Some veterans, when confronted about the University’s buying its way out of its failings rather than correcting the failings, pose as sages: “Well, sometimes the payoff is the best thing.”
Not to make too much out of yet another thought-free remark from old parrots – I intend to make just enough out of it – faculty should realize two "A's" that buyouts betoken:
- Aversion to litigation and, even more, to exposure
- Affinity for unaccountability and irresponsibility.
Aversion to Litigation and especially Exposure
The Ad Hoc Committee on Tenure [AHCT] – the four fools who took accountability seriously, crafted findings bravely, and endured brickbats stoically – worried about the University’s procuring protection from litigation and from adverse publicity at too great a price. The AHCT asked whether the University was spending freely rather than using such less expensive means of warding off litigation as doing the right thing in the first place or policing processes and professors when they go awry. The AHCT hazarded a conjecture that following the Faculty Code might be cheaper than flouting the Faculty Code and paying off a few victims who secure legal representation, evidence from Ford’s Pinto litigation notwithstanding. However, once that ad hoc committee released findings at odds with pronouncements from Jones Hall, their concerns about payoffs largely disappeared beneath ostensibly methodological, actually mythological critique.
Colleagues who were not gulled by the caterwauling of those who can abide anything but candor were nonetheless taken in by the myth of litigious America. They assured themselves and others that Puget Sound would win the litigation but only after enormous legal bills, so that the better part of jural valor might be to throw money at colleagues who objected to being ill-used. [If you do not object to being ill-used, wait for the named chair in your future!] Why not let the school off cheap, they ask, before some benighted jury fails to understand that violations of the rules are actually evidence of fidelity to higher ideals. [It is distressing how few jurors have read 1984 as a guide to institutional self-help!]
Yet many buyouts come before victims have engaged counsel or contemplated litigation. The school is expending thousands of dollars to fend off lawsuits that might never be? I suppose the pre-emptive surgeries work, but removing tonsils and adenoids at birth seems precipitous.
Maybe the school actually wants to buy the silence of victims. The aggrieved must be shut up lest faculty, staff, students, or trustees be wised up. More than litigation or negotiation, the University fears exposure.
What if colleagues found out that a whistleblower was induced to take a buyout before the whistleblower’s file reached the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]? [Naturally, the serial plagiarist on whom the naïve junior faculty blew the whistle not only continued on the faculty but also participated in dismissing the whistleblower – exactly the sort of process with which unsophisticated jurors might have some difficulty!] Why need the University fear that a third-year review might be read by five faculty [on the FAC or a hearing board] sworn to secrecy? If the University worried that the negative letters might expose the University to litigation, wouldn’t it have been more straightforward and just to wait for a hearing board or the FAC to screen the file for unfairness, inadequacy, or incompleteness? Did the University fear that some faculty might conclude that more than 20 pages written against the whistleblower by the spouse of the serial plagiarist might fall short of the objectivity that the Faculty Code commands? [Another detail that pesky jurors might not understand!] Or was the worry that five or more professors might learn what the AHCT called “departmental meltdown?”
Affinity for Unaccountability and Irresponsibility
Buyouts, especially preemptory buyouts, do more than gag those in the know and protect practices and processes from exposure and judgment. They instruct the few faculty in the know that malefactors will not be held responsible or accountable.
Consider the erstwhile faculty plagiarist. How did a third-year assistant professor get through her departmental review unscathed after two of her plagiarized works were exposed by the whistleblower before deliberations? Most faculty probably will never know. Two witnesses to the departmental deliberation have been sent away. The remaining participants are unlikely to take responsibility for any ineffectual or indifferent responses to the revelations. The chair of the department had been informed about each plagiarism before the deliberations. What steps, if any, did he take? Did one or more departmental colleagues excuse or minimize the plagiarisms [one set imperiling a faculty co-author and one set endangering a then-undergraduate co-author]?
We have been told that the FAC “addressed” this matter. Exactly what does that mean? We cannot know, which is precisely why we are told only that the FAC spoke or wrote some words that had something to do with the file. More than that we are not permitted to learn.
The FAC recommends a disposition of the file to the Academic Vice President [AVP], who decides whether to reappoint a third-year assistant professor. Whatever addressing or recommending the FAC did, the AVP was ultimately charged to dispose of the matter. If a serial plagiarist was reappointed by the AVP – and since she was working in Fall Semester 2005 one might infer that she had been reappointed – how can colleagues believe that the AVP took the sets of plagiarisms seriously? Did that AVP inform himself about the particulars, or did he reach his decision without additional information? If we intone that the AVP took faculty plagiarism seriously, what does that say about colloquial usage of “taking seriously?”
And what of the whistleblower’s effort to acquaint the President with the sets of plagiarisms before the whistleblower left town? Did the President “take seriously” faculty plagiarism to such an extent that he refused to look at the evidence? The faculty do not know, courtesy of the buyout.
Some faculty had hoped that, when the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] was created to deal with, among other matters, campuswide disquiet over faculty plagiarism and its apparent mishandling [when it was handled at all], the AHCPS might answer some questions. Instead, the AHCPS issued no findings about faculty plagiarism. The AHCPS issued no explanation for why the formal grievance against the plagiarist was withdrawn. The AHCPS covered up anew, thereby completing the lack of accountability and the irresponsibility worked by buyouts. What a coincidence that senators who had attacked the earlier ad hoc committee welcomed the vacuities of the later committee's report!
When buyouts and payoffs obstruct accountability, responsibility, cognizance, and governance, Jones Hall's “Deal or No Deal” keeps faculty in the dark.
Next: "E is for Etiquette" -- When colleagues call for "civil" discourse, what they mean is mannered discourse that serves over-dogs better than under-dogs.
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