The Good Ol' Days

The University of Puget Sound in the early 1990s: The Myth of the Cave playing to rave reviews from prisoners inured to shackles.

A Puget Sound retiree reminded me today of this university in the early 1990s. I may have conveyed some of this narrative, but I want to contribute to the oral history of those times.

When the president of Puget Sound announced that he intended to retire in one year, administrators and one or more executives of the Faculty Senate conferred on the process for selection of the next CEO of UPS. In those days, Faculty Senate chairs tended to shill for the administrators to a far greater degree than in the later 1990s and early 21st century. The administrators and their apparatchiks announced, among other things, that faculty would select three faculty for the presidential selection committee via the process used for seating faculty on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. That is, faculty would submit names and, pending approval of the trustees, the three named faculty would be on the committee.

No other faculty would know the names of candidates or interviewees. No one interviewing on or near campus would meet faculty. The Dean of the University, through the chair of the Faculty Senate, distributed photocopies of arguments for such secrecy. Indeed, the chair of the Faculty Senate reminded senators than PLU had recently been poised to hire a new president but had been prevented owing to an upsurge from faculty who disliked the choice. When an as-yet-untenured senator asked why it was better for faculty to suffer whomever the committee selected rather than to voice objections prospectively, I was rebuffed.

Then I asked why the indirect election was needful. The Dean intoned, as he sometimes did in defense of administrative brakes on direct election of members of the FAC, that otherwise the faculty might directly elect faculty from the same department or representative of some clique. This pretended solicitude for representation of the faculty made me wince, for even in my early years I had seen through the pretense.

I was somewhat surprised, nonetheless, when three faculty approved by the trustees [or administrators -- other than what administrators or their flunkies told trustees, trustees knew little about faculty then or later] included two faculty with PhDs in chemistry and not a single humanist. As a political scientist, I was not surprised that the selected faculty were more representative of administration dogma than of the teaching faculty. The Dean's concern for representation of the faculty failed elementary skepticism: "What would one expect an administrator to say?" That administrators and trustees were audacious enough to undermine their only announced rationale for indirect election surprised me. Usually deceptions are better protected from detection. [This eerily foreshadowed the presidency of the successful candidate: she probably fibbed about as often as her predecessor, but she did so in ways that made it unmistakeable to everyone except the most reputable and reliable faculty that she was fibbing; indeed, she seemed to me to revel in having power to mislead with impunity.]

When the Chair of the Board of Trustees later spoke to a faculty meeting, I asked him why the trustees were keeping faculty away from would-be presidents. His face reddened. He sputtered that he knew nothing about that and that trustees did not care who represented the faculty or how many faculty met with candidates. The chair of the board thus exposed as deceitful those who had claimed that the trustees wanted the process to proceed in the way it did.

Once the deceit of the Chair of the Faculty Senate and the Dean of the University had been exposed, the process went forward. I could not find a dozen faculty who knew and cared that all but three of the faculty had been closeted lest candidates or trustees meet the zany loons who do the teaching. When I raised the matter with a 15-year veteran, he croaked, "You'd argue with dean if he said it was raining." I must concede his point. If the dean complained about the rain on a dry day, I should argue. I thought the more pertinent hypothetical was that if that if the dean told that veteran that black was white, that veteran would act as if he believed the dean if rewards sufficed.

The rewards must have flowed because, to my knowledge, that 15-year veteran confronted mendacious, manipulative administrators exactly twice before he retired. Mostly, he mumbled protests and deconstructed absurdities that issued from Jones Hall. Still, that put him far ahead of most of the faculty who had been hired in the 1970s and had prospered in the 1980s. Those faculty not only held their peace but also reveled in their obsequiousness. Veterans traduced newbies who doubted the dubious or observed the obvious. Every day in every way, the university was improving. Pavlovian faculty "freely" associated improvements with going along with each administrative gag. Those who gagged at administrative euphemisms or misdirection lacked the appropriate "personal and professional characteristics" for Puget Sound. Faculty evaluation procedures and other discipline would deal with thralls less than grateful for their subjection.

And why shouldn't the uninquisitive and the credulous rejoice in their shackles? Cheerful credulity and instrumental ignorance profit the shackled in honors, programs, and a reputation for being respectable and responsible. In addition, docile and reticent apologists and apparatchiks have more time for pursuits they value, like pretending to do research.

Why Did I Believe that Paul Simon Could Write?

Standing in line at Starbuck's three days ago, I heard the familiar strains of "The Sound of Silence" for the first time in a while.

The following line struck me as it never had before:

But my words, like silent raindrops fell /

And echoed in the wells of silence. /



What?

Silent raindrops -- as opposed to noisy raindrops?

If they were silent, how could the raindrops echo?

"Songfacts" http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=796 claims that Paul Simon took six months to write the lyrics, averaging a line per day. [Lots of rewrites? The song is but 34 lines long.]

Simon should have sent it to me. Even though I was only twelve, I could have helped.

I liked the song when I was in grade school.

What was I thinking?

What was Simon thinking?

The answers are blowing in the wind.