'Tis the Season – Expect Decision-Makers to Bestow Surprising Gifts

Here's a tip for all you honkies:

Fa La La La La La La La La

It's the time we pay off donkeys!

Fa La La La La La La La La



Colleagues who are barely sentient

Fa La La La La La La La La

Profit from their supine penchant.

Fa La La La La La La La La



Freeze your expression like the icy tundra of Lambeau Field. Decisions about tenure, promotions, and awards have been made and soon will be known. Veterans know how it works: try to remain calm and profess to see logic in even the most preposterous pronouncement(s).

Commit no candor!

Please recall from previous blogs that at least one such decision per year reinforces the perception that merit is not the only criterion for this award or that honor. Our merciful systems allow those spurned to espy at least one unworthy colleague who got what the spurned did not. Since this or that result cannot be explained by established rules and standards, those who were spurned were not necessarily unworthy. Perhaps they lacked allies or advocates in strategic places. Maybe a disgruntled chair or disgraced opponent figured in the decision. No need to take rejection as an affront. No need to be taken aback.

Keep your reserve.

The harder task is to remember, when one receives some honor, how empty the accolade may be. If one served on a power committee or otherwise assisted some decision-maker, one may have received the honor as much for conformity and credulity as for one's other qualities.

At the University of Puget Clowns, that one doubtless earned an honor may have little to do with why one got the honor.

Next: Explaining the Ways of UPS

Why closed files guarantee innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt at least some evaluations.

Confidential evaluation files tend to feature more misinformation and disinformation than evaluation files that evaluees may inspect and police.

At the faculty meeting in the Rotunda on 8 December 2008, a former member of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] intoned that open files were inducing junior faculty to censor their remarks. One junior faculty member objected that the erstwhile evaluator was trafficking in anecdote. The FAC survivor asserted that his observations were not wholly subjective but were based on inquiries to junior faculty beyond merely reading their self-censored letters. The persistent junior faculty member scoffed that such "evidence" was nevertheless anecdotal. If only the 2007-2008 FAC had included a competent, candid social scientist to explain why many disciplines and scholars do not respond well to anecdotage, apocrypha, and other "evidence" too unreliable to be data, perhaps the FAC would not have issued its Fatwa Against Collegiality to the Faculty Senate in May 2008 [see "Open Files and Closed Minds" in this blog, 21 November 2008].

Let's not overcomplicate discussions of closed files [that is, those in which the evaluee waives her or his code-stated right to view letters from colleagues] versus open files [those in which the evaluee reserves his or her right to view letters]. At worst, the evaluee's right to inspect letters from colleagues may induce letter-writers to restrain themselves lest evaluees refute or retaliate. If the evaluee waives her or his right to review the letters, colleagues may write more freely. As a result, closed files may include more candor and more calumny. The issue need be little more complex than that.

Advocates of restricting the right of the evaluee to review letters that affect tenure or promotion often acknowledge the gain in candor and seldom acknowledge the increase in calumny. To advocate closing files, however, is to accept calumny as a price for securing candor. To advocate open files is to accept some diminution in information in return for some protection against misinformation [mistakes that would have been corrected if the evaluee could have known what falsehoods were introduced by evaluators] and disinformation [deliberately misleading or exaggerated "information" that evaluees are prudent to keep out of their files].

Amid the cavalcade of anecdotes and arguments to come on this topic, keep the foregoing in mind. As a class, closed files guarantee that mistakes, misstatements, innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt some evaluations. To fend off such corruption, circumscribing a few evaluators seems a reasonable prophylactic. Indeed, most scholars would rather suffer the rigors of correction and circumspection than to injure a colleague mistakenly or maliciously.

Which almost makes one wonder about tenured colleagues who ignore or minimize corruptions of evaluation that misinformation and disinformation work. What "information" do the proponents of concealment imagine vulnerable faculty to possess that would offset the pollution of the evaluation process? Could "evidence" available solely from vulnerable faculty be so dispositive and reliable as to make a substantial difference to the FAC or to the President and trustees?

And why is the FAC, as in its 2008 report to the Senate, trolling for and trafficking in the sorts of "evidence" more likely to turn up when closed files offer cover and camouflage?

Next: 'Tis the Season – Expect Decision-Makers to Bestow Surprising Gifts

RIP Doug Edwards

Douglas Ray Edwards, 1950-2008


For the second time this year I pay respects to a colleague and friend born in 1950. [See "RIP Michael Denning" supra at March 18, 2008.] Like Michael, Doug Edwards succumbed to cancer. The genetic code that erected him brought him down when it became altered. Thus does biology play its own version of the parlor game "telephone."

We boomers are entering deadlier years. We so enjoy extended life-expectancy that we do not savor every day as a gift that our forebears not so long ago neither expected nor received. However, boomers who mourn should recall that another boomer sang, "Only the Good Die Young," itself an alteration of an ancient aphorism. If only the good die young, most boomers have many years to go.

I have the solace that I am not, never was, and never hope to be as good as Doug Edwards was. If my extended span of scholarly life be decades, I shall still fail of Doug's virtues.

Doug's greatest virtue was fidelity. Doug adhered to scholarly ideals and professed not to comprehend academics who betrayed those ideals. When Doug discussed with colleagues standards for professional attainment, he made the unaccomplished or less accomplished fearful. Colleagues had learned that at Puget Sound professional excellence was attributed far more than achieved. Doug gave every evidence of expecting achievement. Ghastly!

Some of the trembling colleagues did what one would expect. They lashed out at Professor Edwards's "extremism." Dr. Edwards was extreme. He was extremely faithful to professional ideals. He was extremely faithful to scholarship. He was extremely faithful to evidence and objectivity. He was extremely faithful to thinking and speaking the truth. Doug's fidelity did not make him popular with sycophants and shammers, narcissists and nincompoops. [You know who you are.]

Doug's fidelity to truth, objectivity, evidence, scholarly attainment, and idealism made him an unattractive, therefore unlikely candidate for the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Somehow Doug clambered onto the FAC in 2004. Almost instantly, he made a difference. The difference Doug worked was less in results -- the design of the FAC, its traditions and rituals, and its personnel militate against adhering to rules, upholding standards, or reading files straightforwardly -- than in reasoning. Only one as civil as Doug could ask where exactly the department had located "excellence" in a file before the FAC when it was obvious that no excellence was extant. Only one as courteous as Doug could then greet risible rationalizations and sophistical subterfuges with a gentle "Well, I do not quite understand your argument." I have esteemed perhaps five colleagues more after we served together on the FAC than before, none more than Doug. That increase in admiration is all the more remarkable because Doug started so high in my estimation that he had little room for improvement.

I raise the FAC amid a memoriam to make the point that Doug Edwards had so much character and integrity that service on the FAC became him. He saw that the system was corrupted in ways that I have mentioned in various previous entries. No student of religions ignores the blandishments of group-think, but Doug resisted them heroically.

Doug was designated "distinguished" by the FAC. In this instance, the FAC was not designating one of its own for special praise. Doug would have merited special praise if he had never served on the FAC. However, were Doug to epitomize distinction at the University of Puget Sound, the university could save itself a generous sum. Perhaps a half dozen colleagues could approach Doug's attainments. I know I could not. I know as well that almost everyone designated "distinguished" during my stints on the FAC would be distinguished from Doug in a downward direction. Here was a professor who was distinguished more than titularly.

Doug could afford idealism and honesty because he measured up to the standards he used. In teaching, Doug so exuded sincerity that he could be intellectually rigorous. Doug never joined the Wigger Patwol -- those who project rigor that they do not possess -- but lived rigorously. Indeed, Doug's teaching and scholarship frightened some self-aggrandizing colleagues into extolling their own fanciful virtues all the more fulsomely. In scholarship, Doug exhibited more devotion than any other scholar I have known. In service, he was generous and dedicated, not just putting in time.

Already others have lauded Doug as family man, community member, and bass singer. Of these virtues I know little, so I defer to those who do know. What I knew, I have written above.

I offer to my friend and colleague and to his admirers Robinson Jeffers' eulogy to a dead hawk:


#####What fell was relaxed,
#####Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
#####Soared: the fierce rush:
#######the night-herons by the flooded river
#######cried fear at its rising
#####Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.


And to colleagues who adhere to the maxim "Let no great men walk among us," I offer my own sentiments less poetic. Doug's death means not just serenity for Doug but for surviving colleagues. The bar has been lowered by Doug's passing. I find it unlikely that the bar will again be raised so high for so long by performance rather than by PR.

Sleep well, Doug. Like Randall P. McMurphy, you had the courage to try. May I live long enough to discover the Chief Bromdens whom you inspired.


Next: Why closed files guarantee innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt at least some evaluations.

What kind of colleagues caution vulnerable or credulous colleagues not to opt for openness?

When colleagues frighten vulnerable faculty into surrendering their right to an open file, do they confess or do they project onto others? Both?

I do not know how many administrators, apparatchiks, and others are advising our junior faculty to elect closed files, but I should be surprised if there were none. Such advice amounts to a confession that the Faculty Code is being or has been violated. Such advice portrays colleagues as poltroons.

Invulnerable faculty cannot too often remind colleagues that the Faculty Code says about selecting open or closed files:

#####The faculty member being evaluated shall have

#####the right to examine letters of evaluation. ...

#####The decision of the faculty member to waive

#####or not to waive confidentiality shall not be

#####a factor in evaluating the faculty member.

#####Faculty Code Ch. III, Sec. 4, a. (1) (d); p. 12, lines 33-36 of the current code

You read it yourself!

Any colleague who states that any decision-maker looks askance at open letters admits that decision-makers have violated the Faculty Code. The code unmistakably states that the decision to assert or to waive the faculty member's right shall not be a factor.

"Bitter-enders" who argued and voted to preserve closed files have never admitted that -- even under the previous rules -- penalizing colleagues for selecting an open file violated the part of the code inset above. One head officer has long been particularly incorrigible in this regard. She repeatedly warned assembled faculty that she and her colleagues distrusted open files and encouraged colleagues, especially the untenured and non-tenureline, to choose closed files always. When she was, almost as repeatedly, informed that she was confessing that her colleagues and she were doing what the code said that they must not, she waved off the point by stating that the preference for closed files and trust in colleagues was part of their culture.

Before changes that increased openness and choice and faculty rights, enemies of open files argued that colleagues would not be as candid in letters for an open file as they would be in letters for closed files. To whom did they attribute such craven evasion of candor?

Did they confess that they lacked the fortitude to state their own views in open files and, hence, that they assumed others are as weak and fearful as they knew themselves to be? No! Such a confession would require more candor and courage than fans of closed files can muster. Instead, they blamed "human nature." That invoking human nature implicitly included themselves among the cowardly appeared not to have occurred to these enemies of openness.

Did some opponents of openness assume their own candor and courage but attribute cowardice to unspecified lesser faculty? Sure! More than once faculty have had to endure braggadocio: "I myself have always written the truth as I saw it, but I have gotten little support in evaluating colleagues rigorously."

If reactionaries try to deny faculty the right to open files, please ask them whether they are confessing their own spinelessness or assigning weakness to colleagues. Follow up by asking how many senior colleagues have exercised the right that they would now deny junior colleagues. If you enjoy watching colleagues sputter and spew, ask reactionaries why they do not argue for only closed files so that junior faculty may be protected as much as senior faculty are.

But only ask such questions if you are invulnerable. If you are not yet tenured or not eligible for tenure, simply notice this presumption that colleagues are weenies. Then take seriously your seniors' characterizations of the faculty and of themselves.

Next: Douglas Ray Edwards 1950-2008

Open Files and Closed Minds

A Faculty Advancement Committee communique recycles old rhetorical tricks but leaves the same old questions hanging.


Last May, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] submitted to the Faculty Senate the following paragraph:


#####The primary concern of the Advancement Committee is
#####junior faculty participation in open file reviews.
#####The participation of all tenure-line colleagues in
#####departmental and program reviews is a long-standing and
#####highly valued practice at Puget Sound.
#####Evaluees have long had the option of open
#####or closed files for evaluations other than
#####the tenure evaluation. The recent vote by the faculty
#####to extend the option of open files to tenure evaluations
#####has raised the salience of the issue of junior faculty
#####participation in all open file reviews. Since the vote
#####to extend open files, FAC has observed more guarded
#####letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty,
#####and a general reluctance on their part not to weigh in
#####on change of status evaluations. We strongly encourage
#####the faculty to reconsider the open/closed files issue.



How marvelous for the FAC that they enjoyed a year in which concerns about open files were their primary concern!

Because this communication issued from the FAC, however, we must not overread it. The FAC may merely have meant that this concern came first in its list of two. The FAC and its members communicate in a manner as cunning as it is feckless, so we should not attribute to the FAC any weighting necessarily attached to this issue.

The expression of the FAC's "primary concern" is a masterpiece of misdirection: "Since the vote to extend open files, FAC has observed more guarded letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty, and a general reluctance on their part not [sic] to weigh in on change of status evaluations." The FAC flirts with but does not commit a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: The faculty permitted candidates for tenure to choose open files, after which letters were observed to be "more guarded;" it follows that opening up at most three files in 2007-2008 led junior faculty to compose letters more guarded than would otherwise be the case. This enthymeme [an apparent syllogism with one or more premises unexpressed] might easily be misread to attribute cause and effect, but the FAC preserves plausible deniability because the FAC does not specify the links in its sequence.

Moreover, the FAC's language does not specify how many members of the FAC purport to have "observed" guarded letters and general reluctance. This permits readers to presume unanimity and an extensive list of members of the FAC. [I hope that I am excluded from that list, for I served on the FAC after the vote and "observed" not a scintilla of evidence of changes.]

The FAC specifies no means by which the reluctance and the guardedness were "observed." How were the counterfactual letters that would have been forthcoming before the faculty's vote to change policy imagined?

Please note the FAC's use of "observed." Readers might presume that the FAC draws on evidence or experience. However, "to observe" bears at least one other meaning. When bloggers and operatives "observed" that Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim or an Arab, they produced neither evidence nor experience. Nonetheless, they "observed." The use of "observed" in its report committed the FAC to no datum.

Please note as well that changes pertained only to evaluations for tenure. Prior to these changes, everyone else could elect an open or a closed file. How certain are the "observers" on the FAC that junior faculty have become more circumspect regarding files that would have been closed or open in any case?

Remember that any closing of files will not only compromise faculty rights and circumscribe faculty choices but will also return us to conditions that occasioned the change. If an evaluation file is closed, letters are summarized for evaluees. Ask candid veterans about such summaries. You'll discover that summaries are pitched so generally that evaluees often have difficulty learning exactly what spurious nonsense the letters contain. If the department does not see a letter, the FAC summarizes the letter. Who would trust a summary by such as wrote the report of the FAC to the Faculty Senate last May?

How many of the members of the FAC who agreed with this concern supported the opening of tenure files?

How many of the members of the FAC found what they had expected or predicted?

How many of the observers involved in this FAC report are disinterested observers?

The answers to these questions are blowing in the wind broken by the FAC last semester.


Next: What kind of colleagues caution vulnerable or credulous colleagues against selecting open files?

Haltom's Twenty-Fourth Law: Neither Geniuses Nor Mediocrities Imperil Meritocracies as Much as Wannabees

Why do allegedly meritocratic institutions gather so many people who appreciate, envy, and therefore punish competence?



The Earth produces few geniuses, so we expect the learned to admire genius, to emulate geniuses [albeit about as well as Rich Little imitated Johnny Carson], and to hide their shortcomings absolute and relative, real and imagined. Maybe we should also expect learned sinecures to stifle those less credentialed. We know that retarding tyros does not move the learned any nearer to genius. Still, obstruction and destruction happen all around us. Let's recall why.

Learned critics assay the work of geniuses ostensibly to deepen our appreciation of the original genius, yet sooner or later to draw attention to the derivative genius of the critic [as a three-inch plastic replica of the Space Needle recalls the original]. The learned further call on those less schooled to retrace the steps of the genius, as if mapping some savant's path would blaze similar pathways in the brains of others. [Reciting all of Duston Hoffman's lines in "Rain Man" probably does not augur success in Vegas.] When the foregoing exhumations and exhortations do not calm their envy of geniuses, the learned try to hide their inadequacies, usally behind some magnum opus that is ever putative but never produced.

Lamentable as such fraudulence and flatulence may be, many learned easily metamorphose into stinging creatures. In "Good Will Hunting," Professor Lambeau [Stellan Skarsgard] laments that most earthlings cannot appreciate Will Hunting's talents but Lambeau can and that is what torments him. Such torment produces the wannabee, a waspish creature who stings others because his or her stinger will not reach the truer object of the wannabee's scorn.

Trained mediocrities -- that phrase comprises those who become mediocre through training as well as those who start out mediocre and are trained up -- long for excellence or greatness that they cannot attain and so must seem to have attained. They cannot be, so they must seem to be. The wannabee cannot much impede absolute genius or geniuses, so he or she works over relative genius or geniuses, especially developing genius or geniuses, to keep them down. This is to say that wannabees fear that colleagues and subordinates may surpass the wannabees and discover how far from genius the wannabees are. This fear is justified, for discourse between the wannabee and the genius is at least an overseas call and sometimes "sub-space radio."

So wannabees behave as if they were still in a grade-school hive. Wannabees create some distinctions that they "locate" just beneath or behind themselves to push competitors or unmaskers further from greatness than the wannabees have located themselves. "I may not be a Queen, but I am a princess, and you are merely a worker in the hive." To maintain an appearance of genius that they do not possess, they must keep competitors "away" from actual genius.


Suppose that in "Amadeus" Salieri had started to poison composers who might supersede himself instead of eliminating the composer so far above him that Salieri could barely see his superlative butt. Salieri would then have been defining greatness as "the two of us, Mozart and me" and sealing off this imagined duet from rivals. This is about as convincing as my noting that Marlon Brando and I, taken together, have won two Oscars. However, what alternative will avail the swarm of hapless wannabees?

We derived "genius" from the Latin for a protective, minor deity. In that etymologic sense, then, wannabees become geniuses that they make themselves ever pettier and ever more defensive.


Next: Open Files and Closed Minds

Haltom's Twenty-Third Law: What you overhear in public is usually not worth hearing..

When was the last time a noisy vehicle or person was worth hearing?


No car or motorcycle blasts music that you welcome. Your favorite tune is never on the stereo of a car trembling amid its sub-woofer. No song is truly foul until you have heard it involuntarily in public. The moron shouting into her or his cell phone never will utter a clause that justifies the call, let alone your forced eavesdropping.

"Fools' names and fools' faces always appear in public places," I heard as a child. Modern electronics has exponentially exacerbated graffiti and other unwelcome communication.

Worse, amid the present post-literacy -- Thank you, Jerry Collins! -- the voices and choices of fools will assail public places. One cannot look away from amplified noise. The channel-changer does not seem to work. It's worse than being wedged into a faculty meeting.

Next: Haltom's Twenty-Fourth Law -- Neither Geniuses Nor Mediocrities Imperil Meritocracies as Much as Wannabes

Haltom's Twenty-Second Law: The usually powerless govern most when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic.

Those habitually disempowered generate symbols and spectacles of self-governance when chronic potentates find apparent democracy as useful symbolically as it is useless pragmatically and/or when potentates are divided.

The usually powerless govern most -- "most" meaning both "to the greatest degree" and "frequently" -- when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic to the powerless because elites welcome popular governance that serves or does not compromise elites' interests. This supposition is well established among some political scientists.

When established "deciders" divide into factions, there may be more opportunities for "self-governance" than will usually be the case, but we should expect such opportunities to be transitory because some faction will want to capture or to coopt newly mobilized forces. Savvy hegemons -- elites who dominate but do not absolutely control -- who espy negligible stakes in conflicts will not waste resources on the conflicts but will exaggerate the rites and rights of "the people" and other myths. Participation and exuberance testify to democracy when and so long as the masses do not imperil the classes.

Still, the classes permit masses to frolic without supervision rarely lest activists or participants develop a taste for or expectations of self-rule. Various rites have evolved to promote the appearance and to stave off the reality of self-rule. Political conventions, for example, permit "spontaneous" demonstrations that have been choreographed and timed to serve nominees and other party hierarchs. Rank and file may commit candor, if at all, in private but not before cameras, microphones, or reporters. The assembled must coalesce around blather and absurdity. Delegates are largely free to choose buttons, headgear, and signs that do not contradict approved messages. [Indeed, the more disconcerting the costumes, the more that viewers welcome party elites as alternatives to mobs of hayseeds and morons.]

At the University of Puget Clowns, the classes -- administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists -- circumscribe masses of faculty and staff to preserve order and predictability. Staff are reined in because they can be disappeared overnight. Control of faculty, by contrast, must be somewhat subtler. To assure that faculty do not blurt out or even learn disconfirming information, administrators station decanal agents on "Faculty Senate" committees, assign observers to dinners for trustees hosted at faculty homes, and trade on their titular status as members of the faculty. To conceal disconfirming information, administrators rely on apparatchiks -- "reliable," "responsible," and therefore "reputable" faculty who consistently support administrators and thus get appointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or other key positions. These appointees tend to be, shall we say, open to administrative direction. [To be certain, the FAC from time to time and the PSC almost always will include a gadfly or two to "demonstrate" the openness of faculty governance as well as the futility of reminding Power Committees what the Faculty Code and Bylaws say in opposition to what administrators and apparatchiks claim these authorities state.] Faculty not yet favored with sensitive posts on the Power Committees may apprentice as apologists. Apologists attest to the soundness of administrative decisions and to the bona fides of apparatchiks. When apologists stumble upon injustices that they cannot deny, they scapegoat faculty governance for problems. Apologists fulsomely praise civility and community, by which they mean servility and deference to authorities. Apologists acknowledge that the truest guide for governance is whatever administrators and apparatchiks say and that codes, bylaws, and other documents to which employment contracts refer can only undermine propriety and tradition.

Administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists overlap. Apologists who demonstrate their reliability and resistance to independent thought make themselves attractive candidates for service as apparatchiks. To preserve their reputations and status, apparatchiks must explain away malfeasance or nonfeasance without holding Power Committees or administrators accountable. Thus do doors between apologists and apparatchiks revolve. Administrators raised from among the Puget Clowns faculty will tend to have been apparatchiks, apologists, or both, but not every administrator is abjectly "reliable" or "responsible." Administrators who buck top-down policies and directives soon disqualify themselves from the elite and "restore" themselves to status beneath even apologists via memoranda that mention a desire to get back to teaching or research [whether or not the discarded did any research in recorded history or taught competently in collective recollection].

Guided by administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, faculty ostentatiously govern themselves but seldom interfere with elites. The masses validate and valorize the classes.

When colleagues profess not to understand why the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings of the faculty are so inconsequential, they mistake myths and rites for campus realities. The Faculty Senate, it is true, charges committees with certain responsibilities, but committees, under the surveillance and control of administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, then do as they please. As the FAC has shown repeatedly, members of the FAC care not what the Faculty Senate says or what the bylaws mandate. The PSC has consistently refused to admit what it has done or otherwise to answer to the faculty. Members of Power Committees assert hypertrophic confidentiality and revel in their status as servants of Jones Hall.

In sum, committees and the Faculty Senate enervate critical faculty. That is what they were designed to do. When ad hoc committees crop up from time to time, expect administrators to get on the ad hoc committee (1990, 1996) or, if administrative shills do not control the committee, to rally apparatchiks and apologists to undermine the ad hoc committee (1996, 2006).

When elites appear to lose, therefore, the sensible citizen will wonder whether elites were indifferent on the issue on which they lost, were sympathetic with ordinary folk for some reason, or went so far wrong that even somnolent masses used their superior numbers to outmaneuver the classes. The last possibility -- that "the folks" awakened and stopped the deciders -- is the least likely.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twenty-Third Law: Only lousy music emanates loudly from a vehicle.

Haltom's Twenty-First Law: What is not worth doing is not worth doing well

Often the most exacting plans are designed for the most useless projects.


Amid my first year of graduate school, the late Dan Lev greeted a proposed seminar project with the statement, "You have designed your project fastidiously, but I do not see your goal." I experienced that critique as a jarring slap to my peer because I did not yet understand that many presentations would be far stronger on answers to "How best might we do this?" than on answers to "Why should we do this?" Decades of presentations at professional conferences have demonstrated that academics often pound their methodology most when their findings are least interesting.

Some of the most pride-filled journals in political science offer "NEW! IMPROVED!" ways to "test" propositions that no one doubts and, all too often, that no one values. The exactitude with which "Duh!" contentions are contested is stunning -- so much time wasted on proving the obvious. Those who have mastered a statistical technique that baffles most readers or created a dataset to which most referees have little or no access must pretend to need such statistics or such data to disprove some political-science equivalent of the Flat Earth Hypothesis. Justices of the United States Supreme Court tend to decide cases in keeping with their partisan and ideological leanings? Other than every Senate Judiciary Committee in the 20th Century, who knew?

Perhaps similar experiences led a professional colleague to proclaim that "What is not worth doing is not worth doing well." I unabashedly stole this maxim from my colleague and list it as Haltom's Twenty-First Law.

Haltom's 21st is more interesting for its variations than for its stark truth.

If we do not welcome the results of some fact-finding or decision-making, for example, we do not state our distaste for arguments and evidence. Rather, we concoct methodological objections. In the 1990s, for example, the Faculty Senate was persuaded that learning what faculty think might be helpful. An ad hoc committee crafted and conducted a survey. The survey showed that much that the then-President and her Academic Vice President were claiming was sheer balderdash. Suddenly, the administrators drew on methodological expertise that neither possessed to critique the survey's methods. The spectacle of two administrators, each given to self-serving blather, impugning the expertise and integrity of colleagues trained in survey research was quite amusing. [It would be gratuitous for me to note that both administrators were hardened humanists accustomed to supplanting facts with interpretations, so I skip that part.]

The upshot was that the two highest academic officers at the University thought that learning and verifying were among the labors "not worth doing" but did not dare to say so overtly. Instead, they pretended to welcome a survey done well but derided the findings of a survey that was not done well because the survey returned unwelcome information. This is a variation on Haltom's 21st.

In "Rump Parliament" I have already discussed a similar use of pseudo-methodological criticisms. The first ad hoc committee that the Faculty Senate deputed to research problems with processes by which faculty receive or fail of tenure at the University reported to the Senate in early 2006 and recommended reforms. One meeting after that ad hoc committee had reported, a senator who did not welcome the committee's findings and had an alibi for his absence from the ad hoc committee's report then raised, utterly out of parliamentary order, a pseudo-methodological objection over and over. He consumed 20-30 minutes. He slathered objections into the minutes with no opportunity for the ad hoc committee to respond directly and immediately. He badgered the only member of the ad hoc committee present. He wondered why the ad hoc committee did not interview other faculty, including those who had claimed that confidentiality would not let them speak to the ad hoc committee.

This colleague raised not a single cogent point, but I doubt that such was his object. Rather, he wanted to suggest that the nonfeasance and malfeasance that the committee discovered and documented did not count because nonfeasant and malfeasant decision-makers did not get to control the report after the longstanding conventions of faculty governance. Since decision-makers could not cover up their misdeeds, the first ad hoc committee report was a task not worth doing. Unprepared to say so openly, the senator instead proffered a risible critique to give the nonfeasant and malfeasant ostensibly plausible deniability. Worse, this senator was no humanist and therefore was trained not to avoid unwelcome evidence. [Even better, of course, his tactics appear to have induced the next ad hoc committee to avoid pseudo-methodological criticism by issuing no findings. This senator, it seems, achieved a twofer: he berated colleagues for findings that he did not want aired and thereby induced the next ad hoc committee to air no findings that the senator did not want to hear.]

If these variations on Haltom's 21st strike the reader as a bit removed from Haltom's 21st, the reader should reconsider Haltom's 21st in context. For at least the last 22 years, the Puget Clowns, especially denizens of Jones Hall, have had little taste or use for evidence that did not suit their agendas. Indifference to evidence makes the gathering of evidence not worth the bother. Ascertaining the actual is not worth doing. That makes ascertaining the actual not worth doing well.

Keep Haltom's 21st in mind the next time that someone invokes "the culture of evidence."

Coming Soon! Haltom's Twenty-Second Law: The usually powerless govern most when the usally powerful are indifferent or sympathetic.

Haltom's Twentieth Law: The less likely one is to lift a possession, the heavier, more fragile, and more awkward the possession will be to lift

Like "chicken hawks" and "war wimps" eager to send others into war, friends and colleagues are attracted to anything they cannot move except their own asses.

I learned Haltom's 20th the hard way. A graduate student who ended up an administrator -- another good girl gone bad -- asked me to help her move. It should have occurred to me that graduate school selected for brawn even less than for brains, but I did not appreciate that until I arrived at her place. I beheld at least a half dozen men who might never have seen football, let alone played it.

It stood to reason that when a heavy, awkward, fragile case for display [in both the functional and anthropologic senses of "display"] needed to be transported up a narrow, steep staircase, I was selected to be gravity guy. A rugger who then outweighed me was steering at the top of the case. I was pushing from the bottom. No more than two alleged adults fit in the stairway, so Joe and I were elected. As I sweated and slogged, Haltom's 20th law came to me: "Of course, she treasures this display case! Anyone with a chance of having to lift it would have selected a lighter case."

This maxim has cognate propositions.

• Those with weak backs will tend to to have wanderlust and myriad buddies too proud and too stupid to fake a back injury.

• Those who cannot raise a bet will be most indecisive about where furniture should go -- and more indecisive the heavier the furniture.

• Whenever the moving van arrives, the proudest would-be participants in a move will discover that their desk drawer needs immediate reorganization.

• Those who cannot use technology will be most enthusiastic about its availability and adoption -- especially slackers who look for labor-saving devices that save them the capacity to work.

Feel free to comment on perversities that correspond to Haltom's 20th law.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's 21st Law: What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.

Haltom's Nineteenth Law: The greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership you are

When ambition overweens, fantasies and visions take the driver's seat and take the bus over a cliff by a very direct route.


Innumerable academics have asserted that anyone who wants to be chair should by that wanting be disqualified from being chair. They produce many examples of those who want to lead in the worst way and do. In my 19th law, I slightly reformulate their truism to make it truer and a bit more general. Haltom's Nineteenth applies to presidential campaigns and to clubs or college reunions as well as to head officers of departments, schools, programs, and other insignificant billets.


My law is simply stated: the greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership your ambitions will usually make you. I suppose there are exceptions, but why mess up an apothegm with subtlety?

The problem is not people who want to lead. The problem is people who need to lead. When ambition is yoked to some other psychological drive(s), ambition secures the office that the other drives will misuse.

Beware Pseudo-Cincinnatus!

When others must beg someone to lead, that someone might be Cincinnatus, a leader who accepts leadership as delegated duty and unwelcome burden to be surrendered immediately when dangers pass. Historical Cincinnatus became a military dictator because panicked Roman senators believed it necessary. After he put down the Aequi, Cincinnatus put down the fasces and picked up his plow. A statue outside Cincinnati, Ohio tells us so. [Cincinnatus also opposed attempts to benefit plebeians at the expense of patricians, but I am certain that that played no part is his acceptability to patricians as dictator. Well, maybe a little bit. Military dictators who are also egalitarians make things so messy, don't they, Fidel? But perhaps I digress.]

Wherever seeming beats being -- Haltom's Eleventh Law applies, for example, to the United States but not necessarily to all human societies -- expect the myth of Cincinnatus to be ritualized into mystification and usurpation. Some would-be decider reveals his ambitions but hides his certainties in an effort to be offered some top spot. [Is it coincidence that the word "certainty" hides "cretin" within? Readers from Louisiana may want to note as well that "certainty" is an anagram for "cretin yat." Yat denotes a dialect in New Orleans and those who use it. But perhaps I digress.] He mystifies the credulous with his willingness to serve them and thereby enthralls them. In the name of fantasies with which he plied them during his accession, he discards traditions and restraints. Nothing must condition the triumph of the will, will popularized the more personalized it in fact is. If Pseudo-Cincinnatus spins his regime well, he may align allies and successors with his will via spoils, patronage, and sloganeering. Born, bought, or broken, followers and wanna-be successors love Big Brother and propose new prerogatives today for The Leader but tomorrow perhaps for themselves.

Of course, the dynamics need not be so dramatic or revolutionary. As Aaron [Albert Brooks] warns us in "Broadcast News,"

What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? ... He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing. He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance just a tiny bit. ...

Aaron is correct: enthrallment is gradual far more often than revolutionary. A little self-governance lost this time; some consultation faked next time; slight amplification of slogans to dismiss objections based on standards, practices, precedents, and norms.

Through revolution or evolution, the Devil needs souls but cannot seize them. He must seduce them. Either way, the Devil comes disguised as Cincinnatus.

Beware Pseudo-Cincinnatus!

Once offered the top spot for which he has slobbered and schemed, putative Cincinnatus turns into some cheap knock-off of Howard Fast's Marcus Licinius Crassus [Laurence Olivier in Kubrick's Spartacus] of whom Sempronius Gracchus [Charles Laughton] says, "This republic of ours is something like a rich widow. Most Romans love her as their mother, but Crassus dreams of marrying the old girl to put it politely." [As far as I know, this is historically accurate: Marcus Licinius Crassus remains one of the richest men ever but died in pursuit of a triumph. But perhaps I digress.]

Gracchus is barely polite and hardly subtle but exactly right. Having played the reticent fellow whose leadership qualities have shown through and inspired a Senate frightened by Spartacus to bid him dictate, Crassus just happens to have his senatorial toga under his cloak and a plan to consummate his dictatorship under wraps. Crassus summons Senator Gracchus and informs him, "The enemies of the state are known; arrests are being made; the prisons begin to fill." Gracchus sees his prophetic characterization of Crassus fulfilled. Rome must "assume the position." Cincinnatus got back to his plow in under three weeks; Crassus seems determined to take his time and to enjoy his prerogatives. [In the movie, Gracchus notes, "Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant, and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?" Here history and Howard Fast pun. In Latin, "crassus" means fat or heavy. But perhaps I digress.]

Crassus is an ambitious, wealthy schemer who waits for Rome to turn to him, then launches his deliberate reckoning with slaves, with plebeians, with the mob, with the Senate, and with just about everyone else who stands in the way of his triumph. Crassus is the model Pseudo-Cincinnatus. [Did I mention that Crassus's undoing is that tantalyzing triumph that he wants to cap off his career? Crassus has more money than Croesus but wants a monument and a parade and a laurel held over his head. That leads him to his demise. But perhaps I digress.]


Beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!


Crassus is the epitomic Pseudo-Cincinnatus not least because his drives and desires are readily discerned, or would be if senators were not so spooked and if the mob were not so credulous and impotent. Crassus longs for liaisons with Spartacus's wife and Spartacus's best friend -- paging Dr. Freud -- but needs to liaise with fame to match his capacious fortune. [Crassus's marriages and affairs resemble the HBO series "Big Love" or certain outlaw sects in Utah or cults in Texas. But perhaps I digress.]

Crassus' needs define and drive him according to Kubrick: "If there were no gods at all I'd still revere them. If there were no Rome, I'd dream of her." [If one has sufficient funds, delusions are doable, I suppose. But perhaps I digress.]

Like Crassus, other Pseudo-Cincinnati almost always chase fantasies that doom not only those dictating but those dictated to. Pseudo-Cincinnati have visions. They see things. They foresee their own triumphs and so undertake fiascoes that take them down. They dream of Romes built in some short term but take Rome by a short route to chaos. Like many fanatics, the further their mirages recede from their efforts, the more they dedicate themselves to throw new efforts and old followers at causes that were lost before the Pseudo-Cincinnati accessed authority. When they fail of those visions, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

Of the Great Leader's necessity, failures betoken not the faulty vision or foolish schemes of an ersatz Cincinnatus but the deficient loyalty and halting perseverance of the followers, who do not deserve their Great Leader but are about to absorb punishment that their Great Leader believes they deserve for frustrating his fate. [This entry reminds me of certain madmen in authority in the world today, but I mustn't digress.]

Beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!

In sum, Haltom's 19th warns us that ambitious, energetic people who need to get their way and disregard decorum and decency to get their way should be contained and constrained. This is especially the case in academia, where very little good can be done and so very many students, staffers, and faculty may be harmed before the tinniest pots "fulfill" their delusional destinies.

What might be done? What should you do? Simulate collegial courtesy. Invent effete but therapeutic tasks for which the power-mad are well-suited. Let them seem to be in charge of something safe, like a Web site. Redirect their drives and desires into the world's most perfect bowling league.

But never let them take charge. All too often members of programs, departments, schools, colleges, and universities set out to find Cincinnatus but turn up not even Crassus but Captain Ahab or Captain Queeg.

If you would not hunt white whales or missing strawberries or weapons of mass destruction, beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!


Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twentieth Law: The less likely someone is to lift or move a possession, the heavier, more fragile, and more awkward the possession to be lifted or moved will be.

Haltom's Eighteenth Law -- Never mess with someone who has more free time than you do

In a war or contest, beware the enemy or competitor with abundant leisure and deficient sense.


I learned this formulation of common sense from a colleague at my first academic job. This colleague practiced what he preened. At any hint of resistance to his designs or demands, he would escalate unconscionably. He thought himself an academic warrior. He would mass his forces to overwhelm an opponent who did not realize a battle was imminent. [That did make for a surprise attack because, as Richard Mulligan's psychotic General Custer might have stated in Little Big Man, "Nothing in this world is more surprising than the attack without reason!"] After the opponent capitulated to the bluster and psychopathology, my colleague would bray that the opponent should not have started a conflict with someone who had more free time.

The persons with the most free time tend to be those who invest in conflict time that they otherwise would spend on blogging, schmoozing, drinking, or other "social" leisure. This means that Haltom's 18th warns us not to clash with those who have little better to do than to strike poses, project outrage, protest umbrage, and otherwise play the blameless victim. While others may free up time by restricting their energies to essential tasks and by neglecting time-drains that are not very meaningful or rewarding, many layabouts have been clearing their schedules for years.

Even more dangerous is the loafer with something to disprove: his record of dissipation; the hard-earned disrespect of all or nearly all coworkers; his overweening arrogance based on no apparent talents or attainments; actual stigmata and imagined slights that sullied an otherwise spotty reputation. The truer the characterization that the wastrel wouold deny, the greater the wastrel's investment in reclaiming the good name he never enjoyed. Behold the notoriously unreliable chaps who bear any burden and meet every hardship to assure that those who see too clearly and who say what they have seen pay dearly for candor.

Please re-read my immediately previous entry [Haltom's 17th Law] to see how malignant narcissists scare up time to attack the enemies over whom they glory and to "demonstrate" their precarious self-worth. Since they define themselves by defiling others, these "people of the lie" are even more dangerous than loafers and layabouts. The latter losers badly need something similar to a victory and have ample time in which to post ersatz wins. The malignant narcissist craves triumph through conquest and subjugation and has little control over what he will do to crush the enemy.

Sarah Packard [Piper Laurie] saw the malignancy in Bert Gordon [George C. Scott] in Robert Rossen's The Hustler:

Sarah: And that way you are looking at me. Is that the way you look at a man you've just beaten? As if you've just taken his money and now you want his pride?

Gordon: All I want's the money.

Sarah: Sure, sure. Just the money. And the aristocratic pleasure of seeing him fall apart. You're a Roman, Bert. You have to win more.

So avoid the loafer and the layabout and others with ample free time. But most of all, avoid the malignant narcissist who will create free time for your destruction.

Coming soon -- Haltom's Nineteenth Law: The greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership you are.

Haltom's Seventeenth Law -- Propagandists project crimes they are poised to commit

When accusers accuse, they often draw on their own misbehaviors past and planned.



I cannot quite recall the origin of Haltom's 16th Law, but I can pinpoint the source of Haltom's 17th -- Jacques Ellul's Propaganda [p. 58]: "The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit."

Ellul here posits one of the enduring truths of society and politicking. Once one degrades an opponent into the enemy, one entitles oneself to use means that would be forbidden if one were competing with a worthy opponent within some rule-governed venue. At Guantánamo or in the Army-McCarthy hearings [M. Stanton Evans and Ann Coulter notwithstanding], the Marquis of Queensberry is/was not consulted. Those who believe that they would not win a fair contest heap onto the enemy the foulest intentions. One source of such intentions is one's own basest schemes and designs.

Suppose some malignant narcissists -- see The People of the Lie in the UPS Book Nook -- are jealous or resentful of a colleague. The narcissists are likely to accuse the colleague of flaws, schemes, and scams from the narcissists' own hearts. One narcissist foists his own foibles onto the colleague, dragging the colleague down to his level even as his accomplice transforms the absence of evidence for her charges into evidence of absence so that the enemy's innocence is made to seem evidence of cunning deceptions and false fronts. [Otherwise, the narcisists proclaim, the evidence would be clear to everyone and not just to the narcissists.] Opportunistic sociopaths, like other propagandists, project onto their enemies sins from their own pasts, sins that they may reprise in the near future, sins that avert attention from them and direct suspicion to despised others.

From this example we see that well-designed propaganda does double duties. Propaganda is a tool at once offensive and defensive. As offensive weapon, propaganda disparages intentions and imminent actions of enemies. As a defensive shield, propaganda preemptively blames enemies for what the propagandist argues he or she was compelled to do or may be compelled to do in self-defense. In adidtion to those offensive and defensive uses, propaganda works retrospectively as well as prospectively. It rationalizes the past even as it excuses the future, all in the service of getting past some present difficulty.

For instance, if a colleague quietly and privately informs me that I have violated a professional norm, I may strike back at the constructive critic with propaganda at once offensive and defensive, retrospective and prospective. On offense, I hunt down [in multiple senses of "down"] or make up accusations or suspicions and float them [like turds] among confidantes so that my confidantes may propagate smears and rumors without their being traced back to me. On defense, I bootstrap my offensive propaganda into defensive propaganda: my critic concocted false charges against me in a cynical, hypocritical effort to distract everyone from my critic's far greater sins and the true charges that the critic feared I might prefer against him. These tactics are retrospective in that widespread innuendo diminishes both the critic and the criticisms. ["Can you believe it? That toad called me ugly!"] but prospective in that publicized defamation undermines my critic-target-victim.

Hence, I might choose to make a critic's private criticisms public to pre-empt his or her doing so and to incline naifs to ask, "Would he admit the past if he were culpable? The original criticisms must have been unjust."

Ellul's insights go beyond accusations to attributions of intentions and spinning of interpretations, which more generally define [p. 57] " ... the real realm of the lie; it is exactly here that it cannot be detected. If one falsifies a fact, one may be confronted with unquestionable proof to the contrary. ... But no proof can be furnished where motivations or intentions are concerned or interpretation of a fact is involved."

Ellul does not underestimate the potency of false facts. When audiences consist largely of those distracted or ditzy or ignorant or indifferent, one need not engage in more sophisticated propaganda but may simply prolong or promulgate falsehoods. Supposed connections between el Qaida and 9-11, Barack Obama as a Muslim, and exposed urban legends make for low-cost but effective palaver into which accusations or other propaganda may be infused. The more credulous and conformist the throng, the more that flimsy fabrications and evidence-free suspicions will suffice.

Audiences deemed too sophisticated to succumb to bunk will be treated to interpretations and intentions. Malignant narcissists and other propagandists complement rumors, innuendo, and lies with half-truths and non-truths [e.g., statements of values that can be neither true nor false] and rely on the hubris of the sophisticates -- "I am too clever to be taken in by anything but the truth" -- to win over the mob. Once a target has been tarred as an enemy, factionalism do the rest: "Who are you with, the evil one or the forces of goodness?"

When next someone is projecting some image that he or she would like you to credit, ask yourself how open and clear the colleague seems. Colleagues who cite their sources or who direct attention to evidence or otherwise enable peers to test propositions are probably not spinning their own shortcomings into characterizations of others. Colleagues -- peers or superiors -- who invoke trust, civility, confidential information, or other devices to occlude usually have something to hide and some reason to avoid "the culture of evidence." Pay close attention to their charges, suspicions, and interpretations. They may be telling you what they have done and will again do.


Coming Soon --- Haltom's Eighteenth Law: Never mess with someone who has more free time than you do.

Haltom's Sixteenth Law -- Whatever is not as it seems is the product of calculated, crafted fakery far more often than of error

If seeming beats being [Haltom's 11th], expect colleagues to work hard on seeming to be what they cannot be. They cannot perfect themselves, but they hope to perfect their imagery. If they succeed too well with the assistance of others, expect the perfected imagery to be (mis)taken for fact.


Would that I could attribute Haltom's Sixteenth Law! I believe that I learned this maxim from Erving Goffman, but it might have come from Kenneth Burke, Daniel Boorstin [The Image], or some other thinker central to my education. All I am certain about is that I learned it from another; I did not think of this myself, which certainly speaks well of this law.

Nonetheless, the gist of Haltom's 16th is as simple as Haltom.

α Most of what we perceive is largely what it appears to be. If colleagues in high dudgeon are deluded, they usually are sincerely deluded rather than feigning delusions [with a few exceptions for particularly cunning colleagues]. Who once were "rebels without a cause" decay into "reactionaries without a clue" not as a means by which to impress but in an earnest attempt to state misgivings and anxieties. [Indeed, most faculty reactionaries posture as Emile Zola but more closely resemble Emily Litella, befuddled commentator Gilda Radner played on "Weekend Update" on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, except that sincerely deluded colleagues never wise up and say, "Never mind." They just accuse more innocents of perfidy.]

β However, if our perceptions seem to mislead us or to obscure actualities, we must admit that whatever is not as it seems is the product of calculated fakery far more often than of error. To seem the least bit believable, a performance must persuade audiences or the performance will be taken for humor or parody or folly. Missteps immediately violate the dramaturgy or imagery and demand instant remediation and emendation of messages. Thus, when being belies seeming, seeming and being must be renegotiated between a protagonist and his or her audiences. [Strains of "Send in the Clowns" swell in the background.]

γ Artless fakery exposes itself and its creator too quickly and too easily to take in an audience. The colleague who looses a screed against students' evaluations/forms takes in no one because she or he lacks the methodological chops to make his or her points stick. Peers effortlessly tlansrate the screed into "I want better evaluations than I have been getting" or "If I do not fault students or forms, I may have to fault myself." If feckless teachers mistake the complaints of self-serving, self-exculpating ostriches for sensible, valid points, they imperil students, staff, administrators, and faculty. However, sensible colleagues dismiss such periodic mewling rather quickly. Much if not most such fakery exposes itself readily.

δ While anyone can make mistakes, errors usually do not align to fake out academics. When "mistakes" all or almost all suit some image that some colleague wants to be taken for reality, almost all PhDs immediately see fakery afoot. When "mistakes" are admitted, the performer may start to repair the imagery. However, many colleagues camouflage or rationalize mistakes behind elaborate, incredible defenses. Such dramaturgy fools no one who does not want to be fooled. For example, members of the Professional Standards Committees [PSCs] 2003-2005 still do not admit that those committees erred even though any fair-minded observer must concede they screwed up multiple times. That long line of evasions does not much imperil the University of Puget Clowns, however, because most faculty know nothing about it and because to hear from those PSCs is to disbelieve the members of those PSCs. In short, the PSCs' exculpations incriminate.

ε By contrast, persistent, persuasive verisimilitude follows from cunning, comprehensive, and copious dramaturgy far more than from good-faith errors or clumsy image-making. Worse, what is enduring and ersatz imperils the University of Puget Clowns. The colleague who faked a degree or an honor may have begun with a simple fraudulent line on his or her CV. The greater the honor or the more impressive the degree, the more tangled the web of "verification" the impostor wove. Accommodating colleagues or superiors then protected the counterfeit honor or degree because the impostor was too important to be forced out or too feisty to go down alone. Academic dramaturgy, alas, is group theater. It is an important part of the "contract of depravity" about which I have repeatedly, endlessly, tediously, exhaustively blogged.

ζ Therefore, the longer that the ersatz endures, the more invested in the fraud those who have accepted it become. Perhaps more important, the longer that the ersatz endures, the more that each responsible, respectable, reliable colleague [see this blog for 4 March 2007] must at least profess to believe the imagery and dramaturgy. Quia absurdum, credo! ["Because it is bullshit, I believe it!"] Hail fellows well kept must believe others' bullshit if others are to profess to believe the bullshit of fellows [female as well as male]. Thus does our "contract of depravity" entail collusion in mendacity and a culture of concealment of which the "Confidentiality Con" was the first example this blog explored.

η Cunning, crafted fakery, it follows, defines the University of Puget Clowns all too often. Take the Wigger Patwol -- please. The Wigger Patwol, readers of this blog will recall, consists of colleagues who are so busy professing to be demanding and stringent that they leave themselves less time to teach, to do research, to publish, or to serve the community than they might have if they were not so busy faking rigor. Most members of the Wigger Patwol are risible. How do they persist without dissolving amid derision? Because "civil" colleagues provide friendly audiences until their turn to perform comes around, at which time they may anticipate credulous colleagues who will pretend to believe the bullshit of "civil" colleagues. ["The Circle Game" now wafts into hearing.] The Wigger Patwol works the way the press corps worked in the 1980 Teddy Kennedy campaign: When Kennedy's advance people had failed to scare up a welcoming crowd at an airport, print reporters exited the planes first and whooped it up in range of cameras and microphones so that broadcast reporters would have tape to air. Many of our colleagues practice civility by scrambling to applaud colleagues for their rigor and by praising Rigor Itself.

θ In sum, at the University of Puget Clowns as at so many acacdemic institutions, seeming beats being because mutual admiration societies avert their eyes from what is and focus on what should be. Idealizations and mystifications perfect the virtual community and fend off embarrassing truths.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Seventeenth Law: Propagandists project crimes they are poised to commit.

Haltom's Fifteenth Law -- Academic sub-units can be inferior far longer than superior to their larger institutions.

It puzzles us more than it should that some departments have been sub-standard for decades yet no department is above-average for long. Judgments of departmental weakness usually are concrete and empirical; judgments of departmental strength usually are fanciful and dramaturgic.


Soon after one gets a job in the academy, one begins to form impressions of departments, schools, and other sub-units of the academic institution that hired one. A dust-up in a department induces old-timers to recall the department's chronic inability to handle conflict or to manage its own affairs. "That has always been a weak department" leads to multiple anecdotes or apocrypha about departmental dysfunction and personal dementia over a very long haul. When some largesse is conferred on another sub-unit, tongues wag to the effect that administrators or other benefactors have recently cossetted that sub-unit and esteemed it far beyond what objective assessments would justify. "They have been favored by the administration lately" leads to anecdotes and apocrypha to show how ill-deserved much of the uptick in favor actually is.

Jealousies and invidious distinctions aside, Haltom's 15th Law notes that identifiably weak departments seem to retain reputations for weakness while departments thought strong will not be thought strong for long. Why?

The short answer is that assessments of sub-units' weaknesses usually follow more from concrete observations and valid inferences than do assessments of sub-units' strengths. Assessments of sub-units' strengths often issue from rationalizations for distributions of favors and largesse. The rest of this entry elaborates on that short answer.

The credulous may believe that virtues lead to rewards and honors, but the savvy appreciate that rewards and honors more often lead to attributions of virtues than vice versa. Chronically fractious and feckless departments will continue to be divided and ineffective whatever subsidies or symbols patrons supply, so patrons invest collective resources and accolades in less risky departments. The distribution of collective spoils must be justified to an extent, so patrons conjure some collective strengths to rationalize the system of collective spoils. [To be sure, patrons also command individuated subsidies and sanctions with which to coopt members of weak sub-units, not so much in hope of improving sub-units as in pursuit of grateful, subservient allies. This entry is not primarily concerned with individual spoils, which will be a topic for one or more subsequent entries.]

When I arrived at the University of Puget Clowns, my mentors warned me of "the chosen ones," a department on which resources had recently been lavished out of proportion with visible accomplishments. As I came to understand how undeserved, even inexplicable, much of the praise of that department was, I came to recognize political-anthropologic patterns of command and cooptation [see F. G. Bailey, Stratagems and Spoils or Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils]. The greatness of "the chosen ones" lay less in published scholarship or practiced pedagogy than in fulsome bluster emanating from Jones Hall and a succession [pun intended] of decanal appointments and other sway and swag. That almost none of "the chosen" even approximated Jones Hall's plaudits was crucial to the cooptation because Jones Hall always had the option of admitting observable facts if administrators became dissatisfied with returns on their "investments." It was, therefore, predictable that most of "the chosen" a) provided reliable votes and spokespersons for administrative schemes, b) garnered designations such as "distinguished professor" when no objective observer would have discovered much distinction [at least in a positive direction], and c) harvested more than their share of individual and collective honors and booty. The strength of the department and the designs of the administration were symbiotically articulated.

It should go without saying that such symbioses were most likely in departments in the humanities, for humanities [variously understood] suited the University's arriviste dedication to "liberal arts" [variously understood]. The more that a sub-unit exemplified or at least dramatized the teaching of works celebrated for being famous, the more probable it became that excellences would be discovered in the sub-unit and spoils dispensed.

Likewise it should go without saying that the superiority of "the chosen ones" was more apparent than real [cf. Haltom's Eleventh Law: Seeming Beats Being] because the actual department was in some respects mediocre. Had Jones Hall and other outlets of propaganda and flackery been restricted to the observable, the concrete, and the verifiable, no case for the superiority of "the chosen ones" likely could have succeeded. Because Jones Hall could indulge in self-validating flim-flam with little risk that anyone would commit candor [candor is so unprofessional!], it could continue both to buy the allegiance and support of "the chosen ones" and to instruct other collectivities and individuals about the benefits of sub-unit tractability and conformity as well as the costs of critical thinking or independence by sub-units. [As noted already, similar manipulations of costs and benefits applied at the individual level, but this entry is about collectivities.]

None of the foregoing implies that a sub-unit cannot be superior to its institution in one or more regards. If qualities are distributed across sub-units, some sub-unit's strengths minus its weaknesses may sum to some figure greater than the institution's aggregate "net." Rather, the foregoing suggests that supposed excellences are, like the glory of the world, usually temporary fictions constructed for the purposes and convenience of the managers and the credulity of the managed.

Strengths are usually more reputed than demonstrable; weaknesses are often [but not always] both demonstrable and reputed. If a sub-unit is both weak and seen to be weak, individuals in that sub-unit face at least a dichotomy: Does one chance improving the sub-unit or does one concentrate on improving one's own reputation? This dichotomy might seem false, a candidate for Haltom's Fourteenth Law ["Never Do Either/Or When You may Do Both/And"]. However, improving one's own reputation is usually realistic when improving one's department's reputation is dauntingly improbable. Cooperating with Jones Hall and other campus potentates will secure one individual awards with far greater probability than undertaking to elevate a chronically pathetic department. After all, if improving the sub-unit were easy, the sub-unit would not have langushed for years or decades. Moreover, whatever absolute personal advancement one may effect, advancement relative to one's substandard department is usually far greater and far more probable.

Indeed, some colleagues have discovered a way around the dichotomy defined above: They strive to be the best of a bad lot, which impels them not only to pursue self-advancement but simultaneously to keep their sub-unit as unprepossessing as possible. In recruitment and hiring, they fend off rivals and thereby preserve their relative, local superiority.

#####How awful to be somebody,
#####How public like a frog,
#####To tell your name the livelong day
#####To an admiring bog.

Those who aspire to be the most visible frog in a risible bog thus acquire an interest in keeping their sub-unit down to keep themselves above the sub-unit. In hiring, "the best of a bad lot" may prefer candidates who will not challenge or overshadow the sub-unit's best. Promotion and tenure decisions may turn on willingness to go along with some of the foibles that make a sub-unit substandard. They certainly will turn on evaluees' fidelity to the local great and, far more important, the greatness of the local great. These tendencies and others predict that departmental stagnation or decline will be sustained and departmental improvement will be rare and transient.

When sub-units are actually [rather than putatively] superior to some campuswide median or mean, look for happy accidents or altruistic behaviors. Since lucky streaks soon break and altruistic behaviors soon give way to habitual selfishness, sub-units cannot long remain above the norm. Hence, Haltom's Fifteen Law obtains.


Coming Soon -- Haltom's Sixteenth Law: Whatever is not as it seems is the product of calculated, crafted fakery far more often than of error.

Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Most alternatives, Kenneth Burke reminded us, need not exclude other alternatives. Many trade-offs can be transformed into syntheses or amalgams.

I derived Haltom's 14th Law from the literary analyst/theorist Kenneth Burke. Beyond the obvious advice to avoid false dichotomies, Burke counseled analysts to consider ways in which contrasting perspectives or passages might complement or mutually reinforce. Perhaps Certs is both a candy mint and a breath mint. To those with numb palates, Miller Lite may both taste great and be less filling. The nuns insisted that Jesus was both man and God.

Both/and!

Perhaps the most dispiriting either/or afflicts campus when one presumes that advance(s) by a peer come at one's expense. Your contract, publication, or opportunity makes the rest of us look bad, these envious dogs believe. Since there are always fewer people with some honor or accomplishment than without [even in a three-person department], such either/or, zero-sum attitudes guarantee more misery and jealousy than celebration and community. Those who want "no great woman or man to walk among us" guarantee mediocrity, sniping, and schadenfreude. That is how middling and weak departments stagnate.

Both/and!

Around campus, the either/or versus both/and problem arises whenever colleagues assert a sanitized, selfless motive as if such a motive precludes a corrupt, selfish motive. When I first raised concerns about permitting colleagues to take Fridays off by offering courses on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:00 p. m. until 4:20 p.m., proponents of four-day weekends quickly corrected me. "The point is not to take Fridays off but to clear Fridays for tasks other than teaching." These colleagues knew that this was a false either/or. As I showed in "U Stands for Unchained Malady" [the 10-27-07 entry in "Rump Parliament"], those pressing to be on campus fewer than a five days per week include slackers, shirkers, shuckers, and other cynics who hide behind few sincere colleagues who would put "free days" to good use. Long weekends reward both colleagues who put days away from campus to good use and far more numerous colleagues who sleep in, leave town, watch TV, luxuriate in tubs, swap spouses, or pursue other leisure activities. The slot on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1500 hours to 1620 hours may be devoted by some to legitimate pedagogy, but it is available for other purposes as well.


Both/and!

How many colleagues have presumed that one publishes only at the expense of one's teaching? Usually such a presumption excuses those who do not publish. While it is true that publishing more means that one must do less of something else, one may do less service, less hobnobbing, less dissipating, less kvetching, less traveling, or less bar-hopping. Publication feeds into teaching less directly and less often than some colleagues claim in personal statements, yet each has been known to improve the other. Thus, the zero-sum tradeoff between publishing and teaching is a false dichotomy. Publishing and teaching may have some positive-sum combinations, and publishing may come at the expense of activities other than teaching.

Both/and!

For decades decision-makers have presumed that the university needed ever-increasing SAT medians and other indicia of academic prowess to continue its transition from a local party-school to a national liberal-arts college. [Why it could not be both was never explained to me. Perhaps it is assumed that fun and learning are mutually exclusive.] Such concerns precluded diversification of our student body by classes, ethnicities, and other demographics we were told. This was more than an empty excuse for temporizing; it was another unnecessary choice dangled before credulous, craven faculty.

Both/and!

When some brave undergraduates in Spring 1993 held an event called "Sex, Lies, and Tenure," one or more members of the Faculty Advancement Committee spoke to students and assured them that recent firings of women had been based on considerations other than the women's facilitation of undergraduates' complaints against multiple members of the women's department. For some reason, the students were not taken in by the claim that this or that overt rationalization precluded certain covert motivations. [That is, the students were not drooling morons.] Indeed, students reasoned that overt rationlizations based on "personal and professional characteristics" might be a cover story that permitted decision-makers to punish whistle-blowers and those who sided with prey against tenured predators. Where did the students get such ideas? Well, many majored in Politics and Government.

Both/and!

Members of the Wigger Patwol insist that one cannot be both rigorous and supportive. This either/or concerns more than men with very small penises who argue about which of them assigned crummier grades to disoriented first-years. Faculty committed to being supportive take all or almost all students as those students enter courses. The supportive teachers strive to make students better. Supportive faculty do not believe that support makes them flaccid, any more than they believe that giving rotten grades makes them better teachers. The deluded in the Wigger Patwol, by contrast, insist that instructors may either be harsh and belittling or permissive and hand-holding. That is scarcely the only dimension along which Wigger-Patwol boneheads exhibit unusual thickness.

Both/and!

The Wigger Patwol, however, may exceed in IQ those who believe that any emphasis on careers, jobs, or practical education defeats attempts to run a liberal-arts curriculum. Need I explain how established liberal-arts colleges teem with alums who get jobs and pursue careers other than post-graduate education? We do not have to crank out professional students to prove that we are not "vocational."

Both/and!

Is there a faculty member who actually believes that paucity of majors demonstrates strength of the major? Cannot strong majors nonetheless be popular or attractive?

Both/and!

Thank God the current president believes the university can and should sport and support students who are engaged in Tacoma and other matters local while at the same time they think about big questions and enduring puzzles.

Both/and!

Now if we could only imagine a faculty both critical and loyal.

Coming Soon: Haltom's Fifteenth Law -- Academic sub-units can be inferior far longer than superior to their larger institutions.

RIP, Michael Denning

Michael James Denning, 1950-2008 Dr. Michael Denning died of leukemia last Thursday. Michael had struggled with illness for some years. He was tough but realistic. Like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, Michael knew what we all have/had coming to us. He did not use mortality as an excuse. He used it to spur himself to "get busy living" (The Shawshank Redemption).

                   

I met Michael in 1977 in graduate school. He liked what I said in a seminar on modern political theory but wanted to push me on my views. The Blue Moon Tavern was on his walk home, so we took the matter one mile and thirty feet off campus to that legendary watering hole [emphasis on "hole" in those days] to which he explicitly dedicated his dissertation in 1984. This was the first of many confabs at the Moon, where the motto was that "There are nights when the Moon howls and the wolves are silent." I swear that Michael pushed me during every single one of our visits.

             

Michael chuckled at my impatience with philosophical gibble-gabble. When a professor elaborated a dilemma that Hamlet faced ― regicide at his father's request versus regicide based on his own anger with the King and Gertrude ― I replied that we each do many things for multiple reasons and that either way Claudius dies, so where's the dilemma? Michael waited out the professor's explanation of the profit of such classroom exercises, then pounced on the professor's distinctions unburdened by differences. That day the professor learned that I was bumptious but Michael far more dangerous.

                   

Michael and I seldom shared coursework, but when we did we made the most of it. We wandered into a graduate seminar in Sociology and scandalized the worshipful, weak-kneed sociology grads:

      #####

Professor: "Bill, that is a fascinating idea, but how would you operationalize it?"

Me: "I wouldn't!"

Professor: "Why not?"

Me: "Because I am working out a theoretical proposition, not writing a journal article. Operationalization should follow thought, not substitute for it."

 

Later that same afternoon, Two-O took the stand to testify. #####

Professor: "So Parsons makes Weber seem like Pareto."

Michael: "Bullshit!" A Greek chorus of Sociology grads sucked in air.

Professor: "So how would you differentiate Weber from Pareto on this point?" 

Michael: "By reading what Parsons and Pareto wrote and realizing that it does not resemble what Weber wrote. [4 minutes of diatribe, screed, and shouting omitted]"

 

Michael recruited me to his softball team, the Lynn Street Dogs, because he needed an outfield arm. The Dogs kept me after it turned out that, for me, the first thing to go was the arm. Sunday after Sunday, Michael patroled the shortfield between left and center and assured that the Dogs beat the other team to the keg. He also led the Dogs in heckling the other team, passersby, and anything else he espied.

Michael and I defended our dissertations on 24 May 1984. He defended in the morning. I went in the afternoon. "The Doctors Dog" then repaired to the Blue Moon to celebrate the end of a raucous era in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington. I am not sure that docility and deference broke out among the graduate throng thereafter, but that's how Michael and I told the tale. 

From 1977 to 2008, Michael and I commiserated on the sheer stupidities that Political Science foisted and fostered. Just today I received notice that the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for last year's Midwest Political Science Association meeting had been awarded to a paper entitled, "Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging." Although I cannot be certain which expletives Michael would have uttered about such a title, I can be sure that "mindless" would have been among the colorful words. I can hear Michael rasping now: "How can sex cause anything other than pregnancy?" Michael did not go gentle into the post-literate era. 

Michael became Assistant Professor at Indiana University, where he discovered that departments welcomed candor even less than professors in seminars. He tired of Bloomington and headed back to Seattle. He became intellectual in residence at the Port of Seattle. This was a dazzling accomplishment. Bottom-line executives and hard-nosed maritimers employed Michael to distill scholarship and to incubate new ideas. This impressed on Michael and on the executives just how practical the academic could be. 

Eager to return to the classroom, Michael undertook graduate education anew at the Maritime Institute at the University of Washington. This time he was the leader [and lader] of the seminar, pulling tyros back to realities.

However, Michael adhered to his plan: to retire to the life of a dilettante scholar. That is, Michael lived the life to which so many of us aspired when we began grad school. He read books. He thought. He followed his bliss. He financed his scholarship with well-selected investments and, let's be honest, fiendish frugality.

He handicapped the NFL draft every year in the hope that the L. A. Rams, then the Indianapolis Colts, and finally the Seattle Seahawks would stock their rosters well. Michael admired the offensive line of the Rams, so I played the loyal friend and did not mention the manifest superiority of the O-line of Oakland Raiders: Do the names Upshaw, Shell, Otto, Dalby, Buehler, Vella, and Casper now seem familiar, Michael? Regarding baseball [Michael did and I did not], Michael loathed the Designated Hitter while I disliked watching pitchers make outs in what was already a tedious sport when not played with a beer in one hand. Born in St. Louis, Michael remained true to the Cardinals for his lifetime. He tended to loyalty in myriad regards far beyond the sports world. 

Michael loved to argue and loved to save and loved to invest. He loved his wife and his family. He loved the road. He was charismatic and charming when he felt like it. When provoked, he was an intellectual berserker. He was intense, becoming a hermit for days when in the throes of some frenzied investigation.  

He was my closest friend in Political Science. I shall miss him. I shall not miss the pain that he withstood for years. A mutual friend suggested that "Michaelangelo" from Emmylou Harris's "Red Dirt Girl" is the appropriate eulogy for Two-O [his nickname on the Lynn Street Dogs, from a youthful fling in Pasco with Mogen David 20-20]. She was correct once again: 

Last night I dreamed about you/ I dreamed that you were riding/ 

On a blood-red painted pony/ 

Up where the heavens were dividing/ 

And the angels turned to ashes/ 

You came tumbling with them to the earth/ 

So Far below/ 

Michelangelo/ 

 

Last night I dreamed about you/ 

I dreamed that you lay dying/ 

In a field of thorn and roses/ 

With a hawk above you crying/ 

For the warrior slain in battle/ 

From an arrow driven deep inside you/ 

Long ago/ 

Michelangelo/ 

 

Did you suffer at the end?/ 

Would there be no-one to remember?/ 

Did you banish all the old ghosts/ 

At the terms of your surrender?/ 

And could you hear me calling out your name?/ 

Well I guess that I will never know/ 

Michelangelo 

NOW you are truly a dilettante, Michael. I hope you've found a worthy library. Will, the Dog Catcher

Coming Soon --- Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Haltom's Thirteenth Law: Only lowlifes espouse Übermenschen.

Why do people who give credence to some master race or outstanding breed so often seem to be seriously damaged if not deranged?



I do not imagine that Haltom's 13th Law is original, but I have never heard anyone come out and state what almost all think: talk of supermen belongs in comic books.

In some classic treatments of characters who think themselves transcendent, the deluded seem taken with themselves for no reason apparent to the mass of men. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is said by many around him to be a genius, but Dostoevsky hides Raskolnikov's superiority well. In Hitchcock's "Rope" and Fleischer's "Compulsion," cinematic Leopolds and Loebs are as callow and feckless as Raskolnikov albeit less depressive. A far more impressive product of eugenics in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" -- as I shift to cultural creations that cost me less time and brought me more pleasure than those mentioned already -- seems outstanding for a while but is bested by Captain James T. Kirk. On the television "Star Trek," Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalban) lost a previous bout to Lieutenant Marla McGivers (the late Madlyn Rhue), who was far from a formidable opponent.

Perhaps such cultural commentaries are not to be trusted. Their audiences are people of middling abilities or less. Perhaps authors were merely soothing too-human humans so that they would not fear the super-human reapers who operate beyond good and evil. Maybe the authors saw in themselves too little superiority and so lampooned their masters like so many valets and maids on holiday. It could be that Western culture is addicted to Manichean portraits about struggles between good and evil about which I believe Zoroaster had views, too.

Nonetheless, the few persons I have known who took master races, higher breeds, or transvaluing over-men seriously and recognized themselves as such Übermenschen were, as the Brits like to say, not prepossessing. I do not propose here a genealogy of morons. A quick example may suffice.


A friend from my teens in Ballard tended to admire the Nazis and joined the American Nazi Party. If this was merely a phase, it was an ominous one. This Irish lad was given to shooting at hobos on passing railroad flatcars with his .22 rifle. He was a good but not great chess player, which is to say that I won perhaps one game in ten from him. Other than that, however, I cannot remember a solitary virtue in the lad. This superman lived in the perpetual twilight of the idle that was adolescence in Ballard in the 1960s. He did escape Ballard by joining the Navy. Now that was super!

To be polite about it, my experiences in academe have not improved my assessments of those who propound some next big human thing. I profited from reading Nietzsche far more than from slogging Dostoevsky. Cliff's Notes improved on the latter far more than on the former, to be sure. I have also known graduate students and professors who could derive insights of value from Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, although I never knew one who actually got beyond gay science to testable propositions. Still, their political patter had a distinguished lineage. Like the futurist who purports to understand it all courtesy of Yeats' gyres or the Straussian who decodes classic texts to discover truths, the intellectual who sees supermen and hears dead people writes fabulous articles for the New York Review of Books without advancing understanding much that those of us with too little will to power can appreciate.

In sum, those who sip the Nietzschean Flavor Aid have deftly hidden their genius from me. They partake of the public timidity and circumspection of Clark Kent more than the pluck and persistence of Lois Lane. They exude the competence and capacity of Lex Luthor's henchmen. Jerry Lewis might mistake them for Professor Moriarty, I suppose.

If these are the Übermenschen, we all owe pessimists a big apology.



Coming Soon --- Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.