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