George Orwell wrote about a confluence of consequences of everyday pusillanimity and mendacity.
I guess it makes sense to read Orwell’s 1984 as dystopic fantasy, but Orwell was writing about tendencies everpresent in every stratum of every society albeit hypertrophied in some. The University of Puget Sound illustrates those tendencies even if it never approaches Orwellian extremes. Let’s look at everyday Orwellian rhetorics and practices.
As each of us fails of expectations and hides our shortcomings behind accounts [Do not try to explain connections between such accounts and accountability to colleagues who cling to the Confidentiality Con -- the pretense that administrators and apparatchiks would be accountable if only confidential proceedings permitted -- lest they sputter and bluster!], we play our parts in a social system of deceptions. When governors [administrators, apparatchiks, and other decision-makers] dare not be honest, they spin and prevaricate so extensively that soon they can no longer tell deceptions from ascertainable realities. Such is the ending of Orwell’s Animal Farm: humans and pigs become indistinguishable as pigs consolidate their control of other animals. Our governed animals, colleagues who are equal to governing animals only less so, are fed a steady diet of propaganda and lies until they crave deceptions and depend on illusions to make everyday campus life understandable, predictable, and pleasant. Fantasies, fictions, folderol, factlets, and factoids each and all manifest underlying social systems of mutual deception.
So it was in 1984. Big Brother deceived the masses with their active complicity. Passivity no more sufficed in Oceania than it would at an Pentacostal tent-meeting. To be seduced by Big Brother or Jim Jones, members of the audience must actively seduce themselves. [Please re-read my earlier posting (“Who’s to Blame?”) on these points.]
When faculty play the passive victims of administrators and apparatchiks to excuse their impotence and debasement, their pretense is convenient but dishonest. If one cannot fight Jones Hall, then one need not fight Jones Hall. But one can fight Jones Hall. Even feckless faculty may resist, evade, decry, expose, and otherwise harry Jones Hall. Fighting Jones Hall and oppression or other faulty governance takes time and energy away from teaching, research, family, and other valued pursuits, but each faculty member can strike a blow for better governance or greater justice IF HE OR SHE IS WILLING TO EXPEND TIME AND ENERGY AND WILLING TO RISK HIS OR HER RESPECTABILITY. [Cf. “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable,” 4 March 2007 in this blog]
Most colleagues most of the time take an easy way out [Not the easy way out! Part of the problem is that so many paths offer escape that keeps the escapee in good with administrators and apparatchiks.] Absurdities to which faculty first silently accede sooner or later reputable, respectable faculty must loudly aver if they are to stay within the spotlight of favor and favors. Thus do otherwise rational intellectuals persuade themselves that standards that are impossible to fulfill have for the most part been fulfilled by the tenured and the promoted.
As noted, to accept misinformation meekly, is insufficient. Reliable, reputable, respectable faculty spread disinformation boldly and in front of monitors and patrons. Every passive self-betrayal becomes yet another reason to traduce others to betray their own better selves. Like Winston Smith, they betray what they once claimed they loved and embrace with stronger faith what they once loathed. Orwell closes his novel with the observation that Winston Smith now loves Big Brother. All too many faculty cling to campus leaders because all too many academics are followers who have bought the official story so long and so often that the story owns them even if administrators do not.
Craven, craving credulity is not the only symbiosis between administrators and faculty. Other faculty bury themselves in their work and ignore apparatchiks’ and administrators’ misleading. Like buying in, opting out permits Big Brother to rule and ruin with impunity and without much notice,
Winston Smith was the particular. Social entities and processes are more general instances of Orwellian processes and rhetorics. The Puget Sound community is not immune to Orwell’s horrors because Puget Sound faculty soon or late practice what Orwell preached against.
