Live Blogging the President's Salary/Benefit Confab

You want to talk about trauma? Forget Klan posters. Administrators and faculty talk, and I listen? I be hurt!
         
 
At 3:32 p.m. on 29 April 2014, President Thomas began a meeting concerning salaries and benefits at the University of Puget Clowns. Colleagues who could not make the meeting asked me to note what was said.
   
Who would want Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's version of events?
    

Then Ron Thom assumed the podium. The faculty's pal thanked everyone for attending.   Ron Thom validated the issues as important. He suggested that he and his entire cabinet ask themselves first thing each year how they can increase compensation for faculty. He then allowed that faculty compensation has been his greatest personal disappointment in the presidency of Ronald R. Thomas.
     
So far, so standard: President Thomas confirmed that he understood faculty concern(s) before he heard them expressed or pressed. Then Ron Thom confessed that, amid President Thomas's myriad successes in raising bricks and mortar and dough, Ron Thom has suffered the personal pain and humiliation of not being able to compensate faculty as much as he wished he could.  Faculty must recall that Ron Thom is a good guy who is very trying even as faculty acknowledge that Ronald R. Thomas is a hard-nosed, realistic Chief Executive.
    
        
"It's all up to you.  I can be a good guy, or I can be one mean son of a bitch.  It's all up to you."
   
          
Hard-charging University of Puget Sound CEO President Thomas then noted that he had asked his cabinet to attend so that discussion might be as "fulsome" as possible.
       
"Fulsome?"  Surf to dictionary.reference.com/browse/fulsome?s=t, please.  Evidently President Thomas meant definitions four or five:  

1.        offensive to good taste, especially as being excessive; overdone or gross:

            fulsome praise that embarrassed her deeply; fulsome décor.
            

2.

disgusting; sickening; repulsive:
        

a table heaped with fulsome mounds of greasy foods.
        

3.

excessively or insincerely lavish:  
         

fulsome admiration.
             

4.

encompassing all aspects; comprehensive:
              

a fulsome survey of the political situation in Central America.
           

5.

abundant or copious.

     
        
Denise Despres asked about the bloat of administrative structures across U. S. colleges and universities and its negative consequences for benefits and salaries of faculty.  U. P. S. is not good for faculty.  How can existing faculty recruit new faculty without lying?  Ron Thom asked for specifics.  Professor Despres suggested salaries and especially medical benefits have fallen behind.  Room-commanding CEO Thomas shouldered faculty pal Ron Thom aside to note that medical benefits were a knotty problem.
        
Message:  Ron Thom cares.  President Thomas cannot do anything about Ron Thom's caring, but you gotta love Ron Thom. 
      
President Thomas, by contrast, demands specifics that he knows faculty cannot obtain. Sooner or later faculty will characterize developments in terms that President Thomas can gainsay.  Plausible deniability suffices.
          
          
CEO Thomas then noted that every employee is still covered under the medical plan. Dependents can be covered, too.  Despite national problems, the University of Puget Clowns still covers basic medical matters for its personnel.

Message: It's not CEO Thomas's fault.  CEO Thomas and his administration are sailing over minimal expectations that they are striving to lower.
     
         
From his first year as CEO, President Thomas intoned, President Thomas had thought that the University of Puget Clowns had too often bootstrapped with next to nothing.  Then came the recession.
       
It's not Ron Thom's fault.  It's not President Thomas's fault.  It's Dubya's fault! [Unless trustees are present, in which case it's Obama's fault.]      
   
   
President Thomas then opined that the University of Puget Clowns remains a good place: "I still think that. Maybe you don't."
     
Ron Thom consoled long-suffering, hard-working, forlorn Denise;  President Thomas then invited Professor Despres to reaffirm that she is not a problem but still a loyal member of his extended team.
            
Doug Cannon said that in 1980 he was offered more from the University of Puget Clowns than he would have been at Yale.  He wondered if the trustees could establish an endowment to bump up faculty salaries.  
    
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
      
            
Tough-minded CEO Ronald Thomas then allowed that "We cannot continue to escalate tuition enough to compensate faculty well.  The times will not permit that." Ron Thom tried to say how much that pained him, but CEO Thomas directed attention from Ron Thom's empathy to President Thomas's fundraiser.  Dave Beers observed that $1,000,000 would yield about $50,000 per year, so it would take much endowment to "move the needle" on faculty salaries much
     
Ron Thom sagged.  CEO Thomas swaggered.
 
At this point my battery began to fail.  My computer's, too.
   

Nick Kontogeorgopoulos complained that administrators' salaries burgeon while faculty salaries have fallen to the bottom of comparison schools.  As a result, faculty morale has fallen into the dumper.  And a student said tuition was rising to accommodate faculty salaries/wages.  What will be done about the disparities?

Are all Puget Clowns equal, but some equaler than others?
        
      

Matt Warning, "Rick Brooks said faculty and administrators were not 'in it all together.' "
     

Ron Thom was sad to think that true;  President Thomas wondered what Professor Warning's point might be.
       
              
Matt Warning wondered why the faculty could pass a graduation requirement regarding inequality but campus cannot talk about inequalities on campus.
  
Ron Thom saw Warning's point;  President Thomas wondered what Professor Warning's point might be.
       
           
Lynda Livingston then saw Doug Cannon's gratuitous self-promotion about Yale's considering him and raised it with an anecdote about the Business School that established that administrators were buttheads.
             
Ron Thom wondered what Professor Livingston was talking about. President Thomas noted that faculty were wasting time in a most agreeable anarchy of special pleading.

     
Jonathan Stockdale brandished The Trail to the point that tuition increases were being blamed on faculty compensation.
          
Arches on 25 March?  The Trail on 29 April?  Is there a source so flimsy that Professor Stockdale will not cite it?
     
               
Sherry Mondou then attempted flimflam by noting that she had not talked to anyone at the The Trail but only emailed some remarks and had happened to be considering faculty compensation when she emailed.
     
Those pesky cub reporters at The Trail!  Who would take seriously an email from an administrator? What kind of journalist reproduces what administrators say?
          
                
"That's true, isn't it?"
         
"No.  But it's accurate."
       
             
Kris Bartanen followed with some detail-quibbling and distinctions that made little difference, at which quibbling Professor Despres channeled Joe Wilson [R SC] and shouted at Bartanen.  Bartanen's point was that Puget Clowns is really not the worst in its class.
     
Good point!  Professor Kontogeorgopoulos's point that UPS once led its class and aspired to head its class of schools but now trails was left utterly unrebutted, but ritual demands only that administrators answer, not that their answers make sense or make any difference.  "Nick, we may not be alpha these days but one could argue that we are not omega."  
   
   
Richard Anderson-Connolly suggested that Ron Thom consider Rawlsian budgeting: those paid most get raised least.
                  
Extremely busy CEO & President Thomas then noted the lateness of the hour and so began a filibuster of marketing nostrums and soothing faculty-relations.
       
           
Previously bellicose faculty now began to assure Ron Thom that they still loved him and President Thomas that they still feared him.
         
The Mass is ended.  Go and whine no more!
          
              

"There's no time to lose," I heard her say /
Catch your dreams before they slip away /
Dying all the time /
Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind /
Ain't life unkind? / 

She just can't be chained /
To a life where nothing's gained /
And nothing's lost, at such a cost. /
         
        

Post-Literacy

  
Can anyone at Puget Sound play this game read?
    

The faculty recently added to the graduation requirements:   

Learning Objectives  Courses in Knowledge, Identity and Power provide a distinct site for students to develop their understanding of the dynamics and consequences of power differentials, inequalities and divisions among social groups, and the relationship of these issues to knowledge representation and production.  In these courses, students also develop their capacity to communicate meaningfully about issues of power, disparity, and diversity of experiences and identities.
 
Guidelines   1.     These courses promote critical engagement with the causes, nature, and consequences of individual, institutional, cultural and/or structural dynamics of disparity, power, and privilege.
2.     These courses provide opportunities for students to:
a.     engage in dialogue about issues of knowledge, identity, and power, and
b.     consider linkages between their social positions and course themes related to these issues.
3.     Courses can also fulfill other program or graduation requirements.

   

A recent petition calls this the "diversity overlay."  Could the new requirement be diluted more and still serve as misleading evidence that the University of Puget Sound has said or done anything about diversity?  What is so scary about "diversity of experiences and identities?" 
       
         
Fear not, post-literate faculty, staff, and students!  The system of governance worked about as it has in my 28 years here:  An irresponsible, reckless, and extravagant proposal was shrunk to a responsible, feckless, and meager measure.  Zealots secured an empty symbol and ersatz status.  The status quo ante endures.  Unless the Curriculum Committee ignores the wording that the faculty endorsed, many popular, successful courses should be declared to fulfill the KIP/KNOW requirement.  This means that the worst excesses forecast by opponents of the KIP/KNOW requirement will likely never come to pass.  Faculty who long to evangelize captive audiences will continue to be "miserable merchants of unwanted ideas" [William O. Douglas, Dennis versus United States 1951] preaching to students who take the courses because they are already true believers. Meanwhile, competent instructors will try to coach students about what we all should know and how critical skeptics who nonetheless remain conversant with facts and evidence proceed.
                         
The PAP [Positionality / Affective Learning / Praxis] was drained from the proposal before it passed.  Read the new requirement, then stop whining.  Volunteer to offer terrific courses so that the dilettantes and ideologues do not offer substandard courses to many students.  Make the KIP/KNOW victory Pyrrhic.
        
Really, colleagues and students, this internal and external marketing game/scheme is not as challenging as many of you are making it seem. I realize that whining about supposed grave threats is itself an established game at Puget Sound as elsewhere in academia, but hysteria works least when it is most boring.
    
As I noted in "I'm Sorry," a posting published on this blog on 4 April, reading is fundamental.  Try reading instead of bleeding or bleating.
   

  
        

  


  

A Petition That Begs Condign Neglect

Not content to get their way, sophomoric thinkers demand to have their way with faculty.


Many faculty have expressed to me concern about a petition "crafted" by one or more Puget Sound students.  The faculty should not be concerned. One colleague got matters right when he said, "They're college students." That is, Spring Semester is always the silly season for students.  This silly season produced an uncommonly silly document.
     
The first published version of the petition was as laughable as some of my first drafts:

           

Petition for Transparency in Senate Faculty Vote

The faculty senate voted through Wednesday, April 9 on whether to accept the KNOW diversity overlay requirement. The measure passed by a vote of 123 to 88. We believe that this many professors voting against a diversity core overlay is unacceptable at a university claiming to be concerned about diversity and social justice. There is no excuse for the perpetuation of the old core requirements when so much of this campus remains exclusive to white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, upper middle-class students.

 

We demand transparency because:

1.      We are robbed of meaningful education when that education reflects only the standards and values of a hegemonic western culture. We believe that the professors who voted against the requirement must be held accountable for voting to perpetuate the unacceptable state of our curriculum prior to the introduction to the overlay requirement.

       

2.      We are not represented in this university’s governance structures when faculty who make decisions on the content of our curriculum are insulated from accountability for their votes that perpetuate an unacceptable educational program that considers critical analysis of power, social location, the construction of knowledge and identity a politically correct garnish rather than an integral part of a liberal arts education.

             

3.      We are irresponsible members of the campus community if we do not do everything we can to make this community more accessible to people from historically marginalized communities. Some of us are students from these communities who know that this university, despite its best efforts, continues to perpetuate social inequality. Faculty members who voted against the overlay requirement voted to uphold a curriculum that did not reflect the experience of students from historically marginalized communities and therefore perpetuated this social inequality.

         

We are not under any delusions that the overlay will resolve this campus’ failure to meaningfully address issues of diversity. But we think that it is less bad than where we were before. Any argument to the contrary is ridiculous because despite progress the university has made the state of our diversity efforts remain unacceptable because there are obviously members or groups within the administration and faculty resistant to change.

We therefore request the release of the names of all faculty who voted on the diversity overlay requirement and the names of those who abstained. Secrecy is antithetical to the democratic values of a liberal arts college and prevents students from engaging with the college administration and faculty. If the University of Puget Sound is serious about increasing diversity, we need to have a meaningful dialogue about what it means that eighty-eight faculty members voted against this requirement. Excuses for secrecy are not acceptable. We demand transparency.
 

My initial response to this initial petition was laughter.  The information in the petition was askew.  If we were to dignify the contents by calling them "arguments," the arguments in the petition were far from cogent.  The demand that became a request by petition's end could be met if someone provided the students with any document or website that lists all full-time faculty, for that would list all who voted or sustained.  I suspect the University of Puget Sound's Bulletin would suffice.  All the names are at 
   
<www.pugetsound.edu/files/resources/6782_Bulletin13-14_UG_WEB.pdf>.
     

          

<www.facebook.com/groups/1470043629893175/1470054679892070/> tidies the petition a bit, but it remains far from compelling [sic].  The petitioners are still undergraduates in an era after literacy. Rather than review the post-literate posturing, I suggest we continue to ignore the fatuous document.
    
Faculty who over-read the petition -- giving it a second glance, for example -- risk overreach.  Youths are entitled to tantrums.  Their naïve obstreperousness distresses me less than the disingenuousness of colleagues.
   




    

The Challenges and the Blather of the New Graduation Requirement

A proponent for the graduation "overlay," recently passed by the faculty, set a high standard for Puget Sound education and for faculty oratory.
    
Opening remarks on behalf of [sort of] proponents of a new graduation requirement articulated [sort of] the urgent needs [sort of] that the overlap might meet [sort of].  The speaker who formally moved the overbite asked whether a Puget Sound education would prepare Puget Sound students for the following situations [I draw from the speaker's own notes]:

• "Upon returning home, encountering an overworked, underpaid Molly Maid"
• "After graduating and buying a house, considering a roofing company staffed by undocumented immigrant laborers, who cannot bargain with the contractor for fear of deportation"
• "Alone in a elevator with three young black men"
• "Learning that the 'beau' of a sibling has undergone sex-change surgery and therapy."

This array of grueling dilemmas must daunt every reader as it did every awake listener last September 23rd.  Puget Sound students demand the graduation over/under so that they may handle the problems that await them in their Puget Sound afterlife. Otherwise, what will our students do? Work their maids less and pay them more?  Avoid elevators frequented by minorities?  Kill their siblings?
      

Still, how will Puget Sound faculty devise courses to cover the crises listed?  One thing is certain: administrators will have to supply swag and bring the booty to induce faculty to craft courses to meet the challenges.  We are talking major release-units and maximum marketing.  Is there enough blowsy vacuity [Mencken] even in Puget Sound faculty to deliver on the promise of the diversity overreach?

  
Which faculty possess education and experience commensurate with dealing with domestic help upstairs and down;  anticipating and indemnifying home repairs and enhancements; sharing elevators — not to mention escalators at Neiman Marcus or gondolas at Gstaad — with young adult males of perhaps indeterminate ancestry or sexuality; and other problems typical of the lives of alumnae and alumni of the University of Puget Sound?
   
Forget student loans!  Look past post-literacy!  We are talking real First-World problems of the one-percent, Puget People!
   
The First Speaker, great subwoofer that he was and is, not only set the tone for faculty discussion of the overpass requirement;  he established as well the epitome of faculty oratory.  As my mind drifted, I thought back to a like Demosthenes in 1984.
  

Several years ago I was given an assignment to write a letter. It was to go into a time capsule and would be read in 100 years when that time capsule was opened. I remember driving down the California coast one day. My mind was full of what I was going to put in that letter about the problems and the issues that confront us in our time and what we did about them, but I couldn’t completely neglect the beauty around me — the Pacific out there on one side of the highway shining in the sunlight, the mountains of the Coast Range rising on the other side, and I found myself wondering what it would be like for someone, wondering if someone 100 years from now would be driving down that highway and if they would see the same thing. And with that thought I realized what a job I had with that letter. I would be writing a letter to people who know everything there is to know about us. We know nothing about them. They would know all about our problems. They would know how we solved them and whether our solution was beneficial to them down through the years or whether it hurt them. They would also know that we lived in a world with terrible weapons, nuclear weapons of terrible destructive power aimed at each other, capable of crossing the ocean in a matter of minutes and destroying civilization as we know it. And then I thought to myself: what are they going to say about us? What are those people 100 years from now whether we used those weapons or not. Well, what they will say about us 100 years from now depends on how we keep our rendezvous with destiny. Will we do the things that we know must be done and know that one day down in history 100 years, or perhaps for those people back in the 1980′s, for preserving our freedom, for saving for us this blessed planet called earth with all its grandeur and its beauty. You know, I am grateful for all of you giving the opportunity to serve you for these four years and I seek re-election because I want more than anything else to try to complete the new beginning that we charted four years ago. George Bush, who I think is one of the finest vice presidents this country has ever had, George Bush and I have crisscrossed the country and we’ve had in these last few months a wonderful experience. We have met young America. We have met your sons and daughters.

I am encouraged that, as Puget Sound's faculty strive to stave off the Scylla and Charybdis of staffing manors and otherwise living large in the 21st century, Puget Sound students will be compelled to learn from faculty educated in such domestic sciences and experienced with the subtle arts of estate and leisure management.  More, I marvel that such education and experience pass for "diversity" over the rainbow at the University of Puget Sound.
   

Live Blogging a Buffalo Chip Throw

4:00 p.m.    OT/PT faculty whom I have seldom seen at faculty meetings filter in to pack the meeting-room.  May we anticipate self-interested, self-serving colleagues will populate meetings to come?  Will faculty repeat the 25 March 2014 bum-rushing in future meetings?  Will bum-rushing faculty continue to object to electronic ballots that negate or reduce stratagems and subterfuges?
   
4:04 p.m.   The President opens with minutes.  The minutes are accepted.  Thus ended the suspense.  Everyone now could relapse relax.
   
4:05 p. m. The President proceeded to another gratuitous report.  Thank God/god/gods that such reports are not sent via email.  Better to waste faculty time with transient factlets & factoids.
   
        4:09 p. m.  Then The Vice President provided information that might better adorn a memorandum.  The pedagogical Scam of the Month, it appears, is "experiential learning."  Branding, marketing, and shibboleths rained upon faculty again. Multiply the length of the report [5-6 minutes] by perhaps 50 attendees and divide by 60 to see how many hours of faculty time & attention we are pissing away every meeting.

          4:16 p. m.  The Chair of the Senate then intoned about, among other things, electronic voting.  How proponents of the new graduation requirement kept from hissing at the prospect of an outbreak of democracy I know not.

        4:20 p.m.   As tradition dictates, a member of the Curriculum Committee misstated the motion regarding degrees at the OT School.  Faculty, perhaps still snoring from earlier inaction, did not notice.
    
             Adjourned at 4:23 p.m. without further incident.  I got no chance to use my finger puppets to illustrate any points I might have made [see "I'm Sorry" from 4 April 2014].
             
           
   
   

I'm Sorry

In a recent faculty meeting I presumed literacy.  I apologize for that presumption.
   
On 25 March 2014 I proposed an amendment: “Implementation  The ‘Knowledge, Identity, and Power’ requirement for graduation shall not be implemented until a majority of the faculty shall consent by means of a mail ballot corresponding to the electronic process used to elect members of the Faculty Senate.”  The faculty promptly passed this amendment.  A bit later a member of the faculty asked whether "a majority of the faculty" meant more than half of all faculty rather than more than half of all faculty who voted.  I confirmed that such was my reading of the language.  After some folderol, the faculty reconsidered and relaxed that amendment so that a majority of all faculty who voted could implement the diversity overlay.
   
Since that meeting some colleagues have faulted me for failing to tell faculty what they were voting on.  I read my amendment aloud.  I distributed printed copies of the text of the amendment.  That was apparently not enough to indicate to colleagues what they were voting on.
  
I presumed the faculty literate.  I apologize.
  
I promise that, the next time I move any language in a faculty meeting, I shall use finger puppets.
    
On behalf of "Rump Parliament," I thank my colleagues for parodying themselves.  That eases my workload.