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?
1 comment:
The ills of Puget Sound include, not "no professional standards," as some would claim, but too many professional standards. In department x, you might be pressed to get tenure if you don't have a book, whereas in department y, you might get tenure on a co-written article, not refereed; ... include a "Diversity Strategic Plan" devoid of tactics, measurable outcomes, and accountability; a Board of Trustees that parodies the 1 per cent and hasn't a clue what goes on at the college; an admission director who's never worked at another college; a college-profile that is indistinguishable from that of other small colleges (can't decide between UPS and Fuzzy Creek College? --flip a coin); and an "aspire-to" mentality--which would be okay, but when has UPS ever improved itself enough to be the equal of any college to which it aspires?
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