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.
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