Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses V

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So faculty who will go along with anything because they are merely killing time on the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] and recidivists from the Professional Standards Committee of 2004-2005 neither questioned nor opposed the ASC fixtures when those fixtures chanted stale shibboleths and conjured policy thereby. [See previous postings of this inventory of hypotheses, starting with the entry for 3 December 2010, if you please.]

Why didn't students on the ASC question policy proposals?

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Explanation 5 -- Stockholm-Syndrome Undergraduates Go Along with "Authorities."

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I suppose it is understandable that students appointed to the august Academic Standards Committee [ASC] strive to conform [group-think again] and to impress faculty, staff, and others. Even when the ASC is stifling students' choices and decrying students' preferences, undergraduates on the ASC are not likely to defend their peers or to wise up deciders who barely remember being students. Hostages to the "rigor" and respect of faculty, these undergraduates not only avoid abuse by acceding to posturing, preening professors and authoritative, authoritarian bureaucrats but also contribute other-adulation to festivals of self-adulation common on the ASC. Like about one-quarter of prisoners, these hostages identify with oppressors and join in oppression.

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Whatever third-year student Winston Smith thought when he was appointed to the ASC, after a very few meetings Winston loves Big Brother and participates every few meetings in Two Minutes' Hate against enemies or vices on the agenda of the ASC, especially vices identified by fixtures or enemies identified.by faculty.

Stockholm Syndrome

Stockholm Syndrome may be unavoidable when vulnerable youngsters

are surrounded by accomplished academic poseurs. Students easily

admire sophisticates -- those who know the proper slogans and

shibboleths to chant and no arguments or reasons that support the

chanting or get in the way of damnable proposals -- and
want to be included among the cognoscenti.

Trouble is, these connoisseurs of rigor are conning tyros with noise.

[A false etymology of "con·nois·seur" = a CON man who deploys NOISE

to entice others into his SEWER. But I digress.]

To support mythic rigor, the con men and women invoke noise about

how rigorous their own undergraduate experiences were. Students are unlikely

to see through such blather as easily as colleagues do. A tyro does not

realize that this member of the Rigor Police cannot spell or that another

bunko artist glories in his or her fabled days at Our Lady of the Swamps

because that was the last time he or she actually completed any writing on time.

Trusting novices are likely to presume, in short, accomplishments when

the absence of accomplishments explains the origins of the noise.

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The five hypotheses I have so far identified explain why the ASC went beserk 2008-2010. But why did the Faculty Senate fail to intervene?

Next entry.