Saturday, July 8, 2017

Emeritus Rickoll


                  
For Wayne Rickoll’s birthday I compose the following entry.  Wayne should be by now emeritus professor at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  That he should be does not, of course, mean that he is.  At the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996], oughts amount to aren’ts as often as to ares.
             
When I met him on the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] in the early 1990s, Associate Professor Rickoll fit my stereotype of scientists in academia.  He was logical, straightforward, candid, unassuming, professional, honest, and humble.  He expected evidence to bolster contentions.  He expected colleagues to bend to the weight of what evidence was available and to speculate only after available evidence was exhausted.  More important, he expected colleagues to admit honestly and forthrightly when they ventured beyond what they knew into what they wished.  The “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] would dash those expectations for Associate Professor Rickoll as it has and had for so many faculty.  Still, Associate Professor Rickoll adjusted slowly.  He was adapting to his clown niche but unprepared to become a clown himself.
           
Hence, Associate Professor Rickoll did not expect the committee to transmogrify into chimpanzee feces-fights.  As members of the committee molded presumptions, anecdotes, and absurdities to suit the interests and limbic systems of colleagues and departments and administrators and staff but mostly them­selves, Dr. Rickoll would lower his brows, lower his expectations, and serve out his sentence.  What passed for arguments at “Disney Does Dartmouth” [© Diana Marre 1991] featured prominently on lists of fallacies at Dart­mouth, Dr. Rickoll knew, for he had taught at Dartmouth.  [To have taught at an actual university, of course, is advantageous and disadvantageous.] The head administrator—or, from the point of view of faculty self-governance, chief administraitor—on the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] would insinuate the preferences of Jones Hall as some “will of the faculty” that he conjured ad hoc.  Accommodating members of the committee—i.e., clowns-in-training—would then accede and defer to the administration as long as the concocted “will of the faculty” did not interfere with their individual or departmental whims.  Dr. Rickoll, unpracticed in the arts of deception [© Jagger-Richards 1968], did not understand academia as subordination or subornation of faculty and so did not suffer the committee gladly.
           
As the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] would pass something “new” and call it a policy then undo the “new” policy at its next meeting, Wayne Rickoll got his education in Puget Clowning.  It did not suit well any person who saw science as pursuit of knowledge and truth.  That it did suit so many scientists who passed through the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] like greasy hash augured ill for Dr. Rickoll.  For social scientists and especially humanists, of course, clowning required less adaptation from their classroom and, to go a little hypothetical in most cases, their researches.
            
Dr. Rickoll even endured nobly annual discussions of the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] around [and around and around . . .] “grade inflation” in which the decanal cutout would piously warn of evils not one of which he could substantiate.  Members of the committee would strut poses down the rhetorical runway, dramatizing their own rigor and thereby alerting all savvy witnesses that they assigned grades instrumentally.  Instead of “I’m Too Sexy,” developing clowns regaled the committee with “I’m Too Exacting” [among other shtick].  After each self-parodist had been self-serving for a sufficient time, the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] would rediscover its inability to do anything about grade inflation.  That inability masked unwillingness and lack of imagination, so it was for most on the committee a good.  For Wayne Rickoll it was a puzzling waste of time unworthy of serious professionals.  Professor Rickoll did not yet realize how short the supply of professionals was and would continue to be at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  Associate Professor Rickoll was not adept at statistics and admitted it, so he did not get to participate in self-parody in the manner of journeymen and journeywomen clowns who demonstrated the arithmetic they never quite mastered.  Still, Associate Professor Rickoll persisted and persevered in his laboratory and his classrooms.
        
Having arrived in the early 1990s as colleagues were denied tenure for their gender or for conforming to law or for other “local” sins, Associate Professor Rickoll was as perplexed by unprofessional evaluation as he was by unprofessional committee-work.  For Professor Rickoll as for the few other honest colleagues at our clown college, evaluation and promotion of colleagues presented the most puzzlement and eventually cynicism and fatalism over subsequent years.  Trained incapacities [Thorstein Veblen 1933—posthumously, which is of course when I expect publications from some leading lights of the university] of evaluators to follow rules, procedures, and sensible, decent practices enervated Professor Rickoll even as it energized scheming clowns [who would never measure up to standards and criteria except by making themselves useful to administrators and senior evaluators].  Evaluation practices and sometimes even procedures reflected studied avoidance of documents and records and any other verifiable evidence offended Professor Rickoll as it should offend others who call themselves scientists.  Willful, fanciful exaggeration of anecdotes into evidence seemed to Professor Rickoll the very opposite of intellectual honesty.  Other dark arts of preserving the College of Sleepy Hollow against minorities [or, in the case, of women, the majority of the population and a growing majority of undergraduates] impressed and depressed Professor Rickoll.  Professor Rickoll believed in science and in method and in disciplined evidence and logical inference, in the advancement of knowledge, and other practices that were, at his previous billets, less hopelessly idealistic than at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  At the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] such practices were professed piously at meetings, enshrined unreservedly in official documents, and invoked fulsomely at deliberations—so-called because calumnies and injustices were slow-paced cluster-fucks—but were elsewhere gag lines at which sophisticated, fully corrupted clowns hooted their derision.  Thus did Professor Rickoll’s honesty and decency mark him as unworthy of the clown college at which he was employed.  Yet in his classroom and in his laboratory Professor Rickoll persisted.  He had been warned, yet he persisted.
         
Professor Rickoll opposed hypocrisy and pretense, so in meetings of committees, of faculty, and of his department he decried those whom he labeled “face men.”  These poseurs saluted research that they seldom or never designed or executed.  These philosophasters feigned erudition they neither possessed nor fathomed.  These campus legends, in the words of another truth-teller hired in the 1990s who escaped the clown college rather than degrade himself, “knew the first sentences of everything ever published but nothing else.”  These hardliners inveighed against colleagues’ holding students’ hands while they themselves were spoon-feeding students blather that served more to glorify instructors than to instruct students.  Professor Rickoll came to see that campus became infested with imposters and phonies whenever the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] even pretended to virtues elsewhere deemed axiomatic.
             
Distinguished Professor Rickoll came to expect but never to accept corruptions from evaluation of colleagues at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996], which impeded his own decay into clownishness.  He could not believe me, for example, when I told him about the Faculty Advancement Committee Dispensation.  The FAC, the committee that recommends promotion and tenure, has long and often double-secretly conferred on its recent graduates immunity from strictures that those recent graduates had deployed against others while on the FAC.  No standard or criterion could be so explicit as to bind those who had just cycled off to measure up on formal, official merits, any more that departmental statements could induce evaluating departments to obey their own rules however clear.  Those who demanded rigor insistently when evaluating others need never practice rigor in their own teaching, research, or service [let alone in all three!].  The FAC alum need only flash a Cheshire grin and recy­cle some excuses at which the alum had scoffed a year before to complete just one of the FAC’s unwritten contracts of depravity [© Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen 1961].  Distinguished Professor Rickoll was not fooled and not amused.  He remained a stereotypic scientist:  straightforward, candid, and honest.  Honesty, candor, and forthrightness, of course, generally profit one at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] only if one is going along with some joke.  Instead, Distinguished Professor Rickoll’s virtues, not forsaken in order to secure tenure and promotion, made him gag at the joke.  Indeed, gagging on the joke, Distinguished Professor Rickoll grew ever more dyspeptic about contracts of depravity he was expected to honor and execute.  Distinguished Professor Rickoll was too decent to prosper or even to abide at the clown college.
             
Being acquainted with demonstrable reality, Distinguished Professor Rickoll came to understand, was the ordinary state neither of the “Academic” “Standards” Committee nor of plenary meetings of faculty who put the “clowns” into the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  To be competent pretenders, of course, preening, grifting posers would have to acquaint themselves with the actual and the concrete.  That they never did so acquaint themselves with reality meant that they could seldom be competent pretenders, which in turn further enmeshed “respectable,” “responsible,” “reliable,” and “reputable” faculty in deceptions and delusions.  Dr. Rickoll immersed himself in his researches and in his classes, finding in his laboratory and in his classroom the pursuit of truth and dedication to honesty by which he defined academia.  The carnival of buncombe [Mencken 2006] proceeded without him and without his lab and his classes. 
                    
Like Juli MacGruder, Bill Lyne, Dash Goodman, and a few others whom I shall salute when they retire or escape and are safe from association with me, Emeritus Distinguished Professor Wayne refused to become a clown and disdained to be clowned. 
           
I adapt from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad  XLIV:
Right you guessed the rising morrow
And scorned to tread the mire you must:
Dust's your wages, son of sorrow,
But men may come to worse than dust.
       
Souls undone, undoing others,--
Long time since that tale began.
You would not live to wrong your brothers:
Oh lad, you retired as fits a man.

Now to NOLA shall friend and colleague
With ruth and some with envy come:
Undishonored, clear of danger,
Clean of guilt, pass hence and home.

Turn safe to rest, no dreams, no waking;
And here, man, here's the wreath I've made:
'Tis not a gift that's worth the taking,
But wear it and it will not fade.