Small ethical missteps accumulate quantitatively and qualitatively into corrupted character and corroded collegiality.
We begin from the last lines of “Judgment at Nuremberg:”
Judge Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster): “Judge Haywood... the reason I asked you to come … Those people, those millions of people ... I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it!
Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy): “Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.
Long I have snorted at that Liberal arithmetic. “Numbers two through six million might think that 5,999,999 repetitions made things worse.” Still, Judge Haywood had a point. Minor misconduct and petty corruption may erode character to make additional miscarriage of justice easier, hence greater qualitatively as well as quantitatively.
An important cause of the “Able was I ere I saw Elba” Syndrome [by which colleagues devolve the longer that they are at the University of Puget Clowns] is venality that starts minor but ramps up rapidly. One stifles one’s opinions to gain the affirmation of colleagues until, so soon, one tailors one’s opinions to others and deprives them of critical consideration and sober second looks. In return, one is promoted or tenured or honored. One awakens like Richard Rich in “A Man for All Seasons:”
Richard Rich (John Hurt): “I've lost my innocence.”
Thomas Cromwell (Leo McKern): “Some time ago. Have you only just noticed?”
Then on the Faculty Advancement Committee one circumvents the Faculty Code or pretends that this welcome colleague has met criteria or that unwelcome colleague has not. Such is perhaps a venial sin, but “From small things, mama, big things one day come” (Bruce Springsteen).
Or one chairs the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] and bends the rules until one twists and breaks the rules, all the while protesting that one is behaving exactly as PSC chairs have long or always behaved.
Oh, chip chip,
You tell a little lie,
Chip chip,
You make your baby cry,
Chip chip,
You cheat a little bit,
Chip chip,
You quarrel over it.
One day you`re gonna discover,
One little wrong leads to another.
Chip chip,
Chipping away,
Chipping at your mansion of love.
Or one trims and truckles to get or to keep one of the minor appointments or titles or designations available. One looks the other way when women are being fired. One dodges faculty meetings. One otherwise becomes "institutionalized." In the case of the University of Puget Clowns, one becomes miniaturized:
Thomas More (Paul Scofield): “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?”
2 comments:
In my experience, candor and critique are often viewed in institutions as phenomena to be "managed," sometimes by means of spin, sometimes by means of stifling, and sometimes by means of rephrasing the critique so that is is unrecognizable. At a smaller institution, especially, a critique of a structural or "process" problem is sometimes rephrased as a critique of a person--an insult. Because people are well acquainted at the institution, they are more likely, perhaps, to indulge in this spinning of the argument. One productive method of leading is to get in the habit of considering critique at face-value--considering in an academic way, not a tactical or defensive way. Defensive: "How dare you!" Academic: "You may have a point; let's explore that."
Good points all.
Management of candor, critique, or dissent is informed by our post-literate culture, in which " ... there's no such thing as a lie. There's only expedient exaggeration" ("North by Northwest"). As a result, "management" immediately kicks in when faculty say or do what is seldom said or never done.
We cannot be certain that faculty managers are fully cognizant of spin. One does not "manage" often or long before it becomes a "management style" and a character flaw. Thus does petty corruption fester into more momentous and more ominous maladies.
Although managers -- including administrators, apparatchiks, accomplices, and accessories -- extol critical thinking, they are often tactical in responding to critique. They welcome critiques of process or structure that serve managers' ends [including the end of portraying critics as curmudgeons or cranks]. They transmogrify structural or processual points that they would prefer not to acknowledge.
Whether critique is welcome or unwelcome, it will be spun. If the critique accords with managers' thoughts or fantasies, it might be improved by advancing some other trope or fancy as well. If candor about process or structure threatens longstanding prerogatives or practices [of managers, of course -- faculty prerogatives are as nothing relative to managers' whims], expect administrators, apparatchiks, accomplices, and accessories to fabricate and to exaggerate wildly to save myths and rituals from collapse.
If managers or colleagues have no immediate answer that seems to them remotely plausible [and their standards for plausibility are less than rigorous], they may temporize by taking or faking umbrage. Temporizers differ from most faculty who take or make criticisms personal insults. The latter simply lack a superior response. Crying "Uncle!" would be demeaning, so maladroit interlocutors cast questions as aspersions, institutional inferences as personal insinuations, and structural flaws as individual charges. Their intellectual or civil performances riff off "I am a victim!"
By contrast, tactical managers transmute institutional problems into personal problems without being obvious. Spinners who seem to be spinning can, in "The Age of Nixon," do very well. Spinners whose spin is imperceptible to most or all of the managed do even better.
Spinning structural into personal without being caught out demands that the manager craft masks and assign roles without being so obvious that workaday faculty can detect the dramaturgy. Behind the scenes, trusted aides and acolytes may be favored with sly insinuations the provenance of which will not be revealed lest followers lose their insider status. Managers thus send messengers out among the faculty to spread this or that useful mischaracterization. If messengers are caught out, managers are usually protected against disclosures by plies and ploys.
Messengers need not be mercenary or mendacious. Indeed, messengers work best if they are messianic or mystified.
The crucial tactical consideration is that those who would re-examine precedents, practices, and problematics wear masks that predispose colleagues to skepticism and to conformity. When such misdirection is accomplished surreptitiously and skillfully, whatever the critic says is taken for new evidence or his or her personal shortcoming.
The real beauty of such tactics is that managers so often effect this defamation through characterization even as managers exhort all colleagues to be civil.
Which means that I lack civility when I raise these points. Some member of the flock will doubtless respond, "Wild Bill, aren't you assigning motives and masks to managers?" Yes, dim-wit, I am. However, I do so overtly. If you can refute what I have said, do so. If you cannot, shut up and learn.
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