Sunday, September 30, 2007

R Stands for Resistance and Rejection

Despite quiescence among lotus-eating colleagues, resistance is futile but fun, and rejection rewards the rejected.



If there are no problems except for faculty who see problems, why not be a problem?

Resistance is usually futile but often fun. Rejected by right-thinking colleagues, resisters may revel as the “born, bought, and beaten” don fezzes and mount mini-cycles around rings of the “University of Puget Clowns.”

Speaking of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC], we all should indulge in a still-legal drug: note what the PSC vaunts but cannot and will not defend. Ask colleagues where to find the confidentiality that the PSC conjures to fend off accountability. [See “Beyond the Confidentiality Con” and “Confidentiality Cons” to refresh your appreciation for how such confidentiality is concocted.] Once they confirm that such confidentiality is nowhere authorized, you will have stunned the new mullets until veteran suckers mouth anew that “Oooooopenness is oooooonerous.” Then invite tyros and veterans alike to explain why our scholarship de­pends on authority and transparency but our governance depends on subterfuge and secrecy. Sit back and revel in the rhapsodic stillness that will ensue as administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices reject such strange notions as that official accounts might correspond with empirical reality. Students do denial, but they do not do denial with dudgeon. Go for the dudgeon!

Challenge decisions or rationalizations of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] by reading the Faculty Code or the Bylaws aloud where such dissent ia still permitted. As you are castigated for raising mere technicalities or for being uncivil, secretly exult that on our campus literacy is not funda­mental but subversive of good order. Feeling puckish? Bring up what some file says in stark contrast to what the FAC has written about that file. Does your taste run to wacky? After the FAC announces honors, tell colleagues where to find public records that belie the honors. If nothing else, you will keep your schedule free from invitations to faculty birthday parties. Such rejection will thus pay dividends for years.

Watch an administrator seethe red as a colleague pierces confidentiality and points out how the administration is again playing fast and loose before the slow and regimented. Sure, the administrator will fall back on doubletalk and doublespeak to befuddle the majori­ty of colleagues who long to acquiesce and to believe, “… But, mama, that’s where the fun is!” [Bruce Springsteen, “Blinded by the Light”] Make administrators decloak! Make them reveal anew that they are strategic and insincere. When administrators lose battles that they thought they could win in faculty fora, they will proclaim themselves “shocked! shocked!” to discover that administrative prerogative authorized them to make all the decisions all along. What they cannot wrest from the faculty via suasion adminis­tra­tors rip from the faculty via authority and coercion, but make administrators reveal their inner despots, who lurk behind masks of civility and community. Administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices will whisper how disreputable, unreliable, and irresponsible you are. There are other benefits as well.

Faculty meetings parody intellectual life and governance so that one may avoid despair as early retirement is wrecked or the protections of the Faculty Code are gutted. Marvel as a committee chair urges faculty to pass a pernicious, muddled reform with the compelling argument that “We can always fix it later.” Reel as a president bestows “five minutes” on a colleague hawking a proposal and that five minutes turns into half an hour halted after the faculty’s greatest time-sinks ridicule the filibusterer. After parliamentary slapstick is over, recount simperers' greatest hits – "He sat on an infamous rogue committee, yet he inveighs against rogue committees?" – to make certain that the vast majority of colleagues who dodged the meeting know why they avoid faculty conclaves. Prepare to be rejected by those unmasked, but for the sake of comedy and sanity tell the truth. "If you tell people the truth, make them laugh or they'll kill you." [George Bernard Shaw]

Spit your Dr. Pepper on the back of a pal when a president asks for announcements and a colleague announces, “Is anyone else having trouble finding parking these days?” [Do not note that you get to campus before noon or that it is good that no colleague had a rectal itch when the president asked for announcements unless you are content to dine alone at Wheel-Lock.]

Mark a bingo card with faculty exordia in central squares. Try to get away with “As a …” in multiple squares. Don’t pin your card down unless you have to. If you must complete the exordium, opt for “As an ethicist, …” because that has been modal station identification in faculty meetings for years. Too bad we tenured the fellow who always identified himself with a passel of adjectives or nouns before moving to the alleged point of his speaking. That was entertainment! Maybe the President should emulate old-style political conventions – “The chair recognizes Kansas’s favorite daughter ... a pedagogue in the classroom and a demagogue in these meetings ... no shrinking violet she but a saguaro with not just one point but many ... a stalwart researcher undeterred by the absence of evidence because, boy, can she cook!” – to provide colleagues the content-free communications that represent our highest art form and potty breaks.

In the hallways and on the footpaths, practice everyday resistance. Compliment colleagues for the finery that they wear and watch hilarity ensue as they take you seriously: “That shiny saucepan adorns your pate, Dr. Cleaver!” Kid on the square how impressed you are with recent decisions by some committee on which a colleague sat – “I never would have thought that a Martin Nelson could resurrect the dead, so your committee really showed me something, Professor Lignified.” – then time the interval between your phony compliment and eventual realization. Note the hypocrisy of a campus progressive who believes in wholesale, abstract justice but participates in retail, concrete injustices and wait for threatened reprisals by email or gossip.

When a leader of a campus Borg cube repeatedly notes how her or his cube flouts the Faculty Code and recommends that others do the same, reminisce about others who have rocked depositions with psychoses and neuroses masked as principles and professional­ism. Of course, the damned legal system does not take a joke as well as campus toadies do.

The best advice for resistance amid rejection comes from Animal House:

Boon: I gotta work on my game.

Otter: No, no, no, don't think of it as work. The whole point is just to enjoy yourself.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Q Stands for Quiescence

Convenient as it is to blame the docility and conformity of faculty on their having been "born, bought, or beaten," faculty go along with injustice and unfairness because it is just too much trouble to insist on truth and propriety.



So far this blog has ascribed the quietude of the faculty amid corruptions and injus­tices to competing responsibilities to family, research, or life. That may seem too polite an explanation. Indeed, the last three entries may incline reader and blogger alike to reconsider that polite verdict. How many times has each of us heard that faculty go along with in­jus­tices and chicanery because they are “born, bought, or beaten” into silence and sub­mission? Maybe it's not our fault!

It is our own fault. Let's see why "born, bought, or beaten" excuses accomplices' languor.

One problem with “born, bought, or beaten” is that it phrases as alternatives what in practice are sequential complements. Passive, quiescent colleagues tend to be born [that is, created through recruitment and socialization] then to be bought [that is, tenured, promoted, honored, and well paid] but only to be beaten [that is, penalized, disciplined, or spurned] if the breeding and buying of inertia and resignation succeed too little or too seldom. Administrators and apparatchiks cannot do all the work! They require accomplices to form an approving audience.

Faculty are born and bred to regard meekly going along with half-truths as the essence of professionalism [see the immediately previous entry in this blog]. Once a rambunctious graduate student in hot pursuit of truth has been “raised” to assume the position of sober professional craving a good reputation among peers but especially among superiors, the seeker of truth commits suicide [perhaps via Flavor Aid – Rev. Jim Jones did not dispense Kool-Aid] and becomes born again in the wonders and beliefs of the Puget Sound congregation. The baptism of hiring leads to confirmation through tenure as colleagues decide that someone has the personal and professional characteristics to fit in – which is to say, lacks the personal and professional wherewithal to be reasonably skeptical, critical, or sentient – rather than to impede injustice, to expose deceit, or to indulge in other impieties.

A congregant, believer, and accomplice having been born and bred, positive and negative sanctions reinforce ortho­doxy and orthopraxy. The roles of administrators and apparatchiks are obvious. The FAC enables raises, bestows awards, recommends tenure, and promotes accomplices, although quiet agnostics may survive when noisy infidels would perish. No less important, administrators and apparatchiks may withhold favors, moneys, and reappointments.
Peers and departments sometimes play crucial roles in assisting or obstructing decision-makers “above” the departmental level. Peers and departments look for, among other positives, a reputation for responsible criticism [that is, discovering not yet articulated arguments for what departmental elites have advocated] and demonstrated reliability [that is, predictable responses that serve departmental elites] as well as collegiality [that is, a willingness to commit or condone injustice in return for rewards]. More dysfunctional departments operate in a more defensive manner, ever watchful lest truth-tellers or whistle-blowers be rewarded or anointed. Truly dismal departments are quite bristly: negative sanctions descend on those who “unprofessionally” deconstruct departmental misbehavior.

“Born, bought, AND beaten” may seem to explain quiescence, but that formula misses the sheer expense involved in sanctions and socialization if faculty are the least bit aware or incredulous. Sooner or later all faculty learn of some injustice done in their name, or a faction that helped fire “those” women are “shocked! shocked!” when “their” women are similarly mistreated. The suddenly attentive and alert colleagues are neither reborn nor re-bought nor re-beaten, for such practices take time and work best behind the scenes. Instead, once and future accomplices are re-educated.

As we have seen often in entries of this blog, proce­dures for appeals exist to reassure all who are utterly ignorant of the facts that fairness has prevailed and that decisions are justified. Administrators and apparatchiks assure the temporarily discombobulated that only confidentiality keeps the insiders from demonstrating just how right their decisions were. Veteran accomplices join this chorus of nonsense, resounding hymns such as “When We Have Fired Folks, They Invariably Go On to Do Nothing” or "A Mighty Fortress is Our FAC."

Colleagues accept soothing twaddle because to do otherwise would require great efforts that would ultimately be unavailing. Worse, to admit that the Faculty Advancement Committee or the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or an administrator is misleading the faculty would be unpleasant and would mark one as lacking in civility. Why did an ad hoc committee learn about multiple acts of malfeasance by the PSC but avoid public documentation of such missteps so something might be done about them in the future? Perhaps they stifled themselves because accountability and candor might alienate colleagues and endanger reputations for reliability and responsibility. The safer course was to praise “forward looking” policies [almost none of which, quite predictably, have been discussed in the Faculty Senate or passed by the faculty] and to divert colleagues from corruption, deception, and dereliction in their governance.


“ … I always knew what the right path was.
Without exception, I knew, but I never took it.
You know why?
It was too damn hard.”
Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman

It’s also not pleasant, not cordial, not collegial, and not proper to speak truth to power, so lazy and depraved or scared and depressed faculty choose silence and impotence and thereby make themselves accomplices after the fact. Awareness of and familiarity with the actual conditions of one’s employment imperils tenured professionals as much as union apprentices if either is inclined to articulate what he or she sees or hears. To make the most obvious observations or deductions is in extremely poor taste and indicates a rotten attitude and perhaps a self-destructive tendency. To utter such observations in a forum supposedly designed for faculty self-governance reveals some deeply personal shortcoming and is therefore utterly unprofessional.

To get along, go along. The Emperor is not naked. He is wearing loafers.

Relax! If you knew what your betters knew, you'd see that they're right, so really there is no reason for you to look into the matter. The confidants cannot tell you what they did to whom or why, but if they could you would swell with admiration for their wisdom, so why not just swell with admiration now and skip the intermediate fact-finding?

Everything is alright. Pretend you are at another Fall Faculty Conversation. Blather and shibboleth waft to the rafters. You are mesmerized by the majesty of intellectual discourse when you eschew disruptive reason and discordant reflection. There are no problems except faculty who identify problems.

Pay no attention to the apparatchik behind the curtain.

The winged monkeys are merely dispensing justice.

Sip some more Lotus Flavor Aid.

Ain't intellectual life grand!

Sunday, September 16, 2007

P Stands for Professional

“Professional,” like other dialectical descriptors, depends for its meaning(s) on vices being denied more than virtues being affirmed.



When colleagues call themselves “professional,” they do so for varying reason(s). Positive reasons emphasize conformity to selected norms. Meliorative invocations of professionalism dramatize individual solidarity with the collective and sympathy for the ideals of the collective, especially when the self-praise may serve promotion or evalu­ation or some honor. “Professional” may be brandished for negative, defensive reasons as well. Colleagues em­pha­size conformity lest they expose themselves to disparagement or gossip for failing to be like others or, more commonly, like others demand that they be. Faculty direct atten­tion to professional conduct to deny one or more suspected short­comings or to distract attention from proved unprofessional conduct. And, of course, pos­i­tive and negative assignments of “professional” and “unprofessional” may be teamed to differentiate professional us from unprofessional them.

A dialectical adjective, “professional” varies with positives being affirmed and with negatives being denied. Affirmed positives form a public account crafted to be accepted if not quite believed. To understand the positive, however, one often must suss out nega­tive(s) being contradicted. When professions of professionalism are not harmless self-promotion, they mask fears that identity will be damaged. Col­leagues’ sins and terrors are often private until their self-praises and self-exculpations expose the private terrors and latent sins.

Professors who prey upon their students, for example, will stress their professional­ism in myriad ways to construct a positive persona accepted by a credulous majority to be in­con­sistent with abuse of students and trust. Worried that dalliances might become known or rumored, predators advertise the ways in which they are thoroughgoing pro­fessionals. They dramatize their punctiliousness and punctuality. They regale all who will listen about the high regard in which they are held by professional associates. Of course, they would be self-promoting even if they were not predators because self-promotion yields praises and raises. Because self-promotion is ubiquitous, especially among faculty who are not very accomplished, most colleagues will not ask what ulterior motives such self-promotion could serve. Rubes in robes will “gape at you in dull sur­prise” [Janice Ian, “Seventeen”] if they realize that a cover story was at best partially true.

Of course, professors prey upon colleagues as well and so require a concept of professionalism that hides their personal animus and tactical dishonesty. When a psychopath savages an evaluee – merely a hypothetical example until it happens to you – he or she will list a myriad of ways in which he or she struggled to find the evaluee worthy until diligence and love of truth compelled an honest evaluation. The psychopath will note that evaluee – the ingrate! – reacted against this open, sincere, professional evaluation with fury that only proved just how unworthy the evaluee was. As in sports in which the initial aggression goes undetected but the retaliation is noticed, the unprovoked assault is professional assessment but self-defense is unprofessional revenge against an honest servant of the university. All who perceive a stake in defending the procedural and substantive justice of evaluations irrespective of actualities will cluck at how un­pro­fessional, even personal, the victim of assault or assassination is being and will praise the psychopath for remaining above the fray. Any foibles or faults of the aggressor will be ignored. Whatever foibles or faults will transmogrify the victim into an unprofessional, unworthy pariah will be inventoried as they are invented.

For another common example, candor defines professionalism in both negative op­po­sition and in positive alliance. To seem professional one must be candid judiciously while emphasizing how brutally candid one is being. When Thomas More told Henry VIII that the latter’s musical composition was “frankly” splendid [Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”], even the ninth grader in the back row grasped that “frankly” af­firmed that More was not mincing words with his liege lord, which of course meant that More was lying like a convict to keep on the good side of Henry. [More’s genuine can­dor re­gar­ding the King’s second marriage affixed More’s head to Traitor’s Gate.] The genius of this usage on campus is that it makes one “unpro­fessional” to speak truth and another “professional” to obscure the truth. Any colleague who blows a whistle on shoddy aca­demic programs or fraudu­lent practices marks himself or herself as “unprofessional;” it being far more “profes­sional” in this usage to ignore, condone, or laud misconduct or men­dacity in anticipation that colleagues will recipro­cate when one’s own shortcomings be­come evident. In this usage, “professionals” a) conceal poor instructors, approve weak courses, and salute slapdash majors; b) dispense inadequate advice that may imperil ad­vi­sees but will keep one on the good side of incompetents and incompetence; and c) other­wise flaunt their integrity and probity in the very act of flouting those virtues. When poseurs preen and pretend, “professionals” at least avert their eyes and remain silent but sometimes attack those who deconstruct the pretenses for being “unprofessional.” These “pros” see no scams, admit no disappointments, and defer to any justifica­tions offered by their betters, all the while accentuating how costly their candor has been to their [usually unmerited] advancement.

Nothing gives away tactical use of “professional” more than passionate concern for one’s or one’s department’s reputation. Such fervent, febrile concern is almost always undue. It is undue because almost no one due a good reputation is denied one for long. Gossip, rumors, and yarns do not adhere to well-reputed colleagues, and well-reputed colleagues almost always laugh off this disparagement or that assertion. The ill-reputed usually have desperate concern for their reputations because they fear exposure. Desperation is also undue because well-established infamy is reinforced more than amplified when misdeeds are publicized. It may be ironic but it is assuredly true: those who most often tout high regard for their reputations do not possess such reputations but wish that they did and strive mightily to deny charac­teri­za­tions that would exacerbate their deserved bad names, even though in many cases their bad names could scarcely be worse.

What is true of individuals overwrought about their perceived “professionalism” is truer still of departments. I once met with two members of a department that has been viewed as a campus weak spot for only a few decades. They were concerned that some­thing that I had written members of my own department might defame their department [as if anything short of complicity in 9/11 could]. They defended their concern by obser­ving that, had anyone similarly disparaged my department, my depart­ment would like­wise protest. After I stopped chuckling at this flaccid riposte, I responded, “My depart­ment would neither say nor do anything. Who would believe that my department would do what your department did?” As I recollect, the two did not grasp the differences be­tween departments that made their contention risible.

So beware of those who excuse self-indulgent behavior because “my personal and pro­fessional reputation is at stake.” They almost always protest criticisms or observa­tions too close to a truth that they cannot handle. What was true in high school is if any­thing truer in academia: what individuals or departments protest that they resent, they all too often resemble or even represent. Those who behave in a truly professional manner do not have to tell others how professional they are any more than high school athletes who are truly accomplished have to tell their classmates what jocks they are. Mildly observant peo­ple already know or will not believe. If they do not know or do not believe, self-serving bloviation does not substitute well for the real thing but actually inclines savvy audiences to assume that some opposite is nearer to the truth of the matter. While high school chums or campus colleagues smile and nod amicably if absently, they are asking themselves what unprofessional act(s) this wretch must be denying.

Monday, September 10, 2007

O Stands for Orwellian

Orwell taught us how systems of irrationalizations denied vices whenever underlings relabel them virtues.


It follows from the immediately preceding entry [26 August 2007] that when we describe usage as Orwellian we invoke systems of “irrationalization.” By irrationaliza­tion I mean accounts or catch-phrases with great credence-value but little truth-value that, through repetition, make nonsense sound like sense. Through irrationalizations, account-givers and account-accepters mutually assent to equations between vices and virtues, goods and evils. Once formalized, organized, and routinized, irrationalization-systems reaffirm rational, honest, legitimate governance by means of groundless, misleading, illicit proclamations and practices. With misinformation and disinformation, leaders and followers alike se­duc­e themselves and traduce others. Methodically and inexorably, an Orwellian system corrupts the virtues it simulates and cele­brates. That corruption is a collective effort. [Review the entry “Who’s to Blame?” from 16 March 2007, please.]

To persist, such systems must comprise simultaneously individuals and masses and must redress through trite, rehearsed formulas particular insufficiencies real, imagined, or con­jured. Because they are stylized, even ritualized, the formulas do not so much over­come criticism as evade criticism. Colleagues given to empirical observation and logical inference must be socialized as new recruits or dismissed as old cranks lest the credulity and thoughtlessness essential to the survival of the system be corrupted. Thus, truly cri­ti­cal or audacious comments must be condemned as lacking in civility or sophistication and those given to such comments must be marginalized as enemies of the collective. Those who note that the faculty have been misinformed must be condemned as spreaders of calumnies. Through such system-defenses, irrationalizations transcend actualities and reach liturgical excellence when esteemed colleagues identify with cynical inventions and craven conventions as if they fulfilled collective or personal mission-statements.

Of course, no one expresses irrationalizations via equations as in 1984. Campus catch­­phrases must be subtler because our university lacks a formal Ministry of Truth to re-educate recalcitrant individuals to the collective consensus. Professor Winston Smith does not, for example, get sent to the rat lab. Still, only a deliberately obtuse or obsti­nate­ly deluded majority misses the Orwellian overtones in our “contract of depravity” [The Hustler, 1961].

CIVILITY ENTAILS SERVILITY ― Through how many Fall Faculty Conversations have veteran faculty languished in silence as administrators and shills – whom one of our colleagues calls “the born, the bought, or the beaten” – test-drove claims and slogans? Then, for a box lunch, professionals who may have syllabi to prepare and should have manuscripts that need attention coalesce into herds [again, the individual must be incorporated into the collective lest heterodox thoughts intrude] to troubleshoot formulas and to perfect irrationalizations. Thus do cynical inventions become craven conventions.

When an apparatchik or administrator, for example, asks how a member of the faculty attains the standing to raise an issue before the Faculty Senate, that incivil inquiry contradicts pretensions to openness in faculty governance. If a senator were to unmask the disdain for equality among faculty and the preference for hierarchy barely latent in such a query, the defender of open, egalitarian, liberal self-governance would be reckoned incivil.

AGREEABILITY SUBSTITUTES FOR DISTINCTION ― If a colleague known to lack a quality requisite for an honor or position nevertheless is awarded the honor or position, deficiency of merit has likely been over­come with superfluity of conformity, credulity, and utility. As long as some colleagues de­serve positions and honors, the deserving camou­flage the undeserving. Tenuring a rambunctious loudmouth dis­guises the firing of multiple colleagues for “personal or professional characteristics” such as candor, aware­ness, or honor.

When a peer is awarded a grant or a title that contradicts extant evidence – say some classroom slug becomes designated the “Scrooge McDuck Professor of Exemplary Peda­gogy” – the peer’s CV may not disclose contribu­tions to campus orthodoxy or orthopraxy that secured the honor. By contrast, when a member of the faculty has greatly outper­formed many who have received a distinction, it is latent treason to wonder which act of resis­tance, independence, or idiosyncrasy doomed the wretch. Likewise, when coworkers become more affable when up for awards or honors, a campus citizen does not link such behaviors to “merit” as implemented by those who grant honors. It is double-treason even to imagine that craven conformity on a Power Committee garners rewards. These are but a few examples of campus thought-crimes.

ACCOUNTABILITY AMOUNTS TO ANARCHY ― If Power Committees [the FAC and the PSC] must explain the inexplicable or defend the indefensible, the system of ir­ra­tionalizations cannot inspire confidence [etymologically, a mutuality of faith or trust]. Apparatchiks and administrators keep each other’s secrets and cover for each other via ac­counts that will not and therefore must not withstand scrutiny. If conspiracies of confi­dentiality are exposed, the hierarchy feels exposed. Exposure will not be tolerated.

For example, when colleagues who consider themselves critical thinkers, progressive scholars, and even radicals say that Power Committees need not answer to the Faculty Senate or that the Faculty Senate has too much sway, they extol deference to decision-making by the few because they identify with the decision-makers every bit as much as Winston Smith ended up identifying with Big Brother. True, shielding decision-makers from accountability often shields members of Power Commit­tees and other insiders, but insiders protest lesé majésty sincerely. They know not just that calls for accountability are futile but that they must be futile lest the Confidentiality Con Game be busted.

DEFICIENT QUANTITY SIGNIFIES SUPERABUNDANT QUALITY ― Not many aca­demics make it through graduate school without encountering a professor or graduate student who excuses his or her lack of productivity as evidence for his or her perfec­tionism. Such a cliché when I was in graduate school that such “de­fenses” elicited sardonic chuckles from second-year graduate students and derision from first-year faculty, such hollow pleas have greater currency the less research-oriented a faculty or the college in fact is.

What veteran cannot recall which colleague, renowned for a world-class writer’s block, argued repeatedly that those who publish should be docked salary to demonstrate that they valued their own publications enough to lose income? Who cannot remember the fellow who won multiple honors for erudition but managed perhaps two book reviews in his decades at our school? Behold our campus variant on the French saw that less is more!

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATION REFLECTS NEGLECT OF TEACHING ― On the self-serving canard that hard-working teachers have no time to publish, colleagues per­suade themselves and others that an absence of publication betokens strict attention to pedagogy rather than, say, lassitude or a lack of ability.

When campus grants are used as affirmative action for unproductive scholars, the com­pen­satory logic must never be admitted publicly lest the priority of patronage over pro­fessional growth be undeniable. When a member of the FAC approaches a recent evaluee to ask how he manages to be so productive in scholarship while attaining gaudy numbers on teaching evaluations, you may be certain of two things: 1) The evaluee has not published much; and 2) someone got on the FAC because he or she believes that few Puget Sound colleagues are capable of productivity in the classroom and in research simul­taneously.

TOP-DOWN SURVEILLANCE; BOTTOM-UP TRUST ― The system of irrationaliza­tions demands surveillance to ensure subservience. Surveillance is best sustained, of course, by informers who challenge deviations from prescribed behavior or speech. If necessary, how­ever, administrators may announce university policies depriving faculty or staff or students of rights or privacy so that right thinking and behavior may be enforced. When hierarchy becomes manifest, pretensions to self-governance and openness and liberty are imperiled, so those who identify strongly with elites redouble their denunciations of critical or skeptical questions as evidence of incivil distrust.

It would be too obvious were informers and denouncers publicly to declare that “Resistance is futile,” so circumlocutions are necessary. Thus, this colleague chides faculty for asking committees or administrators to explain what has been done in the name of the university: “Collegiality involves trust.” [“Trust your colleagues” sounds better than “Credulity is loyalty and citizenship is treason.”] Thus, that colleague de­clares that documented evidence of violations of the Faculty Code or the Bylaws repre­sents some personal problem rather than any flaw in governance. [After all, it will not do to proclaim, “No one noticed a problem until now, so those who note problems are the problem.”]

*****

In sum, whenever you hear an attractive phrase – “a culture of evidence” during the last reaccreditation, for example – know that each shibboleth has been invented and vetted to substitute a catch-phrase for a remedy, pretended virtue for chronic vice. But keep your knowledge to yourself and never admit that you see actualities behind the spin. Prepare yourself for encounters with those from off campus, lest you end up like a certain Senate Chair during our last reaccreditation:

OUTSIDE EVALUATOR: “Puget Sound’s self-study says that the general-education core is a unitary experience. Do you agree that that is true?”

SENATE CHAIR: “Well, the core does consist of units.”


Granted, I escaped via a lame pun, but at least I did not admit that I had read the reaccreditation report on the web and had warned the authors of that report that no one would believe that the core was unitary.