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.