Yo-Yo Motions

If you would discern what Power Committees are up to, watch for contradictory rulings in identical instances or for initiatives that contradict interpretations.


The immediately previous blog – “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007 – argued that the very vehemence of proclaimed authority indicates a consciousness of culpability. But how does one detect deviance when Power Committees [PC] claim quietly that they were only following orders?

One method to detect misbehaviors behind pseudo-authority is to look for irreconcilable rulings on identical or nearly identical matters. Even the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] have difficulty claiming both that they assiduously followed authority and that they arrived at diametrical results in indistinguishable instances. [Be forewarned, however! PCs will quibble that the results are not really opposed diametrically – as if deciding identical issues in ways that are just, say, 160° removed from one another is a defense – or that instances may be distinguished due to factors that are confidential.]

For example, in the 2003-2004 academic year the PSC – Yes! That PSC again! – formally heard two grievances. Having resolved the first grievance, the PSC sent the grievant [a faculty member] and the respondent [the then Academic Vice President] copies of their report at the same time as they sent their report to the President. Less than six months later, the same members informed another grievant and another respondent [neither an administrator] that the Faculty Code authorized the PSC only to send its report to the President [that is true] and thus prohibited the PSC from doing what it had done months before [that is not true]. If the President wished, he might share the report with the parties to the grievance.

Since the PSC favored its member [the Academic Vice President serves on the PSC] with a simultaneous release and withheld its report from two faculty who were not members of the PSC, a double standard seemed afoot. Moreover, the respondent in the second grievance was not an administrator [a venial sin of omission] and had challenged multiple departures from the Faculty Code by that selfsame PSC and especially its chair [a mortal sin of commission]. What a coincidence that a respondent who had vigorously protested that rulings internally inconsistent with other PSC decisions or externally inconsistent with applicable authority had seriously disadvantaged him would be treated worse than the dean permanently on the committee!

The double standard notwithstanding, these protean procedures make patent what PCs normally keep latent. Usually, the vacillations or the favoritism of a PC may be hidden behind confidentiality or denial so that a PC’s inconsistencies cannot be demonstrated. When the 2003-2004 PSC was of two minds, however, its public acts went on display. This provided that rare opportunity: a departure from the Faculty Code that the PSC could not deny.

The most that the PSC could claim was that one or more of their members [at a weekend PC retreat?] read the Faculty Code between the first grievance and the second grievance. That is not a very flattering claim, but a flat-out contradiction is hard to explain away even for master dissimulators. The claim is more flattering than telling the parties that the PSC made a special concession for one of its members. [That was the first “explanation” that the PSC chair gave the respondent in the second grievance. Imagine that a PC lurched into candor – “We favored a member of our committee who is also a powerful administrator.” – before settling for a different tale: “In Fall Semester we did not know what the Faculty Code ‘required,’ but by Spring Semester we conveniently discovered another way to abuse a second-year colleague who had the audacity to grieve faculty plagiarism and the temerity to point out that the PSC does as it pleases when it is not a Star Chamber at the service of the dean.” Each quotation is an expository device—the PSC is never that candid!]

[Even worse, the Faculty Code neither authorizes the PSC to provide the parties the report nor forbids the PSC from doing so. The PSC’s “improved” reading is a misreading! Can anyone around here play this game?]

Our first lesson at detecting PC artifice and fabrication, then, is what Izzy Stone long ago told us: any modern government publishes so many decisions and rulings that sooner or later it will betray its misdeeds if one pays attention. Too bad we do not have an Izzy Stone to help out our easily misdirected, easily distracted, and easily acquiescent faculty.


Such flat-out contradictions rarely surface, so we need to be vigilant about other PC “tells.” A second device is to ask questions to reveal inconsistencies that have not surfaced on their own. For example, when the 2005-2006 PSC proposed that the 15 days within which the PSC must schedule a grievance hearing be amended to be 15 working days, all ten faculty in the know should have inquired [aloud, if they are tenured] why that had not already been done. After all, the authoritative interpreters of the code [the aforementioned PSC] declared it so for two grievances in December 2003. Does the PSC fear another yo-yo? What if a future PSC looks at the Faculty Code and" discovers" that “working” days was neither intended nor implied? How would the expedient delays of December 2003 then appear?


Confronted concerning such yo-yoing, the 2003-2004 PSC wrote to the Faculty Senate that their consciences were clear and that they made no apologies. As one senator responded, “That’s the problem!”

It was a problem. It is a problem. Cult-like decision-making will be a problem again and again. All that good citizens of the University of Puget Sound can do about PC cults is to catch them out when they are compelled to release materials. If a PC yo-yos and no one notices, con games and cant will frustrate faculty oversight and neuter faculty governance.


Next – Zone of Caprice – Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.