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?

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Explanation 2 -- Stagnant Mantras Fend Off Information.

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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.

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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]

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

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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?

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

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