. Faculty more candid than civil will be denounced. Faculty who do not condone corruption or countenance charades will be discharged. Bye, Dash!
Any longing for respectability, for a reputation for being reliable, will sooner or later make colleagues accessories to various outrages. If socialization or experience or incentives transform recruits into cats, dogs, or other pets, faculty become ever more complicitous in the distribution of rewards and penalties. And, worse than cats or dogs, faculty consent to be neutered. Indeed, some full professors celebrate their own castration as if they were thereby made men, while others salivate as administrators ring out the old schemes and ring in the new.
The Bible tells us that it profits a man nothing to sacrifice his soul for the whole world. To give up one’s humanity for a collar gilded with “Distinguished” or “Reliable” is a bad bargain indeed.
Disclaimers: 1) it is easy for this feral cat to liken his colleagues to domesticated pets; 2) when rewarded with tenure, promotions, or other mercenary rewards, I have not refused them, although I believe that I was indifferent to the praises even before two stints on the Advancement Committee; and 3) I have been entrusted by colleagues with faculty office despite their certainty that I would not collaborate and would seldom cooperate but would continue to howl my heart out amid the darkness of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Next – “Standards are Performative and Adjustable” – Most faculty cannot meet our literal standards for tenure and promotion, which makes subterfuges and “terms of art” indispensable.
Plaudits and patronage cloud judgment and erode principle in every institution. Indeed, elites do not so much bestow prizes and praises as invest them in exemplary behavior and withhold them from conduct that displeases elites. Because approval is usually more plentiful than other rewards, elites will use approbation rather than treats to train faculty to be cooperative, civil, perhaps even cheerful. Seldom will administrators or apparatchiks [i.e., those beneath the level of Vice President who collaborate with administrators] interest themselves in a critical faculty. Skeptical, thoughtful, and analytical colleagues are harder to domesticate, and elites have much more interest in extolling the virtues of critical thinking than in putting up with it.
Campus leaders tend to prefer dogs to cats as colleagues. Cats like treats as much as dogs, but treats cost more than kind words. More, even treats will not induce cats to degrade themselves to the depths to which dogs will go simply for praise. Thus, administrators and apparatchiks search the faculty pack for dogs who will for cheap praise do what the cats would not do even for scarce catnip. Colleagues routinely tapped to fetch for Jones Hall will routinely be called reputable, responsible, and respectable because “Good dog!” seems a bit demeaning.
When they acutely crave treats, even some faculty cats will degrade themselves. Those who are not particularly good instructors will want to be pronounced “excellent” come tenure-time, so they throw themselves into whatever fad or fetish those who confer tenure happen upon. Those who aspire to an “excellence” in professional growth that they suspect that they will not achieve will gladly perform service that their masters will insinuate under “Professional Growth” in the tenure-letter. Once sated, faculty cats resume their indifference to authority. Indeed, in faculty meetings and in committees feline colleagues will lick away the traces of their immediate past and preen and pose as faculty lions. Hey! It works better than proclaiming, “I can be rented but not bought!”
Cats or dogs, few pets demand treats such as tenure or promotion. Some hope that their occasional solidity and routine stolidity will net them the Piggly Wiggly Chair or a Thriftway Professorship or some such. Others perform dirty deeds to seem respectable and reliable to their betters and to peers. Seldom skeptical, suspicious, or searching about directions or communications from masters, they fetch help when their masters, like Lassie’s Timmy, need assistance. They eagerly roll over before “administrative prerogative” and wag their tails amid administrative apocrypha and travelogues.
And, of course, when attack dogs hear “personal and professional characteristics,” woe to the faculty cat or dog on whom the pack are sicced. Faculty who will do not cooperate or collaborate on command will be disciplined until they do. Faculty more candid than civil will be denounced. Faculty who do not condone corruption or countenance charades will be discharged. Bye, Dash!
Any longing for respectability, for a reputation for being reliable, will sooner or later make colleagues accessories to various outrages. If socialization or experience or incentives transform recruits into cats, dogs, or other pets, faculty become ever more complicitous in the distribution of rewards and penalties. And, worse than cats or dogs, faculty consent to be neutered. Indeed, some full professors celebrate their own castration as if they were thereby made men, while others salivate as administrators ring out the old schemes and ring in the new.
The Bible tells us that it profits a man nothing to sacrifice his soul for the whole world. To give up one’s humanity for a collar gilded with “Distinguished” or “Reliable” is a bad bargain indeed.
Disclaimers: 1) it is easy for this feral cat to liken his colleagues to domesticated pets; 2) when rewarded with tenure, promotions, or other mercenary rewards, I have not refused them, although I believe that I was indifferent to the praises even before two stints on the Advancement Committee; and 3) I have been entrusted by colleagues with faculty office despite their certainty that I would not collaborate and would seldom cooperate but would continue to howl my heart out amid the darkness of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Next – “Standards are Performative and Adjustable” – Most faculty cannot meet our literal standards for tenure and promotion, which makes subterfuges and “terms of art” indispensable.
Friday, March 2, 2007
Quibbles
Nit-picking signals that our system is malfunctioning normally.
Some faculty get angry when our unaccountable elites claim that exposés are errant in some unspecified way. Quibbling does not anger me. It assures me that the expression of concerns is largely correct. If powerful people had more important objections, they would issue them.
Some faculty were chagrined when an administrator wrote that an article about faculty plagiarism in The Trail contained unspecified errors. I took this familiar quibble in stride because no one demanded or requested a retraction. Indeed, I chuckled at the cheek of the editors when they reproduced the trivial criticisms that The Trail had weathered: the article started from a mixed metaphor [A trenchant if mistaken critique!]; “serial plagiarism” was a lurid label [Should The Trail avoid terms used by The Chronicle of Higher Education?]; and so on. A repeat offender imperiled the reputations of a generous colleague and a credulous student [each a co-author of a plagiarized manuscript], yet our campus features folks ready to confront anything except serious violations of professional canons and ethics.
Of course, shams and spin deceive no one who does not want to miss the point or to overlook problems. When the Senate discussed faculty plagiarism, the minutes bowdlerized “plagiarism” to “academic honesty,” but such lipstick did not become the pig. I am told that “multiple narratives” explain why a colleague who reported the serial plagiarisms became so disgusted with the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] over retaliations against him that he withdrew his grievance. May we anticipate a singular story about why no administrator or other person in the know took up the matter? We have been told that the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] “addressed” the matter, but we know not which matter the FAC addressed or even knew about. Amid uproar over faculty plagiarisms, the Faculty Senate appointed an ad hoc committee to look into grievances [including the aborted grievance over the second set of plagiarisms]. By the time that ad hoc committee issued no findings about the plagiarism grievance or much of anything else, the tumult over faculty plagiarisms had become faint and quaint. Indeed, the ad hoc committee did not even inform the faculty that the plagiarism grievant stated in an email to the PSC that he wanted to withdraw his grievance because 1) he no longer trusted the PSC to behave in a procedurally or substantively fair manner and 2) he hoped that withdrawing his grievance would stop the harassment he had undergone since he had grieved the plagiarist anew. I guess the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards thought such matters to be of no importance.
Quibbles, euphemisms, and cover-ups followed by calls for civility signal all of us that our system is malfunctioning normally. That, too, is reassuring to everyone who is not vulnerable.
Next – “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable” – When reputations and rewards issue from administrators and apparatchiks rather than from critical faculty, respectability corrupts faculty.
Some faculty get angry when our unaccountable elites claim that exposés are errant in some unspecified way. Quibbling does not anger me. It assures me that the expression of concerns is largely correct. If powerful people had more important objections, they would issue them.
Some faculty were chagrined when an administrator wrote that an article about faculty plagiarism in The Trail contained unspecified errors. I took this familiar quibble in stride because no one demanded or requested a retraction. Indeed, I chuckled at the cheek of the editors when they reproduced the trivial criticisms that The Trail had weathered: the article started from a mixed metaphor [A trenchant if mistaken critique!]; “serial plagiarism” was a lurid label [Should The Trail avoid terms used by The Chronicle of Higher Education?]; and so on. A repeat offender imperiled the reputations of a generous colleague and a credulous student [each a co-author of a plagiarized manuscript], yet our campus features folks ready to confront anything except serious violations of professional canons and ethics.
Of course, shams and spin deceive no one who does not want to miss the point or to overlook problems. When the Senate discussed faculty plagiarism, the minutes bowdlerized “plagiarism” to “academic honesty,” but such lipstick did not become the pig. I am told that “multiple narratives” explain why a colleague who reported the serial plagiarisms became so disgusted with the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] over retaliations against him that he withdrew his grievance. May we anticipate a singular story about why no administrator or other person in the know took up the matter? We have been told that the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] “addressed” the matter, but we know not which matter the FAC addressed or even knew about. Amid uproar over faculty plagiarisms, the Faculty Senate appointed an ad hoc committee to look into grievances [including the aborted grievance over the second set of plagiarisms]. By the time that ad hoc committee issued no findings about the plagiarism grievance or much of anything else, the tumult over faculty plagiarisms had become faint and quaint. Indeed, the ad hoc committee did not even inform the faculty that the plagiarism grievant stated in an email to the PSC that he wanted to withdraw his grievance because 1) he no longer trusted the PSC to behave in a procedurally or substantively fair manner and 2) he hoped that withdrawing his grievance would stop the harassment he had undergone since he had grieved the plagiarist anew. I guess the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards thought such matters to be of no importance.
Quibbles, euphemisms, and cover-ups followed by calls for civility signal all of us that our system is malfunctioning normally. That, too, is reassuring to everyone who is not vulnerable.
Next – “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable” – When reputations and rewards issue from administrators and apparatchiks rather than from critical faculty, respectability corrupts faculty.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Plagiarisms
Does anyone remember what led to the formation of the AHCPS?
The Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] arose out of concerns expressed in the Faculty Senate that plagiarisms by a faculty member had been “addressed” in a manner that no senator was permitted to learn. Senators and other faculty allowed that it was so difficult to oversee this “addressing” that it was tempting for senators to overlook the whole matter. Despite claims that the University took faculty plagiarism seriously, senators wanted to know what “addressing” and “taking seriously” meant. To the best of my knowledge, no senator yet knows what apparatchiks and apologists meant.
The AHCPS did not address these questions, so let me do so here. One department, two Power Committees, one Academic Vice President, and one President “addressed” severe serial plagiarisms so assiduously and took faculty plagiarism so seriously that almost no one knew what, if anything, had been done. What more need we know or hear?
Thus, questions asked at senate on 14 November 2005 should answer themselves. The claim that instances of faculty plagiarism were “addressed” supplies no information beyond the invitation to stop asking embarrassing questions. To declare that the University takes faculty plagiarism seriously amounts to an account that itself obstructs accountability. Empty assurances supplant information. “Trust us” substitutes for justification. Thus is oversight defeated.
Before oversight could be evaded, some senators offered excuses for overlooking the whole matter in the senate. Perhaps the plagiarisms were few or minor, some naifs said. The plagiarisms were many and major, as multiple members of the senate might have attested if anyone present had cared enough to inquire sincerely. Even if the sets of plagiarisms had been a few technical mistakes or missteps, wouldn’t we hold our students responsible for such mistakes or missteps? Mightn’t a PhD be held to a higher standard than someone thirteen weeks removed from high school? Yet the first impulse of a few senators was to advance a cover story, any cover story. Perhaps they thought that the civil thing to do. Their evolution from apologists to apparatchiks will be interesting to observe.
About two years after the sets of plagiarisms had been discovered, the discoverer of the plagiarisms and his primary defender had been driven from the University of Puget Sound, yet the plagiarist was still on the faculty. Those facts should be enough to show the assurances to be meaningless and the communications to be counterfeit.
Did the AHCPS encounter multiple narratives about the sets of plagiarisms? When the besieged grievant told the AHCPS that he withdrew his grievance concerning the second set of plagiarisms –plagiarisms on a paper written with a student – after expressing reservations about the conduct of the Professional Standards Committee in other matters and pleading for someone to police acts of intimidation and reprisals to which he had been subjected, did the AHCPS discover some way to multiply narratives beyond the grievant’s own account?
The AHCPS has excused its failure to reach findings regarding the (mis)conduct of the Professional Standards Committee and assorted other faculty and administrators. The AHCPS has yet to explain away the absence of findings regarding what one member of the AHCPS has admitted to senators was the reason for the ad hoc committee’s creation. What an oversight!
Next – “Quibbles” – Nit-picking signals that nothing is substantially amiss.
The Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] arose out of concerns expressed in the Faculty Senate that plagiarisms by a faculty member had been “addressed” in a manner that no senator was permitted to learn. Senators and other faculty allowed that it was so difficult to oversee this “addressing” that it was tempting for senators to overlook the whole matter. Despite claims that the University took faculty plagiarism seriously, senators wanted to know what “addressing” and “taking seriously” meant. To the best of my knowledge, no senator yet knows what apparatchiks and apologists meant.
The AHCPS did not address these questions, so let me do so here. One department, two Power Committees, one Academic Vice President, and one President “addressed” severe serial plagiarisms so assiduously and took faculty plagiarism so seriously that almost no one knew what, if anything, had been done. What more need we know or hear?
Thus, questions asked at senate on 14 November 2005 should answer themselves. The claim that instances of faculty plagiarism were “addressed” supplies no information beyond the invitation to stop asking embarrassing questions. To declare that the University takes faculty plagiarism seriously amounts to an account that itself obstructs accountability. Empty assurances supplant information. “Trust us” substitutes for justification. Thus is oversight defeated.
Before oversight could be evaded, some senators offered excuses for overlooking the whole matter in the senate. Perhaps the plagiarisms were few or minor, some naifs said. The plagiarisms were many and major, as multiple members of the senate might have attested if anyone present had cared enough to inquire sincerely. Even if the sets of plagiarisms had been a few technical mistakes or missteps, wouldn’t we hold our students responsible for such mistakes or missteps? Mightn’t a PhD be held to a higher standard than someone thirteen weeks removed from high school? Yet the first impulse of a few senators was to advance a cover story, any cover story. Perhaps they thought that the civil thing to do. Their evolution from apologists to apparatchiks will be interesting to observe.
About two years after the sets of plagiarisms had been discovered, the discoverer of the plagiarisms and his primary defender had been driven from the University of Puget Sound, yet the plagiarist was still on the faculty. Those facts should be enough to show the assurances to be meaningless and the communications to be counterfeit.
Did the AHCPS encounter multiple narratives about the sets of plagiarisms? When the besieged grievant told the AHCPS that he withdrew his grievance concerning the second set of plagiarisms –plagiarisms on a paper written with a student – after expressing reservations about the conduct of the Professional Standards Committee in other matters and pleading for someone to police acts of intimidation and reprisals to which he had been subjected, did the AHCPS discover some way to multiply narratives beyond the grievant’s own account?
The AHCPS has excused its failure to reach findings regarding the (mis)conduct of the Professional Standards Committee and assorted other faculty and administrators. The AHCPS has yet to explain away the absence of findings regarding what one member of the AHCPS has admitted to senators was the reason for the ad hoc committee’s creation. What an oversight!
Next – “Quibbles” – Nit-picking signals that nothing is substantially amiss.
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