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.