My Annual Salute to the 2003-2004 PSC -- The Starr Chamber

As malfeasant as the Academic Standards Committee was 2008-2010, the 2003-2004 Professional Standards Committee was worse.

Reading over my seven posts between 3 and 7 December 2010, you might believe that the Academic Standards Committee between Fall 2008 and Fall 2010 was the worst Faculty Senate committee in my 24.5 years at the University of Puget Clowns. To the best of my reckoning, the nadir for committees still belongs to a committee so malfeasant that it merited designation as “The Starr Chamber” after Kenneth Starr and the English court [“The Star Chamber” – one “r”] renowned for abusing its powers.

As is my annual custom, I salute the Starr Chamber -- the "Professional" "Standards" Committee between September 2003 and May 2004 -- as the worst Faculty Senate Committee of my time at the University.

I begin from an elementary distinction to console the Academic Standards Committee [hereinafter abbreviated ASC] that its performance 2008-2010 did not descend to the depth to which the Professional Standards Committee [hereinafter abbreviated PSC] sank:

The ASC 2008-2010 performed as abominably as it could, but supervision by faculty got in the ASC's way; the PSC 2003-2004 plummeted far deeper because faculty could not even learn what the PSC was doing, let alone stop the PSC's doings.

While the ASC ran amuck in academic years 2008-2009 and 2009-2010, the faculty voted down the impostures of the ASC. By contrast, the Starr Chamber was policed neither by the Faculty Senate nor the faculty as a whole and was directed [in fact if not in theory] by an administrator far more powerful, far more cunning, and far more compromised than any fixture on the ASC.

The ineptitude, inequity, and iniquities of the Starr Chamber were Homeric, so there is no shame in the ASC's falling short. I am certain that individual members of the ASC have sunk and will again sink to the inanity and insanity that individual members of the Starr Chamber sustained in 2003 or 2004. Still, a collective effort demands just the right combination of arrogation and anarchy to produce truly malign results.

I need not in this entry rehearse the missteps and mendacity of the Starr Chamber. My entries in this blog for 11 February 2009 and 9 February 2010 preserve acts and statements of buffoonery and buncombe to which most faculty cannot aspire or conspire. Even in those entries taken together, I did not detail all of the failings and double/multiple dealings of the Starr Chamber.

Even the limited record in this blog establishes, however, the degree to which the Starr Chamber parlayed nonfeasance with malfeasance, audacity with mendacity, and recklessness with fecklessness.

Of course, holdovers from the 2003-2004 PSC, having earned their dubious distinction, then characterized a hearing board as "rogue." Don't you admire colleagues who leave the Caps Lock on when they type hypocrisy?

Five veterans of the Starr Chamber still walk among us on campus, so watch out for them.

Moreover, as I noted in my entry for 5 December 2010 [Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses III] in 2008-2009 the ASC featured three Starr Chamber veterans.

For those three veterans, for all five holdovers, for the two emeriti, and for the single most malign force on this campus over my 24.5 years here, I pray:

Áve Manía, deduco pléna, Dóminium técum.