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.