Monday, May 18, 2009

Scoundrels and Frauds

Puget Sound observes its ideals on Graduation Day.

A colleague spoke from the heart about graduation:

#####I am happy to attend for the kids but usually dislike
#####the speeches. The speeches are high-minded. I get
#####inspired then look around and see so many
#####scoundrels and frauds sitting near me. I feel soiled,
#####but say nothing. The hypocrisy bothers me.

Doesn't seem to bother most faculty or administrators.

Maybe you should turn off your critical faculties and let the nonsense pour over you.

Slumber through the ceremonies and be at most semi-conscious amid faculty governance or other dissimulations.

"Men go to bed with Gilda, but they wake up with me," said Rita Hayworth. Graduate students are seduced into academia; if they awaken at Coyote Date University, they feel used. This is all the more reason not to wake up.

Sleep in.
Talk critical thinking, but never practice it.
Advocate skepticism about change.
Let reassurance wash over you.
Avoid faculty meetings in favor of alternative soporifics.
Go along and you'll get along.
Stage more conversations among the folks.

There are no problems. The only problems are colleagues who espy problems. They're the problems.

But forget about them.

Have a lotus with that beer?

Before you give me grief about spelling out "STALAGS" along the left margin supra, please note that "stalag" was coinage from "Stamm" main body and "Lager" camp. Scoundrels and frauds are not the numeric majority at the university, but those who avert their eyes from scoundrels and frauds or apologize for the condoning of frauds and other abuses are the leading cadre.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Can you assist the FAC?

The FAC has issued a cry for help. Will you answer?




In its annual report dated 5 May 2009, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] has implicitly admitted its cognitive disarray:


"As we noted last year, a continuing concern of the Advancement Committee is 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 members have observed more guarded letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty though also by some senior colleagues, and a general reluctance by some to weigh in on change of status evaluations."



The FAC's deployment of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy disappoints. It is too bad that the FAC featured no social scientists or scholars familiar with logical validity or cogency.

Can commenters help out?

Please supply arguments that the FAC would advance if members of the FAC cared to be taken seriously.

Please assist your challenged colleagues.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

The FAC flips the Senate the bird then invites senators to pull their fingers

The Faculty Advancement Committee Evades the Bylaws Again!

Every spring of late, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] evades the Bylaws. The Bylaws mandate that each Faculty Senate Committee appoint a chair. The Faculty Senate has insisted for years that the FAC follow the Bylaws. Whether through recalcitrance or arrogance, the FAC has instead upheld the cherished Puget Sound tradition that the Professional Standards Committee and the FAC do as they please irrespective of rules. When challenged on their misbehaviors, the power committees ply the credulous with aged canards and newly hatched rationalizations.

Aged Canard 1: The FAC objects to electing a chair because the FAC has never had a chair.

This objection is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that, over the years, the Academic Vice President or Dean has been unacknowledged chair of the FAC. The FAC has been guided by a de facto decanal chair more often than it has resembled any roundtable of six decision-makers of equal standing or identical function. Ask veterans who have visited the FAC on multiple occasions over the years whether they were able to detect a de facto chair.

If the FAC has never had an official chair, so what? Other than Puget Sound administrators and apparatchiks, who argues that never having followed the rules justifies continuing to ignore the rules? If only Al Capone had known this "argument" was available to him: "But I have never paid income taxes!"

That the FAC has never appointed a chair establishes only that the FAC has never considered itself bound by rules that apply to all faculty senate committees.



Aged Canard 2: The FAC objects to electing a chair because electing a chair might have legal ramifications.

At least one member of the FAC has argued unspecified legal perils might follow from following the Bylaws. How intriguing! Ignoring or evading the Bylaws has no legal downside, but following them imperils the University? Who vetted this legal argument—John Yoo? Did the FAC ask any competent attorney about the advisability of following authority—often reckoned a legal virtue—as opposed to defying both the Bylaws and the Faculty Senate? Or would asking a competent attorney divest the FAC member(s) of this excuse?

The FAC has supplied no legal authority for this "legal opinion" because any legal peril—to the chair of the FAC or to individuals on the FAC—from following Bylaws is a chimera.

Indeed, that one or more members of the FAC would invoke such hokum shows little faith in other FAC canards.


Aged Canard 3: Electing a chair would spoil the egalitarianism of the FAC.

The 2008-2009 report of the FAC features this drollery: "... the Advancement Committee discussed at its first meeting of the year the matter of committee chair. Affirming that it continues to prefer that all voices at the table be equal participants, the Committee elected Priti Joshi, Sunil Kukreja, Andy Rex, Stuart Smithers, Kate Stirling, and Kris Bartanen as co-chairs."


The FAC knows that not all its members participate equally or identically:

  • Concerning third-year assistant professors and distinction, five members of the FAC recommend to the sixth member, the Academic Vice President and Dean.
  • Unless the FAC has changed recently, the Academic Vice President and Dean handles correspondence for the FAC, while members of the FAC draft letters regarding individual evaluees.
  • Through 2005, the Academic Vice President and Dean was never the lead person for a file; the other five members of the FAC took turns taking the lead.
  • "Streamlined" evaluations result in no inequalities of participation?

However, the FAC presumes that most senators and most faculty will not know how often the voices around the table will not be "equal." So the FAC bullshits the faculty.

Even if the suggested equality or equivalence were true, this argument would not be cogent. The Bylaws require every faculty senate committee to elect a chair at each committee's first meeting. The Bylaws further require that the chair be responsible for inducing the committee to meet and producing a report at year's end. The Bylaws require nothing else. How a chair's being responsible for the committee's meeting and reporting would roil or spoil the FAC, we are never told. We are never told for the same reason that we are never told why George W. Bush was one of our greatest presidents.

The FAC does not want to follow the Bylaws and so will not. The rest is blather summoned to explain why members of the FAC are above ordinary rules and authorities.


Newly Hatched Rationalization 1: The FAC this year elected six co-chairs.

The latest evasion by the FAC collides with Article V of the Bylaws [boldface added]:

...

Sec. 2. Organization. The Senate shall name a Convener for each committee during the first month of the fall semester for the purpose of electing a Committee Chairperson and orienting the committee based on the committee's prior year-end report, except when otherwise provided in the organization of the committee.

Sec. 3. Committee Meetings.
A. The Chairperson of each committee shall convene the committee during the first month of the fall semester to plan the work of the committee. Times for additional meetings will be at the discretion of the committee members. The Chairperson shall be responsible for presenting reports to the Senate.


Who would be so wanting in candor as to claim that appointing six co-chairs matched the Bylaws' requirement of "a chairperson" and of "the chairperson?" To ask the question is to answer it.

Perhaps most remarkable, the two newbies on the FAC conformed to the FAC's defiance in their very first meeting. What profiles in credulity! Did they hold out for even ten minutes before abasing themselves?

So here's to the FAC, ladies and gentlemen!

Six doctors who believe that 6 = 1.