Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Most alternatives, Kenneth Burke reminded us, need not exclude other alternatives. Many trade-offs can be transformed into syntheses or amalgams.

I derived Haltom's 14th Law from the literary analyst/theorist Kenneth Burke. Beyond the obvious advice to avoid false dichotomies, Burke counseled analysts to consider ways in which contrasting perspectives or passages might complement or mutually reinforce. Perhaps Certs is both a candy mint and a breath mint. To those with numb palates, Miller Lite may both taste great and be less filling. The nuns insisted that Jesus was both man and God.

Both/and!

Perhaps the most dispiriting either/or afflicts campus when one presumes that advance(s) by a peer come at one's expense. Your contract, publication, or opportunity makes the rest of us look bad, these envious dogs believe. Since there are always fewer people with some honor or accomplishment than without [even in a three-person department], such either/or, zero-sum attitudes guarantee more misery and jealousy than celebration and community. Those who want "no great woman or man to walk among us" guarantee mediocrity, sniping, and schadenfreude. That is how middling and weak departments stagnate.

Both/and!

Around campus, the either/or versus both/and problem arises whenever colleagues assert a sanitized, selfless motive as if such a motive precludes a corrupt, selfish motive. When I first raised concerns about permitting colleagues to take Fridays off by offering courses on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:00 p. m. until 4:20 p.m., proponents of four-day weekends quickly corrected me. "The point is not to take Fridays off but to clear Fridays for tasks other than teaching." These colleagues knew that this was a false either/or. As I showed in "U Stands for Unchained Malady" [the 10-27-07 entry in "Rump Parliament"], those pressing to be on campus fewer than a five days per week include slackers, shirkers, shuckers, and other cynics who hide behind few sincere colleagues who would put "free days" to good use. Long weekends reward both colleagues who put days away from campus to good use and far more numerous colleagues who sleep in, leave town, watch TV, luxuriate in tubs, swap spouses, or pursue other leisure activities. The slot on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1500 hours to 1620 hours may be devoted by some to legitimate pedagogy, but it is available for other purposes as well.


Both/and!

How many colleagues have presumed that one publishes only at the expense of one's teaching? Usually such a presumption excuses those who do not publish. While it is true that publishing more means that one must do less of something else, one may do less service, less hobnobbing, less dissipating, less kvetching, less traveling, or less bar-hopping. Publication feeds into teaching less directly and less often than some colleagues claim in personal statements, yet each has been known to improve the other. Thus, the zero-sum tradeoff between publishing and teaching is a false dichotomy. Publishing and teaching may have some positive-sum combinations, and publishing may come at the expense of activities other than teaching.

Both/and!

For decades decision-makers have presumed that the university needed ever-increasing SAT medians and other indicia of academic prowess to continue its transition from a local party-school to a national liberal-arts college. [Why it could not be both was never explained to me. Perhaps it is assumed that fun and learning are mutually exclusive.] Such concerns precluded diversification of our student body by classes, ethnicities, and other demographics we were told. This was more than an empty excuse for temporizing; it was another unnecessary choice dangled before credulous, craven faculty.

Both/and!

When some brave undergraduates in Spring 1993 held an event called "Sex, Lies, and Tenure," one or more members of the Faculty Advancement Committee spoke to students and assured them that recent firings of women had been based on considerations other than the women's facilitation of undergraduates' complaints against multiple members of the women's department. For some reason, the students were not taken in by the claim that this or that overt rationalization precluded certain covert motivations. [That is, the students were not drooling morons.] Indeed, students reasoned that overt rationlizations based on "personal and professional characteristics" might be a cover story that permitted decision-makers to punish whistle-blowers and those who sided with prey against tenured predators. Where did the students get such ideas? Well, many majored in Politics and Government.

Both/and!

Members of the Wigger Patwol insist that one cannot be both rigorous and supportive. This either/or concerns more than men with very small penises who argue about which of them assigned crummier grades to disoriented first-years. Faculty committed to being supportive take all or almost all students as those students enter courses. The supportive teachers strive to make students better. Supportive faculty do not believe that support makes them flaccid, any more than they believe that giving rotten grades makes them better teachers. The deluded in the Wigger Patwol, by contrast, insist that instructors may either be harsh and belittling or permissive and hand-holding. That is scarcely the only dimension along which Wigger-Patwol boneheads exhibit unusual thickness.

Both/and!

The Wigger Patwol, however, may exceed in IQ those who believe that any emphasis on careers, jobs, or practical education defeats attempts to run a liberal-arts curriculum. Need I explain how established liberal-arts colleges teem with alums who get jobs and pursue careers other than post-graduate education? We do not have to crank out professional students to prove that we are not "vocational."

Both/and!

Is there a faculty member who actually believes that paucity of majors demonstrates strength of the major? Cannot strong majors nonetheless be popular or attractive?

Both/and!

Thank God the current president believes the university can and should sport and support students who are engaged in Tacoma and other matters local while at the same time they think about big questions and enduring puzzles.

Both/and!

Now if we could only imagine a faculty both critical and loyal.

Coming Soon: Haltom's Fifteenth Law -- Academic sub-units can be inferior far longer than superior to their larger institutions.

RIP, Michael Denning

Michael James Denning, 1950-2008 Dr. Michael Denning died of leukemia last Thursday. Michael had struggled with illness for some years. He was tough but realistic. Like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, Michael knew what we all have/had coming to us. He did not use mortality as an excuse. He used it to spur himself to "get busy living" (The Shawshank Redemption).

                   

I met Michael in 1977 in graduate school. He liked what I said in a seminar on modern political theory but wanted to push me on my views. The Blue Moon Tavern was on his walk home, so we took the matter one mile and thirty feet off campus to that legendary watering hole [emphasis on "hole" in those days] to which he explicitly dedicated his dissertation in 1984. This was the first of many confabs at the Moon, where the motto was that "There are nights when the Moon howls and the wolves are silent." I swear that Michael pushed me during every single one of our visits.

             

Michael chuckled at my impatience with philosophical gibble-gabble. When a professor elaborated a dilemma that Hamlet faced ― regicide at his father's request versus regicide based on his own anger with the King and Gertrude ― I replied that we each do many things for multiple reasons and that either way Claudius dies, so where's the dilemma? Michael waited out the professor's explanation of the profit of such classroom exercises, then pounced on the professor's distinctions unburdened by differences. That day the professor learned that I was bumptious but Michael far more dangerous.

                   

Michael and I seldom shared coursework, but when we did we made the most of it. We wandered into a graduate seminar in Sociology and scandalized the worshipful, weak-kneed sociology grads:

      #####

Professor: "Bill, that is a fascinating idea, but how would you operationalize it?"

Me: "I wouldn't!"

Professor: "Why not?"

Me: "Because I am working out a theoretical proposition, not writing a journal article. Operationalization should follow thought, not substitute for it."

 

Later that same afternoon, Two-O took the stand to testify. #####

Professor: "So Parsons makes Weber seem like Pareto."

Michael: "Bullshit!" A Greek chorus of Sociology grads sucked in air.

Professor: "So how would you differentiate Weber from Pareto on this point?" 

Michael: "By reading what Parsons and Pareto wrote and realizing that it does not resemble what Weber wrote. [4 minutes of diatribe, screed, and shouting omitted]"

 

Michael recruited me to his softball team, the Lynn Street Dogs, because he needed an outfield arm. The Dogs kept me after it turned out that, for me, the first thing to go was the arm. Sunday after Sunday, Michael patroled the shortfield between left and center and assured that the Dogs beat the other team to the keg. He also led the Dogs in heckling the other team, passersby, and anything else he espied.

Michael and I defended our dissertations on 24 May 1984. He defended in the morning. I went in the afternoon. "The Doctors Dog" then repaired to the Blue Moon to celebrate the end of a raucous era in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington. I am not sure that docility and deference broke out among the graduate throng thereafter, but that's how Michael and I told the tale. 

From 1977 to 2008, Michael and I commiserated on the sheer stupidities that Political Science foisted and fostered. Just today I received notice that the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for last year's Midwest Political Science Association meeting had been awarded to a paper entitled, "Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging." Although I cannot be certain which expletives Michael would have uttered about such a title, I can be sure that "mindless" would have been among the colorful words. I can hear Michael rasping now: "How can sex cause anything other than pregnancy?" Michael did not go gentle into the post-literate era. 

Michael became Assistant Professor at Indiana University, where he discovered that departments welcomed candor even less than professors in seminars. He tired of Bloomington and headed back to Seattle. He became intellectual in residence at the Port of Seattle. This was a dazzling accomplishment. Bottom-line executives and hard-nosed maritimers employed Michael to distill scholarship and to incubate new ideas. This impressed on Michael and on the executives just how practical the academic could be. 

Eager to return to the classroom, Michael undertook graduate education anew at the Maritime Institute at the University of Washington. This time he was the leader [and lader] of the seminar, pulling tyros back to realities.

However, Michael adhered to his plan: to retire to the life of a dilettante scholar. That is, Michael lived the life to which so many of us aspired when we began grad school. He read books. He thought. He followed his bliss. He financed his scholarship with well-selected investments and, let's be honest, fiendish frugality.

He handicapped the NFL draft every year in the hope that the L. A. Rams, then the Indianapolis Colts, and finally the Seattle Seahawks would stock their rosters well. Michael admired the offensive line of the Rams, so I played the loyal friend and did not mention the manifest superiority of the O-line of Oakland Raiders: Do the names Upshaw, Shell, Otto, Dalby, Buehler, Vella, and Casper now seem familiar, Michael? Regarding baseball [Michael did and I did not], Michael loathed the Designated Hitter while I disliked watching pitchers make outs in what was already a tedious sport when not played with a beer in one hand. Born in St. Louis, Michael remained true to the Cardinals for his lifetime. He tended to loyalty in myriad regards far beyond the sports world. 

Michael loved to argue and loved to save and loved to invest. He loved his wife and his family. He loved the road. He was charismatic and charming when he felt like it. When provoked, he was an intellectual berserker. He was intense, becoming a hermit for days when in the throes of some frenzied investigation.  

He was my closest friend in Political Science. I shall miss him. I shall not miss the pain that he withstood for years. A mutual friend suggested that "Michaelangelo" from Emmylou Harris's "Red Dirt Girl" is the appropriate eulogy for Two-O [his nickname on the Lynn Street Dogs, from a youthful fling in Pasco with Mogen David 20-20]. She was correct once again: 

Last night I dreamed about you/ I dreamed that you were riding/ 

On a blood-red painted pony/ 

Up where the heavens were dividing/ 

And the angels turned to ashes/ 

You came tumbling with them to the earth/ 

So Far below/ 

Michelangelo/ 

 

Last night I dreamed about you/ 

I dreamed that you lay dying/ 

In a field of thorn and roses/ 

With a hawk above you crying/ 

For the warrior slain in battle/ 

From an arrow driven deep inside you/ 

Long ago/ 

Michelangelo/ 

 

Did you suffer at the end?/ 

Would there be no-one to remember?/ 

Did you banish all the old ghosts/ 

At the terms of your surrender?/ 

And could you hear me calling out your name?/ 

Well I guess that I will never know/ 

Michelangelo 

NOW you are truly a dilettante, Michael. I hope you've found a worthy library. Will, the Dog Catcher

Coming Soon --- Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Haltom's Thirteenth Law: Only lowlifes espouse Übermenschen.

Why do people who give credence to some master race or outstanding breed so often seem to be seriously damaged if not deranged?



I do not imagine that Haltom's 13th Law is original, but I have never heard anyone come out and state what almost all think: talk of supermen belongs in comic books.

In some classic treatments of characters who think themselves transcendent, the deluded seem taken with themselves for no reason apparent to the mass of men. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is said by many around him to be a genius, but Dostoevsky hides Raskolnikov's superiority well. In Hitchcock's "Rope" and Fleischer's "Compulsion," cinematic Leopolds and Loebs are as callow and feckless as Raskolnikov albeit less depressive. A far more impressive product of eugenics in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" -- as I shift to cultural creations that cost me less time and brought me more pleasure than those mentioned already -- seems outstanding for a while but is bested by Captain James T. Kirk. On the television "Star Trek," Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalban) lost a previous bout to Lieutenant Marla McGivers (the late Madlyn Rhue), who was far from a formidable opponent.

Perhaps such cultural commentaries are not to be trusted. Their audiences are people of middling abilities or less. Perhaps authors were merely soothing too-human humans so that they would not fear the super-human reapers who operate beyond good and evil. Maybe the authors saw in themselves too little superiority and so lampooned their masters like so many valets and maids on holiday. It could be that Western culture is addicted to Manichean portraits about struggles between good and evil about which I believe Zoroaster had views, too.

Nonetheless, the few persons I have known who took master races, higher breeds, or transvaluing over-men seriously and recognized themselves as such Übermenschen were, as the Brits like to say, not prepossessing. I do not propose here a genealogy of morons. A quick example may suffice.


A friend from my teens in Ballard tended to admire the Nazis and joined the American Nazi Party. If this was merely a phase, it was an ominous one. This Irish lad was given to shooting at hobos on passing railroad flatcars with his .22 rifle. He was a good but not great chess player, which is to say that I won perhaps one game in ten from him. Other than that, however, I cannot remember a solitary virtue in the lad. This superman lived in the perpetual twilight of the idle that was adolescence in Ballard in the 1960s. He did escape Ballard by joining the Navy. Now that was super!

To be polite about it, my experiences in academe have not improved my assessments of those who propound some next big human thing. I profited from reading Nietzsche far more than from slogging Dostoevsky. Cliff's Notes improved on the latter far more than on the former, to be sure. I have also known graduate students and professors who could derive insights of value from Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, although I never knew one who actually got beyond gay science to testable propositions. Still, their political patter had a distinguished lineage. Like the futurist who purports to understand it all courtesy of Yeats' gyres or the Straussian who decodes classic texts to discover truths, the intellectual who sees supermen and hears dead people writes fabulous articles for the New York Review of Books without advancing understanding much that those of us with too little will to power can appreciate.

In sum, those who sip the Nietzschean Flavor Aid have deftly hidden their genius from me. They partake of the public timidity and circumspection of Clark Kent more than the pluck and persistence of Lois Lane. They exude the competence and capacity of Lex Luthor's henchmen. Jerry Lewis might mistake them for Professor Moriarty, I suppose.

If these are the Übermenschen, we all owe pessimists a big apology.



Coming Soon --- Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Haltom's Twelfth Law: No matter how well you teach a class-session, students would have preferred you to cancel.

Most students have better things to do than to listen to professors. If they do not, they are losers.

Professor, be not proud. Generous evaluations, awards from student organizations, and plaudits from the Faculty Advancement Committee cannot gainsay a simple fact. On almost any day of the semester, almost every student in your section had a place she or he would rather have been. Haltom's 12th Law does not maintain that lectures are pointless or that taking pride in presentations is counterproductive. Instead, Haltom's 12th Law suggests that professors adopt more realistic attitudes about how entertaining and how informative they actually are on any given class-day.

Were you showing a boffo movie? Students would have preferred to have watched the film over refreshments at some reasonable hour. They likely would have gotten more out of the watching as well. Spin the DVD and do your best not to talk over the soundtrack like a demented disk jockey, but realize that you are saving yourself a lecture and entertaining the internees and that "mixing it up" is tacit admission that normal classroom activities are tedious.

Are you about to loose your most riveting presentation? Save it into PowerPoint and let students process the slides at their own pace in their own quarters -- if you dare to be bested by a pillow.

Do you protest that students love your classes and would not miss them? Then admit that you are an entertainer who has found ways to overcome students' alternative activities by pedagogical arts, crafts, devices, and dodges. That is, your refutation of Haltom's Twelfth Law reinforces the truth of Haltom's Twelfth Law.

No matter what protests brash blowhards belch, no matter what platitudes self-promoters chant, and no matter what self-aggrandizement full pustules ooze, some class-sessions represent substantial opportunity costs for every student with a life and a mind. Any student who could not have found multiple activities superior to those in a classroom deserves pity instead of a bump for class-participation.

Colleagues note and grade attendance because they must wield sanctions to fill their sections. Haltom's 12th Law helps peers admit what they are doing. In 1999, for an example, one of my advisees was graded down from the B- he had earned to a D because he had missed too many meetings of a course. I asked the professor about the matter. She or he replied that the penalty was listed in the syllabus. "When students miss class, they do not do well on examinations and do not learn!" He or she had no apt answer when I responded to this pious pronouncement with logic: "Then shouldn't a grade based on examinations and other course responsibilities represent any such gaps in learning?" I was not surprised that the instructor had no back-up bullshit. I was happy to help her or him see that he or she was affronted that some student could do average work without her or his assistance. He or she seemed less happy to receive my help.

In sum, deductions for missing classes often become more severe the more that instructors, in their few moments of reflection, realize that absences do not reflect in performance, learning, or grades. Such is not to say that students should not be encouraged to attend, that students who are blowing off class too often should not be rounded up, or that providing rewards and penalties for attendance or deportment is atavistic. Again, Haltom's Twelfth is about attitudes rather than actions.

Indeed, Haltom's Twelfth Law articulates with Haltom's Ninth Law. See what you are doing [XII], then do what you are doing [IX]. Get out of the habit of denying what you are doing, for that habit will induce you to lose sight of what is before your nose in your own classroom. Lose too much sight and you'll blindly join the "Wigger Patwol." Among the Wigger Patwol, thumbscrews and waterboarding demonstrate anew how eager your students are to be in class this morning.

I know that "the few, the proud, the professoriate" will never acknowledge that, at least for some students, weathering lectures, deciphering scrawl, and "engaging" in gabfests that raise students' evaluations more than students' acumen are often related more to pumping up the performer than to learning or to grades. They'd rather coerce captive audiences before whom they perform shtick that will secure evaluations that will get the performers raises and praises and the hapless audience an hour closer to their deaths [with or without learning].

Such colleagues are correct to suppose that coercion serves professors far better than voluntary consent ever would. One need not have done much peer evaluation to see why so many colleagues will not leave attendance up to students' assessments of relative rewards.

However, if you suspect that colleagues sanction attendance because they despair of defeating video games, slumber, and good books [as opposed to required readings] by any other means, you are a cynic, "[a] blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are ..." [Ambrose Bierce] rather than as your peers' rationalizations require.

When cynics are correct, they imperil mindless conformity even more than when they are wrong.

Coming next -- Haltom's Thirteen Law: Only lowlifes espouse Übermenschen.