The same Ballard Vietnam vet who tended to repeat "Don't mean nothing" was prone to "If it don't fit, use a bigger hammer." Son of a Swedish carpenter and adept at home repair, Mike disparaged those so given to impatience and brute force that their repairs tended to make matters worse. On the other hand, Mike might have pondered why German carpenters call deep impressions made when hammers missed nails "Swedish dimples."
Not restricted to shoddy repairers or volcanic vets, Haltom's Fourth Law mocks all partisans of "I want it to be so; therefore, it is so" methodologies. Haltom's Fourth Law parodies the Procrustean.
At a glance one surmises why Haltom's Fourth Law should hold true. We each know dozens of folks capable of Procrustean thinking. Some are flat-out practiced at bricolage to "verify" what they fervently wish were true. Each of us knows few who are capable of Promethean thinking, so it cannot suprise us that Procrustean thinkers greatly outnumber Promethean thinkers. We each have friends or colleagues who will stake a claim and defend it long past the point at which anyone could believe the nonsense, so we realize that the Procrustean greatly outnumber the candidly perplexed and vastly outnumber the Promethean. The plurality of Procrustean "thinkers" is what Haltom's Fourth Law memorializes.
We see it around the University of Puget Clowns all too often. A colleague who has never uttered an intellectual thought and could never publish anything the least bit intellectual laments that since a certain administrator left, "the intellectual climate has declined." The lamenter knows that not one colleague in one hundred could suggest suitable measures by which such a decline might be measured or tested. Indeed, that is why the lament is risk-free. No matter what information one might marshal, the lamenter will parry the information as somehow suspect and will reiterate that the intellectual climate is poorer. Most colleagues will not press the lamenter over such empty blather, for they realize that the blather dresses up the true source of displeasure: the lamenter enjoyed some largesse from the prior administrator that has not been forthcoming from current administrators. The lamenter should be taken as seriously as we took Ronald Reagan when he attributed declining math scores to the absence of school prayer.
Expect Procrustean excess in peer evaluation, especially when such lamenters serve on the FAC [as, being false-positives, almost all of them will]. Every anecdote or observation may exemplify one's prejudices if only one is agile, shameless, and relentless.At the departmental level, suppose you observed a colleague who did not do in a situation what you are confident that you would have done. If the colleague is vulnerable and you are invulnerable, pummel the sucker! After all, you know yourself to be the perfect judge of all classroom situations. What you would have done is the best thing to have done. The vulnerable evaluee frittered away a golden opportunity to follow your lead. What lousy teaching!
Or suppose you are on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and learn that one or more administrators opposed hiring an evaluee and that people in power don't like the evaluee. Time to concoct some vague, abstract failing that is ineluctable because ineffable. Subsume every negative on students' evaluations under some rubric that you cannot quite articulate. Claim that you know it when you see it. You must not define the great, generalized flaw, of course, for then it would be too obvious that most students crammed into the "Category that has no Name" did not mean what you are mistaking their comments to indicate. Just refer to assorted parts as if they constituted a discrete, valid failing. Most members of the FAC cannot spell or detect synecdoche or metonymy, so no one will call you on wholly Procrustean amalgams. And you'll please administrators behind the cover of confidentiality.
In faculty meetings, our Procrustean colleagues husband anecdota and apocrypha the way Ballard youth brandished "Ford persuaders" and whacked engines until the engines resumed [barely] running. One Puget Clowns colleague suggested that faculty tend to follow the advice of Red Green: "Any tool can be the right tool," but I have stuck with the metaphor of the hammer to preserve the subtlety with which colleagues at faculty meetings pound large square pegs into tiny round holes. Many is the faculty meeting during which someone has tried to force a four-by-four through the holes in peg board. When the peg board gives way, many colleagues exclaim, "We have a perfect fit!"
This is not to claim that all administrators have used sledge hammers to run faculty meetings. President Phibbs and Dean Davis fixed faculty tools around some top-down orthodoxy and orthopraxy, then let the credulous [merely 90-95% of the faculty] attribute policies and practices to governance. The Phibbs-Davis team brought down Thor's hammer when they had to, but they seldom had to because they were so adept at selecting, using, and [usually] rewarding the right faculty tools for the right jobs and because they were so adept with needles, nails, screws, and surgical instruments.
By contrast, President Pierce was so maladroit at "leading" faculty that she frequently and publicly had to resort to sledge hammers and jack hammers. The faculty were fortunate that, for some reason, she usually missed her targets. Maybe it was a vision thing.
Pierce violated the Faculty Code to sell the law school, then stonewalled the Faculty Senate and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] when they raised her violations. She then spun laughable yarns about what had happened. Frustrated at the ability of Senate Chair Walter Lowrie and the PSC to read the Code [Yikes! Once the PSC was replete with literates!], Pierce and her new dean tried to recruit incoming faculty at "Rookie Camp" in 1994. They plied newbies with the claim that Pierce and her team wanted to upgrade the university but were obstructed by an old guard. One need not be a seer to foretell the fates of rookies who believed Pierce and her dean. The reputations of some of the first-years barely outlasted the lunch at "Rookie Camp" when UPS veterans were grilled about why they were thwarting Pierce's brave, new world. Some of the first-years were gone before the new dean was sacked! In sum, Pierce wielded big hammers to get her way but tended to brain her allies rather than to clobber her opponents. [Of course, hitting one of her few supporters was a much tougher feat than nailing her many detractors, so I should show some respect for her markspersonship.]
President Pierce and her deans eventually flourished a hammer suited to their arrogance: administrative prerogative. During the Pierce presidency, administrators all too often escalated to that sledge hammer when they did not get their way with consultation, conversation, or cajoling. The class schedule that Puget Clowns uses at present was run by the Academic Standards Committee and the Faculty Senate multiple times, but it found few if any takers. The administrators could neither persuade nor entice faculty to agree to the new scheme, so the then-dean declared that scheduling, long thought to be part of faculty prerogative with respect to curriculum, was in fact subject to administrative ukase. Tlansration: We tried to woo the faculty, but the faculty spurned us, so now we have moved to the famed "My way or the highway" syllogism.
Exhuberant over getting their way, Pierce's administrators decided that furnishings and arrangements in Wyatt Hall were not matters for consultation with faculty who would occupy the offices but were matters meet for the administrative prerogative hammer. When students, staff, and faculty questioned the headstones and electronic signs that popped up around campus, a subaltern did not deign to discuss such matter. Administrative prerogative made administrators deciders of such things, we all were told.
At faculty meetings, in committee meetings, and in departmental meetings, then, expect Procrustes to run the inn. Prometheus -- whose name means foresight -- is usually absent, chained to his desk or to a barstool and beset by various vultures masquerading as eagles around Jones Hall. Administrators follow Prometheus's brother Epimetheus -- hindsight -- in hammering students, staff, and faculty even when administrators might prevail through discourse or dialogue.
Coming Soon -- Haltom's Fifth Law: "No one who whistles in public can."
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