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.