Here's a tip for all you honkies:
Fa La La La La La La La La
It's the time we pay off donkeys!
Fa La La La La La La La La
Colleagues who are barely sentient
Fa La La La La La La La La
Profit from their supine penchant.
Fa La La La La La La La La
Freeze your expression like the icy tundra of Lambeau Field. Decisions about tenure, promotions, and awards have been made and soon will be known. Veterans know how it works: try to remain calm and profess to see logic in even the most preposterous pronouncement(s).
Commit no candor!
Please recall from previous blogs that at least one such decision per year reinforces the perception that merit is not the only criterion for this award or that honor. Our merciful systems allow those spurned to espy at least one unworthy colleague who got what the spurned did not. Since this or that result cannot be explained by established rules and standards, those who were spurned were not necessarily unworthy. Perhaps they lacked allies or advocates in strategic places. Maybe a disgruntled chair or disgraced opponent figured in the decision. No need to take rejection as an affront. No need to be taken aback.
Keep your reserve.
The harder task is to remember, when one receives some honor, how empty the accolade may be. If one served on a power committee or otherwise assisted some decision-maker, one may have received the honor as much for conformity and credulity as for one's other qualities.
At the University of Puget Clowns, that one doubtless earned an honor may have little to do with why one got the honor.
Next: Explaining the Ways of UPS
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Why closed files guarantee innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt at least some evaluations.
Confidential evaluation files tend to feature more misinformation and disinformation than evaluation files that evaluees may inspect and police.
At the faculty meeting in the Rotunda on 8 December 2008, a former member of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] intoned that open files were inducing junior faculty to censor their remarks. One junior faculty member objected that the erstwhile evaluator was trafficking in anecdote. The FAC survivor asserted that his observations were not wholly subjective but were based on inquiries to junior faculty beyond merely reading their self-censored letters. The persistent junior faculty member scoffed that such "evidence" was nevertheless anecdotal. If only the 2007-2008 FAC had included a competent, candid social scientist to explain why many disciplines and scholars do not respond well to anecdotage, apocrypha, and other "evidence" too unreliable to be data, perhaps the FAC would not have issued its Fatwa Against Collegiality to the Faculty Senate in May 2008 [see "Open Files and Closed Minds" in this blog, 21 November 2008].
Let's not overcomplicate discussions of closed files [that is, those in which the evaluee waives her or his code-stated right to view letters from colleagues] versus open files [those in which the evaluee reserves his or her right to view letters]. At worst, the evaluee's right to inspect letters from colleagues may induce letter-writers to restrain themselves lest evaluees refute or retaliate. If the evaluee waives her or his right to review the letters, colleagues may write more freely. As a result, closed files may include more candor and more calumny. The issue need be little more complex than that.
Advocates of restricting the right of the evaluee to review letters that affect tenure or promotion often acknowledge the gain in candor and seldom acknowledge the increase in calumny. To advocate closing files, however, is to accept calumny as a price for securing candor. To advocate open files is to accept some diminution in information in return for some protection against misinformation [mistakes that would have been corrected if the evaluee could have known what falsehoods were introduced by evaluators] and disinformation [deliberately misleading or exaggerated "information" that evaluees are prudent to keep out of their files].
Amid the cavalcade of anecdotes and arguments to come on this topic, keep the foregoing in mind. As a class, closed files guarantee that mistakes, misstatements, innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt some evaluations. To fend off such corruption, circumscribing a few evaluators seems a reasonable prophylactic. Indeed, most scholars would rather suffer the rigors of correction and circumspection than to injure a colleague mistakenly or maliciously.
Which almost makes one wonder about tenured colleagues who ignore or minimize corruptions of evaluation that misinformation and disinformation work. What "information" do the proponents of concealment imagine vulnerable faculty to possess that would offset the pollution of the evaluation process? Could "evidence" available solely from vulnerable faculty be so dispositive and reliable as to make a substantial difference to the FAC or to the President and trustees?
And why is the FAC, as in its 2008 report to the Senate, trolling for and trafficking in the sorts of "evidence" more likely to turn up when closed files offer cover and camouflage?
Next: 'Tis the Season – Expect Decision-Makers to Bestow Surprising Gifts
At the faculty meeting in the Rotunda on 8 December 2008, a former member of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] intoned that open files were inducing junior faculty to censor their remarks. One junior faculty member objected that the erstwhile evaluator was trafficking in anecdote. The FAC survivor asserted that his observations were not wholly subjective but were based on inquiries to junior faculty beyond merely reading their self-censored letters. The persistent junior faculty member scoffed that such "evidence" was nevertheless anecdotal. If only the 2007-2008 FAC had included a competent, candid social scientist to explain why many disciplines and scholars do not respond well to anecdotage, apocrypha, and other "evidence" too unreliable to be data, perhaps the FAC would not have issued its Fatwa Against Collegiality to the Faculty Senate in May 2008 [see "Open Files and Closed Minds" in this blog, 21 November 2008].
Let's not overcomplicate discussions of closed files [that is, those in which the evaluee waives her or his code-stated right to view letters from colleagues] versus open files [those in which the evaluee reserves his or her right to view letters]. At worst, the evaluee's right to inspect letters from colleagues may induce letter-writers to restrain themselves lest evaluees refute or retaliate. If the evaluee waives her or his right to review the letters, colleagues may write more freely. As a result, closed files may include more candor and more calumny. The issue need be little more complex than that.
Advocates of restricting the right of the evaluee to review letters that affect tenure or promotion often acknowledge the gain in candor and seldom acknowledge the increase in calumny. To advocate closing files, however, is to accept calumny as a price for securing candor. To advocate open files is to accept some diminution in information in return for some protection against misinformation [mistakes that would have been corrected if the evaluee could have known what falsehoods were introduced by evaluators] and disinformation [deliberately misleading or exaggerated "information" that evaluees are prudent to keep out of their files].
Amid the cavalcade of anecdotes and arguments to come on this topic, keep the foregoing in mind. As a class, closed files guarantee that mistakes, misstatements, innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt some evaluations. To fend off such corruption, circumscribing a few evaluators seems a reasonable prophylactic. Indeed, most scholars would rather suffer the rigors of correction and circumspection than to injure a colleague mistakenly or maliciously.
Which almost makes one wonder about tenured colleagues who ignore or minimize corruptions of evaluation that misinformation and disinformation work. What "information" do the proponents of concealment imagine vulnerable faculty to possess that would offset the pollution of the evaluation process? Could "evidence" available solely from vulnerable faculty be so dispositive and reliable as to make a substantial difference to the FAC or to the President and trustees?
And why is the FAC, as in its 2008 report to the Senate, trolling for and trafficking in the sorts of "evidence" more likely to turn up when closed files offer cover and camouflage?
Next: 'Tis the Season – Expect Decision-Makers to Bestow Surprising Gifts
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)