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.
No comments:
Post a Comment