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.