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?
3 comments:
I find the "observation" to be specious unless the FAC had before and after samples coming from the self same writers or departments regarding the same candidates. EVEN IF there could be direct comparison of letters by the same writer pre- and post- this new directive, I can easily imagine other causes of a change in prose style.
How would the FAC know with certainty that the letters were written in a more guarded fashion?
I do not know how many of the scientists or social scientists on the FAC went along with or endorsed the "observation" forwarded to the Faculty Senate. That is part of the culture of concealment that long has afflicted Power Committees and corrupted those who serve on them.
More likely, faculty accustomed to the old order [Phibbs and Davis] revert to premises that have been rejected for years or decades.
Hence, the members of the FAC do not "know" any effects of allowing tenure files to be open. They posit effects because they do not care for open opinions openly stated.
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