Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses VII

To

a) the groupthink of fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee [See this blog, 3 December 2010];

b) hackneyed formulas that purport to justify the changes that the fixtures prefer & proffer [This blog, 4 December 2010];

c) veterans of THE rogue committee of all time [This blog, 5 December 2010];

d) inert and indifferent time-servers on the committee;

e) uncritical students [This blog, 6 December 2010];

and

f) a dozing Faculty Senate [This blog 7 December 2010]

let us now add the leadership of a rogue committee:


The Academic Standards train went off its tracks largely owing to the proclivities of its conductors and engineers.

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Explanation 7 -- Authoritarian Personalities
.....

..Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde:
misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb,
zu strafen, mächtig ist!

But thus do I counsel you, my friends:
distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

.......

The ASC 2008-2010 proved Nietzsche [Thus Spake Zarathustra] prescient. More than one authoritarian on the ASC longed to punish students who disappointed members of the committee. Students who chose other than the authoritarians would prefer disappointed the authoritarians. Students who elected options that authoritarians wished the students did not have disappointed the authoritarians. That is the way authoritarians think and behave. That is why I label them authoritarians.
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In the 4 October 2010 entry in this blog I noted with F. G. Bailey the preponderance of deceivers, especially self-deceivers, among those who dedicate themselves to the work of committees. I presume much delusion and many deceptions on any committee, so that is not what I am getting at with this seventh explanation.
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Rather I intend to note that a will to power distorts the deceptions of delusional colleagues into tyranny. As it was with the Professional Standards Committee 2003-2004, so it was with the Academic Standards Committee 2008-2010:

  • members with powerful impulses to sanction, to coerce, and to punish drove committees to precipitate decisions that could not be defended before colleagues; as a result,
  • chairs of each committee mismanaged communications between their committees and overseeing or superordinate entities; and
  • chairs misled, misstated facts, or lied.:::::::::::::::::::::::::
.....
These tyrannical drivers of renegade committees are not fascists. They are fantasists. Deceived and deluded by their own dogma and doggerel, these tyrants must live up to images that they concocted to hide from colleagues shortcomings that their tyrannies make evident. As a result, these tyrants must redouble their efforts to seem to be what they cannot be. Denial and duplicity are overdetermined and overwhelming whenever an academic makes being himself or herself impossible.
..........................
I fault malfeasant and nonfeasant fantasists in the rank and file of the ASC, to be sure. They are supposed to be responsible and accountable. Yet, about the irresponsible, incompetent, unaccountable, and inexplicable fantasists what can we do? The fixtures are group-thinking apparatchiks who serve masters and missions over which faculty have little sway. Mantras that have bedeviled the "Academic" "Standards" Committee are immune to argument, instruction, reason, or suasion, so faculty can no more cure shibboleths and sloganeering than herpes. If we rid the ASC of these defective fantasists, those defective fantasists likely take their places.

---------

Membership on the ASC is largely self-selected. All too often, authoritarians bent by and bent on rigor elect to "serve" on the "Academic" "Standards" Committee. Fantasists with irresistible impulses to punish those who do not conform then re-imagine their own undergraduate triumphs and concoct spurious explanations for their own excellences. With each passing year the noncommissioned officers of the "Rigor Patrol" become retrospectively magnificent. Imbued with enthusiasm to transform undergrads into the intellectual figures that the rigorous refashion their autobiographies to conjure, these apostles of "hard love" then belch

  • "I never used pass-fail when I was an undergraduate."*
  • "I worked hard to get my degree; I expect our students to do the same."**
  • "I don't see why a senior at a national liberal-arts college should have to take a first-year-level course pass-fail."***
  • "Our students have to learn that grades do not matter."****
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Such statements, derived from members of the "Academic" "Standards" Committee 2008-2010, should dash any hopes of remedying the powerful draw of that committee for colleagues who misremember their past and prosecute that fanciful past on the undergrads of the present.

------------------------------

It may be, however, that faculty may do something about leadership of and in the ASC. Let the Faculty Senate attend to processes by which the willful ascend to authority and descend to tyranny.

  • Each time a committee elects as chair the member who arrives latest at the first meeting of the committee, that committee disdains competence for convenience.
  • Each time that shirkers elect a junior colleague chair, they risk that someone with something to prove will assume a position for which she or he will prove ill-suited.
  • Each time a member of the faculty yearns to chair a committee [or a department, program, or school], she or he marks herself or himself as a potential malefactor.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Faculty Code leaves committee chairpersons to the accident and expedient of first-meeting elections. Thus the Code devalues design and deliberation from the start.

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Given ASC leadership in 2008-2010, a rogue ASC should shock us about as much as we are shocked when a young Cuervo-drinker talking on a cell-phone is piloting a muscle car 50 mph the wrong way down a one-way street. You can pronounce the results an accident, but most adults would find the result predictable.

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It is now past time for the Faculty Senate and the trustees to amend The Faculty Code so that committee chairs are annually elected by faculty or appointed by the Faculty Senate.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Enough accidental amateurs! No more tyrannical tyros!


* And? So? Some of our colleagues do not use dental floss now, let alone when they were sophomores. Your assertion would be inconsequent if true, moron!

** If you worked hard to get an undergraduate degree in the 1970s or 1980s, you must be even dumber than your remark.

*** But you understand why careful drivers might carry insurance, Bozo?

**** Did you get into graduate school based on your looks or your personality, Doctor?
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Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses VI

::::::::::::::::
....
None of the foregoing factors -- persistent bureaucrats, stale ideas, blundering faculty, time-serving faculty, or credulous undergrads -- need have been pernicious if The Faculty Senate had done its job.
......

Explanation 6 -- The Faculty Senate Overlooked More Than It Oversaw.............

When the Faculty Senate is respectful and deferential but vigilant and demanding, renegade committees cannot go as far wrong as when senators are so respectful and so deferential that committees know they are free to promulagte the policies that they please. However, not all Senates are watchful and not all senators are demanding. Indeed, some senators of late have been even timider and more sensitive than most faculty are, and more than one chair of the Senate has longed to be liked and respected.


Better colleagues than censors, the Faculty Senate has of late overlooked rather than overseen governance.


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

In 2008-2009 the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] issued policies with little support either among senators or among faculty as a body. The minutes of the ASC disclose little debate about and no cogent arguments for those policies -- a sure indication that groupthink was afflicting the ASC. The Faculty Senate -- the executive committee of the faculty as a whole -- was and is charged to notice impulsive, precipitous lurches on Senate committees. Indeed, liaisons so much ballyhooed as an advance by recent senates exist to assure that the Faculty Senate will know what committees are doing and will exercise senate oversight. In 2008-2010 the Faculty Senate too often let ill-considered motions and policies reach meetings of the faculty. The senators thereby saved themselves time and trouble but wasted the time and exacrebated the troubles of the faculty.

.....
A slumbering Faculty Senate with desultory leadership and wavering attention accounts for some of the misdeeds of the ASC 2008-2010. The ASC had no adult supervision aside from plenary meetings of the faculty. That guaranteed that revolutions that should have been stifled without wasting the time of the faculty made it to plenary meetings. "The executive committee of the faculty" was apparently on hiatus 2008-2010.

..................

Senatorial indolence and deference enabled the fixtures on the ASC to mouth in meetings of the full faculty -- "full faculty," of course, stands for the one in seven members of the faculty who attend meetings -- refrains that pleased uncritical members of the ASC far more than the larger body.

But why did the failing gate-keepers have to keep the gates? Next time!

at the faculty
.......

Monday, December 6, 2010

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses V


.....
So faculty who will go along with anything because they are merely killing time on the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] and recidivists from the Professional Standards Committee of 2004-2005 neither questioned nor opposed the ASC fixtures when those fixtures chanted stale shibboleths and conjured policy thereby.
[See previous postings of this inventory of hypotheses, starting with the entry for 3 December 2010, if you please.]

Why didn't students on the ASC question policy proposals?


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Explanation 5 -- Stockholm-Syndrome Undergraduates Go Along with "Authorities."
.....
I suppose it is understandable that students appointed to the august Academic Standards Committee [ASC] strive to conform [group-think again] and to impress faculty, staff, and others. Even when the ASC is stifling students' choices and decrying students' preferences, undergraduates on the ASC are not likely to defend their peers or to wise up deciders who barely remember being students. Hostages to the "rigor" and respect of faculty, these undergraduates not only avoid abuse by acceding to posturing, preening professors and authoritative, authoritarian bureaucrats but also contribute other-adulation to festivals of self-adulation common on the ASC. Like about one-quarter of prisoners, these hostages identify with oppressors and join in oppression.

...........................

Whatever third-year student Winston Smith thought when he was appointed to the ASC, after a very few meetings Winston loves Big Brother and participates every few meetings in Two Minutes' Hate against enemies or vices on the agenda of the ASC, especially vices identified by fixtures or enemies identified.by faculty.


Stockholm Syndrome

Stockholm Syndrome may be unavoidable when vulnerable youngsters
are surrounded by accomplished academic poseurs. Students easily
admire sophisticates -- those who know the proper slogans and
shibboleths to chant and no arguments or reasons that support the
chanting or get in the way of damnable proposals -- and
want to be included among the cognoscenti.
Trouble is, these connoisseurs of rigor are conning tyros with noise.

[A false etymology of "con·nois·seur" = a CON man who deploys NOISE
to entice others into his SEWER. But I digress.]

To support mythic rigor, the con men and women invoke noise about
how rigorous their own undergraduate experiences were. Students are unlikely
to see through such blather as easily as colleagues do. A tyro does not
realize that this member of the Rigor Police cannot spell or that another
bunko artist glories in his or her fabled days at Our Lady of the Swamps
because that was the last time he or she actually completed any writing on time.
Trusting novices are likely to presume, in short, accomplishments when
the absence of accomplishments explains the origins of the noise.

..........
The five hypotheses I have so far identified explain why the ASC went beserk 2008-2010. But why did the Faculty Senate fail to intervene?

Next entry.

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses IV

.....
In previous episodes [infra] Festering Groupthink among Fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee ["Rump Parliament" 3 December 2010] maturated into
Captious Shibboleths, Slogans, and Other Rationalizations ["Rump Parliament" 4 December 2010] that were in turn carried by Recidivists from THE Rogue Committee of All Time ["Rump Parliament" 5 December 2010].

In this entry's episode, suppurating contagions meet little resistance from faculty who are simply punching a clock or a tenure-ticket on the ASC.
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Explanation 4 -- Sentence-Servers



I do not claim that all or most faculty on the Academic Standards Committee were malfeasant in 2008-2010 or in any other period. A majority, to judge from the committee's minutes, were merely nonfeasant [or nonsapient or non-sentient]. Why?
...........................
Many faculty serve on committees the way convicts serve in prisons. They do their time.
......................................
They avoid displeasing colleagues who have loud voices or sharp remarks. To get along, they go along. They do not resist; they submit. They keep their heads down. They turn their senses off. They avert their eyes as ravishers commit ravages in the name of "Rigor."
.......................................
Indeed, I suspect that one of the recidivists who served on the Starr Chamber [as I call the Professional Standards Committee of 2003-2004] was barely cognizant of what was going on at the ASC because the goings-on had nothing to do with what he values. To my knowledge, that colleague has only seen matters that way for 25 years. This colleague on 3 May 2004 informed the Faculty Senate that the Starr Chamber could not keep track of its less substantial interpretations of The Faculty Code because the Starr Chamber was inventing interpretations too quickly and wildly even to write down what they were deciding.
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What a moment for the senators present!
....................................
Great defense of the committee, colleague!
......................................
"We work too fast and loose to keep track of what we're doing."
..................................
"I was never in the Texas Book Depository, officer. I was cleaning my carbine on the grassy knoll when it accidentally discharged a few times."
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In short, the ASC or any other Faculty Senate committee teems with time-servers, especially dutiful junior faculty who will go along with any outrage or stupidity lest they be thought less than rigorous.
.......................
Just as human innards have reduced resistance to infections where evolution has not "anticipated" introduction of sepsis, time-serving shirkers and slackers barely resist groupthink and doubletalk, especially when blunders and blather are wielded by experienced dupes, dopes, and dodgers.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
But the students on the ASC know better, don't they? Why don't the students resist nonsense on the march?
.............................
Radar O'Reilly: "Wait for it!"

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses III

What spread the suppurating discharges from the Academic Standards Committee into the Faculty Senate and infected plenary meetings over the last two years?

.................................

Shibboleths and slogans [Hypothesis II, 4 December 2010] that have long festered amid groupthink among ASC fixtures [Hypothesis I, 3 December 2010] do not explain why the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] extruded policies that garnered almost no support in plenary meetings of the faculty. The contagion of groupthink must radiate beyond fixtures into the faculty and students on the ASC. How did arguments so hokey that almost no faculty will support them in a public meetings gain consensus in the ASC?

...

Explanation 3 -- Starr-Chamber Deciders Erupt Anew.

...

In the most recent episodes, a rogue committee [the ASC] carried three faculty who had graced the rogue committee of all time, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of 2003-2004. Since two members of the rogue PSC have retired since 2004, 60% of the available veterans of the renegade 2003-2004 PSC voted to do away with pass-fail on the ASC in 2008-2009.

............

Frequent readers of this blog need not read "Malfeasant or Nonfeasant?" supra at 9 February 2010, but infrequent readers should. In that entry and some earlier entries, I chronicled and ridiculed the sheer ineptitude [at best] of the 2003-2004 PSC. Re-read the 2-9-10 entry to see why I call that PSC "The Starr Chamber" and why the 2003-2004 snagged my designation as the most renegade Faculty Senate committee of all time.

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An Iconic Interposition....

..

In 1961 President Kennedy likened the "vitality and devotion to public interest"

of President John Adams and various of his descendants to

a "scarlet thread throughout the entire tapestry"

of the history of the United States.

.............................


Faculty who fouled the Professional Standards Committee 2003-2004

evinced indifference to injustices and derelictions of duty

and so constitute a scarlet thread marring the white toga

of faculty governance.

..............................


.

Faculty who countenanced and complemented savagery against at least two untenured faculty in 2003 and 2004 could scarcely be expected to recognize what the ASC was doing, let alone to summon the courage and wit to stop the savaging of undergraduates. If those three members of the Starr Chamber believed what they said or wrote publicly in 2003-2004, they could go along with anything -- including hackneyed formulas and ASC hacks.

....................


Of course, to get consensus on the 2008-2009 ASC, policy contagion needed to spread beyond the Starr Chamber recidivists. In addition, a Starr Chamber recidivist susceptible to opportunistic infections of "Rigor-Osis" or "Self-Involvement-Itis" might spread policy contagion to similarly vulnerable faculty and students.

:::::::::::::::::::::::

So truly insipid ideas spread from the groupthink of the fixtures [Hypothesis I] via years of mindless sloganeering [Hypothesis II] to Starr Chamber" recidivists [Hypothesis III]. What explains the etiology beyond the fixtures and the recidivists?

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Next entry!

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Saturday, December 4, 2010

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses II

Hypothesis One, the immediately preceding post in "Rump Parliament," proposed that chronic fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] have over the years indulged in groupthink. These ASC insiders accept orthodoxies and verities that students and faculty across campuses and eras have not shared. The immediately preceding post [3 December 2010] also noted, however, that these disjunctions between longtime ASC insiders and the broader campus community change slowly if at all. "Inside groupthink," then, is nearly constant. How can a constant predilection explain the ASC stampede 2008-2010?

.........................


Explanation 2 -- Stagnant Mantras Fend Off Information.

.

Once a long-(dis)serving member of the ASC substitutes shibboleths for reasons, he or she is unlikely to stop or to learn. Instead, she or he will recite formulas that spread a contagion to credulous colleagues who cycle onto the ASC. Even if mantras evolve slowly, sooner or later such mantras will find faculty or students more credulous than most.

Please permit me to illustrate how shibboleths can long gestate before breaking out when the makeup of the ASC permits.

.......

Long ago an associate dean who was technically a member of the faculty but who never to my knowledge taught a class at UPS or earned tenure in a department declared that many students were using pass-fail in ways not explicitly authorized by the faculty. Ensconced on the ASC, this dean so treasured his thought that he would voice it over and over. Over the years, he repeated his saying so often that he came to believe its truth more and more. Even as this Ass. Dean was persuading himself of the gravity and probity of his mantra over the years, he was winning converts among the fixtures on the committee [see Hypothesis One, 3 December 2010]

...............

This Ass. Dean emulated a caricature of a filiopietistic martinet in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall:"

.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

.

--------------------------------------------------

Perhaps the key clause quoted above, for present purposes, is "... as it seems to me ... ." Frost, as it seems to me, presumed that his readers would agree with Frost that rebuilding stone fences between pine woods and apple orchards was largely wasted effort. So it was with this Ass. Dean when I served with him on the ASC. He would intone his inconsequent drivel that students used pass-fail for purposes other than taking risks. Most faculty with whom I served stifled the obvious response: "No shit!" Most members of the ASC presumed that most motions that elicit faculty agreement have one or more official rationales and multiple ulterior motivations. I suspect that most members of the ASC presumed that the Ass. Dean knew that faculty meetings consist of good reasons and real reasons and that good reasons are voiced more often and more loudly than some real reasons are. The Ass. Dean was being disingenuous because he had no stronger arguments to advance and because he did not want to admit his own ulterior motivations and real reasoning: pass-fail is bad because grades promote rigor and because pass-fail coursework may promote inflation of GPAs.

------------------------------

More than once I invited this Ass. Dean to move against Puget Sound core curricula, which faculty explicitly designed to do what the core curricula never did. He never did. Nor to my knowledge did he protest when a reaccreditation report claimed that the core at that time ensured undergraduates a "unifying experience." This reaccreditation document -- to keep matters short and clear -- lied about the core curriculum. That was no problem for Jones Hall or for the Ass. Dean. But when students use pass-fail for any purpose not explicitly authorized by faculty but tacitly acknowledged by every colleague who recalls his or her undergraduate years, the Ass. Dean and a few fixtures espy a problem.

None of the foregoing is very mysterious. Many long-serving members of the campus community have never reconciled themselves to pass-fail. They repeat mantras to mask their long-standing opposition to decisions of the faculty. Repetition makes slogans and shibboleths seem less fatuous and less reactionary than they are. Uncritical faculty accept repeated nonsense. If intra-committee sloganeering is insulated from colleagues' questions and disputation, the mantra persists.

.

For the very reasons noted in the 3 December 2010 post, however, we must see that shibboleths and slogans cannot alone explain how policies that garner almost no support in plenary meetings of the faculty could issue from the ASC. Such mantras must be adopted by students and faculty on the ASC. What spread the long suppurating discharges through the ASC and into the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings?

.......

Stay tuned to "Rump Parliament for the answers to that query.

...