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.