Do veterans of the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] hear what they have become when they quibble over corruptions of peer evaluation?
Upon hearing scuttlebutt about collusion in a tenure evaluation, colleagues with 50 years of service at our fine university independently inquired, "What's wrong with collusion?"
Such a question asked without irony limns a depravity* of faculty evaluation here. I have quoted from "The Hustler" more than once the jarring characterization of Sarah Packer [Piper Laurie]: "We have a contract of depravity. All we have to do is pull the blinds down."
Some Puget clowns no longer pull the blinds down.
* To go all etymological on your butt, to deprave is to descend ["de-"] into crookedness ["pravus"]. Perhaps our colleagues were straight and whole when they arrived so long ago. Their speech illuminates what has become of them.
2 comments:
A definition of "collude" for the Princeton wordnet site:
conspire: act in unison or agreement and in secret towards a deceitful or illegal purpose;
Muser's post emphasizes covert unison. Prior to or beside a departmental deliberation, a faction fashions mutually reinforcing arguments out of the sight of the rest of the department, school, or program.
And what could be wrong with that?
I find it so revealing that our colleagues countenanced such pre-deliberation determination. We all know of instances in which one colleague slithers into another colleague's office to share an anecdote or an inference. In addition, we each know that such chats prior to deliberation facilitate letter-writers getting their stories straight, both in the sense of seeing what anecdota or apocrypha might be credible and in the sense of conforming anecdota and apocrypha to an eventual recommendation.
In 1997 I challenged a senior colleague for always setting up covert confabs before official meetings of faculty. I asked him whether he would ever just allow faculty governance to go where it would go. He professed not even to understand my point. To this veteran, "that's the way the game is played." [In Latin, "colludere" meant "to play together."]
I recall as well that in 1991 an associate dean asked a designer of the incipient, inchoate, and incoherent program in international political economy to propose to split the two units of "Society" then required in the core into a domestic unit and an international unit. The associate dean thought it looked better if faculty proposed the dean's scheme.
Please do not misunderstand me. I do not excoriate colleagues for recognizing that covert confabs happen in faculty evaluations. Rather, I worry for our associates that they no longer recognize collusion as a deceitful or illicit subversion of the evaluation process. The code calls for independent letters written prior to deliberation. Collusion saps the supposed independence of observations and interpretations.
Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary on CD-ROM concurs with Princeton that collusion involves secret collaboration in deception or chicanery:
"1. to act together through a secret understanding, esp. with evil or harmful intent.
"2. to conspire in a fraud."
If our veterans want to admit that conspiracy to defraud is routine, perhaps tyros should heed their judgments.
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