Friday, January 31, 2014

Haltom's Eighth Law & The Offense Card


   

At a recent meeting of the Faculty Senate, a colleague pronounced a survey of the faculty "offensive."  What offended our colleague?  Not necessarily anything.
 
 
The minutes of the Faculty Senate for 25 November 2013 disclose that a colleague "... viewed a survey structured in the way the Senate was proposing as demeaning the expertise that the Burlington Northern Group brings to the issue of power, privilege and diversity and makes it into 'either/or.' He stated that the survey undermines faculty expertise and that he found it to be borderline offensive." After cringing, I began to consider what his gambit may have betokened.
     
Was he sincerely offended?  I neither know nor care.  My Eighth Law reminds us all that "No one may be offended;  one may only take offense." http://rumpparliament.blogspot.com/2008/02/haltoms-eighth-law-no-one-may-be.html  Our colleague took offense.  He played "The Offense Card."  That public act makes his private state(s) irrelevant.
   
"The Offense Card" is almost always a stratagem or plea in lieu of effective, rational argument.  Logic will not avail you?  Go for an emotional ploy.  In the instance last November, there was no reasonable argument that the faculty should not be surveyed regarding a requirement that the faculty are asked to impose on all Puget Sound students.  Our colleague and others might reasonably discuss wording, sequence, or other methodological or logistic issues.  Senators might decide whether a survey was an appropriate way to elicit what ordinary faculty think or whether other means might work better or might have been working well already.  To play "The Offense Card," by contrast, was to short-circuit an attempt to find out what colleagues think.  Manufacturing offense—sincerely or slyly—amounts to telling the assembled to STFU.
   
This pitiful and pitiable episode of taking offense while blustering expertise was itself offensive, if one elects to regard it as such.  The faculty have before them a proposal to force all Puget Sound students to take one or more courses.  No one can honestly state of what such courses will consist.  The inchoate requirement, the colleagues who will be importuned or authorized to teach authorized courses, the materials and lessons to be employed, and almost every other characteristic of the proposed requirement remain unsettled at best.  Yet our colleague takes offense that the Senate might ask faculty what faculty, rather than an élite coalition professing specialized expertise, thought students might be forced to endure.
 
Still, the episode is not exclusively cringeworthy.  It is instructive as well.  One or more of the proposers who would conscript our students barely deign to converse from their lofty expertise with faculty who can scarcely appreciate the knowledge and virtuosity of the proposer(s).  Our better(s) find it insulting to have to explain themselves to the rest of us, let alone to listen to what we might have to say under circumstances not under the control of the élite(s).
 
So the comments of our colleague are instructive and perhaps revealing.  I have heard the "appeal to expertise" voiced by other proposers before the Faculty Senate and elsewhere.  I have chosen to laugh it off rather than take offense.  It is sad if one chooses to see it that way.  It is insulting, if one opts to be insulted.  I prefer to regard it as entertaining self-parody.
 
One or more self-appointed tell elected representatives not to inquire of colleagues what colleagues might think about requirements and curriculum.  Instead, the diversity overlord(s) proclaim their openness and transparency while insisting that diversity thralls defer to the overlords' authority.
 
Enjoy this burlesque!  This was a mean ploy in a sense, but it was no mean ploy in another sense.  It was an audacious tossing off of "The Offense Card."