Do Mediocrities Tend to be Mean? Why?

Are many colleagues both mean-spirited and mediocre? Why?

A colleague recently opined, "She's mediocre, so she has to be mean."

"Read" as tautology, I guess that sentiment works. The mean is one definition of mediocrity.

"Read" as a syllogism, the sentence is a non sequitur. Plenty of professors are mean-spirited but not mediocre. Plenty of campus mediocrities are not mean-spirited. So the most one should posit is a mild positive correlation between excellence(s) and equanimity.

Besides, many mediocrities do not have to be mean; viciousness is just an extra.

As a mild positive correlation, the meanness of the mediocre corresponds to experience. In junior high school, the fellow barely tolerated by the cool clique was usually the fellow most intolerant of those not admitted to the clique. We did not wonder that the last fellow on the social yacht repelled boarders. We expected it and were surprised when a social deckhand was civil.

How often on how many campuses have not particularly talented graduates of modestly prestigious universities derided lesser institutions as if the greatest graduate of a more mediocre institution could never measure up to the worst survivor of some less mediocre institution?

One whose teaching is truly excellent will usually be disinclined to disparage the teaching of another, while many an ordinary teacher must tell you why he or she is at least better than this or that colleague because how else would you know? [See "If Colleagues Read and Believed SI," the entry in this blog for 16 December 2009.]

However, I suspect that the meanness of the mediocre should most pertain to professional growth. Many who prate about the professional growth of others often have undistinguished professional growth when they have any verifiable professional growth at all. This form of hypocrisy seems quite common in academia.

How about anecdotes that members of the Faculty Advancement Committee would treat as data if it suited them?

1. A senior member of the faculty at the a "Public Ivy" made bold to tell a candidate for tenure that he had voted against that candidate. [Openness and honesty were uncommon at that school, too!] When the evaluator mentioned how little he thought of a book that the evaluee had presented as professional growth, the evaluee snapped back, "What would you say was your best book to date?" The senior detractor had produced no book in his first 14 years at the institution. The tenured evaluator huffed and puffed down the hall, angered that the untenured dared to note his hypocrisy. That mediocrity was the meanest sphincter I have met in academe.

2. An ideologue renowned for the emptiness of his or her classes and the nullity of his or her professional growth -- at the University of Puget Clowns [TM Susan Resneck Pierce] that hardly distinguishes this colleague -- browbeat students for years and disparaged colleagues who had accomplished more, which provided many targets. As lousy a chair as he or she was a scholar or instructor, this full professor was renowned for mistreating staff as well. [That, by the way, is one way in which mediocrities excel: meanness to staff. Every or almost every mediocrity will lord her or his status and renown over "at will" employees.] As vicious and unaccomplished as they come, this colleague guaranteed the meanness and mediocrity of a department.

3. My favorite recollection of another mean mediocrity is his or her being chased down a corridor by another professor. The pursuer was screaming, "I am sick of having to humor a psychopath." Pursued and pursuer alike had seemed to me unbalanced for as long as I had known either, but the professor being chased wasted more of his or her colleagues' time than any five other professors combined. His or her professional accomplishments were as legendary as the Loch Ness Monster, albeit with less documentation. He or she could always be counted on for scathing appraisals of colleagues who saw through his or her preening and posturing. Not quite as vicious and unaccomplished as the subject of anecdote 2 supra, this colleague merely guaranteed the meanness and mediocrity of a program.

Despite the anecdotes above and other war stories that would correspond to the claim that professional mediocrity and meanness tend to go with one another, I am not certain that the mediocre have to be mean any more than do the inept or the excellent.*

Still, I am disposed to wonder why colleagues with modest professional growth might have a propensity for meanness.

Are they mean to drop their betters beneath themselves so that they might be mediocre? Many of the mediocre imagined themselves too good for Puget Clowns but discovered themselves barely up to the job. They settled then sank as a temporary billet became a permanent prison. The mediocrities therefore clawed at others to reduce their betters to an underclass lest the mediocrities themselves fail of adequacy.

Are they mean because they despair of accomplishments other than fierce arrogation? I have written that for many colleagues "able was I ere I saw Elba" summarizes their careers to date. Despite the University of Puget Clowns, they are able to be ornery and unfair. Due to the University of Puget Clowns, they cannot accomplish much else.

Are the mediocre mean out of ambition? As I blogged on 24 May 2008, the greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership you are [Haltom's 19th Law]. Pursuing meager honors and minor authority with modest abilities, the ambitious brandish standards that they have never met. Professional growth is easier to fake than good teaching evaluations, so the ambitious pretend to be serious scholars. These ersatz leaders understand themselves enough to apply standards to vulnerable others, especilly those who are not allies or admirers. Anyone who sees through the ambitions to the inadequacies must be destroyed.

Are at least a few colleagues mediocre and mean owing to the same lack of mental prowess? Some colleagues cannot achieve because they cannot think beyond animal cunning. Some colleagues are vicious because they cannot summon less vicious means by which to strike back at their many betters. When the Venn sets "Those who cannot achieve much" and "Those who are vicious" overlap, is the intersection large or is the intersection merely glaring?

Do mean mediocrities drive out their betters, some of whom might have been or become mean non-mediocrities? If meanness and mediocrity each peak around the median of a normal distribution, maybe mediocrities assault those too obviously better or worse at professional growth than the mediocrities. Those who are sub-mediocre at professional growth often get tenured nonetheless, so mediocrities have plenty of targets. If not rooted out before tenure, however, sub-mediocre targets cannot escape to another campus. Mean mediocrities cannot drive the sub-mediocrities out if the latter have nowhere to go. Supra-mediocre colleagues, by contrast, may be able to go elsewhere. If supra-mediocrities who might also have been mean often escape abuse, that might explain why mediocrities are more often mean than supra-mediocrities.

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Still, I do not quite know what to conclude. Do the mediocre tend to be mean? If so, why?



*I here use "excellent" in its dictionary meaning -- "possessing outstanding quality or superior merit; remarkably good" Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary on CD -- rather than its operational meaning at the University of Puget Clowns: "possessing arguable quality or putative merit; no worse than some others whom we do not like as much."

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Yuck of the Day

The WASHINGTON POST's obituary for the late Jerome David Salinger provided my guffaw for today:

##########Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently
##########did not extend to his own. In 2000, daughter
##########Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher" portrayed the
##########writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own
##########urine and spoke in tongues.

##########Ms. Salinger said she wrote the book because she
##########was "absolutely determined not to repeat with my
##########son what had been done with me."


Great point, Margaret! The only way to protect your son from your father's style of parenting was to publish a book lambasting your father. Your justification utterly persuades me.

Margaret probably gave the royalties to charity.

With Apologies to Johnny Mandel

To the tune of Johnny Mandel's "Suicide Is Painless," the theme to M*A*S*H


Through academic fog I see
What this place has done to me.
The frauds and fakes I cannot flee
I realize; how can it be

That menticide is painless
And nothing ever changes
Yet I can take or leave it if I please?

I tried to find a way to make
Our governance a bit less fake,
But now I know I'll never slake
The thirst of poseurs on the make.

But menticide is painless,
And nothing ever changes,
So I can take or leave it as I please.

To tell the truth will never pay
Where liars tend to rule the fray.
So as I while away the day
This is what I try to say:

Hey! Menticide is painless,
And nothing ever changes,
And I can take or leave this if I please.

The only way to win is cheat
Or fabricate your every feat.
So let another have my seat.
I'll pound a very diff'rent beat.

Though menticide is painless,
It brings on many changes,
and I don't care to live amid the sleaze.

Able was I ere I saw
Each blemish and each morbid flaw,
And though it all sticks in my craw,
When things get heinous I guffaw

That menticide is painless;
It brings on many changes;
And I don't care to live amid the sleaze.

So if you come to question me
About some issue you think key,
I'll talk about my standard fee:
Rebuke for your naivete.

'Cause menticide is painless,
it brings on many changes ,
and I don't care to revel in the sleaze.
But you go on without me, if you please.

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

Two phrases from a classic film will ease your way around campus and throughout your career here.


The movie "Chinatown" ends with two lines as forlorn as Oscar-winning scriptwriter Robert Towne could make them. Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who has just witnessed a police killing in service of avarice and power, mutters, "as little as possible," the phrase that the L. A. prosecutor had used to tell Gittes what to do in Chinatown. Gittes' associate Walsh muscles Gittes away from the death scene with the memorable "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

I respectfully suggest that colleagues use the mantras "as little as possible" and "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." to address conditions they may never redress. The phrases may be defeatist, cynical, or fatalistic. However, these two mantras will get colleagues past irrational decision-making and crass favoritism and myriad other vices of academic life.

Take the young colleague who asked me, "Doesn't the university support scholarship and publication?" As little as possible.

The university luxuriates in mostly imagined glories from accomplishments of faculty but supports research and scholarship minimally. Bequests and donations keep support from being entirely rhetorical, but such support mostly falls on the university rather than wells up from within the university. Almost all support for scholarship is honorific. In multiple senses of the term, support for scholarship is cheap. You need support to execute researches that you were promised you could pursue? Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

Sound too cynical? Look at "The Open Line,"* the newsletter by which the university's PR flacks keep the community informed about the accomplishments of faculty and staff. Ignore the few entries that seem to be genuine accomplishments. [Many of them are only apparent accomplishments, but do not let that concern you.] Now assay the remaining majority of entries. Tenure-seeking self-promoters tout minuscule feats as attainments. Would-be experts report recent interviews by media whose provenance is unknown and whose prominence may be doubted. If faculty had less pathetic accomplishments to report, would the "Noteworthy" section be so unworthy? "The Open Line" imparts new meaning to the phrase "minimum publishable unit." What items are not reproduced in "The Open Line?" As little as possible.

Still unconvinced? Find a report of colleagues tenured, promoted, or reviewed in a given year. Now search the Internet to see what accomplishments those colleagues claim on their resumes. If the university sincerely values academic excellence, how did this person get tenure without a peer-reviewed publication? If the university earnestly demands academic accomplishments, how did that person become a "Distinguished Professor" with nary a substantial scholarly credential? To be sure, the university consistently embraces scholarly achievement, but the university also embraces an absence of scholarly achievement. As a result, many faculty publish as little as possible.

Maybe the curricula vitarum are selective and the most impressive scholarly achievements are not yet listed? And maybe it's Chinatown.

Given that Puget Sound supports scholarship as little as possible, a naif might expect support to be directed to the most productive scholars and worthiest projects. Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown. If track records mattered, those rationing support for research would demand a Curriculum Vitae with applications for support. At the University of Puget Clowns, we ask that applicants not provide a resume. Could the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] be clearer that it's Chinatown?

Multiple colleagues have held named chairs despite decades or careers largely bereft of publication. As little as possible indeed.

When a colleague is feted for a book about which he or she has been talking and getting rewarded for decades, don't ask why it took so long or other questions. Just mumble to yourself, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

When a colleague coming up for evaluation quickly publishes a book with a flimsy press, it is impolite to comment on the press or the absence of peer reviews before or after publication. The colleague is after all merely living the Puget Clowns motto: as little as possible.

Look up this blog's "Scoundrels and Frauds" from 18 May 2009. A member of the faculty said nearly despondently of 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." Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown!

So what to do? Teach your students, read and learn, and, if you're serious about research, look for another place at which to do it. But do not even think about service, accreditation, or faculty governance unless you can keep in mind as little as possible.

You expect administrators, colleagues, committees, schools, departments, or programs to approximate their ideals or to redeem their promises or to deliver what they talked about while recruiting you? Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

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*In this blog, "The Open Line" is usually called "The Open Manhole," for it leads to sewage. See "Lifting the Manhole Cover," 14 March 2009 for my parody of "The Open Line."