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
