You Can Judge a Book by its Cover

On Being Presidential:

A Guide for College and

University Leaders

Susan Resneck Pierce

Ha Ha Ha

Really?

Ha Ha Ha Ha

Seriously?

Pub-

lished

by

The

Onion?

If you do not recoil from the injustices and insincerity, the juxtaposition of that title and that name is pants-shittingly hilarious.

Collegiality, Civility, Cooperation, Collaboration

Can you believe that some faculty have long regarded calls for collegiality and cooperation as clumsy attempts to induce faculty to conform or to acquiesce?

At a plenary meeting of the faculty on 15 November 2011, the President of the University of Puget Sound explicitly replaced his "normal presidential report" with extended remarks in favor of cooperation, collaboration, and civility. He opened with some sententious smarm, counseled faculty on the merits of the only two major items on the agenda of that meeting, chastised leaders of the faculty for supposed breaches of ethics as well as of decorum, and closed with a call for administrators, staff, and faculty to work together.

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I shall not comment on the sententious smarm or the call to work together except to write "Gack!"

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I pass by the parliamentary impropriety of the presiding officer's delivering a screed in place of the report authorized on the agenda and staking out positions on motions without surrendering the gavel for the duration of discussions of those motions.

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Instead, I call attention to the incongruity of chastising two or more faculty and defaming one or more faculty before a meeting of faculty while extolling the virtues of collegiality, civility, and community. How civil! How civil?

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The president denounced as an ethical breach the distribution among Puget Sound faculty of some information that was property of others. He stated that he and another administrator would have to apologize to their counterparts at the other university for this ethical breach. I did not understand why Puget Sound administrators would apologize for an ethical breach by faculty at the other school, and I did not see that any release of a leak from the other school was a breach of ethics or etiquette on the part of Puget Sound faculty.

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What I did understand was that the president should not have accused any faculty of (mis)deeds in front of colleagues. To do so violated parliamentary procedure, Political Science 101, and professionalism. Worse, defamation clashed with an ostensible thesis of the president's remarks. The president decried divisive rhetoric by denouncing one or more leaders of his own faculty? And is Professor Kettle also blackened, President Pot?

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Matters got worse when faculty and administrators learned soon after the 15 November meeting that the information was not or no longer proprietary. That development made it apparent that the president had denounced one or more Puget Sound faculty for an ethical breach that was not a breach even for the faculty from the other university.

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At the meeting of the faculty on 7 February 2012 the president said not one word about his own violations of civility, propriety, or collegiality. He did not own up to his mistakes. He did not retract his attributions of unethical conduct.

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Why do so many veteran faculty regard calls for civil discourse to be one-way and top-down? That is, the calls are top-down; the expected civility, by contrast. is bottom-up.

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Why have I said for years that at Puget Sound the difference between civility and servility cannot be measured with existing technology?

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Can anyone here play this game?

The Starr Chamber

Five years or eight years and counting, the Starr Chamber stands as the worst committee of my time at Puget Sound.

Veterans of "Rump Parliament" must have wondered where my annual denunciation of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of 2003-2004 was. Never fear; it is here. Newbies who have stumbled across this blog may wonder about my recalling a committee eight years or five years -- depending on what and how one counts -- after its last malfeasance. Please find my entries in this blog for 6 February and 5 February 2011, 9 February 2010, or 11 February 2009 to catch up on the missteps of miscreant colleagues. The "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" of 2007, on which day at least five erstwhile members of the Starr Chamber disgraced themselves, is especially rewarding to read.

New or old readers should pay close attention to those old entries, for only three of the eight malefactors have left the University of Puget Sound. That leaves five fuck-ups colleagues who should not be trusted to make sensible or fair decisions.

As you read those old posts, please recall that a former Chair of the Faculty Senate called the Professional Standards Committee "the Star Chamber" long before I did. I added the extra "r" to the mocking to recall Judge Kenneth Starr, who exhibited similar fairness, objectivity, and sense in Javerrting President Clinton.

And to the five, if any of them read my blog: I have not forgotten who you were or what you did. I also have not forgotten that I volunteered to one of you more than eight years ago to argue the nonfeasance and malfeasance of the PSC before the self-same PSC. Yes, the prisoners in the dock and the jury in the box would have been the same eight persons. So confident was I that the errors committed by the PSC violated either The Faculty Code or commonsense fairness or both that I was willing to let the PSC adjudicate. My sucker bet generous challenge was not accepted. I wonder why.

I hope the members of recent Academic Standards Committees do not despair. [See "Rump Parliament" 7 December 2010 for a summary.] Those committees were every bit as wanton as the Starr Chamber, but there was far less at stake.

If anyone would like to learn more about how low colleagues can go, please stand me to martinis at Primo Grill.