Fear faculty malevolence less than faculty mediocrity because many colleagues are trying to hide a lack of talent already widely perceived.
Every educational institution will have mediocre faculty. Any school that has not given up hope will make some efforts to improve its faculty so that the unavoidable mediocrity presently at their school surpasses the unavoidable mediocrity in the past. Of course, exaggerating the mediocrity of faculty no longer present is the easiest way to simulate “progress” without the trouble of achieving advancement.
The University of Puget Sound has elevated its mediocrity over the last decades. When President Phibbs and Dean Davis determined to turn a jock-and-party school in North Tacoma [remember that such a retroctive characterization is more than a little convenient to "measuring" Phibbs' and Davis's progress!] into a national liberal arts school, oral historians inform us, they had to replace sinecures with more productive faculty. Because Phibbs and Davis could raise the centroid of the faculty but a little in reality, top-down imagery and bottom-up fakery raced ahead of faculty capacity. Indeed, the University rewrote its Faculty Code to conjure a faculty beyond Lake Wobegon – not merely all above average, everyone tenured is declared excellent in teaching and excellent in professional growth. [If you immediately inferred that some colleagues got tenure without being excellent either at teaching or at professional growth, you have been paying attention.]
For many years since, administrators and apparatchiks have skillfully exploited public-relations multipliers to seek in flim-flam what they could not secure in fact. They could not counterfeit quality on their own, so patronage and clientage complemented public relations. Patronage had to be skillfully targeted toward would-be apparatchiks who would never flirt with critical or independent perspective and who would be unlikely to achieve or to merit glory or respect among faculty by other means. Thus, patronage flowed to mediocrities.
However, the sheer number of mediocre faculty outstripped the patronage available to administrators. This led to clientage: a reserve army of the undeployed eager to be used by the regime. Wannabe clients strive to head programs, departments, or schools so that they might demonstrate their loyalty to an entity greater than themselves. Wannabes parse mission statements and cosset legitimating myths to show how higher truths that “emerged” from some Fall Faculty “Conversation” are actually far more consistent with what this or that Great Leader had been saying all along than mere facility with English would have indicated.
Faculty too disorganized or scattered or daffy would not be promoted to the ranks of apparatchiks but might retain their jobs if they did not threaten the illusions or epigons of the regime [or if they already had tenure]. Faculty who truly were accomplished teachers and/or productive scholars would be allowed to remain but would be marginalized lest they question pedagogical or scholarly fads or otherwise make reference to realities.
Since the above is standard at many schools, why raise the matter? We must acknowledge these usual processes lest we conclude that many faculty who head schools or departments or programs, appointees to the Faculty Advancement Committee or to the Professional Standards Committee, and various other holders of key positions – the apparatchiks – are malevolent. They are often merely mediocre. They are colleagues trying to get respect to which their talents do not entitle them. All too often, apparatchiks are faculty with some gaping flaw(s) who imagine that being well thought of by administrators will camouflage their shortcomings and who discover too late that their being used by administrators magnifies their shortcomings.
In sum, do not let service at the University of Puget Sound lead you to loathe the apparatchiks. Pity them. Fear them but disguise your anxiety as respect. Do not provoke or annoy them, for many are desperate to disguise their weaknesses. Publicly acknowledge their authority and acuity, but do not believe them lest you become lost. Do not let their mediocrity become your mendacity.
Next – “N Stands for Nineteen Eighty-Four” – George Orwell wrote about a confluence of consequences of everyday mendacity.
