U Stands for Unchained Malady

Proponents of minimal time on campus profit from manifold cynicismS.


Many colleagues prefer to teach fewer than five days per week. Some have respectable reasons for shaving a day or two off their days on campus. Some travel to collections or laboratories and have papers and monographs to show for their exertions. Some prepare better or grade better over longer periods than in the interstices of advising appointments, committee meetings, and teaching sessions.

Colleagues with sincere, convincing reasons for reducing their days on campus serve as stalking horses for cynics who want more time to themselves for less worthy reasons. Slackers, scammers, shirkers, shuckers, and other cynics use a few outstanding faculty to camouflage headlong pursuit of time off. Every veteran knows some of the worst offen­ders. Most colleagues, however, do not want to offend the offenders or upend comity by committing candor. As a consequence, faculty of good will are played for saps and suckers, and faculty governance is degraded by chiselers and dissemblers.

Clearly it is time for a guide to the multiple plies of arguments that currently roil campus.


Ply One: Shirkers offer pedagogic premises for eighty-minute periods and a “work” "week" of two to three days. The few premises not risible apply to very few faculty, such as those who have great reasons for showing extended videos during sessions of a course. While a few delusional colleagues have come to believe what started out as sly lies, most cynical shirkers know that they are sacrificing the interests of students, the time of colleagues, the energies of staff, and the patience of administrators to secure longer weekends and less campus face time. Schedulers cannot arrange class times so that majors may graduate when almost an entire department goes Tuesday-Thursday, but shirkers save a Friday commute if they claim that their teaching “needs” fewer, longer periods. Committees cannot meet on certain days because moonlighters are not on campus two or three days per week, but the moonlighting is masked as professional growth. Malin­ger­ers’ sick days [tlansration: mental health days or really good Thursday rates at Orbitz] cost students 1/30th of a course but teach students self-reliance and independent learning.

Every member of the faculty should see through this folderol. With perhaps a dozen ex­cep­tions, any competent instructor can offer any course at fifty minutes or at eighty minutes. In fact, let’s stay on the Truth Train for at least one more stop: any com­petent professional could teach an ordinary course in fifteen-minute increments if she or he set her or his mind to it. The vast majority of claims to “need” eighty minutes are not be­lieva­ble. How do we know? Because Ivy League avatars and community-college arche­types and a host of academics in between make do with less than eighty minutes on campuses across the globe. Whatever self-serving specific the shirker summons is easily debunked by “If you wanted to, you could, so need is not at issue. You don’t want to.” Like Bartleby the scrivener, the shirker would prefer not to. Unlike Bartleby, the shirker will never be honest about the matter.

Ply Two: Shirkers beget slackers. Having marshaled their cynical stock of peda­go­gical premises, shirkers mobilize other faculty, thereby expending time that, put to better use, would advance whatever teaching or researching the shirkers claim to have too little time to pursue. Shirkers encourage colleagues to believe themselves ill-used by a simple job and more money than they had any reason to hope to make. “Souls undone undoing others” (Housman) breed slackers at great cost to the productivity of the slackers. People who actually had time for their pursuits before they started bitching now fritter away that time [and the time and patience of the rest of us] in demagogy and mendacity.

Ply Three: Nobody knows the troubles that shirkers, slackers, and shuckers have seen. Morale depleted, shirkers and slackers repair to salons, taverns, lounges, or the Faculty Club to commiserate with other under-worked, over-paid blowhards about how cruel and punishing is the intellectual life that they never have led but perhaps read about in a novel. Behold the threefold cynicism of shuck artists at great cost to sincerity and honesty! As noted supra, feeble-minded slackers come to believe what once were deliberate deceptions until fictions suffuse discourse and governance and spin displaces sense. Hustlers hustle themselves and others into participation in a curricular cargo cult.

Ply Four: Shirkers, slackers, and shuckers cultivate suckers and excoriate debun­kers. Any sentient being may call shirkers, slackers, and shuckers on their subterfuges but does so at some risk. As I wrote in “Who’s to Blame” [10 March 2007] and “S Stands for Scams and Slackers” [10 October 2007], most faculty recognize half-truths and whole lies but do not care to endure the blowback that debunking the buncombe will whip up. Since most arguments for lengthening weekends and reducing face time with students and campus are blowzy vacuities (Mencken), a reasonably skeptical colleague who innocently wonders at this or that self-serving assertion must be rebuked quickly. “It is insulting to suggest that a colleague from whom we have heard only self-serving proposals is insincere or deluded.” How true! Learning from experience is so uncouth. When colleagues make arguments that cannot be believed, that is when we must all pitch in to believe the unbe­lieva­ble – for fellowship and solidarity. Besides, white-washing is so much fun that it would be criminal if a few skeptics deprived suckers of an opportunity to cover up Tom Sawyer’s fence.

Thus, should anyone raise an objection about facts that are not factual or generalizations that are inapposite to Planet Earth, expect a chorus of shirkers, slackers, and shuckers to bray about "civility" and mewl that detractors are "getting personal." This is how institu­tions supposedly dedicated to truth and justice devolve into mutual prevarication pacts. Back-to-back-to-back-to-back cynicism, anyone?

Ply Five: Shirkers, slackers, and shuckers seldom deliver. Grant the shirkers' prem­ises but hold them to higher standards for performance and watch them erupt in um­brage. They'll never admit it explicitly, but slugabeds and scam artists who have not fallen for their own ploys know that their time away from campus will likely not issue in any measurable output. Even the minimally self-aware self-serving know that they cannot meet existing standards while maintaining their active social life, their day-trading, their moonlighting, their community service unknown to any community, their movie reviews for their podiatrist’s blog, their dacha in Yelm, and their affairs with imaginary lovers. At great cost to scheduling flexibility, to students' being able to graduate faster than Bluto Blutarsky, to equity among colleagues, and to straightforward decency and integrity, shirkers, slackers, and shuckers decry “administrative prerogative” and espouse the prerogatives of the Leisure Class. Evidence of productivity? We don’t need no evidence of stinking productivity!

Ply Six: Suckers! Among the better arguments for a minimized work “week” would be to enable probationary faculty to meet rising standards, especially expectations for pub­lication. Propose such a helping hand for faculty who could most use it and watch shirkers, slackers, shuckers, and spinners sag. The lightened workload they had in mind would reward sinecures and a few favored probationaries but not lowly instructors or the mass of tenure-lines. Let’s dragoon the untenured and the untenurable [along with a few senior suckers and people who teach labs and such] into teaching five days a week. If they publish, it will come out of their limited time, as it did for others before the three-day weekend was floated. Whether the untenured or untenurable publish or not, the shirkers, slackers, and shuckers will glory over them because they have tenure and promotion(s) that supplant accomplishments. Many or most of the shirkers, slackers, and shuckers will not have published much but will act as if they once did and will again once their demands to teach from their beds are met.

A few fellows will publish much. They who could not and thus did not get hired at a Research One will glory that they work at a place dedicated to personalized instruction “yet” they themselves possess such talent that they teach and publish [and find their way to campus unassisted and dress themselves and …].

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Dr. Dew Fuss: “You know what makes me so terrific?”

Dr. Rue Fuss: “I have no knowledge of anything that makes you terrific.”

Dr. Dew Fuss: “I am terrific because I do the job I was hired to do.”

Dr. Rue Fuss: “Indeed. I’ll alert the media.”

Dr. Dew Fuss: “In fact, I am so great that I can do all of this and have four-day weekends as well.”

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Ply Seven: More Suckers! The long-weekend brigade, I have noted, have wasted much of their own time pursuing more time to waste on themselves. Perhaps worse, brigadeers waste faculty meetings, senate meetings, and committee meetings with new scams. Shirkers shirk their responsibility to learn how to work faculty governance, so colleagues must perform the simplest tasks for the shirkers. Of course, that is what makes shirkers shirkers. Slackers leave it to suckers to create principles of scheduling that make slackers’ slacking possible. Shuckers run their spin past the productive faculty: “Are you too busy or too selfish to discuss at great length how we might secure more personal time for me?” Scam artists importune colleagues who are readily found on campus every day to hatch schemes whereby eighty-minute periods never fall near weekends. Spinners leave the hallways of their departments unpopulated on Fridays so that suckers can do their advising for them [which probably benefits both of their academic advisees].


Who pays for our preening poseurs? Only students, staff, untenured and untenurable instructors [and a few tenured suckers who don their hardhats, swing their lunch pails, and work without whining], and those who have sacrificed much to secure their progeny more than an empty credential must pay. Isn’t that a pittance to secure our glorious, indolent elite?

What is to be done to torment the shirkers, slackers, scammers, suckers, and slugabeds? I suggest two ploys.

Ploy One: Advocate that every member of the faculty with less than a five-day teaching schedule must publish on the school website his or her CV. Loose a “culture of evidence” on simulators and dissimulators alike. Make the long-weekend crowd maintain an up-to-date curriculum vitae on an accessible web site so that the entire university may see what we are getting for all this time off. Those who miraculously discover that they teach best when they confront students [and colleagues and committees and their offices] least must favor campus with accounts of what they accomplish once they have Fridays or Mondays free. Those who teach five days per week need not reveal what they have been able or unable to accomplish, but all who teach fewer that five days per week must reveal their accomplishments. This will not necessarily shame scammers, for many of them lack the self-awareness that is a prerequisite for shame. Those who have enjoyed a T Th schedule for a decade or more must point to the myriad ways in which students, tuition-payers, colleagues, the University, and Knowledge have profited from that time away from campus.

Ploy Two: Make eighty-minute sessions available in ascending order of seniority. No one actually needs weekends of three days or more, but newer faculty could put the time off to better use than, say, those who have proved over the last ten or fifteen years that they are incapable of publishing and disinclined to change their teaching. So direct the down time to those who can use it best. If there are eighty-minute periods left once the tyros have been accommodated, then associate professors and then full professors may sidle up to the trough.

T Stands for Tlansrations

Argot is found wherever people to be manipulated are found, but argot at the University of Puget Clowns bamboozles on many levels.


In my senior year of high school, I wrote an occasional column called “Tlansrations” wherein I commented on absurd communications. I had learned to expose absurdity from MAD Magazine’s “What They Say / What They Mean” features. Down a left column MAD would list banalities that seemed straightforward. To the right MAD would list ironic meanings often masked by the banalities. I adapted MAD methodology to Blanchet High. Classmates were amused. Teachers were less amused: “What we have here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t teach.” One reaction was pretty much the same as the other to a teenager who was usually playing "I'm Looking Through You" in his head.

In looking over some previous entries in my blog, it appears to me that I have retraced “Tlansrations” by discussing the latent usages of “responsible,” “civil,” “professional,” and “inter-disciplinary,” among other terms of art deployed about the campus. Although the movie Cool Hand Luke and the newspaper feature “Tlansrations” explain much about “The University of Puget Clowns,” administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices at our school use ironic expres­sions in a manner far more nuanced that my teachers at Blanchet or Luke's bosses. [Of course, the foregoing juxtaposition between my high school and a road prison was strictly unintentional. The prison did not teach theology, for example.]

“The Senate has raised a technical objection.” tlansrates to “To invoke explicit rules is in poor taste and perhaps malicious.”

When apologists for campus rule-breakers thus dismiss violations of the Faculty Code or Bylaws, they go beyond Harry Callahan’s beliefs that rights and rules are for prisses. They explicitly or implicitly claim that rule-breakers have pursued higher justice by any means necessary. [Stop laughing! They are serious!] What is more, this “mere technicality” trope subtly incorporates the Confiden­tiality Con: if confidentiality permitted decision-makers to explain their actions, faculty of good will would understand and applaud but, alas, such accountability is not per­mitted by custom. By a remarkable, pithy sentence, then, practices warranted by no explicit authority overpower mandated rules. What the Faculty Code states in so many words becomes the merest trifle; decanal self-aggrandizement and/or committees' evasions and delusions that contradict the explicit rules become controlling authority.

“This is getting personal.” tlansrates to “This may expose too much truth.”

In ordinary usage “personal” denotes what is private or individuated, but campus usage incorporates the connotation “inappropriately candid, open, or transparent.” When a person or side with whom a colleague identifies is being confronted by truths that hurt, the colleague may say that “this has gotten personal,” especially when the truths relate to governance and are vigorously being denied. “Personal issues” include matters elimi­nated from public discussion by decree or by confidentiality, no matter how crucial the matter to governance, understanding, or integrity. The variability of subtext that invoca­tions of “personal” permit boggles the mind, which is of course the political purpose be­hind the professed solicitude for feelings. “This is getting personal” tlansrates sometimes to “I do not care to answer,” sometimes to “I do not know what to say,” sometimes to “You are very rude to raise what I cannot plausibly deny,” sometimes to "I have a very small penis," and on occasion to “How un­kind of you to respond in kind to my attacks on you.” In governance, “pursuing per­sonal agenda” or “for personal reasons” connotes that actions or arguments are not consis­tent with the personal agendas or motives of the speaker who deploys “personal.”

Although “personal” might be used in a sincere attempt to elevate discussion or de­bate, I know of no instance in which that usage has been employed on campus.

“Are we being rigorous enough?” tlansrates to “Are you as exacting and severe as I claim to be?”

It is well known across campus that a moment before his death, Goethe uttered, “More rigor!” “Rigor” combines common, straightforward understandings of scholarly virtue or virtues with presumptions about the scholarly superiority of whoever wields the Sword Rigor. This or that peer may from time to time exemplify rigor, especially if the peer bought the first round or a recent autobiographic anecdote, but the campus Wigger Pat­wol – those so busy es­pous­ing rigor that they leave themselves little energy for practicing rigor – epitomize rigor in their febrile fantasies. Such self-glorification is a common symp­tom of inferiority complex, so academe teems with variants on this demand that col­leagues’ prowess measure up to one’s own. That persons of actual prowess so seldom make such demands underscores the insidiousness of Wiggerspeak: no one can measure up to rigor that cannot be detected.


The examples above do not exhaust my trove of tlansrations. I shall note more in future postings and highlight those that I have incorporated in past postings. Watch this blog for such campus favorites as “mandated confidentiality” [what a decision-maker would just as soon not explain], “personal and professional characteristics” [respectable camouflage for why we really don’t like you], and, of course, “interdisciplinary” [matters covered by an existing discipline in which one has no competence or credentials].


However, we must remember that some tlansrations are so common in academia that campus usage and users merely follow longstanding fashion:

“We have decided to be prospective, not retrospective.” on many campuses tlansrates to “We have decided to minimize accountability and maximize chances of recurrence.”

“Let’s be proactive on this matter.” on many campuses tlansrates to “Let’s make sure that this does not happen to me or mine, but otherwise let’s avert our eyes.”

“Civility” on many campuses tlansrates to “Use ineffective argumentation that reinforces existing elites or authorities.” All too often, civility is a proper synonym for servility.

“Collegial” or “collegiality” on many campuses tlansrates to “Serving [my/our] greater good.”

“Culture of evidence” on many campuses tlansrates to “A cult worshipping spin.”

“That matter has been addressed by the appropriate body.” on many campuses tlansrates to “We have covered that matter up and would appreciate its staying buried.”

S Stands for Scams and Slackers

Self-serving, self-indulgent colleagues induce supervision, surveillance, and sanctions that task innocent faculty alongside scammers and slackers.


In the 1990s various colleagues intoned that it was too bad that many male faculty were reluctant to touch or console female undergraduates lest they risk suspicions or charges of sexual harassment. Some such laments signaled the astonishing credulousness of enablers, who took infamous predators seriously that efforts to police illicit, unethical relations between faculty and students were compromising avuncular relations be­tween professors and their charges. It did little good to remind predators or their enablers that whatever excesses efforts to control sexual harassment and hostile environs had fomented, the harassers bore far more of the blame than policymakers and decision-makers trying to protect students.

As with sexual harassment in the 1990s, efforts to police faculty scams and shirking often seem excessive -- especially to known slackers and scammers -- because such exertions must be energetic to keep up with wily veterans bent on fraud or misprision. The few faculty who find paperwork for travel to or participation in conferences to be onerous seldom as­so­ciate requirements with laws or false claims or profi­teering. When sur­veil­lance of faculty is excessive few academics acknowl­edge that surveillance often springs from financial liability and ethical responsibility. No one got into academe to be regimented like an assembly-line worker or, more accurately, like stereotypes or vague notions of what someone who held a real job must go through. Still, when faculty cannot be trusted, they will not be trusted. Untrustworthy, self-serving colleagues necessitate supervision, surveillance, and sanctions that annoy the conscienti­ous.

To be certain, administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices go overboard. Administra­tors despair of winning arguments on the merits and instead impose their will on faculty because administrators know that apparatchiks and accomplices will go along and most faculty will acquiesce in almost any outrage. For example, when mul­ti­ple Academic Standards Committees showed little interest in the Rube Goldberg schedule that we currently use at Puget Sound and the Faculty Senate dismissed the idea as more trouble than it was worth, the Academic Vice President at the time proclaimed “administrative preroga­tive” and did as he [and perhaps the President] pleased. As usual, the coercion was ac­companied by liver-lipped professions of solicitude for cordial, collegial relations and faculty control of the curriculum. The faculty pissed and moaned like impotent jerks, then bent over and took it up the tailpipe [to mangle a Jim Carrey line from “Liar Liar”]. Because “the cul­ture of evidence” is a stratagem rather than a reality, faculty have never been able to ascer­tain what reasons impelled the current scheduling regime. Did administrators end up with too few classrooms after the bricks-and-mortar campaign of the last 10 years and so turned to pack­ing courses into Tuesdays and Thursdays? Who knows? The apparat­chiks and accomplices don’t want to know. The rank and file are too lazy and compla­cent to inquire. Cooptation and quiescence combine to allow administrators to do pretty much as they please, so excesses are to be expected.

Even amid cooptation and quiescence, faculty may speak out if they think the stakes worth the speaking. Those who speak out will be debilitated all too often by self-seeking scam artists and slackers. Faculty initiatives need not be self-serving for administrators and their thralls to portray reforms and reformers as self-serving.

Every slacker and every scam artist on the faculty provides administrators and accom­plices ready examples for opposing proposals. This colleague would like to free up more days per week in which to have time for research? Some opponent will allude to colleagues given to three- or four-day weekends. That colleague would like to offer classes in other than fifty-minute meetings? A detractor will mention instructors who opt for generous breaks in the midst of long meetings. A whole department wants to free up Fridays? Too many colleagues know about departments that are, shall we say, under­staffed every Friday as is.

For any change you might imagine, multiple colleagues have already been abusing leeways and loopholes in ways that call for more supervision, scrutiny, surveillance, and sanctions. We the faculty demand trust but seldom upbraid those who routinely abuse trust. Yet more silences, more quiescence, and more passivity render faculty incapable of governing themselves.