Ever tried to explain "Disney Does Dartmouth" to someone from an actual university? It's "... like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll."
Last Thursday, I dined with a professor from a Research One institution. As I described some customs and usages at "Disney Does Dartmouth," [Thank you, Diana Marrế!] an anthropologist reeled from shock to protest. Trained in encountering and contextualizing seemingly savage practices and bizarre behavior, this anthropologist could not fathom exotica of ersatz-Dartmouth based on her experiences at universities and colleges large and small.
I told her about issues regarding junior faculty and closed versus open files [see my posts in Rump Parliament for 21 and 22 November 2008 for more details]. She gasped, "What are untenured faculty doing evaluating colleagues for tenure?" She seemed unimpressed by the history of the practice at "Disney Does Dartmouth," almost as if she thought reiterating etiology was insufficient justification. [She probably thought Bruce Hornsby's "That's Just the Way It Is" was a lament about classism and racism instead of a call for quiescence and indifference when confronted with injustice.]
As often as she repeated, "Isn't that practice against AAUP guidelines?" I repeated that to the best of my knowledge most colleagues at "Disney Does Dartmouth" neither knew nor cared what the AAUP recommended or required.
When I mentioned candidates for tenure simultaneously evaluating other candidates for tenure, she asked, "Now how does that not raise conflicts of interest?" In defense of my institution, I pointed out that spouses were prohibited from evaluating one another. She seemed unimpressed by this height of ethical rigor. Of course, I have no idea why she might believe that a candidate for tenure or promotion might disparage other candidate(s) in the same department. How could that happen?
Guess how she reacted when I told her that for some competitions internal to "Disney Does Dartmouth" a curriculum vitae is neither requested nor welcome. "I had thought that the CV was the coin of the academic realm. How the hell can my record be irrelevant to whether I get funding?" I assured her that one's record was not irrelevant. Decision-makers attended assiduously to the sorts of performance normally not to be found on a CV. As an anthropologist, she understood favoritism and clientilism but seemed to think the spoils system a queer way of promoting scholarship. I did not trouble her with how patrons have for centuries cultivated sycophants and other dependents. [See my entry for 4 March 2007, "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" to see how faculty vie for patronage.]
How does someone from a major university fathom the senior colleague who told two disappointed aspirants for a Lantz Senior Fellowship that the "committee" went with someone who had produced almost nothing because "We knew you would accomplish your plans even without the fellowship?" Of course, the professor who got the award returned to campus with little to show for his year off-campus and the two spurned scholars did produce what they had proposed, so the prescience of the committee was vindicated. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" takes on new meaning courtesy of this leading cadre, this vanguard of the faculty.
And what of the persistence of "personal and professional characteristics" as considerations for promotion or tenure? An experienced scholar who believes that, to be professional, evaluation must be impersonal must be puzzled by a university proclaiming that it assesses personnel on "personal characteristics." All schools and many colleagues take "personal characteristics" into account, and candor about this practice has its charms. Still, to mandate such unprofessional evaluation may strike the uninitiated as crass. To strike that mandate from the Faculty Code in 1994 seems redemptive until one realizes that atavists continued to use "personal and professional characteristics" unabashedly at least until University counsel explained in 2007 that the practice was jurally indefensible. Even then some dead-enders stated in a faculty meeting that they could not believe that they had been violating the Faculty Code for so many years.
How do I explain routines at the "Disney Does Dartmouth?"
Do I restrict myself to misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, and other inequities rife on campuses large and small and say nothing about perversities peculiar to "Disney Does Dartmouth?"
I cannot claim, as in the movie "An Innocent Man," that it's an insane place with insane rules so things end up being logical. The rules are not insane. Rather, we ignore the rules when we please to do so. On those rare occasions when colleagues or administrators deign to account for themselves, "logical" is hardly the first descriptor that leaps to tongue.
Do I transcend? "This too can be understood on a higher plane." Uh-huh. "This too can be understood in a fevered swamp" does not seem sufficiently transcendent. Moreover, to understand or to purport to understand myths and rituals at "Disney Does Dartmouth" is to catalyze one's own demise as scholar and professional.
How does any veteran with three digits of IQ and any awareness of what happens at "Disney Does Dartmouth" explain DDD to those familiar with academia?
Next -- The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, 2007
3 comments:
David Lodge did not concoct UPS.
I did.
"Disney Does Dartmouth" made me laugh.
More seriously, has anyone proposed that we exclude the untenured from decisions on tenuring?
I'd support that change.
Let's stop promoting professors before tenure as well.
A few colleagues have raised the advisability of getting untenured faculty out of the line of fire. I do not know which timid souls would raise that option in a faculty meeting. It might make a juicy topic now that some of our colleagues in greatest denial have retired. Some veterans with more blood on their hands than O. J. Simpson were given to practiced sophistries about the unifying effects of universal participation in evaluation. Good riddance to convenient memories and sunny stories.
One argument certain to be advanced in favor of the current scheme has some merit: participating in reviews instructs tyros about creating and assessing files. Those who would cut the untenured out of the evaluation process should probably prepare some claims about how mentoring and other socialization would be accomplished.
I do not much care whether or how the untenured participate in evaluations for tenure, so I shall accede to colleagues, especially to vulnerable colleagues.
What concerns me far more is how often I hear strains of Phil Ochs's "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends" when someone speaks of "transparency" or openness at Disney Does Dartmouth.
When I arrived [1986] most faculty were plied with soothing myths and mystifying rituals that obscured decision-making and, often, decision-makers. Alas, many colleagues achieved promotion and tenure by professing to believe what privately they admitted was untrue and by justifying what some of them could recognize as unconscionable until they shared so much culpability for inequities that they ceased to admit or even recognize nonfeasance or malfeasance.
It took me years to appreciate how crucial concealment was to administrators and, far more important, inside-operators -- those whom I usually designate apparatchiks in "Rump Parliament." All administrators conceal. All "insiders" are far more accountable to their patrons than to peers. Indeed, one becomes an "insider" to guarantee what peers might withhold.
Administrators and apparatchiks protect their prerogatives and their patron-client relations by means of concealment. Anecdota and apocrypha must camouflage actual decisions and processes. For myths and rituals to mystify, insiders must cower behind confidentiality while praising themselves for making "the hard calls."
Perhaps the worst consequence of such concealment is that insiders and timorous colleagues must turn away from injustices and the victims of injustices. To maintain concealment, apparatchiks and apologists urge each other to hearken to orthodoxy as they avert their eyes.
Someone got hosed? How tasteless of the newly unemployed to bring up such dross when the rest of us are working so hard to make pseudo-Dartmouth better! Those fired are short-timers who should bend to the will of the insiders. Those who are about to die should salute their murderers rather than dwell on the murders.
I no longer wonder, given the cultures of concealment around campus, that colleagues who have prospered for decades by forgetting discordant information and by striving never to hear iconclastic truths should treasure concealment and dread accuntability. Colleagues who recall neither when they first sold out or what it means to sell out must preserve closed files and confidential proceedings lest they be forced to measure up to scrutiny. Too long they have regarded those who worked in the open as suckers and/or subversives. No longer do these insiders know how to proceed candidly and publicly.
Besides, what the insiders are up to "surely wouldn't interest anybody outside of a small circle of friends."
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