Sunday, September 11, 2011

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.






Friday, September 9, 2011

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?"


Sunday, September 4, 2011

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.”