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.