X Stands for X-Rays

Institutional occlusion is the next best thing to transparency.



They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.

Robinson Jeffers wrote the line above as Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Jeffers’ line reminded me that reaccreditation looms. Among other horrors “the culture of evidence,” a shibboleth crafted by rascals in the 1990s to generate propaganda for the reaccreditation report and to surveil faculty and staff, will echo. “The culture of evidence” or some other reheated then over-heated argot will summon the credulous and the taskless to heap information without provenance or consequence onto the Logger version of a Texas A&M bonfire. This agglomeration will collapse before it can light academe but not before it secures reaccreditation. No one will be killed as a result, for reaccreditation reports are designed to implode neatly to bury unsightly truths.


Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but … men favorably
Representative of massed humanity.


The reaccreditation heap will fill some room where outside authorities will inspect exhibits before conversing with campus notables. Artifices, fabrications, and rationalizations that make up the heap will reveal images that institutional potentates think efficacious, which in turn will give the visitors something to gab about in their report. Ritual requirements met, the accreditation team will file a report, our school will be certified anew, and various ministries of truth will claim that all is well because a collage was warmly received.


Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant.


As Jeffers counsels us, we should not fulminate or ridicule what we might perceive and understand. The reaccreditation report will be an official narrative. As such it will emphasize the institution’s struggles, accomplishments, and dreams as well as the institution’s complacency, failures, and fears. Every major claim in the report will as much deny perceived shortcomings as affirm perceived strengths, so the few faculty who take what is on the surface and ask what the surface occludes will behold an institutional X-ray. Most faculty will contribute little to the report and will read less of the report.


Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.


Thanks, Robinson! I now feel better about reaccreditation than about blitzkrieg.