Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Apparat-Chicks and Maid Men

Given how few women have been employed here, this university has had more than its share of female apparatchiks.

Reflecting on "Women Against Women's Advancing" [WAWA] the other day, I reviewed the tormenters, abettors, and bystanders who have made this campus unfriendly to females over my years here.

And what got me thinking about women afflicting other women these days?

Slide 2Coining "Women Against Women" in 1991-1996 to point out a disadvantage that sexist pigs and patriarchs faced at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], I pretended to lament that male colleagues who wanted to fire or otherwise torment women usually found the victim beset by too many female colleagues to participate fully. Relatively and absolutely few women were in decision-making positions in the 1980s and 1990s, yet the women who were in such spots often beat many men to the punching. Moreover, such women took the lead in defending decisions because firing women just looks better if it appears done by women.

E
lder boars could not make their way through old sows to get at, so to speak, women standing or stooping or crawling for tenure. Those old sows founded WAW, which I now have restyled "WAWA." Please compare "W Stands for Women Against Women," 24 November 2007.

Know why the Old Girls were displacing the Old Boys?

I dispensed anew with one hypothesis common in the 1990s. "The Crone Hypothesis" posited that attractive, young professors annoyed colleagues of a certain age who were losing their looks, in some cases declining little from a less than lofty start. In 1991, 1992, 1994, and 1995, fans of The Crone Hypothesis argued, women denied tenure were far too fetching for their own good.

Recall that attractive young women who spurned advances from senior colleagues would be vulnerable, but such is a different hypothesis.

Crone-hypothesizers must know, however, that tenure-rejections were less about fetching females than about Stepin Fetchit. Attractive but accommodating women got tenure and promotions. Not particularly attractive but particularly accommodating women got tenure and promotions. The Crone Hypothesis, thus, mistook a spurious subset for the general relation. The Crone Hypothesis was always more about disappointed and disappointing males disparaging females for their looks than about explaining thuggery.

He who quite occasionally despises thuggery attacks the looks of female thugs. How convenient.

No, a more persuasive if incomplete explanation follows from what one victim of thuggery called "The Asshole Clause."
"The Asshole Clause" abased all of its deployers, females more than males. Let us see how.

Excellence in teaching and professional growth aside, in the 1980s and 1990s candidates for tenure had to manifest "personal and professional characteristics" lest they be rebuffed. The Faculty Code explicitly demanded that evaluees "possess" qualities that promised to make them personable and professional for decades to come. In practice, this standard for decorum and congeniality was deployed when decision-makers wanted to deny tenure [or other rewards] to candidates who too evidently had met academically and intellectually appropriate criteria.

Really? How could awarding tenure according to congeniality lead to women who obstruct or injure other women?

In the view of most academics,
"personal and professional characteristics" must be anathema. To self-respecting scholars, any evaluator who would deny tenure to an otherwise qualified evaluee owing to "personal and professional characteristics" would degrade himself or herself and the process of evaluation. Indeed, "The Asshole Clause" was what most sets of standards and criteria were designed to deny. What other schools tried to fend off as a calumny, this school enunciated as a calling card.

Simply explain The Asshole Clause to colleagues from elsewhere. They only half-believe that such a standard could have been explicit. They concede that such considerations taint tenure decisions everywhere. They cannot believe that any school announced it. "That seems like an invitation to litigation."

Lo it was that, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], evaluators were expected to embrace and to enforce what most institutions denied: that personality, docility, obedience, and deference were expected of junior faculty who wanted to retain their positions.

Our musical interlude -- "I've Become Accustomed to Disgrace" from "My Fair Lady"

Worse, personality, docility, obedience, and deference were qualities gendered in application if not in conception. Male faculty might be colorful, skeptical, rambunctious, and independent without threatening or upsetting the old boars who ran the school. Females lacking in orthodoxy or orthopraxy were improper, unladylike, bitchy, or prickly. Traditional, quiet, submissive females might be dismissed and derided, but females who challenged men would be targeted. Women who made themselves useful to men would be favored. Women who showed men up would be fired.

Rogues who objected to sexual misconduct were especially dangerous and instantly targets.

Intelligent maidens who became academic "maid men" under this gendered system did not much care to acknowledge how they had become responsible, respectable, reliable colleagues, so they had to erase acknowledgement of their own humiliation and subjugation by valorizing the system of faculty evaluation and by humiliating, subjugating, and firing junior faculty who would not submit to degradation rituals.

Encounter anew, please, my entry from 4 March 2007 in this blog. Males or females who craved a reputation for respectability, reliability, and responsibility had to degrade themselves all the while praising the degradation. They still do, readers. This Stockholm Syndrome is not peculiar to Puget Clowns but is endemic and ongoing.

When the faculty in 1994-1995 moved to delete "The Asshole Clause" from the code, many of those who had imposed that clause defended it assiduously. Even among the women, this was understandable. Women who had fired women for being uppity and women who had attained their decision-making positions by being obsequious
could not have been expected to acknowledge their subservience, their opportunism, and their supple spines. Instead, like Winston Smith at the close of 1984, they loved Big Brother -- or proclaimed that they did for so long that it became true.

Is a colleague -- male or female -- regaling the faculty with professions of commitment to equality or justice? Ask "How much of whose blood is this professor trying to wash away?"

Now, some women destined for the WAWA leadership went further. Some so identified with their trainers and their trainers' values that they had long since incorporated patriarchy into their psyches. Their patina of feminist sensibilities disguised their willingness or longing to please the Old Boys as some women became more Old Boy than the old boys were. By the time I arrived on campus, then, many self-proclaimed [yet male-derided] "feminists" extolled and executed orthodoxy and orthopraxy all while denying that the process was gendered at all. Long since having submitted, they saw submission not as surrender but transcendence. They were apparatchiks, defined in this blog [4 March 2007] as those beneath the level of Vice President who collaborate with administrators and justify decisions.

Not long ago, a male colleague wanted to deny what a female denied tenure had said about advancement at this school. "You cannot map gender onto everything," he told me. That phrase is clown-talk. On campus it means "You cannot notice any use of gender that I'd prefer not to acknowledge," which soon enough amounts to "You cannot map gender onto anything." [Please see other tlansrations in the entry at 19 October 2007 in this blog.]

Even so, not all socialization into the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] was gendered. Some was general, which made submission and surrender seem less gendered. To advance, tyros female or male had to voice their agreement with policies; had to honor traditions, myths, and rituals; and had to master local newspeak and doubletalk. Male and female at first acted as if they believed so that they would not be disreputable and vulnerable. Soon enough, they did believe. Worse, they forgot what it was not to believe. Tenured and promoted, these women and men were no longer at Puget Clowns. They had become Puget Clowns.

Recall a twice-told tale: The single leader of WAWA perhaps most instrumental to the demise or detriment of women on this campus was walking away from a faculty meeting with a female colleague when she waved toward me and said that I'd never get tenure at this campus because I mouthed off at faculty meetings. She was on the FAC that recommended me for tenure but not the woman she was talking to. Interesting coincidence?

Norman Bates had to deny his matricide; so too those who had to disgrace themselves to get tenure had to deny the disgrace by which they secured permanent employment. Who could deny the disgrace if assertive, candid, loud-mouthed, threatening, disruptive females were parading about campus? Better that such women not torment the maid men by their presence.

Observe and mark well women who are touted for service to this university, for employment at the University of Puget Clowns once demanded especially from women service qua SubsERVIenCE.

Who will join "Women Against Women's Advancing" next?

?

?

?

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

At Least One Senator Tried

Amid bad faith and cynical evasions, the incoming chair of the senate offers hope.

After Randall P. McMurphy tried but failed to lift a heavy machine, he offered a resounding phrase in the screenplay to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:"

"But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that." http://sfy.r/?script=one_flew

I rehearsed that phrase several times in my head in an attempt to calm down before a report to the Faculty Senate last Monday [10 May 2010]. The always wily, always deceptive Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had reported via one of its six chairs. See "The Persistence of Blather" [11 December 2009] and "O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here" [immediately previous entry in this blog, 24 April 2010].

The incoming Chair of the Faculty Senate, in his capacity as mere senator, had asked whether the FAC might move to change the Bylaws [one chair] to match FAC practice [six allegedly co-equal chairs]. He said that he preferred adjusting the Bylaws to circumventing the Bylaws. A novel notion that! Yes, we could follow the rules and, if we would not follow the rules, change the rules so that they resemble our practice.

The feckless, accommodating, thankfully outgoing chair of the Faculty Senate produced a communication from the FAC in which the FAC updated its deceptions and evasions. Does any member of the faculty remember when we had a Faculty Senate Chair who was not supine?

The member of the FAC presenting the report declined to pursue such a change. It would be unsual for a member of the FAC to take a straight path to any object or to acknowledge the authority of the faculty or the senate!

Then, in a usurpation that would have been merely hilarious were it not so pathetic and fatuous, the spokesperson attempted to "charge" the incoming chair to change the Bylaws himself. Ya gotta love FAC logic. A senator attempting to induce the FAC to follow the rules is asked to serve the FAC by changing rules that the FAC is content to flout.

Then senators were regaled with a flagrant misreading of a passage in the Bylaws that, if one were unfamiliar with standard English, might fool a dull sophomore. But let's keep it positive: how many FAC members have failed of our expectations for dull sophomores?

Rather than in anger, how might I respond to such vaudeville?

Shall I repeat "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown?"

Shall I rejoice that the spokesperson for the FAC wore flame-resistant pants amid her rendering of the Bylaws?

Shall I remind myself that many members of the FAC could not have found the meeting?

Shall I rebuke the faculty anew for electing to the FAC colleagues of so little credibility or ability?

Nope. Nope. Nope. And nope.

Shall I rejoice that the incoming chair of the Faculty Senate will not subvert the rules or suborn those who do?

Yep.

At least he tried.

God damn it! At least the new chair did that.

Amid the loons, one sane senator spoke truth to a Power Committee.

At the University of Puget Clowns
[© Susan Resneck Pierce], that is a miracle.

On the other hand, a
t the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], loons run the asylum.

Let's see if the new chair will be leader or loon.

Can he do much worse than his predecessors?