Zone of Caprice

Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.

The “Zone of Caprice” may be defined as the distance between the qualifications of the finest person denied tenure [called a “false negative” below] and the qualifications of the worst person granted tenure [that is, a “false positive” infra]. The polar false positive is less meritorious than the polar false negative, creating a gap. At least one false negative was a better teacher and a better scholar than the worst false positive was or is, which means that other factors account for the dismissal of the better and the retention of the worse.

Firings of false negatives probably occasion more outcry, but the tenure of the false positives did the University more damage. The opportunity costs of dismissing great teachers and terrific scholars are difficult to cal­culate. The net costs of keeping incompetents on staff for decades seem more readily ap­parent over time.

Those costs, however, are particularized and minuscule relative to the institutional price exacted when processes belie procedures and when standards in theory are super­seded by standards as practiced. I am not, of course, referring to fathomable dif­ferences of opinion. I write of flouting of rules abetted by the cynical confidence that most colleagues won’t notice and that the few who do notice won’t protest loudly or long.

If some louts do protest, the Confidentiality Con, some doubletalk and double­think, Rovian denials, and high dudgeon worthy of Bill O’Reilly will be aimed at the hooligans. Bereft of allies in the Faculty Senate or elsewhere, the hooligans howl in vain amid indifference and obliviousness as the departed slip away from almost all faculty.

The false positives have nowhere else to go. They stick around to remind us of the gulf between those wrongly rewarded and most of the faculty. That part of the zone of caprice every faculty member may see if she or he wants to see. [Most do not want to see and do not acknowledge the false positives except if a false positive offends.] The other part of the zone of caprice – the myriad resemblances between the rejected and the mass of the tenured and all too often the manifest superiority of the rejected to the mass of those accepted – is usually hidden by lapsing memory and fatigue, by apologetics and secrecy, and by perfidy and stupidity.

Even worse, colleagues whose tenure or promotion or promotions are inexplicable are disproportionately likely to end up on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Because many faculty expect that colleagues who barely scraped by or were saved from just deserts will be flaccid, forgiving decision-makers, folks who never truly met standards for tenure or promotion(s) will stand better odds of making the FAC than those who truly merited tenure or promotion(s). Need I add that expectations of laxity are often dashed when the unworthy retaliate for their being undeserving by punishing the worthy for outstripping the unworthy; or when some feeb saved by an administrator pays his or her debt to the administrator by becoming a very reliable vote [which often is what saved the feeb in the first place]; or when the very vices that made the improvidently rewarded fall short of standards also impair performance on the FAC; or when the patronized would like to impress their patrons to secure other patronage?

The zone and the caprice are systemic features of our community. Arbitrariness and patronage not only accumulate but proliferate. If false negatives occasionally fail upwards, the false positives consistently make our university less than it might have been.


Next – “Advanced Accounting” – How the FAC actually works.