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.
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