Opportunity Costs Knock

Charging the School of Education for offices is a good first step;

however, we can pick up the pace.

.............

Upon learning that some creative accountant was dunning the School of Education for square feet assigned to faculty offices, many colleagues were

briefly awakened from their campus comas

as affronted as they were taken aback. These colleagues err. Accountants and the administrators who direct them reveal to the university a cunning conceit tantalizing opportunity.

Opportunity is knocking in the form of charging for opportunity costs, so don't knock opportunity costs or Ebeneezer Scrooge’s demeanor beforehand. Embrace the horror opportunity costs. Opportunity costs are ways in which to screw over our friends.

No more than a A moment's reflection will suggest the genius behind assigning opportunity costs to the Ed School to make the Ed School seem less profitable, hence more harvestable to suit the economic well-being of the remainder of the campus, and costlier. Administrators and accountants concoct wholly fictitious recognize hitherto unsuspected debits that they then assign to targeted unitsof what more than once has been called a community. [Of course, calling a corporate entity a community does not make a corporate entity a community. Indeed, that one must invoke the meme signals that one knows that little or no actual community exists.]

Crass as it is, the This accounting fantasy practice does not go far enough. We are missing opportunities! Let’s get to it!

First, let us consider opportunities to

imperil inform

every department, program, school, and unit:

1. For example, why settle for two-dimensional opportunity when three-dimensional opportunities lie about like full professors? Every member of the faculty and staff should be debited for cubic space assigned to him or her. If I were paying to the ceiling tiles, I’d use at least seven vertical feet of my office. Let’s give me some incentives to maximize productivity. Whether I move in suspended work stations or not, my department should be billed as if spammers and telemarketers were working in the lofts.

2. And what of my office phone? While I am bloviating captive audiences in lecturing my classes, a telemarketer could be turning my office telephone to profit. Bill me for the revenues I deliberately forego by leaving my office fallow when I leave my office! If I do not pay up, bill my department.

3. Most faculty get to their offices after 9:00 7:00 a.m. and leave before 4:006:00 p.m. Some faculty do not visit their offices at all from Friday through the ensuing Monday inclusive. Assign departments the revenue that they could make from subletting offices when faculty are not occupying them. Indeed, departments should encourage all members to secure carrels in Collins Library so that faculty offices may be sublet 24/7.

4. Harned/Thompson faculty must keep their laboratories active. Charge science departments for times during which labs are not used. Apply a rate commensurate with a meth comparable labs.

5. Whether departments are soliciting kickbacks for grades and honors or not, departments should be billed at a standard rate for grades above C and for anything that ends “cum laude.” Departments should auction grades and honors to instruct undergraduates in the glories of the free market.

6. Naturally, the newer the building the higher the room rate should be. Denizens of McIntyre cannot be expected to pony up at the same rate as those who work in newer facilities, even shoddier facilities like Wyatt Hall. Charge departments for all upgrades and improvements.

With the above and other charges, each unit of the university may be driven to bankruptcy on paper disciplined by fiscal realities. Then administrators and accountants may shed any units they do not care for quietly, civilly update various university subdivisions. Garnish some wages for noisy faculty and those Most faculty will go quietly for dimes on the dollar doubtless appreciate and profit from the information.

Loopy Transparency or Transparent Loopiness?

Administrators claim to value transparency but practice it in a loopy manner.

¶ In a Rump Parliament post on 27 June 2011 ["Faculty Meetings, Administrators, & Deliberation"] I opined that expecting transparency from faculty meetings was contrary to my experience at the University of Puget Clowns. Last June a memorandum regarding faculty meetings had suggested that faculty would not feel "out of the loop" and would be "in the know" if faculty attended faculty meetings and read memoranda in which decision-makers made their decisions and decision-making transparent. I derided this communique as a transparent, loopy excuse for blindsiding faculty on tuition benefits for dependents. http://rumpparliament.blogspot.com/2011/06/faculty-meetings-administrators.html

¶ As the plenary meeting of the faculty on 20 September 2011 begins to unravel, faculty must ask themselves anew whether faculty meetings harm mental health. One who attends faculty meetings exposes herself or himself to transparent loops that entangle the mind by weaving webs of facts and folderol.

¶ On 20 September faculty were regaled regarding the School of Education. That report contained some numbers about an alleged shortfall in profits from the Ed School. The Faculty Governance Forum has since exposed the numbers as tendentious accounting at best. We'll see if administrators favor faculty with more suspect "data" at next week's faculty meeting. Probably the administrators will rely on faculty obliviousness and inattention to let the matter drop from awareness. We'll see.

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¶ What we see already is that the transparency about which faculty read in June will be iffy. Maybe administrators are eager to keep faculty "in the loop," as the 6-27 memorandum suggested, but maybe the faculty's feeling "out of the loop" had far less to do with non-attendance at faculty meeting than it had to do with the nature or quality of information provided faculty in faculty meetings and inmemoranda. Maybe administrators who have often been far from open have changed their ways, but maybe professions of transparency are the latest camouflage.

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¶ And maybe the numbers to which faculty were exposed on 9-20 will turn out to be misleading. The Faculty Governance Forum recently featured the information that the School of Education is debited for the square feet of their offices. What other creative cost-accounting does the Jones Hall practice? For how long has the university charged which departments at what rates for office-space?

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¶ This tactical accounting seems consistent with a tactic used when earlier administrators were trying to eliminate Occupational and Physical Therapy. The strategy then was to isolate OT/PT as an entity that lost money. When I asked the dean and the president why OT/PT was measured in such a manner yet various departments outside OT/PT were not, I was told that the trustees had decided to count in such a manner. A circular argument circles the wagons and keeps me "in the loop." That is how the university has often practiced transparency.

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¶ I did not expect transparency. I expected loop-the-loop. I expect more loopiness to follow. So perhaps the call for greater attendance at faculty meetings was more than the excuse for which I took it in June. Was it as well precondition for misleading the faculty? After all, what is the point of a magic show without an audience? Why, that would be like a confidence game without marks!

¶

Neglected Beauty of the Obvious

My favorite remark from the first two weeks of Fall 2011: “I have not done anything on my research for weeks. You know, this is a pretty easy gig if all you're doing is teaching.”

For many colleagues who have not soiled their hands or minds with research or ― Gasp! ― publishing, this report is belated but welcome. Still another colleague has figured out the scam worked by so many faculty at so many schools that pretend to value the pursuit of knowledge. Indeed, our colleague need take but one more step to enhance her or his retirement in place. She or he must complain daily about having too little time for research.

The clowns who most often bewail the time that teaching and service and other duties divert them from their windpath-breaking research almost always do no research, almost never produce research, and would not know peer-review if they ever were asked to do it.

You cannot aptly say that these clowns long ago retired in place, for retirement implies something from which to retire or some shift from more to less activity. Many clowns have not since their dissertations had a research program to halt.

Truly impressive are clowns who, bereft of research programs and accomplishments, use research to justify their piling into the three- or four-day-weekend clown-car. These clowns need an exclusively Tuesday-Thursday schedule or a Monday-Thursday schedule so that they can secure another day with which to pursue the work that they never get done or started. Now that is a cushy berth!

So, beloved colleague, aim high. Get a Lantz to pursue an imaginary project. Secure the designation “Distinguished Professor” despite your having published no peer-reviewed research in the last five or ten years. Become a low-level administrator and lament its stunting of your research.

The University of Puget Clowns affords faculty many opportunities for leisure and lassitude.

This is a very easy job when you're not doing much of it.

It is an even easier job when you aren't doing any of it. The colleagues whose service is grudging and desultory and whose teaching is at best a rumor truly have easy gigs. Who are these colleagues? Listen for those who trumpet most their service or teaching. Those who are advertising most are producing least.

What the FAHC?

Funniest remark at the party at the Faculty Club on 9 September 2011: "Why not call it the Faculty Academic Hazing Committee?"

Undistinguished Distinctions

Colleagues assert that the Faculty Advancement Committee makes arbitrary distinctions. As distinguished from what other decision-makers at the University of Puget Clowns?

When colleagues who have been at the University of Puget Clowns [® Susan Resneck PieRce] for years are shocked to discover capricious decision-making, I envy them their outrage. I have lost most of my capacity to be appalled or even surprised by designations and distinctions routinely made by Power Committees, administrators, or apparatchiks. I am enervated: able was I ere I saw Elba.

When the FAC makes decisions that can neither be understood nor believed, I mutter, “Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown.” [Please review the entry 14 January 2010 in this blog.]

The process by which the FAC names certain full professors “Distinguished” has been suspect to me at least since 1997 when I first participated in those decisions. [Specifics forthcoming over a martini.] Many “Distinguished Professors” actually are distinguished in a positive direction. Some full professors are distinguished from other full professors more by their patrons or allies or buddies than by their performance or any discernable merit. Still other “Distinguished Professors” are “Extinguished Professors,” distinguishable from other full professors in a negative direction.

From 1997 on I have warned colleagues who would listen to me that some designations that seem arbitrary are in fact not arbitrary but artful.

The title “Distinguished Professor” was, if the oral historians who have informed me are reliable, an invention of the Phibbs-Davis Regime. For years the designation was somewhat secret. Only “Distinguished Professors” and a few of their buddies knew about the title and the booty that went with it. I have repeatedly heard that President Phibbs and Dean Davis used “Distinguished Professor” to reward loyalty and conformity at least as much as merit. [Given the general paucity of merit, especially scholarly productivity, when Drs. Phibbs and Davis took over, finding merit to reward might have required Sherlock Holmes.] If this oral history is at all correct, then designating “Distinguished Professors” has been artful when not corrupt almost from the inception of the “honor.”

That the FAC makes not very defensible decisions has long struck me as one reason for confidentiality.

Regular readers of “Rump Parliament” are more familiar than most colleagues with failings of “Power Committees,” especially of the FAC and the “Professional” “Standards” Committee [usually designated the PSC or Starr Chamber in this blog]. Indeed, this blog began with an entry about confidentiality and its abuses. [See “An Apology for Conning Colleagues” 21 January 2007.] When we consider the oral history, we should keep in mind that in previous years and regimes, the FAC and the PSC were even more secretive and conformist than in the last decades. From my experiences with each, they had much to be secretive about.

Judgments made amid secrecy occasionally diverge from ideals, methinks.

The very process by which faculty nominate but the Dean selects respectable, reliable, responsible, reputable faculty for the FAC makes clear to eyes that will see that President Phibbs and/or Dean Davis preferred loyal lackeys to critical colleagues on the FAC. [Please consult “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable” in this blog 4 March 2007.] Some faculty managed to be selected by faculty for the FAC multiple times before they were finally permitted to serve on the FAC by deans. Some were never permitted to serve. They were not obsequious, predictable, deferential, or conforming respectable, reliable, responsible, or reputable enough to suit the dean.

Given the process by which colleagues reach the FAC, I seldom can be surprised by decisions of the FAC.

In addition to a pliable FAC, administrators long relied on an accommodating PSC. “The Starr Chamber” for so long served as the privy council for and to the dean or other administrators that many faculty [not just cynical I] abandoned hope whenever an issue entered The Starr Chamber. Indeed, the silence behind confidentiality was welcome relative to the suborning of colleagues' honor worked whenever members of the PSC came out to the Faculty Senate.

I have long become accustomed to Power Committees that make decisions that are not defended and cannot be defended.

Owing to evidence and experience, then, I have consistently asserted and argued in this blog that many matters in multiple venues are subject to Type One and Type Two Errors―respectively, false positives and false negatives. Many professors awarded the designation “Distinguished” have not earned that designation. They are false positives. Good teachers and obedient servants of the administration have enjoyed patronage despite research records unadorned by recent accomplishments or by anything that would be counted as professional growth at an actual university. The false negatives are much better than satisfactory at teaching, at research, and at service, but they have run afoul of an administrator or otherwise made themselves unworthy on grounds other than teaching, professional growth, and service. Perhaps they were not respectable, reliable, responsible, or reputable?

Evaluees tenured or promoted with no professional growth cannot puzzle me, and colleagues awarded honors despite failings that should be disqualifying cannot flabbergast me, so a designation without discernible standards and with only a legendary provenance cannot trouble me.

Not just I but everyone who has dared to look behind shibboleths and slogans knows that professors at this university have received chairs with designations that the chair-sitters belie. This colleague resides in a chair for distinguished teaching yet he has always been a desultory instructor? Welcome to Puget Clowns. Arches declares that a professor is a legendary instructor? I did peer observation of one such instructor who was far more legend than actuality.

I have found that some products touted as excellent are at least good; some touted teachers are terrific. I have also found that much touting exists to camouflage unpleasant realities.

I have learned in two stints on the committee that the FAC routinely relies on students' evaluations for decisions far more momentous than a few thousand bucks per year. The FAC from time to time denies evaluees tenure based mostly and sometimes solely on members' tendentious, Procrustean constructions of students' evaluations. You read that right. The arbitrariness of promotion and tenure often issues from the personal quirks or animosities of FAC decision-makers rather than from the usual combination of disinformation from peers or students.

I realized that colleagues were selected for teaching awards based mostly on students' evaluations when I came to see that the FAC had almost no valid, credible evidence or sustained, professional judgments on which to rely.

When “professional growth” is being constructed or deconstructed, assessments are even shakier than they are regarding teaching. The FAC cannot very easily or very often rely on substantive assessments by experts, for the University cannot afford much overlap in many departments. Whenever some tyro mentions that actual universities rely on external reviews, the Puget Clowns behave like chimpanzees with an ample supply of feces. Hence, professional growth will be judged by standards that are often evanescent, unreliable, and invalid. [This is also true of substantive judgments about teaching, but students' evaluations and evaluators' stylistic predilections will seemingly validate teaching judgments.] Members of departments, programs, or schools conjure impediments to promotion and transmogrify “professional evaluation” into an oxymoron about as often as those evaluators falsify the record or fabricate evidence to get some pal a promotion that she or he does not deserve.

With professional growth as with teaching, false positives and false negatives abound behind walls of confidentiality and quires of flim-flam.

In addition to students' evaluations of teaching the FAC reads briefs candid communiqués written by departmental or other colleagues about teaching or researching. I long ago became aware that colleagues' letters often resulted from reasoning backward from evaluators' conclusions or whims or animosities, so I cannot in the 21st century be surprised that “Distinguished Professor” is an arbitrary judgment from a committee that arbitrarily denies or grants tenure and promotion.

I have said no to drugs, so I can no longer join the Puget Clowns congregation in believing.

How many peers denied tenure or a promotion in the last few decades were doomed by the dislike of one or more strategically situated evaluators? I cannot be sure. What I can be certain about is this: Sometimes the record is so strong that the denial is actually corrupt rather than arbitrary.

Indeed, my experiences at Puget Clowns have inclined me to ignore baubles such as “Distinguished Professor” altogether.

In 2001 and again in 2006, I was designated a “Distinguished Professor.” In 2011 I was not. I have never placed “Distinguished” anywhere near my name or rank. I never would, for I can tell the difference between genuine distinction and arbitrary swag. When last I became “Distinguished,” I respected the FAC and its judgments to such a degree that I did not read the letter from the FAC. I still have not read that letter. I respected exactly one member of that FAC enough to care what he or she might say.

At the University of Puget Clowns, honors are like houses: You think you possess them, but soon enough they possess you.

Many recent nominees and appointees to the FAC have manifest far less professional growth than other attainments, such as obsequiousness to authority and obliviousness to merit or suffering or decency. Some members of the FAC have, shall we say, a relaxed attitude toward verisimilitude alongside their passion for truthiness.

How could I take such decision-makers or their decisions seriously?

So I leave this crusade to colleagues not yet so jaded as I. However, I warn my colleagues as Lou Mannheim [Hal Holbrook] warned Bud Fox [Charlie Sheen] in the movie “Wall Street:” “The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things that you don’t want to do.” At Puget Clowns the money involved is chump change, which saves most of us from venality most of the time. Instead, we should fear praise, honors, or awards lest we get accustomed to them and find perfidy a Pavlovian acquisition.

How do I avoid despair? I heed Lou Mannheim’s other advice to Bud Fox: “Man looks in the abyss … there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”

William R. Haltom 1930 -2011

Faculty Meetings, Administrators, & Deliberation

Maybe expecting attendance at faculty meetings is not extravagant; expecting increased transparency, superior deliberation, better ideas, and improved decision-making is extravagant. Indeed, such expectations are bullshit.

__________________________________________

On 27 June 2011, faculty at the University of Puget Clowns [® Susan Resneck PieRce 1996] learned of the dates, times, and locations of faculty meetings in the 2011-12 academic year. The dates and times were accompanied by the dean's "plea" for greater participation in faculty meetings.

In this posting I respond to some passages that most intrigued me.

" ... we have scheduled three rather than two meetings per semester. I think it is important that we as faculty colleagues return to a more regular practice of meeting together to talk about topics, issues, and questions of common concern. I think that we have a terrific faculty and am very proud of your many accomplishments, but we have lost the tradition of coming together in recent years.Given a concurrent lack of attention to minutes and other electronic communications, many colleagues feel 'out of the loop' or are concerned about lack of transparency. ..."

Perhaps the dean is correct, but I do not believe she is. I believe that colleagues are concerned about a lack of transparency owing primarily to a lack of transparency. Many colleagues feel "out of the loop" when they have been excluded from decision-making. After all, leaving or keeping staff and faculty out of loops via decision-making far from transparent is a long-standing yet current tradition.

How many decision-makers or decision-making entities reach decisions in the open?

I began "Rump Parliament" with an entry on the "Confidentiality Con," a confidence game in which members of Power Committees such as the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] claim that The Faculty Code or Bylaws commands secrecy in proceedings. This claim, almost always untrue, excuses excluding faculty from knowledge about and apprehension of proceedings by which faculty are governed. This claim, far from furthering transparency, rationalizes opacity. Please do not miss what this claim also does: decision-makers who hide behind confidentiality get to pretend that they would love to share with colleagues the inner workings of the PSC or FAC but, alas, are not permitted to reveal goings-on. Indeed, the apparatchiks most respected and rewarded by administrators claim that, if the insiders could only reveal their decision-making processes, colleagues would be impressed with the rationality and fairness exhibited by the Power Committee at every turn. Many of the most important decisions around campus, in sum, are precisely the opposite of transparent; members of Power Committees assiduously assiduously keep colleagues "out of the loop."

Those who repeat the "Confidentiality Con" are uninformed or misinformed unless they have read the code or the bylaws with any comprehension. If they have read the code and the bylaws with understanding, those who repeat this claim propagate untruth. Worse, those who propagate the untruth ought to know that they misstate the truth. Usually we call deliberate untruths "lies." Let's be collegial and settle for "bullshit."

"... [B]ullshitters, although they represent themselves as being engaged simply in conveying information, are not engaged in that enterprise at all. Instead, and most essentially, they are fakers and phonies who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they speak. What they care about primarily, therefore, is whether what they say is effective in accomplishing this manipulation. Correspondingly, they are more or less indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false." Harry Frankfurt, On Truth

The Confidentiality Con is bullshit. Worse, confidentiality bullshits colleagues about decisions on promotion and tenure [the FAC], on sanctioning, dismissal, and evaluation criteria [the PSC], and on other matters of concern to staff and faculty. Please examine any entry in "Rump Parliament" with the label "Starr Chamber" for example after example of non-transparent decisions. Or simply ask yourself how the PSC acquired the moniker "Star Chamber" long before I added an "r" thereonto.

Are budgetary decisions reached in the open? Or are those who decide on budgetary recommendations charged to keep to themselves many arguments, issues, and determinations? How long has such been a "tradition?"

Were decisions about tuition benefits to staff or faculty with children open and obvious to all who attended faculty meetings? I doubt it.

Other decisions are by design opaque. Every time that the trustees go into executive session, they deliberately impair transparency. Even if the trustees believe that they are legally bound to shield their decision-making, they reduce transparency.

Perhaps the Dean would prefer that we read her missive closely. If so, when she wrote "Given a concurrent lack of attention to minutes and other electronic communications, many colleagues feel 'out of the loop' or are concerned about lack of transparency. ..." the Dean may have meant that the problems were the feelings and the concerns, not being out of the loop or actual absence of transparency. Perhaps the missive was aimed at reducing the feelings and the realization. I cannot know.

Perhaps faculty are out of the loop because they have been in recent years targets of myriad electronic messages. The Dean's phrasing may lead colleagues to blame themselves and to forget that each day they must triage electronic communications. I do not know.

To summarize anew: colleagues have ample reasons for supposing a lack of transparency. That many colleagues have only lately discovered the cover-ups, double-talk, euphemisms, and happy talk is to the colleagues' discredit. That colleagues say they are shocked to discover that they have been misled is pathetic. To parlay disgruntlement about non-transparencies with low attendance at faculty meetings is, however, beyond pathetic and beneath contempt. It is bullshit.

"In addition, attendance of only 25-35 persons, rather than a more robust faculty participation, means people do not think of Faculty Meetings as a place to bring topics for deliberation (such as ideas about curriculum development, benefits, or strategic planning). We can do better as a community interested in deliberation, thoughtful discourse, and good decision-making."

The Dean may be correct in this passage -- the faculty could do better. That is, however, not a savvy bet. That may be what expedience whispers in the ear of the Dean. That is not what experience bellows at veteran staff and faculty.

In my 25 years at Puget Clowns, I have seen some deliberation, thoughtful discourse, and good decision-making. I have also seen stampedes, thoughtless blather, and bad decision-making. I have participated in smallish meetings in which progress has been achieved. I have attended meetings with more than 25 or 30 faculty modeling irrational behavior. Please review "The Few, The Proud, The Clowns" -- an entry in "Rump Parliament" for 19 April 2011 -- for my account of redrafting student evaluations in a headlong race against the clock. There were, according to the minutes, 36 faculty in the Trimble Forum,. Many of the "Greatest Moments in Faculty Meetings" -- "Rump Parliament" 19 February 2011 -- occurred with 50 or more faculty in the meeting room.

At the least, then, colleagues who infer from modest attendance at plenary meetings that ideas about curriculum, benefits, or planning may not be usefully discussed risk a non sequitur. Such faulty inferences should not imbue us with confidence in deliberation, thoughtfulness, or prudence in groups small or large. Still less do such inferences inspire confidence in administrators. Indeed, I suspect that such inferences are bullshit excuses.

I have no idea which "people" choose not to bring ideas to faculty meetings, but maybe there are some. I think it more probable that so few colleagues attend faculty meetings that the probability of some proponent proposing at a plenary meeting is less.

" ... There are only 6 ongoing faculty members who, by course schedule, could not attend a Wednesday 8:00 meeting so – as an experiment – we have scheduled one Faculty Meeting in the 7:45 to 8:55 Wednesday time slot in order to give that time a try.

"We have returned the meeting location to McIntyre 103 in order to allow space for more of you to attend the meetings. In all, I hope that with this advanced notice you will be able to make arrangements (such as alternate childcare, school transportation, or other adjustments) in order to be a part of a well-informed and deliberatively active faculty community. In short, I expect attendance."

Who will be the wag who connects the Dean's expectation to a trustee's bold proclamation? I speak of the trustee who intoned that the University had neither a legal nor a moral obligation to honor its promises to faculty with children. Do faculty now get to respond to their dean with "The faculty have neither a legal nor a moral obligation to honor the expectations of administrators?"

I'm just asking.

Of course, for me to say that I am just asking is itself bullshit.

Bromance With the Big Man

from THE NEW YORK TIMES June 23, 2011

By TIMOTHY EGAN

There weren’t a lot of blacks in my high school graduation class — two, to be exact — which meant that race was somewhat of an abstraction, happening elsewhere, mostly on a screen or from the grooves of a record.

And then I saw Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen. Mind you, this was a stage, only a bit more of projected reality than television. Still, the Big Man and the Boss — opposites in look and style, Southern Baptist black and Jersey Shore white — projected a kind of joy that made it easy to believe that this mess of a country could get along. My friends and I came home from that first concert doing air saxophone riffs.

They were fused, these musicians from an iconic album cover, and not just in the magical merge of Clemons’s sax with Springsteen’s vocal charisma. Clemons was one tradition, of gospel, storytelling, and swagger; Springsteen was another, the garage band with blue-collar urgency and a poet’s lyrical touch. But even when they met in the early 1970s, the great American hybrid of rock ’n’ roll was becoming a single-race affair.

“You had your black bands and your white bands, and if you mixed the two you found less places to play,” Clemons wrote in his memoir. Sad to say, his voice and his soulful sax are gone, following his deathon Saturday at the age of 69.

The ideal he represented, at least in rock ’n’ roll, may have followed him to the grave as well. With a few exceptions, the most segregated place in America on a given night can be a stadium rock concert — on stage, and in the audience. In one sense, rock mirrors Major League Baseball, where black players made up only 8.5 percent of rosters on Opening Day this year, a 50 percent decline from 20 years ago.

In baseball, blacks integrated the big leagues by force of a few brave pioneers. In rock, whites basically stole the genre, and in some cases have taken it to odious extremes, as with Ted Nugent and his Confederate flag T-shirts and machine gun props.

Springsteen’s E Street Band was all about possibility, uplift, and how music could save a soul. Playing off of Clemons, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, Springsteen could always turn one of his concerts into a spiritual revival from the Church of Rock ’n’ Roll. It was a nod to the roots of the music, as well as the 6-foot-4 sideman. And for someone from a homogenous background, it was transformative.

In its infancy and through its early years, rock had plenty of African-American stars, of course, from Fats Domino and Little Richard to my fellow Pacific Northwesterner, Jimi Hendrix. In their hands, rhythm-and-blues jumped to another dimension.

When rock went big-time and, ultimately, corporate with British bands and the California sound, most of the black, bluesy edge had been stripped away. The Beatles, near the end, recorded with Billy Preston, who brought a gospel-infused keyboard to the band. And, yes, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards paid homage to their Chicago and Mississippi Delta heroes. They were whites doing black music, as they honestly admitted.

Clemons made his splash on the cover of the greatest American rock album of the last century, “Born to Run.” He is the man Springsteen is leaning on, in more ways than one, and smiling back at. The sentiment — hey, these guys really like each other — came through in concert after concert. “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love,” Springsteen once recalled of their first encounter. “And it’s still there.”

That kind of racial bromance can be forced and phony in cop-flick movies that try to convey the same feeling — two buddies, one black, one white, on a mission. Springsteen and Clemons never seemed to fake it. A crowd-rousing moment of any show was when Springsteen sang the lyric from “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” that goes to the mythic foundations of the band:

“When the change was made uptown

And the Big Man joined the band

From the coastline to the city

All the little pretties raise their hands”

After the death on Saturday, Springsteen issued a short statement. “He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music,” he said.

Far deeper, indeed — for it was a story that affected many rock fans. With Clemons’ death, we are one vibrant man short of a cultural example of how the divides of race can come together over music. Bruce Springsteen lost a friend of 40 years; the rest of us lost an ideal.

The Few, The Proud, The Clowns

This week on Dancing with the Stars: the Puget Clowns do the Charlie Foxtrot.

¶

The plenary meeting of the faculty 19 April 2011 considered new forms for students to evaluate their courses and professors. Among the assembled faculty were

• colleagues who had worked on committees or subcommittees concerned with this issue,
• faculty senators who had consulted with colleagues and committees,
• surveys of the views of students and faculty, and
• others who had acquired thorough familiarity with existing forms and alternatives.

¶

But strains of "Entry of the Gladiators" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0CyOAO8y0&feature=related lofted through Trimble Forum. The Puget Clowns barred grounded inquiry and systematic thinking soon enough. Familiarity with issues and outlooks, attention to detail, and comprehension of the range of interests and contexts disappeared as the Puget Clowns began to speculate and to parse, to grouse and to pontificate, and to posture and to preen.

¶

The faults, Dr. Brutus, lie less in our forms than in our faculty.

¶

The dean warned the assembled that the university invests in reams of forms, so tampering and tweaking are as costly as casual. This slowed down no Clown. I reminded the assembled and the dissemblers that nothing worthwhile was ever drafted on the fly at a plenary meeting of the faculty. Maybe the Clowns kept that in mind[less] as they proposed and disposed at bearkneck [sic] speed.

¶

Deliberation? We don't need no stinking deliberation!

¶

The Clowns plunged recklessly into ad hockery. The Clowns woorded [sic], reworded, and deworded with such brio that the Secretary of the Faculty had to ask one colleague -- a veteran of the Starr Chamber who flabbergasted the Faculty Senate in 2004 when she reported that the Professional Standards Committee interpreted the Faculty Code so often and so quickly that they had no time in which to write down PSC interpretations -- to slow down so that the changes could be recorded. I began to wonder whether my colleagues wrote their syllabi and constructed their courses with similar insouciance. I was thankful that, for most of those present, I need not worry whether they went about their research with similar patience and craft.

¶

Professional Growth? We don't need no stinking professional growth!

¶

As I emerged from the meeting -- "Recalled to Life" [Dickens] -- multiple colleagues who had voted in the affirmative asked me what had been decided. They knew not on what they had voted. Perhaps they had responded to the Chair of the Faculty Senate, who stated his hope that some cloture on this issue would be effected by the assembled. After that, the Chair informed us, we could always repair the evaluation forms over time. This remark, of course, echoed one of the most infamously fatuous remarks by a member of the Starr Chamber: Let's change the Faculty Code today so we can get it done; we always can fix mistakes later.

¶

What rot had the Clowns wrought?

¶

I assured them that nothing had been decided or done. The Clowns were the Clowns prior to the meeting; they remained Clowns in the meeting; the traveshamockery [Woody Allen] of faculty governance continued apace. The faculty made the faculty and the idea of faculty self-governance look bad again [and again and again]. Like drunks in a midnight choir [Leonard Cohen], colleagues testified to what they did not know and could not understand about their students' classes or concerns. And, of course, much of what the assembled endured spoke much more about the speakers than about their subjects [in either sense of "subject"].

¶

Other than to faculty self-governance the outcome made little difference. For here is the central fact that few in the meeting seemed to comprehend: The evaluation of faculty at the University of Puget Clowns suffers far more from shady, shaky interpretations by evaluators than from murky messages from undergraduates or from confusing wording on students' evaluative questionnaires.

¶

As we lose colleagues to departmental snipers and departmental sniping, the Puget Clowns debate the caliber of the slugs that inflict the best head shots and gut shots.

¶

Charlie Foxtrot!

¶

As members of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] fabricate latent -- truly latent, as in "I wish I had not read the evaluations so that I might believe that what you are claiming was actually anywhere therein" -- designs in the students' evaluations to justify decisions on which they have settled for other reasons, the Puget Clowns debate nuances in wording items.

¶

Charlie Foxtrot!

¶

The presiding officer at faculty meetings accepts as a friendly amendment an emendation that is then debated for minutes and passed by voice vote.

¶

Charlie Foxtrot!

¶

Once again a plenary meeting of the faculty devolved into masterful misdirection.

http://ia700103.us.archive.org/13/items/BarnumAndBaileys/Barnum_and_Bailey.mp3

Have You Seen This Fellow?

Isn't he a bit like you and me?

In Ferdinand von Schirach's Crime – Stories (Knopf 2011) I found the following sentences of interest: "He was sly rather than intelligent, and because he was weak himself, he recognized the weaknesses in other people. He exploited these even when it gained him no advantage."

Of whom did I immediately think?

Possessed of some talent in book-learning or blather-slathering, perpetual students eventually land a job and enter a system that selects for

• "professionalism," which in context means cowardice and aversions to conflict and to candor;
• "civility," which in context means smarminess and unctuousness; and
• "smarts,"which in context means cunning and cravenness.

So of whom at the University of Puget Clowns did I immediately think?

Greatest Moments in Faculty Meetings

What is your favorite moment from a plenary meeting of the faculty?

¶ When the University of Puget Clowns assembles its faculty, travesty results. About 90 minutes per show, vaudeville lives again:

• Rigor is burlesqued but never practiced.
• Gravitas is parodied but lighter than air.
• Flatulence is celebrated but more substantial than gravitas or rigor.
• Fatuousness is erudition in service of faithlessness and disloyalty to liberal education.
• Obsequiousness is courage among the conflict averse.
• Ignorance is strength especially ignorance aligned with decanal orthodoxies.
• Civility is candor unafraid to voice the thoughts of the powerful.
• Sincerity is unknown absent delusion.

¶ But what were the greatest shams and shames in a plenary meeting of the Clowns?

Please look over the candidates below and propose alternatives.

¶ Professor Lance Rosywiz spoke of extensive, controversial changes in The Faculty Code: "I am the kind of person who likes to get things done. Why don't we pass these changes and fix any problems in subsequent meetings?" Was this call to alter the employment contract of each member of the faculty in a fast and facile manner the worst fraud attempted by a chair of a Power Committee? Was this former member of the Professional Standards Cult channeling Professor Irwin Corey <http://www.irwincorey.org/>?

Whether the remark was careless, reckless, half-clever, or half-cunning, was it the greatest spit-take in the history of faculty meetings? Read on.

¶ In the hallway after another inept attempt by an administrator to deceive the clowns, Professor Soviet Tankard opined, "I don't mind if you serve me a platter of turds, but don't call them sausages!"

Is this the funniest remark immediately after a plenary meeting of the faculty? Does hallway badinage count as faculty meeting vaudeville?

¶ The presiding administrator granted Professor Eve Slimehatch 10 minutes in which to defend a curricular proposal the administrator favored. The proposer took 30 minutes to present 5 minutes worth of material, so smarming the assembled colleagues that this presentation is itself a candidate for most fatuous self-abuse at a plenary meeting of the faculty.

Truly to realize how off-putting the presentation was, one had to have been there. I estimated amid that meeting that Ol' Slimehatch had lost 10 votes for the proposal by the manner of presentation.

¶ The speech by Professor Slimehatch prompted one of the great time-wasting members of the faculty, Professor Terry Snarl, to wave a wristwatch at Slimehatch to stop Slimehatch's blathering. One of the greatest moments of irony in faculty history, this incident was the equivalent of the Unibomber's questioning the ethical propriety of a letter to a representative.

I was getting very sleepy, very sleepy. Then Snarl started to wave his wristwatch.

¶ Before he waved his wristwatch side to side as if trying to hypnotize the administrative favorite, Professor Snarl triumphed by beginning a speech explicitly affirming one side of a debate and ending that same speech minutes later announcing that the opposite side in the debate had the stronger case. The seamless segues distinguished this speech as perhaps the greatest self-parody in a meeting renowned for intentional and unintentional self-parodies.

"Madam President, I rise in opposition to this proposal. It is such an affront that I am taken aback. Its passage would be such a blot on the eschatology of this institution that I am compelled to vote in its favor. I thank you."

¶ Professor Snarl also worked behind the scenes to induce the vilest speech ever delivered at a clowns' meeting I attended. A Puget Clown who went to graduate school with a whistleblower used phony hypotheticals to defame the whistleblower and to defend the most notorious philanderer on the faculty. Professor Ed Needspiers followed Professor Snarl's direction to a zone of twilight infamy.

Hypotheticals that are not hypothetical but are flat-out falsehoods. What will these wackos think up next?

¶ After a colleague had observed that politics makes strange bedfellows, the next speaker began,"As someone who has had more strange bedfellows than anyone here, ..."

But seriously, folks!

¶ One member of a youth movement, Dr. Van I. Smugdad, ended a salute to "Science in Context" -- also known as "Science in Contempt" -- by noting that Smugdad had secured a grant via the program. Colleagues who missed the meeting cursed themselves because they were not there to hear a dazzling defense of the only category of the previous core curriculum of which the student body asked the faculty to rid the university: "I got a grant to pursue it!"

What a candid canard! But was it the greatest revelation of the "me" in "team?" Read on!

¶ At the start of a meeting, the President asked for announcements from the faculty. Professor Hazel-Don Annuls said, "I don't know if this is an announcement, but did anyone else have trouble parking?"

You want self-absorption bordering on solipsism? Faculty meetings got it!

¶ As the faculty debated whether to permit candidates for tenure to select open files, two wonderful moments glistened. First, a notorious assassin argued to keep tenure files closed, saying, "I trust colleagues to be fair." Across the meeting hall, a colleague who had inside knowledge of the assassin's notions of fairness mouthed "Unbelievable" multiple times. Another colleague stared at the speaker in what seemed shock and disbelief.

Did O. J. worry much about Nicole's slicing his throat?

¶ Second, a senior member of the faculty broke out the finger puppets to reveal the perversity of closed files at tenure. "When you, an untenured member of the faculty, come up for tenure, I may write whatever I please about you, and you may not read what I have written. That is, I may savage you in a manner that denies you your job and defames you forever, and the most you will get to see is a tepid summary that attributes the remark to a colleague. However, when I next come up for a five-year review, I may elect to read every word in your letter. You cannot much harm me, but I get to read your letter and hold it against you if I choose."

If jobs and careers did not hang in the balance, the spectacle of a tenured, full professor having to connect dots for a recent Ph. D. might amuse me more.

¶ Professor Ed Fern Carollens repeatedly denounced false rumors that, if anything, were euphemistic with "respect" to a renowned philanderer. Professor Carollens then acted shocked when the philanderer fessed up, but that performance occurred outside a faculty meeting and thus may not count.

The satellite, rarely overhead, was aligned with the Mother Ship to the endless infamy of Dr. Carollens, who for decades was a strong candidate for the most addled member of the faculty.

¶ Amid discussion of electives that seniors tended to select, a professor observed with disgust that many advisees chose ceramics to complete their degrees. "Ceramics!" the colleague snarled as if seniors were choosing a practicum in child abuse. Many colleagues marveled for weeks that the University of Puget Clowns was so fortunate to have such minor foibles pass for problems at a faculty confab. What they may have missed was the virtuosity of the professor's preening. To identify a happy feature of the undergraduate experience at Puget Clowns as a blot on the rigorousness of the curriculum was genius!

Where else but the circus could one luxuriate in such pretentious nonsense?

¶ Munching potato chips, a colleague wandered into a meeting of the faculty just as a dean completed a curricular rant. The dean insisted that the most reckless thing that the faculty could do was to pass the measure on the floor without much further deliberation and debate. A colleague suggested that the eater of potato chips should call the previous question. This he did without realizing what the dean had just said. The dean glared at Professor Potato Chip as the faculty voted in favor of the measure and against the dean.

Stop it! You're killing me!

¶ A legendary psychotic appeared late in a meeting, moved to adjourn, then left. Could anyone do better than that?

Always good to hear from Professor Rebel Screwtrout!

¶ And what of likening a perfectly respectful presentation to denial of the Holocaust? You cannot make this crap up -- unless you're David Lodge or Richard Russo or Jane Smiley.

Who pulled her finger?