Old dogs [see an earlier entry, “Respectable, Reliability, Reputable,” regarding faculty dogs] at UPS know the usages of “civility” on campus. On the surface, civility exhorts faculty to exhibit politeness, tact, sensitivity, orthodoxy, and other artifices of manners and breeding. The latent meaning of civility on this campus is that the disadvantaged should cheerfully accept their lots and should protest, if at all, privately when colleagues backstab, corkscrew, prevaricate, dissimulate, or misstate. Both sorts of civility are called for when administrators, apparatchiks, and other decision-makers inform lesser faculty of what their betters have decided. This dual sense of “civil” may be labeled “meekspeak.”
Meekspeak is directional – one must kiss up but may piss down – so incivility toward one’s betters will be sanctioned more copiously than unpleasantness directed toward one’s inferiors. As preceding entries in this blog have shown, it is especially “uncivil” for colleagues who have been fired to protest that rules have violated or that there are no standards. After all:
1. Rules are violated by each such entity every year, so why bring up deviance in your case? Is everything about you, selfish?
2. Colleagues summon standards that they neither understand nor follow, so what difference would standards make? What are you, disappointed colleague, a lawyer?
The condemned are expected to accede to the superior wisdom of their departments, schools, or programs and to the superior judgment of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and one or more administrators. The fired should cooperate in their degradation and separation – for the greater glory of the university and comfort of faculty. At the “University of Puget Clowns,” respectable, reputable, reliable faculty meekly go along with the jokes from on high.
One is expected to kiss up even to faculty who have fired one, but selected faculty get to piss down as well. That top-down communications are often far from meek, civil, or decent was revealed anew when an attorney for the University informed the faculty that use of “personal and professional characteristics” violated the Faculty Code and risked litigation against the University and, in egregious cases, against individual evaluators. Old dogs who long for respect and often pronounce themselves responsible decision-makers [usually with some jibe at colleagues for being insufficiently rigorous] did not greet their legal responsibilities warmly on 17 April 2007.
Most faculty in the room greeted the attorney’s banal reaffirmations with a “Duh,” but a few old dogs struggled to propose ways in which they might snipe at or smear evaluees without risking legal reprisals. One yappy dog “recalled” that the faculty and trustees had banned personal characteristics but not professional characteristics and seemed to be aghast that personal and professional characteristics had both been excised from the Faculty Code. Well, implementing decisions of faculty and trustees within 12 years is rushing it for some of the slower dogs with weaker noses. A bulldog from the same department concocted hysterical hypotheticals in which he might be able to lob information from outside a file against an evaluee and seemed disconsolate that civil litigation might impair his ability to assail and to assault junior faculty. [Nietzsche warned us to distrust those whose most powerful urge is to punish.] Yet another member of the pack from that department then opined that he had objected to prognostications based on personal and professional characteristics more than the use of such characterizations themselves. A mad dog who ran away from the same department could not reprise his damnable misinformation that the faculty and trustees in 1994-1995 merely eliminated colleagues’ obligation but not their license to consider personal and professional characteristics.
While we may all hope that in the 10-12 years in which “personal and professional characteristics” has been proscribed none of these flouters of the express will of the trustees and the faculty have indulged themselves in forbidden assaults on evaluees, we know that each almost certainly has.
However, the far more interesting probability is that each has lamented some lack of civility and demanded more deference to veteran faculty over the years. Each has probably welcomed or rewarded meekspeak on numerous occasions, all the while lauding liberal learning and academic freedom.
What most interests me is how such colleagues can regard their behaviors and their advocacy as somehow “civil” within the manifest usage of the term.
Next: "F is for Fakery" -- When things are not quite what they seem, faculty enablers make deceptions and delusions work.
2 comments:
A possible explanation for certain limited circumstances:
From Machiavelli’s The Prince:
“[A] general rule is drawn which never or rarely fails: that he who is the cause of another becoming powerful is ruined; because that predominancy has been brought about either by astuteness or else by force, and both are distrusted by him who has been raised to power.”
In the environment herein described as being characterized by meek-speak, people sometimes greet plain speech--let alone angry speech--as if it were impolite. . . . I like to listen to crafty, intelligent diplomats like Madeline Albright speak because they seem to combine subtle speech and precise, plain speech deftly; the subtlety isn't meek, and the civility isn't wormy.
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