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.