Question: Why must faculty abase themselves for profit and pity?
Answer: Because faculty are not able to embarrass themselves.
Last Tuesday [7 February 2017] about 50 faculty gathered in Thompson 193 to discuss, among other matters, an idea adduced by the Faculty Salary Committee [FSC] to raise the salary scale for assistant and associate professors to bring those ranks closer to the median salaries for faculty at institutions that some faculty and administrators compare with the University of Puget Sound. Because the FSC and especially Professor Hanson were clear and logical, they disarmed some faculty who had regaled the Faculty Governance List-Serve [hereinafter, The Wah-Wah Bar, after George Harrison's "Wah -Wah"* on "All Things Must Pass"] with personal details and special pleading. The FSC and Professor Hanson could not, however, overcome the devolution of both The Wah-Wah Bar and faculty meetings into revivals of "Queen for a Day."
Especially young faculty, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_for_a_Day
"Queen for a Day" was a pity party on radio, then television. Multiple women would come on the show and, after preliminary pleasantries, reveal some burdens under which they claimed they labored. Audience members would express sympathy for and with each abject contestant, then applaud for the woman most deserving of pity. That woman would be named "Queen for a Day" and would get some prizes. One or more prizes would be targeted to the woes that the contestant had rendered most melodramatically. The sobbing winner would then be worshipped until the closing credits and commercials.
For the last decade or longer, faculty meetings have all too often resembled "Queen for a Day." Special pleaders compete for special consideration. "What about me?" is masked a little by "What about me and mine?" or "What about me and faculty like me?" Once the whimpering and snivelling signal the start of the competition to be most pitiable, experienced faculty await the deployment of "fairness" or "fair." The pretenders to the throne of melodrama queen for the day regale the assembled with reports, reminiscences, and other folderol that seem or sound designed to wring expressions of concern from faculty. Those expressions of concern are then taken by unwary or inexperienced faculty to be tantamount to establishing unfairness despite any competitor's seldom defining "fair" or "unfair" beyond the competitor's interests. The institutional or collective decision is unfair, that is, if the decision threatens to deprive an individual or class of some benefit they desire. To outstrip colleagues and to construct the unfairness, contestants indulge in melodramatic excess and lawyer's history. They relate however tenuously the personal to the policies or proposals in question. They construct opportunity costs like President Trump. They redirect the faculty from collective interests and concerns to the interests of individuals or ilks. Many of the presentations, of course, are wholly or mostly fanciful. Whether the special pleading is true seems irrelevant; the playing of the victim is the thing.
I confess this much: Nobody knows the troubles these special pleaders claim to have seen or endured. I suspect that no one knows such troubles because the alleged difficulties exist only in the overheated blather of the contestants. For example: Even if a colleague really took a hit in the pension in 2008-2009, he or she also acquired stocks or bonds when the Dow was below 7000 and, if she or he behaved sensibly, now owns shares that have nearly tripled in value. I provide but one example but generalize that few if any claims to individual victimization by general policies will withstand scrutiny.
Nonetheless, as part of conjuring opportunity costs and imagining injuries on their way to bleating "Unfair!" contestants must micro-manage perceptions. That is, they must induce faculty to turn from shared, longer-run concerns to idiosyncratic, immediate concerns. The colleagues cannot serve the contestants unless audience members for "Drama Queen of the Day" are moved to accommodate the proclaimed long-suffering colleague with applause recognizing just how put-upon the contestant "truly" is. If the attention of colleagues can be misdirected and "micro-focused," the utter speciousness or absurdity of claims will slip the minds of the least savvy, most collegial minds -- especially if those unwary minds espy a way to share in swag to which drama queens are laying claim.
How can the drama queens embarrass themselves for whatever small change they can thereby secure? The drama queens cannot embarrass themselves. They cannot be embarrassed. They are unembarrassable. How could they be drama queens if they could be embarrassed? How can we suppose that drama queens even see what spectacles they make of themselves for such paltry prizes?
I suppose, rather, that the prizes that contestants secure even if they do not win the sash and scepter of "Queen for a Day" drive contestants to abase [but not to embarrass] themselves. Like President Trump, they get to imagine that any fable is justified if it draws the attention and sympathy. More, contestants get to hold the floor before a captive audience to tell stories about their maladies and misfortunes. [Remember Zeena Frome?] Such maladies and misfortunes are currency that excuses shortcomings past, present, and future. Excuses that yield sympathy, no matter how bogus its generation, are resources for securing promotion [including, of course, self-promotion].
So pity colleagues who abase themselves for symbolic or other payoffs. To steal from Janis Ian, remember that those who win "Queen for a Day" lose the respect they hoped to gain "in debentures of quality and dubious integrity." Better for themselves if they could be embarrassed, for then they would not embarrass themselves. They cannot be embarrassed. Hence, they embarrass themselves without seeing what they demean and devalue in pursuit of one pittance or another. Steel yourself if you read The Wah-Wah Bar or listen at faculty meetings [a. k. a., The Buffalo Chip Throw] for weepy warbling of "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." But do not steal from the institution or the faculty resources to assuage troubles nobody knows because those troubles exist only in the minds of self-serving snivellers.
Since so many of the contenders for the title "Queen for a Day" have offices in Wyatt Hall, do not wonder that I have called Wyatt Hall "The Whinery" for some time.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wah-Wah_(song)
Cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVKHc9eRv3w
