Thursday, October 11, 2018
Thursday, July 5, 2018
The Good Man who Dashed Honesty, Hope, and Honor
Like my foregoing entries, this entry praises a bygone colleague. I have been delinquent in praising this fellow. I apologize to my exemplary erstwhile colleague for my delay.
The gist of my encomium is that at this university as at so many academic backwaters, committing candor [© William Haltom 1991] was risky. A good man, my colleague may have been viewed by the few faculty or staff who knew him as disreputable, unreliable, irresponsible, and unrespectable even though his behavior and attitudes were diametrically opposed to each of those four descriptors. The good man was reputable, reliable, responsible, and respectable. Of course, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] those four descriptors have distinctive, not quite Orwellian, usage. [Please refer to "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" [Sunday, March 4, 2007] in this blog.]
To colleagues who knew him rather than knew of him, the good man was an honest and honorable colleague deserving of praise and esteem of honest and honorable colleagues. But to colleagues who will not abide a truth-teller in their midst, the good man was
disreputable because his integrity and uprightness exposed departmental and university colleagues as mean and mendacious incompetents;
unreliable because he served forthrightness and fairness rather than the expediency of administrators and other malefactors;
irresponsible because he abided by professional ethics and intellectual mores rather than craven conformity to power; and
unrespectable because to respect the good man's virtues would have been to admit the vices of many faculty and administrators, decision-makers and committees, wannabes and never-weres.
In sum, the good man was honest, honorable, brave, and intelligent; thus, he could not abide the clowns, and they could not abide him.
If the propositions above puzzle you, you must not have been a Puget Clown for long or must not have been paying much attention. Since honest, honorable, brave, and intelligent colleagues have tended, over my third of a century of experience at this school, not to last long [especially if they are female], perhaps you have not run into many.
Or perhaps you yourself are a reputable, reliable, responsible, and respectable member of the faculty. Please re-read "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" [Sunday, March 4, 2007] in this blog. The gist of that entry -- "When reputations and rewards issue from administrators and apparatchiks rather than from critical faculty, respectability corrodes integrity" -- explains why bravery, honesty, honor, and intelligence long were at the University of Puget Clowns maladaptive and therefore rare. Faculty [and even more so staff] who sought a favorable reputation with Jones Hall -- in this blog, "The House of Reptiles" -- had to sacrifice valid grounds for reputation and serve as fools or tools or both. Those faculty or staff praised for reliability tended to be toadies lest they be toast. Faculty or staff deemed "responsible" were those sensitive to sanctions positive and negative. Those who craved respectability had to lose their self-respect and should have, if Puget Clowns were itself respectable, dropped in the esteem of peers. With apologies to Janis Ian ["At Seventeen"]:
To the best of my knowledge and recollection, the good man ran into trouble first in a departmental meeting regarding workloads. Junior faculty in that desultory department tended to teach service courses and other lower-division courses with larger FTEs; senior faculty hoarded upper-division electives with smaller FTEs. One senior member of the department was given to citing the department's special role in articulating, advocating, and practicing social justice, so the good man began from that premise. Holding Puget clowns to their expressed ideals has been across venues and times fraught, for the expressed ideals existed to fend off having to practice preachments. Holding clowns in the good man's department to their shibboleths was especially treacherous. Doing so in his first year was suicidal.
The junior colleagues who had kvetched about iniquities most vociferously in private sat silent when the good man raised the issue in a meeting of the department. This cowardice isolated the good man and perhaps one or two others. After a raucous meeting in which senior faculty pronounced themselves both affronted and taken aback by the waking of exploited junior faculty, the good man walked over to the coffee shop with a senior colleague. The good man joked that perhaps he should be lining up employment elsewhere amid what was his first year. It surprised the good man at least a bit when the senior colleague in the department allowed as how that might be so.
ACT FOUR
The gist of my encomium is that at this university as at so many academic backwaters, committing candor [© William Haltom 1991] was risky. A good man, my colleague may have been viewed by the few faculty or staff who knew him as disreputable, unreliable, irresponsible, and unrespectable even though his behavior and attitudes were diametrically opposed to each of those four descriptors. The good man was reputable, reliable, responsible, and respectable. Of course, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] those four descriptors have distinctive, not quite Orwellian, usage. [Please refer to "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" [Sunday, March 4, 2007] in this blog.]
To colleagues who knew him rather than knew of him, the good man was an honest and honorable colleague deserving of praise and esteem of honest and honorable colleagues. But to colleagues who will not abide a truth-teller in their midst, the good man was
disreputable because his integrity and uprightness exposed departmental and university colleagues as mean and mendacious incompetents;
unreliable because he served forthrightness and fairness rather than the expediency of administrators and other malefactors;
irresponsible because he abided by professional ethics and intellectual mores rather than craven conformity to power; and
unrespectable because to respect the good man's virtues would have been to admit the vices of many faculty and administrators, decision-makers and committees, wannabes and never-weres.
In sum, the good man was honest, honorable, brave, and intelligent; thus, he could not abide the clowns, and they could not abide him.
If the propositions above puzzle you, you must not have been a Puget Clown for long or must not have been paying much attention. Since honest, honorable, brave, and intelligent colleagues have tended, over my third of a century of experience at this school, not to last long [especially if they are female], perhaps you have not run into many.
Or perhaps you yourself are a reputable, reliable, responsible, and respectable member of the faculty. Please re-read "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" [Sunday, March 4, 2007] in this blog. The gist of that entry -- "When reputations and rewards issue from administrators and apparatchiks rather than from critical faculty, respectability corrodes integrity" -- explains why bravery, honesty, honor, and intelligence long were at the University of Puget Clowns maladaptive and therefore rare. Faculty [and even more so staff] who sought a favorable reputation with Jones Hall -- in this blog, "The House of Reptiles" -- had to sacrifice valid grounds for reputation and serve as fools or tools or both. Those faculty or staff praised for reliability tended to be toadies lest they be toast. Faculty or staff deemed "responsible" were those sensitive to sanctions positive and negative. Those who craved respectability had to lose their self-respect and should have, if Puget Clowns were itself respectable, dropped in the esteem of peers. With apologies to Janis Ian ["At Seventeen"]:
Remember those who win the game
Lose the love they sought to gain
In debentures of quality
And dubious integrity
ACT ONETo the best of my knowledge and recollection, the good man ran into trouble first in a departmental meeting regarding workloads. Junior faculty in that desultory department tended to teach service courses and other lower-division courses with larger FTEs; senior faculty hoarded upper-division electives with smaller FTEs. One senior member of the department was given to citing the department's special role in articulating, advocating, and practicing social justice, so the good man began from that premise. Holding Puget clowns to their expressed ideals has been across venues and times fraught, for the expressed ideals existed to fend off having to practice preachments. Holding clowns in the good man's department to their shibboleths was especially treacherous. Doing so in his first year was suicidal.
The junior colleagues who had kvetched about iniquities most vociferously in private sat silent when the good man raised the issue in a meeting of the department. This cowardice isolated the good man and perhaps one or two others. After a raucous meeting in which senior faculty pronounced themselves both affronted and taken aback by the waking of exploited junior faculty, the good man walked over to the coffee shop with a senior colleague. The good man joked that perhaps he should be lining up employment elsewhere amid what was his first year. It surprised the good man at least a bit when the senior colleague in the department allowed as how that might be so.
A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much?
Robinson Jeffers, "Science"
Merest participation ought not to doom junior faculty even at parochial Puget Clowns, but showing departmental colleagues to be feckless hypocrites and "Neiman Marxists" was not to be tolerated. Veterans of the department knew that senior faculty exploited junior faculty but touted the department's dedication to equity and social justice in part to cover up their exploitation. [What would you expect cowardly conflict-averse hypocrites and poseurs to do?] The exploiting senior faculty had protected themselves with rationalizations far too flimsy to withstand candor, so custom and etiquette in their department proscribed candor and conflict to bolster pretense. The departmental member who had done the most to fend off threats to departmental and personal self-esteem let the good man know that debunking individual and collective blather was not tolerated. The good man had spoken truth to self-seeking, self-serving weenies comfortable in their mutually assured depravities. The good man must yield to the weakness of his department and colleagues or seek employment elsewhere.
ACT THREE
. . . You have meddled with the primal forces of nature
and you will atone!
Arthur Jensen [Ned Beatty] "Network"
ACT TWO
The weakness of both department and colleagues was reiterated within months when the good man delegated scut work to a colleague unlikely to publish much otherwise. [Veterans of the University of Puget Clowns {© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996} must cringe at doing a good turn for an object of professional pity, for too many objects of too much pity abound among the clowns.] In return for annotating sources and supplementing text with figures, the delegated colleague would get an apparent co-authorship. The good man barely noticed in time that the delegated colleague had economized on the delegated tasks by plagiarizing from marketing copy. The good man thought he had plumbed the depths of junior colleagues' cowardliness until he confronted the handling of this plagiarism and subsequent plagiarisms. Only then did the good man come to understand the perils of being honest at the Puget clownathon.
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes?
Yeats, "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing"
ACT THREE
When in the good man's second year a departmental colleague was to be denied tenure, the good man's insistence on procedural and substantive fairness quickly plunged him into additional difficulties. Multiple members of the department were not only averse to conflict but also so afraid of at least one unstable colleague in the department that they mangled departmental deliberations in ways too many and multifarious to rehearse herein. For purposes of this encomium, I settle for stating that the good man's insistence on decorum and decency doomed him. The lesson I repeatedly draw in this post is that -- at least in my third of a century in the Puget clown car -- to insist on decency, decorum, integrity, and professionalism is to imperil one's billet.
Chancellor Thomas More "Then why does your Grace need my poor support?"
King Henry VIII "Because you're honest, and, what is more to the purpose,
you're known to be honest. . . . "
Chancellor Thomas More "I am sick to think how much I must displease Your
Grace."
King Henry VIII "No, Thomas, I respect your sincerity. But respect, man,
that's water in the desert."
ACT FOUR
Having thoroughly experienced the banality of evil in departmental governance, the good man moved on to the evil of banality -- the Professional Standards Cult. The Professional Standards Cult long had been at best a Privy Council for the Dean of the University and at worst a Star Chamber for cases trying in more than one sense, but the good man's experiences failed of even the meanest expectations for procedural or substantive justice. The Starr Chamber -- in an entry in this blog I added an "r" to associate the Professional Standards Cult of an era with Kenneth Starr; see "Malfeasant or Nonfeasant?" 9 February 2010 in this blog -- flouted Faculty Code and Bylaws alike but always or almost always to the disadvantage of the good man. In response the good man fearlessly scored the Starr Chamber and Professional Standards Cult for its earning disrepute, its lacking reliability, its failure to be responsible to rules, and its deserving the disrespect of the few who knew what the cult and chamber was [sic] up to. The cult and chamber, of course, responded by trampling rules and practices to strike back at the good man.
IN SUM
The good man went wrong by being a good citizen and an upright human being in a corrupt system. At the University of Puget Clowns one acquired a reputation for reliability, responsibility, and respectability by tolerating dishonesty, subverting rectitude, excusing inequities, and assisting cover-ups.
I cannot be certain that the good man would have fared better years later, but I suspect as much. Faculty hired in the last decade or decade and a half seem to me free agents mostly oblivious to governance and citizenship. In general, Puget clowns nowadays "work to rule:" they do what their contracts require and barely more. That means that the modal member of the faculty may know almost nothing about what happens let alone how and why. Newbies' naivete extends to few principles or practices, so they do not become enmired in misconduct or demoralized by the corruptions. Many tyros keep bankers' hours and so could not find out what is going on beyond their departments. Many regard a nine-to-five job as onerous and a three-course semester as cruel and unusual. Perhaps a majority of the newcomers are so self-regarding that they do not see the relevance of misbehavior and malfeasance outside their own small circle, were it somehow to become known to them. Within departments burger-flipping is rampant. Even the erstwhile good man's department has since shed almost all of the miscreants who punished him for virtue.
So here is to The Good Man. Up to his neck in an immoral, unethical swamp, The Good Man practiced morality, ethics, principle, due process, and professionalism while swamp creatures from his department, the House of Reptiles, the Professional Standards Cult, and even a committee from the Faculty Senate obscured truth and dodged responsibility. When The Good Man was here, to participate was to dishonor yourself in pursuit of clownish reputability, reliability, responsibility, and respectability.
IN SUM
The good man went wrong by being a good citizen and an upright human being in a corrupt system. At the University of Puget Clowns one acquired a reputation for reliability, responsibility, and respectability by tolerating dishonesty, subverting rectitude, excusing inequities, and assisting cover-ups.
I cannot be certain that the good man would have fared better years later, but I suspect as much. Faculty hired in the last decade or decade and a half seem to me free agents mostly oblivious to governance and citizenship. In general, Puget clowns nowadays "work to rule:" they do what their contracts require and barely more. That means that the modal member of the faculty may know almost nothing about what happens let alone how and why. Newbies' naivete extends to few principles or practices, so they do not become enmired in misconduct or demoralized by the corruptions. Many tyros keep bankers' hours and so could not find out what is going on beyond their departments. Many regard a nine-to-five job as onerous and a three-course semester as cruel and unusual. Perhaps a majority of the newcomers are so self-regarding that they do not see the relevance of misbehavior and malfeasance outside their own small circle, were it somehow to become known to them. Within departments burger-flipping is rampant. Even the erstwhile good man's department has since shed almost all of the miscreants who punished him for virtue.
So here is to The Good Man. Up to his neck in an immoral, unethical swamp, The Good Man practiced morality, ethics, principle, due process, and professionalism while swamp creatures from his department, the House of Reptiles, the Professional Standards Cult, and even a committee from the Faculty Senate obscured truth and dodged responsibility. When The Good Man was here, to participate was to dishonor yourself in pursuit of clownish reputability, reliability, responsibility, and respectability.
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Flowers for Cassandra
I write in praise of Professor Cassandra, my colleague of 32 years who is retiring but never was shy. I called my friend Cassandra because so often my buddy foresaw the future and forecast what other faculty at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] refused to believe could happen. Even after what Cassandra had foreshadowed came to pass, colleagues refused to believe what had happened. Thus was Cassandra twice-cursed: like mythical Cassandra possessed of the power of prophesy but disbelieved; beyond mythical Cassandra given to accurate recollection but disregarded.
Cassandra was honest and honorable. Honesty and honor are rare among the Puget clowns but not on that account treasured. Puget clowns prefer colleagues who are sycophants, some born, most bred, and not a few broken. Cassandra was not a Puget clown.
My favorite reminiscence of Professor Cassandra is the time Cassandra slammed books into a pile, proclaimed, “Fuck it!” [¡Haltom’s First Law!], and stormed out of a meeting of the doggedly feckless, desperately faithless, deliberately factless Faculty Senate. The senators in flagrante delicto had been fussing again, as always striving to find a way to seem to care about but not to do anything about the demise of junior faculty, especially junior faculty denied tenure for teaching while being female. Professor Cassandra had seen such dawdling duplicity too often and the immediate rehearsal was too much to bear.
A prissy senator, Dr. Pecksniff, the day after the senate meeting faulted Dr. Cassandra for so rudely interrupting the dithering of posturers and pretenders. I opined that the provocations were more than sufficient to drive one to profanity. Dr. Prissy Pecksniff could not agree for, as despicable cowards do, Professor Pecksniff clung to the civility and decorum that tend to incapacitate institutions and institutionalized alike. For Professor Pecksniff as for so many Puget clowns, injustices were to be lamented loudly while the Cahulawassee River [James Dickey] formed another Lake of Oblivion—calling it "another Lake Jocassee" [likewise from James Dickey's Deliverance] might be reckoned waggish or bookish or both—over colleagues strangled and tossed aside. Those who recalled what departments and the Faculty Advancement Committee and administrators had done would soon shut their mouths or drown. Soon faculty and campus would resume insisting—as a colleague did in a recent plenary meeting of the faculty—that The Faculty Code and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had insured that promotion and tenure at this university would never be gendered. [Yes, and the check is in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and I won’t cum in your mouth.]
After years battling injustices, Cassandra gave up on the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996]. Dr. Cassandra did not give up all at once. I hold it a testament to integrity and perseverance that Cassandra did not surrender sooner. Swimming against the river and the lake for a third of a century is a challenge. Cassandra gave up on faculty governance, but not until Cassandra had chaired the Faculty Senate and tried, mightily but unsuccessfully, to get the FAC to follow the faculty’s bylaws. [It took more than eight years to get the FAC to conform minimally to the bylaws.] Cassandra gave up on more than one department, but not before Cassandra used a named chair to try to build some camaraderie. Cassandra never gave up on the students. Thus did Cassandra die to the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] in segments yet preserve what matters most—the students.
Cassandra was hired by and into a department that, like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon, would be what it used to be. That is, over Cassandra’s 35 years the department ticked up then dissolved into the mediocrity of years before. When Dr. Cassandra arrived, the department was at best desultory. Male faculty stalked and preyed upon students. This or that professor kept in his departmental desk a flask of booze or a Playboy with snapshots of a colleague. This honored [full] professor was provided a named chair despite his having offered the world no refereed publication. [I am certain he has in his long retirement polished the manuscript he always spoke of – LOL.] A departmental colleague admitted that the celebrated intellectual knew “the first line of every book ever published” but wondered if the celebrated intellectual knew any other lines of any other books. A formerly respected [full] professor helped to found “Women Against Women Academics” [WAWA] to defend predators against rumors that, Professor Wawa insisted, had been found unfounded [and this enabler did so until the worst predator confessed to Professor Wawa]. Another colleague was already counting the years and days until retirement. I have more reminiscences, but you get the picture of what greeted Cassandra in the 1980s and into the 1990s.
From time to time the department seemed to improve in the 1990s, albeit that newbies who committed too much candor were driven from the department or discovered that even lesser schools sported lesser and fewer vices. Some of the newcomers denounced a professor who battered an undergraduate. Other untenured folk thought it unseemly that a senior colleague forged academic credentials. Professor Cassandra rejoiced that superior faculty joined Cassandra’s department and other departments and reveled that such notable improvements were not the butt-kissers and bootlicks and steaming frauds recruited by the crime family in the House of Reptiles [Jones Hall]. Cassandra deemed it miraculous that, unlike the scammers and schemers who had conspired with The House of Reptiles to run and to ruin departments and the university prior to Cassandra’s coming, the newer toadies were spurned by the better sort of faculty. Alas, Cassandra lamented that talented tyros impervious to patronage [perhaps because they realized how little The House of Reptiles offered or delivered to genuinely talented teachers or publishers] could not be bought or even rented and so must be driven out. If they committed candor in faculty meetings, refused to join or to excuse WAWA, or otherwise did not indulge the liturgy of respectable, sensitive colleagues who emoted regret at yet another colleague’s unjustified, unjustifiable denial of promotion, tenure, or swag, the improved younger faculty must go.
Thus Cassandra saw the inexorable Darwinian logic propagate Puget clowns within the department and across the university. By the 21st century self-promoting prima donnas and self-serving operators replaced teachers and publishers. As a result student-centered activities defined the worth of faculty less and less. Cassandra could not hold back the tide of whiners as Wyatt Hall became the Whinery. It was all Cassandra could do to preserve the jobs of instructors who were among the best teachers or publishers or both in the department. [By some coincidence, these were with a single exception women.] A department that had progressed regressed to its prior mean mean. A writing component that so enriched the curriculum and populated the department with majors was dishonored and discarded. Writing instructors diminished in influence and respect. Fatigued with what we might politely term “procedural irregularities” [because “corruptions,” while accurate, is so unkind], Cassandra retired from a once bustling undergraduate department as it faded to a boutique.
Cassandra sought asylum in African American Studies [AAS]. Cassandra had helped to found AAS, which at its beginning was about aspiration more than branding, education more than self-promotion, and social justice more than marketing. Cassandra focused on teaching and rediscovered the joy of shrugging off burdens of deception and pretense and grandiloquent badinage in favor of inducing students to see and to discern and to think. Having come back around to teaching as Cassandra had foreseen it, Cassandra declared victory and left the slog to the Puget clowns. “Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay. /” Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XXXII
Note well that Cassandra did not slip away before serving two African American students in a characteristic manner. While “the UPS Three” incited an ill-considered, risible letter that dozens of thoughtless faculty were eager to sign, and even as the Division of Student Affairs was conducting a kangaroo court against three students, two of whom were African American, Cassandra served the students rather than mentors turned tormentors. One final time Cassandra spoke truth to power, both the power of administrators mad with authority and appearances and the power of a faculty mob. Cassandra declined to cultivate the strange fruit that administrators and faculty harvested. www.bing.com/search?q=strange%20fruit%20poem&pc=cosp&ptag=G6C999N1234D010518A316A5D3C6E&form=CONBDF&conlogo=CT3210127
I have not bothered with Cassandra’s curriculum vitae. As Cassandra fades from institutional recollection, the collective CV of the department that hired Cassandra drops by at least half. Anyone who sees irony in that has not yet apprehended the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996]. Cassandra, being an actual scholar who published, resembled amid the College of Puget Clowns Chesterton’s donkey: “The tattered outlaw of the earth, / . . . Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, / I keep my secret still.”
Good thing Professor Cassandra kept secret still, for Robinson Jeffers tells us what becomes of truth-tellers:
The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers
Hooked in the stones of the wall,
The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra,
Whether the people believe
Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they'd liefer
Meet a tiger on the road.
Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion-
Vendors and political men
Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kind
Wisdom.
Poor bitch be wise.
Poor bitch be wise.
No: you'll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men
And gods disgusting—you and I, Cassandra.
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