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.