Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses VII

To

a) the groupthink of fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee [See this blog, 3 December 2010];

b) hackneyed formulas that purport to justify the changes that the fixtures prefer & proffer [This blog, 4 December 2010];

c) veterans of THE rogue committee of all time [This blog, 5 December 2010];

d) inert and indifferent time-servers on the committee;

e) uncritical students [This blog, 6 December 2010];

and

f) a dozing Faculty Senate [This blog 7 December 2010]

let us now add the leadership of a rogue committee:

The Academic Standards train went off its tracks largely owing to the proclivities of its conductors and engineers.

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Explanation 7 -- Authoritarian Personalities

.....

..Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde:

misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb,

zu strafen, mächtig ist!

But thus do I counsel you, my friends:

distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

.......

The ASC 2008-2010 proved Nietzsche [Thus Spake Zarathustra] prescient. More than one authoritarian on the ASC longed to punish students who disappointed members of the committee. Students who chose other than the authoritarians would prefer disappointed the authoritarians. Students who elected options that authoritarians wished the students did not have disappointed the authoritarians. That is the way authoritarians think and behave. That is why I label them authoritarians.

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In the 4 October 2010 entry in this blog I noted with F. G. Bailey the preponderance of deceivers, especially self-deceivers, among those who dedicate themselves to the work of committees. I presume much delusion and many deceptions on any committee, so that is not what I am getting at with this seventh explanation.

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Rather I intend to note that a will to power distorts the deceptions of delusional colleagues into tyranny. As it was with the Professional Standards Committee 2003-2004, so it was with the Academic Standards Committee 2008-2010:

• members with powerful impulses to sanction, to coerce, and to punish drove committees to precipitate decisions that could not be defended before colleagues; as a result,
• chairs of each committee mismanaged communications between their committees and overseeing or superordinate entities; and
• chairs misled, misstated facts, or lied.:::::::::::::::::::::::::

.....

These tyrannical drivers of renegade committees are not fascists. They are fantasists. Deceived and deluded by their own dogma and doggerel, these tyrants must live up to images that they concocted to hide from colleagues shortcomings that their tyrannies make evident. As a result, these tyrants must redouble their efforts to seem to be what they cannot be. Denial and duplicity are overdetermined and overwhelming whenever an academic makes being himself or herself impossible.

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I fault malfeasant and nonfeasant fantasists in the rank and file of the ASC, to be sure. They are supposed to be responsible and accountable. Yet, about the irresponsible, incompetent, unaccountable, and inexplicable fantasists what can we do? The fixtures are group-thinking apparatchiks who serve masters and missions over which faculty have little sway. Mantras that have bedeviled the "Academic" "Standards" Committee are immune to argument, instruction, reason, or suasion, so faculty can no more cure shibboleths and sloganeering than herpes. If we rid the ASC of these defective fantasists, those defective fantasists likely take their places.

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Membership on the ASC is largely self-selected. All too often, authoritarians bent by and bent on rigor elect to "serve" on the "Academic" "Standards" Committee. Fantasists with irresistible impulses to punish those who do not conform then re-imagine their own undergraduate triumphs and concoct spurious explanations for their own excellences. With each passing year the noncommissioned officers of the "Rigor Patrol" become retrospectively magnificent. Imbued with enthusiasm to transform undergrads into the intellectual figures that the rigorous refashion their autobiographies to conjure, these apostles of "hard love" then belch

• "I never used pass-fail when I was an undergraduate."*
• "I worked hard to get my degree; I expect our students to do the same."**
• "I don't see why a senior at a national liberal-arts college should have to take a first-year-level course pass-fail."***
• "Our students have to learn that grades do not matter."****

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Such statements, derived from members of the "Academic" "Standards" Committee 2008-2010, should dash any hopes of remedying the powerful draw of that committee for colleagues who misremember their past and prosecute that fanciful past on the undergrads of the present.

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It may be, however, that faculty may do something about leadership of and in the ASC. Let the Faculty Senate attend to processes by which the willful ascend to authority and descend to tyranny.

• Each time a committee elects as chair the member who arrives latest at the first meeting of the committee, that committee disdains competence for convenience.
• Each time that shirkers elect a junior colleague chair, they risk that someone with something to prove will assume a position for which she or he will prove ill-suited.
• Each time a member of the faculty yearns to chair a committee [or a department, program, or school], she or he marks herself or himself as a potential malefactor.

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The Faculty Code leaves committee chairpersons to the accident and expedient of first-meeting elections. Thus the Code devalues design and deliberation from the start.

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Given ASC leadership in 2008-2010, a rogue ASC should shock us about as much as we are shocked when a young Cuervo-drinker talking on a cell-phone is piloting a muscle car 50 mph the wrong way down a one-way street. You can pronounce the results an accident, but most adults would find the result predictable.

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It is now past time for the Faculty Senate and the trustees to amend The Faculty Code so that committee chairs are annually elected by faculty or appointed by the Faculty Senate.

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Enough accidental amateurs! No more tyrannical tyros!

* And? So? Some of our colleagues do not use dental floss now, let alone when they were sophomores. Your assertion would be inconsequent if true, moron!

** If you worked hard to get an undergraduate degree in the 1970s or 1980s, you must be even dumber than your remark.

*** But you understand why careful drivers might carry insurance, Bozo?

**** Did you get into graduate school based on your looks or your personality, Doctor?
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