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?

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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?

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Explanation 3 -- Starr-Chamber Deciders Erupt Anew.

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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.

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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....

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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