Roman Catholic liturgy and Faculty Senate practices share some features.
Perhaps the most acute revelation of serving Roman Catholic mass was that liturgy mostly moves things along through mindless repetition. In the midst of the Latin Mass, the following rite was thought meaningful:
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
Congregation: Kyrie Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
Congregation: Christe Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Christe Eleison
Congregation: Christe Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
Congregation: Kyrie Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
What about this rite reminds me of the rites of the Faculty Senate?
First, amid a Latin service the Church slips in a little Greek because most of the congregation does not know the difference. Understanding neither Greek nor Latin, the assembled repeat what they learned by rote. Drop a catchphrase before the Faculty Senate and you’ll get the same response, albeit not with the creedal passion of Catholic youth.
Second, the liturgy probably predates Christianity and, thus, represents an accommodation of presumption and prejudices by rulers. In the same way over decades, administrators have accommodated faculty shibboleths – e. g., the faculty control the curriculum – while using the conformist majority of the senate to legitimize decanal depredations.
Third, the stylized surrender to the mob followed by reassertion of control makes this rite almost Kabuki Theater. Content to ask mercy from the Lord, the priest then confronts deviance in the second round when the crowd demands not Barabbas but that Christ give mercy. The priest gives in to the call for a singular lord to grant mercy, gets an echo from the congregation, then reasserts the more general “Lord, have mercy.” To this direction the crowd meekly submits. The Faculty Senate could not have staged a perfectly safe exertion of autonomy followed by meek submission better, but then the Church has had more practice and better command of classical languages.
Fourth, the stunning emptiness of the issue – Shall we appeal to the Lord for mercy or to Christ specifically? – reminds one of countless Senate meetings in which much ado was lavished on nothing and little or no ado was wasted on something. Electronic voting does not comport with bylaws regarding elections because electronic voters have no envelopes to sign? Holy plebiscite, Batman! Let’s change the bylaws post haste! The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] has for more than a decade flouted the demand of the bylaws that every committee have a chair? Let’s not bother with mere technicalities that might cost the FAC a minute or two each September before any files have reached the committee.
Next – "L Stands for Lilliput" – How much malfeasance at Puget Sound shall we attribute to its being a small school?
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
J Stands for Jokers and Jokes
Evaluators all too often consist of jokers rather than colleagues whose judgments should be taken seriously.
The University of Puget Clowns – a label that President Pierce repeatedly justified before and after she uttered it at graduation – must consistently replenish its bag of tricks and its complement of tricksters. While the sources of jokes – the folderol, fictions, flim-flam, factoids, figments, and fabrications that I have discussed above and will cover anew in future entries – vary, jokers recruited by departments and evaluated by departments, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], and one or more administrators tend to resemble one another. Viewed as mordant self-parody, the output of such jokers would be infotainment if the jokers were better informed or dispensed more information.
Because the process by which we staff the FAC is farcical, all too often the jokers who climb thereon augur jokes that will issue therefrom. I have remarked in this blog about features or factors that select for false-positives, faculty who should never have been hired or tenured or promoted. To eke out tenure or promotion increases one’s odds of nomination and appointment to the FAC. Of course, faculty nominate false-positives more often relative to their proportion in the faculty than false-negatives because most false-negatives are being shown the exit. Perhaps faculty nominate false-positives more often than true-positives relative to their proportion in the faculty because colleagues hope that someone who has been subjected to savagery, fickleness, and unfairness might be especially sensitive to miscarriages of procedural or substantive justice. Perhaps this sensitivity to injustices inheres immediately after monkeys escape false-positives’ asses.
Of course, false-positives are usually more available for service on the FAC than faculty who are more talented and accomplished. Other service demands talent, efficiency, and effectiveness to a far greater extent than the FAC. The FAC functions more smoothly with faculty who will follow the choreography and mark stage directions. Critical, analytic, or intellectual faculties get in the way of scripts and foil hoaxes and pranks. You cannot have buffoons actually running into one another as they race around. Someone other than evaluees might get hurt. The buffoons must cooperate in operatic obtuseness and dramatized obliviousness. The FAC's routines can withstand only so much independence, intelligence, and integrity.
However recruited, jokers are socialized by the FAC in much the way that departmental jokers are indoctrinated by programs or schools. As this blog has shown, the FAC overlooks, circumvents, or flouts rules when it pleases to, so the Faculty Bylaws and the Faculty Code shape boilerplate more and more foten than they shape decision-making. In challenging cases, the FAC augments extant authority with figments and folderol. This provides members ample wiggle room, for they may invoke the letter or spirit of rules when the rules get them where they want to go but deviate when they feel a whim coming on or when they may court favor with administrators or colleagues. The process described in rules and procedures provides the set-up; absurd decisions deliver the punch line. Zaniness ensues.
FAC gags are inevitable because explicit flaws in procedures yield risible results irrespective of substantive merits. In any review during the third year of an assistant professor, for instance, the Faculty Code directs that the FAC recommend reappointment [or not] to the Academic Vice President [AVP]. The AVP then makes a decision that is not subject to any explicit criteria or standards.
One great flaw in this process is that the AVP sits with the FAC while the FAC is deciding what to recommend. The FAC considers the file and recommends to the AVP, who has been sitting in the room all along! Members of the FAC easily learn of the AVP’s concerns and orientation. The AVP automatically learns the issues and concerns lurking behind the official letter. The FAC releases to the evaluee and her or his department a rationalization of the committee’s recommendation(s), but a host of considerations, suspicions, and pretexts never make the FAC letter although they made the FAC’s decision.
The potential for groupthink to prevail and for other forms of cross-fertilization or cross-contamination to afflict decisions should be obvious to everyone except a practiced FAC apologist. The code nearly guarantees collusion in hackneyed [yet inadvertent] humor.
In third-year assistant reviews as in other momentous evaluations, FAC letters are redolent of stale shtick and practiced pratfalls from the moment that the diminutive FAC fire truck pulls into the center ring under the big top that is the University of Puget Clowns.
"Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am / ..."
Next -- "K stands for Kyrie eleison" --
The University of Puget Clowns – a label that President Pierce repeatedly justified before and after she uttered it at graduation – must consistently replenish its bag of tricks and its complement of tricksters. While the sources of jokes – the folderol, fictions, flim-flam, factoids, figments, and fabrications that I have discussed above and will cover anew in future entries – vary, jokers recruited by departments and evaluated by departments, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], and one or more administrators tend to resemble one another. Viewed as mordant self-parody, the output of such jokers would be infotainment if the jokers were better informed or dispensed more information.
Because the process by which we staff the FAC is farcical, all too often the jokers who climb thereon augur jokes that will issue therefrom. I have remarked in this blog about features or factors that select for false-positives, faculty who should never have been hired or tenured or promoted. To eke out tenure or promotion increases one’s odds of nomination and appointment to the FAC. Of course, faculty nominate false-positives more often relative to their proportion in the faculty than false-negatives because most false-negatives are being shown the exit. Perhaps faculty nominate false-positives more often than true-positives relative to their proportion in the faculty because colleagues hope that someone who has been subjected to savagery, fickleness, and unfairness might be especially sensitive to miscarriages of procedural or substantive justice. Perhaps this sensitivity to injustices inheres immediately after monkeys escape false-positives’ asses.
Of course, false-positives are usually more available for service on the FAC than faculty who are more talented and accomplished. Other service demands talent, efficiency, and effectiveness to a far greater extent than the FAC. The FAC functions more smoothly with faculty who will follow the choreography and mark stage directions. Critical, analytic, or intellectual faculties get in the way of scripts and foil hoaxes and pranks. You cannot have buffoons actually running into one another as they race around. Someone other than evaluees might get hurt. The buffoons must cooperate in operatic obtuseness and dramatized obliviousness. The FAC's routines can withstand only so much independence, intelligence, and integrity.
However recruited, jokers are socialized by the FAC in much the way that departmental jokers are indoctrinated by programs or schools. As this blog has shown, the FAC overlooks, circumvents, or flouts rules when it pleases to, so the Faculty Bylaws and the Faculty Code shape boilerplate more and more foten than they shape decision-making. In challenging cases, the FAC augments extant authority with figments and folderol. This provides members ample wiggle room, for they may invoke the letter or spirit of rules when the rules get them where they want to go but deviate when they feel a whim coming on or when they may court favor with administrators or colleagues. The process described in rules and procedures provides the set-up; absurd decisions deliver the punch line. Zaniness ensues.
FAC gags are inevitable because explicit flaws in procedures yield risible results irrespective of substantive merits. In any review during the third year of an assistant professor, for instance, the Faculty Code directs that the FAC recommend reappointment [or not] to the Academic Vice President [AVP]. The AVP then makes a decision that is not subject to any explicit criteria or standards.
One great flaw in this process is that the AVP sits with the FAC while the FAC is deciding what to recommend. The FAC considers the file and recommends to the AVP, who has been sitting in the room all along! Members of the FAC easily learn of the AVP’s concerns and orientation. The AVP automatically learns the issues and concerns lurking behind the official letter. The FAC releases to the evaluee and her or his department a rationalization of the committee’s recommendation(s), but a host of considerations, suspicions, and pretexts never make the FAC letter although they made the FAC’s decision.
The potential for groupthink to prevail and for other forms of cross-fertilization or cross-contamination to afflict decisions should be obvious to everyone except a practiced FAC apologist. The code nearly guarantees collusion in hackneyed [yet inadvertent] humor.
In third-year assistant reviews as in other momentous evaluations, FAC letters are redolent of stale shtick and practiced pratfalls from the moment that the diminutive FAC fire truck pulls into the center ring under the big top that is the University of Puget Clowns.
"Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am / ..."
Next -- "K stands for Kyrie eleison" --
Thursday, May 10, 2007
I is for Inter-disciplinary
If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary or interstitial.
At the University of Puget Sound, ironic labels rule. The “Susan Resneck Pierce Atrium” is a foyer, not an atrium. Ostensibly endowed chairs have no matching funds but all the pedigree and fecundity of a mule. A colleague is named the “Alfred Packer Professor of Culinary Studies” despite his inability to boil water or make S’mores. Racial and ethnic “diversity” are fabricated largely absent Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. And “inter-disciplinary” programs do not cross disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of truth so much as they elude disciplines in pursuit of marketing.
Take International Political Economy [IPE]. At most universities across the United States, IPE is a quarter or a third of International Relations, one of four or so official subfields of Political Science. What makes UPS think that a sub-sub-discipline crosses disciplinary lines? Ironic labels do.
If one calls a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs do most dogs have? Four – because calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make a dog’s tail a leg. If one calls a certain breed of dog a cross between a dog and bear, that does not make the critter inter-speciated unless reifying ironic expressions and substituting labels for actualities is an institutional habit.
This is yet another “Iron Law of Emulation.” Curricular con artists adorn some existing sub-sub-discipline with dilettante doo-dads and wannabe widgets to hoodwink the unwary [students, parents, the Curriculum Committee, and trustees] but, so they will not lose recruits to pre-existing majors, copy the name of the established area of study. Professors eager to “branch out” and departments that long to be rid of dabblers untrained in what they now would teach dignify their exodus with marketing slogans. “Political economy” sounds like it ought to cross disciplinary lines, despite the dozen or more offerings in Politics and Government that concern political economy among other things and several in Economics that do the same. “International Studies” will not work because that is what the offshoot actually is or resembles. Where is the ease of emulation, the security of redundancy, or the thrill of deception in that?
At UPS, programs soon enough will be taken for what the faculty wish they were. The labeling and the marketing work. IPE has become at once inner-disciplinary [that is, enlarging a part of a part of Political Science into a major] and interstitial far more than inter-disciplinary. Interstitiality is effected by excluding from the enterprise those disciplines whose boundaries are allegedly being crossed. The most demanding, most discipline-specific features of economics and of political science must be diluted or dispensed with altogether to create the mislabeled international studies program that UPS knows as IPE.
Dilettantism was the inevitable result once the mislabeling had been executed. Marketing expenditures and extra-campus publicity dictated that the enterprise not be allowed to fail. Courses had to be staffed, so IPE turned to colleagues with credentials, expertise, and experience at best peripheral to economics or to political science. Such instructors proclaimed to be crossing disciplinary boundaries careened across, around, and about the edges of disciplines about which they knew little or nothing. They might have made excellent dabblers for an international studies multi-disciplinary program, but they were scarcely fit for inner-disciplinary or interstitial work.
Those who guard the borders of longstanding disciplines do condemn work that “falls between the stools” of established lines of study, so truly inter-disciplinary incursions or excursions are needful. Truly inter-disciplinary work, however, does not consist in declaring that one missed the barstools because the barroom floor is a frontier of learning. Still less does work become inter-disciplinary through throes of anti-disciplinary humbug [see www2.ups.edu/ipe/whatisipe.htm] by which the floor is declared to be up and the barstools down.
At the University of Puget Sound, ironic labels rule. The “Susan Resneck Pierce Atrium” is a foyer, not an atrium. Ostensibly endowed chairs have no matching funds but all the pedigree and fecundity of a mule. A colleague is named the “Alfred Packer Professor of Culinary Studies” despite his inability to boil water or make S’mores. Racial and ethnic “diversity” are fabricated largely absent Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. And “inter-disciplinary” programs do not cross disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of truth so much as they elude disciplines in pursuit of marketing.
Take International Political Economy [IPE]. At most universities across the United States, IPE is a quarter or a third of International Relations, one of four or so official subfields of Political Science. What makes UPS think that a sub-sub-discipline crosses disciplinary lines? Ironic labels do.
If one calls a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs do most dogs have? Four – because calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make a dog’s tail a leg. If one calls a certain breed of dog a cross between a dog and bear, that does not make the critter inter-speciated unless reifying ironic expressions and substituting labels for actualities is an institutional habit.
This is yet another “Iron Law of Emulation.” Curricular con artists adorn some existing sub-sub-discipline with dilettante doo-dads and wannabe widgets to hoodwink the unwary [students, parents, the Curriculum Committee, and trustees] but, so they will not lose recruits to pre-existing majors, copy the name of the established area of study. Professors eager to “branch out” and departments that long to be rid of dabblers untrained in what they now would teach dignify their exodus with marketing slogans. “Political economy” sounds like it ought to cross disciplinary lines, despite the dozen or more offerings in Politics and Government that concern political economy among other things and several in Economics that do the same. “International Studies” will not work because that is what the offshoot actually is or resembles. Where is the ease of emulation, the security of redundancy, or the thrill of deception in that?
At UPS, programs soon enough will be taken for what the faculty wish they were. The labeling and the marketing work. IPE has become at once inner-disciplinary [that is, enlarging a part of a part of Political Science into a major] and interstitial far more than inter-disciplinary. Interstitiality is effected by excluding from the enterprise those disciplines whose boundaries are allegedly being crossed. The most demanding, most discipline-specific features of economics and of political science must be diluted or dispensed with altogether to create the mislabeled international studies program that UPS knows as IPE.
Dilettantism was the inevitable result once the mislabeling had been executed. Marketing expenditures and extra-campus publicity dictated that the enterprise not be allowed to fail. Courses had to be staffed, so IPE turned to colleagues with credentials, expertise, and experience at best peripheral to economics or to political science. Such instructors proclaimed to be crossing disciplinary boundaries careened across, around, and about the edges of disciplines about which they knew little or nothing. They might have made excellent dabblers for an international studies multi-disciplinary program, but they were scarcely fit for inner-disciplinary or interstitial work.
Those who guard the borders of longstanding disciplines do condemn work that “falls between the stools” of established lines of study, so truly inter-disciplinary incursions or excursions are needful. Truly inter-disciplinary work, however, does not consist in declaring that one missed the barstools because the barroom floor is a frontier of learning. Still less does work become inter-disciplinary through throes of anti-disciplinary humbug [see www2.ups.edu/ipe/whatisipe.htm] by which the floor is declared to be up and the barstools down.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
H is for Half-Assed
Between administrators and apparatchiks above and rank-and-file faculty below lie the tools and fools of the Faculty Senate.
Previous entries in this blog have covered the deceptions and delusions of rulers [e. g., administrators and apparatchiks] and the attention-deficit disorders of the ruled [except when more than $1.27 of their benefits or some empty praise focuses their appetites]. Between rulers and ruled the Faculty Senate occasionally surfaces: a dozen or so faculty perpetually in search of courage and purpose who perpetually content themselves with half-measures in service of their betters. Half-afraid and half-annoyed, the half-wits of the Senate form a halfway house of enablers always half a step from licking ass and faking aims.
The Senate meeting on 7 May 2007 revealed anew the canine pleasantries [see the entry on responsible, reputable, reliable faculty dogs] of senators. The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had flouted the Faculty Bylaws [hereafter, Bylaws] despite repeated notice from the Senate and elsewhere that the Bylaws mandate that each committee have a Chairperson. The FAC has no chair. It is fortunate for the FAC scofflaws, therefore, that the Faculty Senate has neither integrity nor intestinal fortitude.
The Chair of the Faculty Senate half-pusillanimously pandered that one passage of the Bylaws might be read to permit the FAC to report to the Senate despite its chairlessness. Good point, sir! If only O. J. Simpson had thought to point out how many Commandments do not proscribe murder!
Numerous senators reiterated their fidelity to the bylaws, then turned away from confrontation and retreated behind “Let’s make just this one exception for now.” Imagine that marines resembled faculty senators. “Semper fi!” would be replaced by “Semper flee!” “Gung ho!” would give way to “Gangway!” On the other hand, were the Faculty Senate the Marines, the United States would be out of Iraq: senators would have invaded Iceland in the first place and would have determined that occupying geysers was an important first step toward capturing the populace. "Today the spa; tomorrow space, the final frontier!"
The Academic Vice President [AVP] mumbled half-truths easily debunked by two veterans of the FAC, neither of whom cared or dared to point out that the interchangeability and equality of FAC members were truer by assumption than in actuality. One senator did note that such arguments, even if true, would be irrelevant. The Bylaws make no exceptions for committee Kum Ba Yah. The absence of an exception did not impress the AVP, who dismissed the rules as some "technicality." Yet another member of the Professional Standards Committee yet again transcends mere rules. As Peter Townshend might have put it, “Meet the new boss / The same as the old boss.”
All but two of the senators acknowledged what the Bylaws commanded, praised principle, and emulated Byron’s Julia: “And whispering 'I will ne'er consent' – consented.” Profiles in Porridge!
To summarize: the FAC continues ostensibly semi-cephalus; the Faculty Senate persists blissfully quasi-gonadal; the faculty suffer blindly pseudo-governing.
Next -- "I is for Inter-disciplinary" -- If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary.
Previous entries in this blog have covered the deceptions and delusions of rulers [e. g., administrators and apparatchiks] and the attention-deficit disorders of the ruled [except when more than $1.27 of their benefits or some empty praise focuses their appetites]. Between rulers and ruled the Faculty Senate occasionally surfaces: a dozen or so faculty perpetually in search of courage and purpose who perpetually content themselves with half-measures in service of their betters. Half-afraid and half-annoyed, the half-wits of the Senate form a halfway house of enablers always half a step from licking ass and faking aims.
The Senate meeting on 7 May 2007 revealed anew the canine pleasantries [see the entry on responsible, reputable, reliable faculty dogs] of senators. The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had flouted the Faculty Bylaws [hereafter, Bylaws] despite repeated notice from the Senate and elsewhere that the Bylaws mandate that each committee have a Chairperson. The FAC has no chair. It is fortunate for the FAC scofflaws, therefore, that the Faculty Senate has neither integrity nor intestinal fortitude.
The Chair of the Faculty Senate half-pusillanimously pandered that one passage of the Bylaws might be read to permit the FAC to report to the Senate despite its chairlessness. Good point, sir! If only O. J. Simpson had thought to point out how many Commandments do not proscribe murder!
Numerous senators reiterated their fidelity to the bylaws, then turned away from confrontation and retreated behind “Let’s make just this one exception for now.” Imagine that marines resembled faculty senators. “Semper fi!” would be replaced by “Semper flee!” “Gung ho!” would give way to “Gangway!” On the other hand, were the Faculty Senate the Marines, the United States would be out of Iraq: senators would have invaded Iceland in the first place and would have determined that occupying geysers was an important first step toward capturing the populace. "Today the spa; tomorrow space, the final frontier!"
The Academic Vice President [AVP] mumbled half-truths easily debunked by two veterans of the FAC, neither of whom cared or dared to point out that the interchangeability and equality of FAC members were truer by assumption than in actuality. One senator did note that such arguments, even if true, would be irrelevant. The Bylaws make no exceptions for committee Kum Ba Yah. The absence of an exception did not impress the AVP, who dismissed the rules as some "technicality." Yet another member of the Professional Standards Committee yet again transcends mere rules. As Peter Townshend might have put it, “Meet the new boss / The same as the old boss.”
All but two of the senators acknowledged what the Bylaws commanded, praised principle, and emulated Byron’s Julia: “And whispering 'I will ne'er consent' – consented.” Profiles in Porridge!
To summarize: the FAC continues ostensibly semi-cephalus; the Faculty Senate persists blissfully quasi-gonadal; the faculty suffer blindly pseudo-governing.
Next -- "I is for Inter-disciplinary" -- If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
G is for Guile
Rank-and-file faculty collude in fakery when they trust guileful communications.
The immediately previous entry in this blog argued that we faculty must assist fakery if various shams are to come off. The credulous among us are to an extent blameworthy, for if frauds concerned our own promotions or programs we each would be quick to deconstruct ersatz communications. Concerning malfeasances and nonfeasances, we usually do not know because we do not want to know.
Even more blameworthy, however, are wily communicators, especially decision-makers who explain away or excuse their chicanery. It is a pity that colleagues become too caught up in their own careers, families, and affairs to be critical or even attentive. An expectation of lenient, lazy audiences for explanations and excuses has emboldened the guileful, who disrespect the analytic capacities of almost all faculty.
Consider a paragraph written by one or more members of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of the 2003-2004 academic year. That group responded to an empty motion barely passed by the Faculty Senate on 5 February 2007 within two weeks, a remarkable feat for a committee that could not hear a grievance within the 15 days that the Faculty Code mandates. [It was of course encouraging to learn that these colleagues could react quickly when they cared to.]
Given the passage of this motion, one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC. Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation. Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006. In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.
Let us consider each sentence in turn to reveal the guile of these special pleaders.
[1] “… one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC.”
Someone who read the minutes of 5 February 2007 – minutes not yet approved and thus not yet available to senators, let alone to others – might presume that the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation, if that someone were ignorant of Senate meetings and minutes from 3 May 2004 to the present.
As respondents knew or should have known, the Senate had been stonewalled by those who endorsed the response. The Senate had appointed two ad hoc committees to investigate, among other matters, perfidies perpetrated by the PSC 2003-2004. One committee found – as any impartial, complete investigation would have to find – PSC violations of the Faculty Code. Members of the latter ad hoc committee witnessed the abuse of the first ad hoc committee by apologists and apparatchiks, which may account for why that committee’s report [October 2006] featured no findings.
The response thus reveals a tactic that the PSC has cunningly deployed for years: spin trivially true but utterly misleading. True, the Senate could be said never to have investigated PSC misprisions carefully. The Senate did not do so; two ad hoc committees appointed by the Senate did. True, the Senate had not found mistakes after a careful investigation; the Senate did so after two ad hoc committees had found mistakes [albeit that the second ad hoc committee did not issue explicit findings].
Maybe the respondents used “conclude” rather than “infer” or “assume” or other more apt terms because the respondents so routinely leapt to self-serving conclusions in 2003-2004 that they cannot imagine peers proceeding more systematically. [In fairness, the response may have been a rush job to which erstwhile members of the PSC gave too little thought. Usually, the PSC takes its time before reaching thoughtless interpretations and indefensible decisions.]
[2] “Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation.”
The key subterfuge of this second sentence has been debunked supra: the Senate conducted no such investigation but assigned two ad hoc committees to do so. The second ad hoc committee sought interveiws with members of the 2003-2004 PSC despite explicit warnings from two members of that committee to senators that confidentiality would prevent any member of the PSC from cooperating. [Recall from early entries in this blog that such statements are at best erroneous and, if members of the PSC are as familiar with the Faculty Code as they habitually claim, mendacious.]
[3] “Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006.”
This is a “nondenial denial,” the technique Ron Ziegler made famous in Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein lampooned in All the President’s Men. The respondents do not specify which allegations, if any, they believe to be the least bit inaccurate. They do not deny the allegations. Instead, they dispute the procedures by which a majority of senators came to hear and to believe the allegations. [One should not fault the response for its nondenial denials. Most if not all of Senator Ostrom’s allegations cannot plausibly be denied, as the failure of the response to specify even one example should reveal.]
[4] “In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.”
One familiar with the PSC cannot but marvel at the chutzpah of the PSC in this fourth sentence. Members who unanimously flouted the Faculty Code and due process on multiple occasions in 2003-2004 now charge the Senate with failure(s) of due process. Members who have steadfastly stonewalled senators’ attempts to gather evidence or testimony complain that the Senate did not gather evidence from all parties. The very people most responsible for the Senate’s having to work around uncooperative, unaccountable colleagues blame the Senate for proceeding with what little they themselves left the Senate. The PSC kills its parents then pleads for mercy because it is now an orphan.
This risible paragraph ought to embarrass every colleague who assented to it, but it will not because the PSC members have no audience before which to be embarrassed. How many faculty will trouble themselves to read the Faculty Code to discover that the PSC’s extravagant claims about confidentiality are folderol? How many faculty read Senate minutes, especially a response from a long-ago committee to a nearly meaningless motion? Among those who read the minutes, how many will be able to deconstruct the four sentences in the second paragraph, let alone cunning phrasings throughout the response?
To ask those three questions is to answer them. To answer them is to understand how workaday faculty collude in the acts of rogue committees and tyrannical administrators. Until more faculty participate in governance, faculty committees will remain unaccountable and, from time to time, unconscionable.
Therefore, let us not thunder at the PSC, "How dare you?" The PSC's audacity follows from faculty lassitude.
Next -- "H is for Half-Assed" -- The Faculty Senate goes off half-cocked unless it might displease administrators.
The immediately previous entry in this blog argued that we faculty must assist fakery if various shams are to come off. The credulous among us are to an extent blameworthy, for if frauds concerned our own promotions or programs we each would be quick to deconstruct ersatz communications. Concerning malfeasances and nonfeasances, we usually do not know because we do not want to know.
Even more blameworthy, however, are wily communicators, especially decision-makers who explain away or excuse their chicanery. It is a pity that colleagues become too caught up in their own careers, families, and affairs to be critical or even attentive. An expectation of lenient, lazy audiences for explanations and excuses has emboldened the guileful, who disrespect the analytic capacities of almost all faculty.
Consider a paragraph written by one or more members of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of the 2003-2004 academic year. That group responded to an empty motion barely passed by the Faculty Senate on 5 February 2007 within two weeks, a remarkable feat for a committee that could not hear a grievance within the 15 days that the Faculty Code mandates. [It was of course encouraging to learn that these colleagues could react quickly when they cared to.]
Given the passage of this motion, one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC. Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation. Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006. In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.
Let us consider each sentence in turn to reveal the guile of these special pleaders.
[1] “… one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC.”
Someone who read the minutes of 5 February 2007 – minutes not yet approved and thus not yet available to senators, let alone to others – might presume that the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation, if that someone were ignorant of Senate meetings and minutes from 3 May 2004 to the present.
As respondents knew or should have known, the Senate had been stonewalled by those who endorsed the response. The Senate had appointed two ad hoc committees to investigate, among other matters, perfidies perpetrated by the PSC 2003-2004. One committee found – as any impartial, complete investigation would have to find – PSC violations of the Faculty Code. Members of the latter ad hoc committee witnessed the abuse of the first ad hoc committee by apologists and apparatchiks, which may account for why that committee’s report [October 2006] featured no findings.
The response thus reveals a tactic that the PSC has cunningly deployed for years: spin trivially true but utterly misleading. True, the Senate could be said never to have investigated PSC misprisions carefully. The Senate did not do so; two ad hoc committees appointed by the Senate did. True, the Senate had not found mistakes after a careful investigation; the Senate did so after two ad hoc committees had found mistakes [albeit that the second ad hoc committee did not issue explicit findings].
Maybe the respondents used “conclude” rather than “infer” or “assume” or other more apt terms because the respondents so routinely leapt to self-serving conclusions in 2003-2004 that they cannot imagine peers proceeding more systematically. [In fairness, the response may have been a rush job to which erstwhile members of the PSC gave too little thought. Usually, the PSC takes its time before reaching thoughtless interpretations and indefensible decisions.]
[2] “Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation.”
The key subterfuge of this second sentence has been debunked supra: the Senate conducted no such investigation but assigned two ad hoc committees to do so. The second ad hoc committee sought interveiws with members of the 2003-2004 PSC despite explicit warnings from two members of that committee to senators that confidentiality would prevent any member of the PSC from cooperating. [Recall from early entries in this blog that such statements are at best erroneous and, if members of the PSC are as familiar with the Faculty Code as they habitually claim, mendacious.]
[3] “Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006.”
This is a “nondenial denial,” the technique Ron Ziegler made famous in Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein lampooned in All the President’s Men. The respondents do not specify which allegations, if any, they believe to be the least bit inaccurate. They do not deny the allegations. Instead, they dispute the procedures by which a majority of senators came to hear and to believe the allegations. [One should not fault the response for its nondenial denials. Most if not all of Senator Ostrom’s allegations cannot plausibly be denied, as the failure of the response to specify even one example should reveal.]
[4] “In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.”
One familiar with the PSC cannot but marvel at the chutzpah of the PSC in this fourth sentence. Members who unanimously flouted the Faculty Code and due process on multiple occasions in 2003-2004 now charge the Senate with failure(s) of due process. Members who have steadfastly stonewalled senators’ attempts to gather evidence or testimony complain that the Senate did not gather evidence from all parties. The very people most responsible for the Senate’s having to work around uncooperative, unaccountable colleagues blame the Senate for proceeding with what little they themselves left the Senate. The PSC kills its parents then pleads for mercy because it is now an orphan.
This risible paragraph ought to embarrass every colleague who assented to it, but it will not because the PSC members have no audience before which to be embarrassed. How many faculty will trouble themselves to read the Faculty Code to discover that the PSC’s extravagant claims about confidentiality are folderol? How many faculty read Senate minutes, especially a response from a long-ago committee to a nearly meaningless motion? Among those who read the minutes, how many will be able to deconstruct the four sentences in the second paragraph, let alone cunning phrasings throughout the response?
To ask those three questions is to answer them. To answer them is to understand how workaday faculty collude in the acts of rogue committees and tyrannical administrators. Until more faculty participate in governance, faculty committees will remain unaccountable and, from time to time, unconscionable.
Therefore, let us not thunder at the PSC, "How dare you?" The PSC's audacity follows from faculty lassitude.
Next -- "H is for Half-Assed" -- The Faculty Senate goes off half-cocked unless it might displease administrators.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
F is for Fakery
When things are not quite what they seem, faculty enable deceptions and delusions.
At the University of Puget Clowns [so called by President Pierce at graduation], administrators and apparatchiks rely on audience participation. As sad-sack deans, slapstick chairs, and supporting jesters engage in deliberate irony and inadvertent parody, rank and file faculty must suspend disbelief, credit performances, and accept verisimilitude as verity.
Most of the time, ordinary faculty suspend disbelief easily because most performances approximate reality. Many professors that the Faculty Advancement Committee (FAC) dubs distinguished, for example, have outperformed colleagues. Many recipients of teaching awards are good teachers. Many promotions are merited. These decisions at least roughly meet standards, criteria, and expectations and need little or no help or credence from faculty enablers.
From time to time, the FAC will deviate from rules or expectations and will have to counterfeit honors, designations, or decisions. When this happens, faculty enablers are indispensable. Colleagues must under such circumstances believe the unbelievable, credit the incredible, and deny the undeniable. More, colleagues must shore up accounts where they are obviously faulty lest innocents who are not enablers catch on to the fakery.
As we saw in “Evaluating Committee Performance,” an earlier entry in this blog, whatever social production appears to be exactly what one would expect probably is what it seems; if a performance is not what it seems, most likely it is a perfect fake (as Erving Goffman taught us).
Veteran faculty routinely perfect fakery to nudge the FAC within range of practice and precedents. A few colleagues stretch the facts or bury inconvenient truths to enable the FAC to award a mediocrity a teaching award; far more colleagues at the Fall Faculty Dinner clap politely and avoid obvious mismatches between the evidence and the outcome. When a colleague who is distinguished from other full professors mostly or only in a negative direction is designated “Distinguished,” colleagues avert their eyes at the Fall Faculty Dinner then acted surprised that such designees claim to be “Distinguished” on business cards or on correspondence as if such designation were equivalent to “Distinguished Professor of This or That” at a genuine university. Colleagues must assist in the fakery.
So when next one marvels at ersatz evaluation, give some thought to the bozos piling out of the little car. They perform their parts so that featured actors can fake out the unwary.
At the University of Puget Clowns [so called by President Pierce at graduation], administrators and apparatchiks rely on audience participation. As sad-sack deans, slapstick chairs, and supporting jesters engage in deliberate irony and inadvertent parody, rank and file faculty must suspend disbelief, credit performances, and accept verisimilitude as verity.
Most of the time, ordinary faculty suspend disbelief easily because most performances approximate reality. Many professors that the Faculty Advancement Committee (FAC) dubs distinguished, for example, have outperformed colleagues. Many recipients of teaching awards are good teachers. Many promotions are merited. These decisions at least roughly meet standards, criteria, and expectations and need little or no help or credence from faculty enablers.
From time to time, the FAC will deviate from rules or expectations and will have to counterfeit honors, designations, or decisions. When this happens, faculty enablers are indispensable. Colleagues must under such circumstances believe the unbelievable, credit the incredible, and deny the undeniable. More, colleagues must shore up accounts where they are obviously faulty lest innocents who are not enablers catch on to the fakery.
As we saw in “Evaluating Committee Performance,” an earlier entry in this blog, whatever social production appears to be exactly what one would expect probably is what it seems; if a performance is not what it seems, most likely it is a perfect fake (as Erving Goffman taught us).
Veteran faculty routinely perfect fakery to nudge the FAC within range of practice and precedents. A few colleagues stretch the facts or bury inconvenient truths to enable the FAC to award a mediocrity a teaching award; far more colleagues at the Fall Faculty Dinner clap politely and avoid obvious mismatches between the evidence and the outcome. When a colleague who is distinguished from other full professors mostly or only in a negative direction is designated “Distinguished,” colleagues avert their eyes at the Fall Faculty Dinner then acted surprised that such designees claim to be “Distinguished” on business cards or on correspondence as if such designation were equivalent to “Distinguished Professor of This or That” at a genuine university. Colleagues must assist in the fakery.
So when next one marvels at ersatz evaluation, give some thought to the bozos piling out of the little car. They perform their parts so that featured actors can fake out the unwary.
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