Friday, August 28, 2015

History Lessons for Martinis

            
In the last years I have avoided not troubled myself to meet most junior faculty.  I can no longer share the enthusiasms and hopes of naïfs even if I once could and I never did.  Too many arrivistes do not share the solidarity and delusion of the liberal arts mission, so their opportunism and indifference to students atomistic egotism is are too much with even a chat at the Faculty Club.  Recruitment tides have washed in flotsam and jetsam a roster of poseurs and frauds serious, indeed grievous, intellectuals and scholars to replace retirees, like shingles,  who will not go away.  The apostles Proponents of "rigor" [in this blog I call them the Wigger Patwol] we shall always have with us so long as we employ faculty more conscious of how the workload they impose makes them great than of whether "our children is learning" [G. W. Bush].
            
However, I am the only candid a source of the oral history of this institution who does not suffer amnesia actual or feigned, so I should be available to provide newer faculty accounts that they will never believe when I deliver them but will soon come to see understate the banality, ineptitude, savagery, incompetence, perfidy, cowardice, mendacity, and malfeasance that have characterized some vicissitudes of the University of Puget Clowns  [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] over the last few decades.
         

To see if you might stand this ancient mariner to a martini in return for being wised up, 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 some missteps of miscreant colleagues.   The "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" of 2007, on which day at least five erstwhile members of the Starr Chamber  soiled utterly debased disgraced themselves, is especially depressing rewarding to read.  [See rumpparliament.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html]  New or old readers should pay close attention to those old entries, for only three of the eight malefactors fools have left the University of Puget Clowns. That leaves five fuck-ups colleagues who should not be trusted to make sensible or fair decisions but may be trusted to harm vulnerable colleagues and assist double-dealing administrators.
          
            
As you read those old posts, please note 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 mockingly recall Judge Kenneth Starr, who exhibited similar fairness, objectivity, and sense in Javerting 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 nine 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 you same eight boobspersons. 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 you "Professional" "Standards" Clods adjudicate. My sucker bet generous challenge was not accepted. Would that I could believe that you declined to hear me because you realized too late that you had succumbed to the Great Deceiver poor counsel and suborned due process for your own convenience or your circle of friends!  Then you might hope for redemption.  That, however, is not what I believe. I believe that you thought the Starr Chamber too lofty to trifle with me or with the victims you screwed strewed.
              
As I noted some time ago, 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.  Keep at it, however.  You may yet in the name of rigor harm students as much as the "Professional" "Standards" Clowns harmed faculty.
       
If anyone would like to learn more about how low colleagues can go, please stand me to martinis at Primo Grill.
             


"I'd Like a President Who Pretends to Value My Bullshit, Please"

  
When faculty and staff assembled to state their preferences regarding the new president, multiple faculty showed why faculty should be allowed far less access to selecting the new president than staff should be permitted.
                 
For the third time in my stay at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996], the faculty assembled to state their priorities in a search for a new president.  Staff and perhaps even some trustees, administrators, and students sat among the faculty.  The faculty embarrassed themselves relatively and absolutely—as I should have expected.  Students and staff tend to be punished for self-regarding behavior, so we get less preening and whining from staff and students than from faculty, who appear to revel in their brittle, feeble, self-pitying solipsism.
      
As in previous presidential searches, faculty snouts instantly and insistently dived toward the trough:  How might the new president represent or otherwise benefit me or mine?
         

Unabashedly self-interested, self-seeking, and self-serving, faculty debased themselves and abased their departments or schools via special bleating pleading.  Sad but not surprising, this misconduct amounted to an argument that faculty should play a minimal role in selecting the president.  Too many faculty are incapable of considering interests other than their own.
        
[I am informed that a less public if not private meeting of "campus leaders" with those in charge of the search featured no or almost no individual aggrandizement and teemed with thinking institutionally.  Maybe some faculty should be admitted to search processes.]
       
When faculty stated their priorities for the search of a president, those with low self-esteem begged for a president who would profess to esteem their pitiful selves.  Although some faculty managed to speak to institutional interests and to values shared by students, staff, and faculty, too many faculty could not get beyond their immediate, individual wants.  How interesting that staff who spoke focused on institutional interests and shared concerns.  How telling that multiple early volunteers among the faculty could find neither institutional interests nor common concerns to camouflage their egoism.
       
Some faculty did get to a point beyond their own anxieties about their status and stores.  Was it an irony that two philosophers concerned themselves with realism rather than symbolism?  The two philosophers went concrete.  They noted that raising money, managing expenses, and otherwise preserving the solvency of the university constituted a priority.  A member of the professional schools opined that a president with an affinity for evidence and a willingness to adapt to realities no matter how unwelcome would be positive.  That is, these three faculty spoke to needs.  They suggested that keeping the doors of Puget Sound open and paying faculty and staff might be necessary outcomes for which or by which to search.  By contrast, the faculty who wanted their status reaffirmed and their low self-esteem remedied served up word salads regarding less important matters, such as how the new president might stanch hemorrhaging departments.  ["If fans don't come out to the ball park, you can't stop them."  Yogi Berra]
                            
The philosophers did not channel the words of bygone nabobs:  “The new president should be an intellectual leader.  That is my highest priority!”  Perhaps the philosophers had enough confidence in their intellects/intellectualism that they did not feel they must preen.  Maybe, as philosophers, they realized that pretenses to intellectualism do not fool incoming undergraduate, although of course Puget Sound faculty might believe such traveshamockeries. 
       
 Is there a way to get the philosophers and not the philosophasters into the search?  I fear not.
          
Let's play safe.  Keep the faculty in the dark.  Faculty, like mushrooms, do best in the dark.