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.