Rump Parliament

Opportunity Costs Knock

2011-10-10T06:50:00.001-07:00

Charging the School of Education for offices is a good first step;

however, we can pick up the pace.

.............

Upon learning that some creative accountant was dunning the School of Education for square feet assigned to faculty offices, many colleagues were

~~briefly awakened from their campus comas~~

as affronted as they were taken aback. These colleagues err. Accountants and the administrators who direct them reveal to the university a ~~cunning conceit~~ tantalizing opportunity.

Opportunity is knocking in the form of charging for opportunity costs, so don't knock opportunity costs ~~or Ebeneezer Scrooge’s demeanor beforehand~~. Embrace ~~the horror~~ opportunity costs. Opportunity costs are ~~ways in which to screw over~~ our friends.

~~No more than a~~ A moment's reflection will suggest the genius behind assigning opportunity costs to the Ed School to make the Ed School seem less profitable~~, hence more harvestable to suit the economic well-being of the remainder of the campus,~~ and costlier. Administrators and accountants ~~concoct wholly fictitious~~ recognize hitherto unsuspected debits that they then assign to targeted unitsof what more than once has been called a community. [Of course, calling a corporate entity a community does not make a corporate entity a community. Indeed, that one must invoke the meme signals that one knows that little or no actual community exists.]

~~Crass as it is, the~~ This accounting ~~fantasy~~ practice does not go far enough. We are missing opportunities! Let’s get to it!

First, let us consider opportunities to

~~imperil~~ inform

every department, program, school, and unit:

1. For example, why settle for two-dimensional opportunity when three-dimensional opportunities lie about ~~like full professors~~? Every member of the faculty and staff should be debited for cubic space assigned to him or her. If I were paying to the ceiling tiles, I’d use at least seven vertical feet of my office. Let’s give me some incentives to maximize productivity. Whether I move in suspended work stations or not, my department should be billed as if spammers and telemarketers were working in the lofts.

2. And what of my office phone? While I am ~~bloviating captive audiences in~~ lecturing my classes, a telemarketer could be turning my office telephone to profit. Bill me for the revenues I deliberately forego by leaving my office fallow when I leave my office! If I do not pay up, bill my department.

3. Most faculty get to their offices after ~~9:00~~ 7:00 a.m. and leave before ~~4:00~~6:00 p.m. ~~Some faculty do not visit their offices at all from Friday through the ensuing Monday inclusive.~~ Assign departments the revenue that they could make from subletting offices when faculty are not occupying them. Indeed, departments should encourage all members to secure carrels in Collins Library so that faculty offices may be sublet 24/7.

4. Harned/Thompson faculty must keep their laboratories active. Charge science departments for times during which labs are not used. Apply a rate commensurate with ~~a meth~~ comparable labs.

5. Whether departments are soliciting kickbacks for grades and honors or not, departments should be billed at a standard rate for grades above C and for anything that ends “cum laude.” Departments should auction grades and honors to instruct undergraduates in the glories of the free market.

6. Naturally, the newer the building the higher the room rate should be. Denizens of McIntyre cannot be expected to pony up at the same rate as those who work in newer facilities~~, even shoddier facilities like Wyatt Hall~~. Charge departments for all upgrades and improvements.

With the above and other charges, each unit of the university may be ~~driven to bankruptcy on paper~~ disciplined by fiscal realities. Then administrators and accountants may ~~shed any units they do not care for~~ quietly, civilly update various university subdivisions. ~~Garnish some wages for noisy faculty and those~~ Most faculty will ~~go quietly for dimes on the dollar~~ doubtless appreciate and profit from the information.

Loopy Transparency or Transparent Loopiness?

2011-10-06T19:01:00.001-07:00

Administrators claim to value transparency but practice it in a loopy manner.

¶ In a Rump Parliament post on 27 June 2011 ["Faculty Meetings, Administrators, & Deliberation"] I opined that expecting transparency from faculty meetings was contrary to my experience at the University of Puget Clowns. Last June a memorandum regarding faculty meetings had suggested that faculty would not feel "out of the loop" and would be "in the know" if faculty attended faculty meetings and read memoranda in which decision-makers made their decisions and decision-making transparent. I derided this communique as a transparent, loopy excuse for blindsiding faculty on tuition benefits for dependents. http://rumpparliament.blogspot.com/2011/06/faculty-meetings-administrators.html

¶ As the plenary meeting of the faculty on 20 September 2011 begins to unravel, faculty must ask themselves anew whether faculty meetings harm mental health. One who attends faculty meetings exposes herself or himself to transparent loops that entangle the mind by weaving webs of facts and folderol.

¶ On 20 September faculty were regaled regarding the School of Education. That report contained some numbers about an alleged shortfall in profits from the Ed School. The Faculty Governance Forum has since exposed the numbers as tendentious accounting at best. We'll see if administrators favor faculty with more suspect "data" at next week's faculty meeting. Probably the administrators will rely on faculty obliviousness and inattention to let the matter drop from awareness. We'll see.

-----------------------

¶ What we see already is that the transparency about which faculty read in June will be iffy. Maybe administrators are eager to keep faculty "in the loop," as the 6-27 memorandum suggested, but maybe the faculty's feeling "out of the loop" had far less to do with non-attendance at faculty meeting than it had to do with the nature or quality of information provided faculty in faculty meetings and inmemoranda. Maybe administrators who have often been far from open have changed their ways, but maybe professions of transparency are the latest camouflage.

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¶ And maybe the numbers to which faculty were exposed on 9-20 will turn out to be misleading. The Faculty Governance Forum recently featured the information that the School of Education is debited for the square feet of their offices. What other creative cost-accounting does the Jones Hall practice? For how long has the university charged which departments at what rates for office-space?

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¶ This tactical accounting seems consistent with a tactic used when earlier administrators were trying to eliminate Occupational and Physical Therapy. The strategy then was to isolate OT/PT as an entity that lost money. When I asked the dean and the president why OT/PT was measured in such a manner yet various departments outside OT/PT were not, I was told that the trustees had decided to count in such a manner. A circular argument circles the wagons and keeps me "in the loop." That is how the university has often practiced transparency.

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¶ I did not expect transparency. I expected loop-the-loop. I expect more loopiness to follow. So perhaps the call for greater attendance at faculty meetings was more than the excuse for which I took it in June. Was it as well precondition for misleading the faculty? After all, what is the point of a magic show without an audience? Why, that would be like a confidence game without marks!

Neglected Beauty of the Obvious

2011-09-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

My favorite remark from the first two weeks of Fall 2011: “I have not done anything on my research for weeks. You know, this is a pretty easy gig if all you're doing is teaching.”

For many colleagues who have not soiled their hands or minds with research or ― Gasp! ― publishing, this report is belated but welcome. Still another colleague has figured out the scam worked by so many faculty at so many schools that pretend to value the pursuit of knowledge. Indeed, our colleague need take but one more step to enhance her or his retirement in place. She or he must complain daily about having too little time for research.

The clowns who most often bewail the time that teaching and service and other duties divert them from their ~~wind~~path-breaking research almost always do no research, almost never produce research, and would not know peer-review if they ever were asked to do it.

You cannot aptly say that these clowns long ago retired in place, for retirement implies something from which to retire or some shift from more to less activity. Many clowns have not since their dissertations had a research program to halt.

Truly impressive are clowns who, bereft of research programs and accomplishments, use research to justify their piling into the three- or four-day-weekend clown-car. These clowns need an exclusively Tuesday-Thursday schedule or a Monday-Thursday schedule so that they can secure another day with which to pursue the work that they never get done or started. Now that is a cushy berth!

So, beloved colleague, aim high. Get a Lantz to pursue an imaginary project. Secure the designation “Distinguished Professor” despite your having published no peer-reviewed research in the last five or ten years. Become a low-level administrator and lament its stunting of your research.

The University of Puget Clowns affords faculty many opportunities for leisure and lassitude.

This is a very easy job when you're not doing much of it.

It is an even easier job when you aren't doing any of it. The colleagues whose service is grudging and desultory and whose teaching is at best a rumor truly have easy gigs. Who are these colleagues? Listen for those who trumpet most their service or teaching. Those who are advertising most are producing least.

What the FAHC?

2011-09-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

Funniest remark at the party at the Faculty Club on 9 September 2011: "Why not call it the Faculty Academic Hazing Committee?"

Undistinguished Distinctions

2011-09-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

Colleagues assert that the Faculty Advancement Committee makes arbitrary distinctions. As distinguished from what other decision-makers at the University of Puget Clowns?

When colleagues who have been at the University of Puget Clowns [® Susan Resneck PieRce] for years are shocked to discover capricious decision-making, I envy them their outrage. I have lost most of my capacity to be appalled or even surprised by designations and distinctions routinely made by Power Committees, administrators, or apparatchiks. I am enervated: able was I ere I saw Elba.

When the FAC makes decisions that can neither be understood nor believed, I mutter, “Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown.” [Please review the entry 14 January 2010 in this blog.]

The process by which the FAC names certain full professors “Distinguished” has been suspect to me at least since 1997 when I first participated in those decisions. [Specifics forthcoming over a martini.] Many “Distinguished Professors” actually are distinguished in a positive direction. Some full professors are distinguished from other full professors more by their patrons or allies or buddies than by their performance or any discernable merit. Still other “Distinguished Professors” are “Extinguished Professors,” distinguishable from other full professors in a negative direction.

From 1997 on I have warned colleagues who would listen to me that some designations that seem arbitrary are in fact not arbitrary but artful.

The title “Distinguished Professor” was, if the oral historians who have informed me are reliable, an invention of the Phibbs-Davis Regime. For years the designation was somewhat secret. Only “Distinguished Professors” and a few of their buddies knew about the title and the booty that went with it. I have repeatedly heard that President Phibbs and Dean Davis used “Distinguished Professor” to reward loyalty and conformity at least as much as merit. [Given the general paucity of merit, especially scholarly productivity, when Drs. Phibbs and Davis took over, finding merit to reward might have required Sherlock Holmes.] If this oral history is at all correct, then designating “Distinguished Professors” has been artful when not corrupt almost from the inception of the “honor.”

That the FAC makes not very defensible decisions has long struck me as one reason for confidentiality.

Regular readers of “Rump Parliament” are more familiar than most colleagues with failings of “Power Committees,” especially of the FAC and the “Professional” “Standards” Committee [usually designated the PSC or Starr Chamber in this blog]. Indeed, this blog began with an entry about confidentiality and its abuses. [See “An Apology for Conning Colleagues” 21 January 2007.] When we consider the oral history, we should keep in mind that in previous years and regimes, the FAC and the PSC were even more secretive and conformist than in the last decades. From my experiences with each, they had much to be secretive about.

Judgments made amid secrecy occasionally diverge from ideals, methinks.

The very process by which faculty nominate but the Dean selects respectable, reliable, responsible, reputable faculty for the FAC makes clear to eyes that will see that President Phibbs and/or Dean Davis preferred loyal lackeys to critical colleagues on the FAC. [Please consult “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable” in this blog 4 March 2007.] Some faculty managed to be selected by faculty for the FAC multiple times before they were finally permitted to serve on the FAC by deans. Some were never permitted to serve. They were not ~~obsequious, predictable, deferential, or conforming~~ respectable, reliable, responsible, or reputable enough to suit the dean.

Given the process by which colleagues reach the FAC, I seldom can be surprised by decisions of the FAC.

In addition to a pliable FAC, administrators long relied on an accommodating PSC. “The Starr Chamber” for so long served as the privy council for and to the dean or other administrators that many faculty [not just cynical I] abandoned hope whenever an issue entered The Starr Chamber. Indeed, the silence behind confidentiality was welcome relative to the suborning of colleagues' honor worked whenever members of the PSC came out to the Faculty Senate.

I have long become accustomed to Power Committees that make decisions that are not defended and cannot be defended.

Owing to evidence and experience, then, I have consistently asserted and argued in this blog that many matters in multiple venues are subject to Type One and Type Two Errors―respectively, false positives and false negatives. Many professors awarded the designation “Distinguished” have not earned that designation. They are false positives. Good teachers and obedient servants of the administration have enjoyed patronage despite research records unadorned by recent accomplishments or by anything that would be counted as professional growth at an actual university. The false negatives are much better than satisfactory at teaching, at research, and at service, but they have run afoul of an administrator or otherwise made themselves unworthy on grounds other than teaching, professional growth, and service. Perhaps they were not respectable, reliable, responsible, or reputable?

Evaluees tenured or promoted with no professional growth cannot puzzle me, and colleagues awarded honors despite failings that should be disqualifying cannot flabbergast me, so a designation without discernible standards and with only a legendary provenance cannot trouble me.

Not just I but everyone who has dared to look behind shibboleths and slogans knows that professors at this university have received chairs with designations that the chair-sitters belie. This colleague resides in a chair for distinguished teaching yet he has always been a desultory instructor? Welcome to Puget Clowns. Arches declares that a professor is a legendary instructor? I did peer observation of one such instructor who was far more legend than actuality.

I have found that some products touted as excellent are at least good; some touted teachers are terrific. I have also found that much touting exists to camouflage unpleasant realities.

I have learned in two stints on the committee that the FAC routinely relies on students' evaluations for decisions far more momentous than a few thousand bucks per year. The FAC from time to time denies evaluees tenure based mostly and sometimes solely on members' tendentious, Procrustean constructions of students' evaluations. You read that right. The arbitrariness of promotion and tenure often issues from the personal quirks or animosities of FAC decision-makers rather than from the usual combination of disinformation from peers or students.

I realized that colleagues were selected for teaching awards based mostly on students' evaluations when I came to see that the FAC had almost no valid, credible evidence or sustained, professional judgments on which to rely.

When “professional growth” is being constructed or deconstructed, assessments are even shakier than they are regarding teaching. The FAC cannot very easily or very often rely on substantive assessments by experts, for the University cannot afford much overlap in many departments. Whenever some tyro mentions that actual universities rely on external reviews, the Puget Clowns behave like chimpanzees with an ample supply of feces. Hence, professional growth will be judged by standards that are often evanescent, unreliable, and invalid. [This is also true of substantive judgments about teaching, but students' evaluations and evaluators' stylistic predilections will seemingly validate teaching judgments.] Members of departments, programs, or schools conjure impediments to promotion and transmogrify “professional evaluation” into an oxymoron about as often as those evaluators falsify the record or fabricate evidence to get some pal a promotion that she or he does not deserve.

With professional growth as with teaching, false positives and false negatives abound behind walls of confidentiality and quires of flim-flam.

In addition to students' evaluations of teaching the FAC reads ~~briefs~~ candid communiqués written by departmental or other colleagues about teaching or researching. I long ago became aware that colleagues' letters often resulted from reasoning backward from evaluators' conclusions or whims or animosities, so I cannot in the 21st century be surprised that “Distinguished Professor” is an arbitrary judgment from a committee that arbitrarily denies or grants tenure and promotion.

I have said no to drugs, so I can no longer join the Puget Clowns congregation in believing.

How many peers denied tenure or a promotion in the last few decades were doomed by the dislike of one or more strategically situated evaluators? I cannot be sure. What I can be certain about is this: Sometimes the record is so strong that the denial is actually corrupt rather than arbitrary.

Indeed, my experiences at Puget Clowns have inclined me to ignore baubles such as “Distinguished Professor” altogether.

In 2001 and again in 2006, I was designated a “Distinguished Professor.” In 2011 I was not. I have never placed “Distinguished” anywhere near my name or rank. I never would, for I can tell the difference between genuine distinction and arbitrary swag. When last I became “Distinguished,” I respected the FAC and its judgments to such a degree that I did not read the letter from the FAC. I still have not read that letter. I respected exactly one member of that FAC enough to care what he or she might say.

At the University of Puget Clowns, honors are like houses: You think you possess them, but soon enough they possess you.

Many recent nominees and appointees to the FAC have manifest far less professional growth than other attainments, such as obsequiousness to authority and obliviousness to merit or suffering or decency. Some members of the FAC have, shall we say, a relaxed attitude toward verisimilitude alongside their passion for truthiness.

How could I take such decision-makers or their decisions seriously?

So I leave this crusade to colleagues not yet so jaded as I. However, I warn my colleagues as Lou Mannheim [Hal Holbrook] warned Bud Fox [Charlie Sheen] in the movie “Wall Street:” “The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things that you don’t want to do.” At Puget Clowns the money involved is chump change, which saves most of us from venality most of the time. Instead, we should fear praise, honors, or awards lest we get accustomed to them and find perfidy a Pavlovian acquisition.

How do I avoid despair? I heed Lou Mannheim’s other advice to Bud Fox: “Man looks in the abyss … there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”

William R. Haltom 1930 -2011

2011-07-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

Faculty Meetings, Administrators, & Deliberation

2011-06-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

Maybe expecting attendance at faculty meetings is not extravagant; expecting increased transparency, superior deliberation, better ideas, and improved decision-making is extravagant. Indeed, such expectations are bullshit.

__________________________________________

On 27 June 2011, faculty at the University of Puget Clowns [® Susan Resneck PieRce 1996] learned of the dates, times, and locations of faculty meetings in the 2011-12 academic year. The dates and times were accompanied by the dean's "plea" for greater participation in faculty meetings.

In this posting I respond to some passages that most intrigued me.

" ... we have scheduled three rather than two meetings per semester. I think it is important that we as faculty colleagues return to a more regular practice of meeting together to talk about topics, issues, and questions of common concern. I think that we have a terrific faculty and am very proud of your many accomplishments, but we have lost the tradition of coming together in recent years.Given a concurrent lack of attention to minutes and other electronic communications, many colleagues feel 'out of the loop' or are concerned about lack of transparency. ..."

Perhaps the dean is correct, but I do not believe she is. I believe that colleagues are concerned about a lack of transparency owing primarily to a lack of transparency. Many colleagues feel "out of the loop" when they have been excluded from decision-making. After all, leaving or keeping staff and faculty out of loops via decision-making far from transparent is a long-standing yet current tradition.

How many decision-makers or decision-making entities reach decisions in the open?

I began "Rump Parliament" with an entry on the "Confidentiality Con," a confidence game in which members of Power Committees such as the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] claim that The Faculty Code or Bylaws commands secrecy in proceedings. This claim, almost always untrue, excuses excluding faculty from knowledge about and apprehension of proceedings by which faculty are governed. This claim, far from furthering transparency, rationalizes opacity. Please do not miss what this claim also does: decision-makers who hide behind confidentiality get to pretend that they would love to share with colleagues the inner workings of the PSC or FAC but, alas, are not permitted to reveal goings-on. Indeed, the apparatchiks most respected and rewarded by administrators claim that, if the insiders could only reveal their decision-making processes, colleagues would be impressed with the rationality and fairness exhibited by the Power Committee at every turn. Many of the most important decisions around campus, in sum, are precisely the opposite of transparent; members of Power Committees assiduously assiduously keep colleagues "out of the loop."

Those who repeat the "Confidentiality Con" are uninformed or misinformed unless they have read the code or the bylaws with any comprehension. If they have read the code and the bylaws with understanding, those who repeat this claim propagate untruth. Worse, those who propagate the untruth ought to know that they misstate the truth. Usually we call deliberate untruths "lies." Let's be collegial and settle for "bullshit."

"... [B]ullshitters, although they represent themselves as being engaged simply in conveying information, are not engaged in that enterprise at all. Instead, and most essentially, they are fakers and phonies who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they speak. What they care about primarily, therefore, is whether what they say is effective in accomplishing this manipulation. Correspondingly, they are more or less indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false." Harry Frankfurt, On Truth

The Confidentiality Con is bullshit. Worse, confidentiality bullshits colleagues about decisions on promotion and tenure [the FAC], on sanctioning, dismissal, and evaluation criteria [the PSC], and on other matters of concern to staff and faculty. Please examine any entry in "Rump Parliament" with the label "Starr Chamber" for example after example of non-transparent decisions. Or simply ask yourself how the PSC acquired the moniker "Star Chamber" long before I added an "r" thereonto.

Are budgetary decisions reached in the open? Or are those who decide on budgetary recommendations charged to keep to themselves many arguments, issues, and determinations? How long has such been a "tradition?"

Were decisions about tuition benefits to staff or faculty with children open and obvious to all who attended faculty meetings? I doubt it.

Other decisions are by design opaque. Every time that the trustees go into executive session, they deliberately impair transparency. Even if the trustees believe that they are legally bound to shield their decision-making, they reduce transparency.

Perhaps the Dean would prefer that we read her missive closely. If so, when she wrote "Given a concurrent lack of attention to minutes and other electronic communications, many colleagues feel 'out of the loop' or are concerned about lack of transparency. ..." the Dean may have meant that the problems were the feelings and the concerns, not being out of the loop or actual absence of transparency. Perhaps the missive was aimed at reducing the feelings and the realization. I cannot know.

Perhaps faculty are out of the loop because they have been in recent years targets of myriad electronic messages. The Dean's phrasing may lead colleagues to blame themselves and to forget that each day they must triage electronic communications. I do not know.

To summarize anew: colleagues have ample reasons for supposing a lack of transparency. That many colleagues have only lately discovered the cover-ups, double-talk, euphemisms, and happy talk is to the colleagues' discredit. That colleagues say they are shocked to discover that they have been misled is pathetic. To parlay disgruntlement about non-transparencies with low attendance at faculty meetings is, however, beyond pathetic and beneath contempt. It is bullshit.

"In addition, attendance of only 25-35 persons, rather than a more robust faculty participation, means people do not think of Faculty Meetings as a place to bring topics for deliberation (such as ideas about curriculum development, benefits, or strategic planning). We can do better as a community interested in deliberation, thoughtful discourse, and good decision-making."

The Dean may be correct in this passage -- the faculty could do better. That is, however, not a savvy bet. That may be what expedience whispers in the ear of the Dean. That is not what experience bellows at veteran staff and faculty.

In my 25 years at Puget Clowns, I have seen some deliberation, thoughtful discourse, and good decision-making. I have also seen stampedes, thoughtless blather, and bad decision-making. I have participated in smallish meetings in which progress has been achieved. I have attended meetings with more than 25 or 30 faculty modeling irrational behavior. Please review "The Few, The Proud, The Clowns" -- an entry in "Rump Parliament" for 19 April 2011 -- for my account of redrafting student evaluations in a headlong race against the clock. There were, according to the minutes, 36 faculty in the Trimble Forum,. Many of the "Greatest Moments in Faculty Meetings" -- "Rump Parliament" 19 February 2011 -- occurred with 50 or more faculty in the meeting room.

At the least, then, colleagues who infer from modest attendance at plenary meetings that ideas about curriculum, benefits, or planning may not be usefully discussed risk a non sequitur. Such faulty inferences should not imbue us with confidence in deliberation, thoughtfulness, or prudence in groups small or large. Still less do such inferences inspire confidence in administrators. Indeed, I suspect that such inferences are bullshit excuses.

I have no idea which "people" choose not to bring ideas to faculty meetings, but maybe there are some. I think it more probable that so few colleagues attend faculty meetings that the probability of some proponent proposing at a plenary meeting is less.

" ... There are only 6 ongoing faculty members who, by course schedule, could not attend a Wednesday 8:00 meeting so – as an experiment – we have scheduled one Faculty Meeting in the 7:45 to 8:55 Wednesday time slot in order to give that time a try.

"We have returned the meeting location to McIntyre 103 in order to allow space for more of you to attend the meetings. In all, I hope that with this advanced notice you will be able to make arrangements (such as alternate childcare, school transportation, or other adjustments) in order to be a part of a well-informed and deliberatively active faculty community. In short, I expect attendance."

Who will be the wag who connects the Dean's expectation to a trustee's bold proclamation? I speak of the trustee who intoned that the University had neither a legal nor a moral obligation to honor its promises to faculty with children. Do faculty now get to respond to their dean with "The faculty have neither a legal nor a moral obligation to honor the expectations of administrators?"

I'm just asking.

Of course, for me to say that I am just asking is itself bullshit.

Bromance With the Big Man

2011-06-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

from THE NEW YORK TIMES June 23, 2011

By TIMOTHY EGAN

There weren’t a lot of blacks in my high school graduation class — two, to be exact — which meant that race was somewhat of an abstraction, happening elsewhere, mostly on a screen or from the grooves of a record.

And then I saw Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen. Mind you, this was a stage, only a bit more of projected reality than television. Still, the Big Man and the Boss — opposites in look and style, Southern Baptist black and Jersey Shore white — projected a kind of joy that made it easy to believe that this mess of a country could get along. My friends and I came home from that first concert doing air saxophone riffs.

They were fused, these musicians from an iconic album cover, and not just in the magical merge of Clemons’s sax with Springsteen’s vocal charisma. Clemons was one tradition, of gospel, storytelling, and swagger; Springsteen was another, the garage band with blue-collar urgency and a poet’s lyrical touch. But even when they met in the early 1970s, the great American hybrid of rock ’n’ roll was becoming a single-race affair.

“You had your black bands and your white bands, and if you mixed the two you found less places to play,” Clemons wrote in his memoir. Sad to say, his voice and his soulful sax are gone, following his deathon Saturday at the age of 69.

The ideal he represented, at least in rock ’n’ roll, may have followed him to the grave as well. With a few exceptions, the most segregated place in America on a given night can be a stadium rock concert — on stage, and in the audience. In one sense, rock mirrors Major League Baseball, where black players made up only 8.5 percent of rosters on Opening Day this year, a 50 percent decline from 20 years ago.

In baseball, blacks integrated the big leagues by force of a few brave pioneers. In rock, whites basically stole the genre, and in some cases have taken it to odious extremes, as with Ted Nugent and his Confederate flag T-shirts and machine gun props.

Springsteen’s E Street Band was all about possibility, uplift, and how music could save a soul. Playing off of Clemons, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, Springsteen could always turn one of his concerts into a spiritual revival from the Church of Rock ’n’ Roll. It was a nod to the roots of the music, as well as the 6-foot-4 sideman. And for someone from a homogenous background, it was transformative.

In its infancy and through its early years, rock had plenty of African-American stars, of course, from Fats Domino and Little Richard to my fellow Pacific Northwesterner, Jimi Hendrix. In their hands, rhythm-and-blues jumped to another dimension.

When rock went big-time and, ultimately, corporate with British bands and the California sound, most of the black, bluesy edge had been stripped away. The Beatles, near the end, recorded with Billy Preston, who brought a gospel-infused keyboard to the band. And, yes, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards paid homage to their Chicago and Mississippi Delta heroes. They were whites doing black music, as they honestly admitted.

Clemons made his splash on the cover of the greatest American rock album of the last century, “Born to Run.” He is the man Springsteen is leaning on, in more ways than one, and smiling back at. The sentiment — hey, these guys really like each other — came through in concert after concert. “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love,” Springsteen once recalled of their first encounter. “And it’s still there.”

That kind of racial bromance can be forced and phony in cop-flick movies that try to convey the same feeling — two buddies, one black, one white, on a mission. Springsteen and Clemons never seemed to fake it. A crowd-rousing moment of any show was when Springsteen sang the lyric from “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” that goes to the mythic foundations of the band:

“When the change was made uptown

And the Big Man joined the band

From the coastline to the city

All the little pretties raise their hands”

After the death on Saturday, Springsteen issued a short statement. “He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music,” he said.

Far deeper, indeed — for it was a story that affected many rock fans. With Clemons’ death, we are one vibrant man short of a cultural example of how the divides of race can come together over music. Bruce Springsteen lost a friend of 40 years; the rest of us lost an ideal.

The Few, The Proud, The Clowns

2011-04-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

This week on Dancing with the Stars: the Puget Clowns do the Charlie Foxtrot.

The plenary meeting of the faculty 19 April 2011 considered new forms for students to evaluate their courses and professors. Among the assembled faculty were

colleagues who had worked on committees or subcommittees concerned with this issue,
faculty senators who had consulted with colleagues and committees,
surveys of the views of students and faculty, and
others who had acquired thorough familiarity with existing forms and alternatives.

But strains of "Entry of the Gladiators" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0CyOAO8y0&feature=related lofted through Trimble Forum. The Puget Clowns barred grounded inquiry and systematic thinking soon enough. Familiarity with issues and outlooks, attention to detail, and comprehension of the range of interests and contexts disappeared as the Puget Clowns began to speculate and to parse, to grouse and to pontificate, and to posture and to preen.

The faults, Dr. Brutus, lie less in our forms than in our faculty.

The dean warned the assembled that the university invests in reams of forms, so tampering and tweaking are as costly as casual. This slowed down no Clown. I reminded the assembled and the dissemblers that nothing worthwhile was ever drafted on the fly at a plenary meeting of the faculty. Maybe the Clowns kept that in mind[less] as they proposed and disposed at bearkneck [sic] speed.

Deliberation? We don't need no stinking deliberation!

The Clowns plunged recklessly into ad hockery. The Clowns woorded [sic], reworded, and deworded with such brio that the Secretary of the Faculty had to ask one colleague -- a veteran of the Starr Chamber who flabbergasted the Faculty Senate in 2004 when she reported that the Professional Standards Committee interpreted the Faculty Code so often and so quickly that they had no time in which to write down PSC interpretations -- to slow down so that the changes could be recorded. I began to wonder whether my colleagues wrote their syllabi and constructed their courses with similar insouciance. I was thankful that, for most of those present, I need not worry whether they went about their research with similar patience and craft.

Professional Growth? We don't need no stinking professional growth!

As I emerged from the meeting -- "Recalled to Life" [Dickens] -- multiple colleagues who had voted in the affirmative asked me what had been decided. They knew not on what they had voted. Perhaps they had responded to the Chair of the Faculty Senate, who stated his hope that some cloture on this issue would be effected by the assembled. After that, the Chair informed us, we could always repair the evaluation forms over time. This remark, of course, echoed one of the most infamously fatuous remarks by a member of the Starr Chamber: Let's change the Faculty Code today so we can get it done; we always can fix mistakes later.

What rot had the Clowns wrought?

I assured them that nothing had been decided or done. The Clowns were the Clowns prior to the meeting; they remained Clowns in the meeting; the traveshamockery [Woody Allen] of faculty governance continued apace. The faculty made the faculty and the idea of faculty self-governance look bad again [and again and again]. Like drunks in a midnight choir [Leonard Cohen], colleagues testified to what they did not know and could not understand about their students' classes or concerns. And, of course, much of what the assembled endured spoke much more about the speakers than about their subjects [in either sense of "subject"].

Other than to faculty self-governance the outcome made little difference. For here is the central fact that few in the meeting seemed to comprehend: The evaluation of faculty at the University of Puget Clowns suffers far more from shady, shaky interpretations by evaluators than from murky messages from undergraduates or from confusing wording on students' evaluative questionnaires.

As we lose colleagues to departmental snipers and departmental sniping, the Puget Clowns debate the caliber of the slugs that inflict the best head shots and gut shots.

Charlie Foxtrot!

As members of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] fabricate latent -- truly latent, as in "I wish I had not read the evaluations so that I might believe that what you are claiming was actually anywhere therein" -- designs in the students' evaluations to justify decisions on which they have settled for other reasons, the Puget Clowns debate nuances in wording items.

Charlie Foxtrot!

The presiding officer at faculty meetings accepts as a friendly amendment an emendation that is then debated for minutes and passed by voice vote.

Charlie Foxtrot!

Once again a plenary meeting of the faculty devolved into masterful misdirection.

http://ia700103.us.archive.org/13/items/BarnumAndBaileys/Barnum_and_Bailey.mp3

Have You Seen This Fellow?

2011-03-09T06:07:00.000-08:00

Isn't he a bit like you and me?

In Ferdinand von Schirach's Crime – Stories (Knopf 2011) I found the following sentences of interest: "He was sly rather than intelligent, and because he was weak himself, he recognized the weaknesses in other people. He exploited these even when it gained him no advantage."

Of whom did I immediately think?

Possessed of some talent in book-learning or blather-slathering, perpetual students eventually land a job and enter a system that selects for

"professionalism," which in context means cowardice and aversions to conflict and to candor;
"civility," which in context means smarminess and unctuousness; and
"smarts,"which in context means cunning and cravenness.

So of whom at the University of Puget Clowns did I immediately think?

Greatest Moments in Faculty Meetings

2011-02-19T20:08:00.000-08:00

What is your favorite moment from a plenary meeting of the faculty?

¶ When the University of Puget Clowns assembles its faculty, travesty results. About 90 minutes per show, vaudeville lives again:

Rigor is burlesqued but never practiced.
Gravitas is parodied but lighter than air.
Flatulence is celebrated but more substantial than gravitas or rigor.
Fatuousness is erudition in service of faithlessness and disloyalty to liberal education.
Obsequiousness is courage among the conflict averse.
Ignorance is strength especially ignorance aligned with decanal orthodoxies.
Civility is candor unafraid to voice the thoughts of the powerful.
Sincerity is unknown absent delusion.

¶ But what were the greatest shams and shames in a plenary meeting of the Clowns?

Please look over the candidates below and propose alternatives.

¶ Professor Lance Rosywiz spoke of extensive, controversial changes in The Faculty Code: "I am the kind of person who likes to get things done. Why don't we pass these changes and fix any problems in subsequent meetings?" Was this call to alter the employment contract of each member of the faculty in a fast and facile manner the worst fraud attempted by a chair of a Power Committee? Was this former member of the Professional Standards Cult channeling Professor Irwin Corey <http://www.irwincorey.org/>?

Whether the remark was careless, reckless, half-clever, or half-cunning, was it the greatest spit-take in the history of faculty meetings? Read on.

¶ In the hallway after another inept attempt by an administrator to deceive the clowns, Professor Soviet Tankard opined, "I don't mind if you serve me a platter of turds, but don't call them sausages!"

Is this the funniest remark immediately after a plenary meeting of the faculty? Does hallway badinage count as faculty meeting vaudeville?

¶ The presiding administrator granted Professor Eve Slimehatch 10 minutes in which to defend a curricular proposal the administrator favored. The proposer took 30 minutes to present 5 minutes worth of material, so smarming the assembled colleagues that this presentation is itself a candidate for most fatuous self-abuse at a plenary meeting of the faculty.

Truly to realize how off-putting the presentation was, one had to have been there. I estimated amid that meeting that Ol' Slimehatch had lost 10 votes for the proposal by the manner of presentation.

¶ The speech by Professor Slimehatch prompted one of the great time-wasting members of the faculty, Professor Terry Snarl, to wave a wristwatch at Slimehatch to stop Slimehatch's blathering. One of the greatest moments of irony in faculty history, this incident was the equivalent of the Unibomber's questioning the ethical propriety of a letter to a representative.

I was getting very sleepy, very sleepy. Then Snarl started to wave his wristwatch.

¶ Before he waved his wristwatch side to side as if trying to hypnotize the administrative favorite, Professor Snarl triumphed by beginning a speech explicitly affirming one side of a debate and ending that same speech minutes later announcing that the opposite side in the debate had the stronger case. The seamless segues distinguished this speech as perhaps the greatest self-parody in a meeting renowned for intentional and unintentional self-parodies.

"Madam President, I rise in opposition to this proposal. It is such an affront that I am taken aback. Its passage would be such a blot on the eschatology of this institution that I am compelled to vote in its favor. I thank you."

¶ Professor Snarl also worked behind the scenes to induce the vilest speech ever delivered at a clowns' meeting I attended. A Puget Clown who went to graduate school with a whistleblower used phony hypotheticals to defame the whistleblower and to defend the most notorious philanderer on the faculty. Professor Ed Needspiers followed Professor Snarl's direction to a zone of twilight infamy.

Hypotheticals that are not hypothetical but are flat-out falsehoods. What will these wackos think up next?

¶ After a colleague had observed that politics makes strange bedfellows, the next speaker began,"As someone who has had more strange bedfellows than anyone here, ..."

But seriously, folks!

¶ One member of a youth movement, Dr. Van I. Smugdad, ended a salute to "Science in Context" -- also known as "Science in Contempt" -- by noting that Smugdad had secured a grant via the program. Colleagues who missed the meeting cursed themselves because they were not there to hear a dazzling defense of the only category of the previous core curriculum of which the student body asked the faculty to rid the university: "I got a grant to pursue it!"

What a candid canard! But was it the greatest revelation of the "me" in "team?" Read on!

¶ At the start of a meeting, the President asked for announcements from the faculty. Professor Hazel-Don Annuls said, "I don't know if this is an announcement, but did anyone else have trouble parking?"

You want self-absorption bordering on solipsism? Faculty meetings got it!

¶ As the faculty debated whether to permit candidates for tenure to select open files, two wonderful moments glistened. First, a notorious assassin argued to keep tenure files closed, saying, "I trust colleagues to be fair." Across the meeting hall, a colleague who had inside knowledge of the assassin's notions of fairness mouthed "Unbelievable" multiple times. Another colleague stared at the speaker in what seemed shock and disbelief.

Did O. J. worry much about Nicole's slicing his throat?

¶ Second, a senior member of the faculty broke out the finger puppets to reveal the perversity of closed files at tenure. "When you, an untenured member of the faculty, come up for tenure, I may write whatever I please about you, and you may not read what I have written. That is, I may savage you in a manner that denies you your job and defames you forever, and the most you will get to see is a tepid summary that attributes the remark to a colleague. However, when I next come up for a five-year review, I may elect to read every word in your letter. You cannot much harm me, but I get to read your letter and hold it against you if I choose."

If jobs and careers did not hang in the balance, the spectacle of a tenured, full professor having to connect dots for a recent Ph. D. might amuse me more.

¶ Professor Ed Fern Carollens repeatedly denounced false rumors that, if anything, were euphemistic with "respect" to a renowned philanderer. Professor Carollens then acted shocked when the philander fessed up, but that performance occurred outside a faculty meeting and thus may not count.

The satellite, rarely overhead, was aligned with the Mother Ship to the endless infamy of Dr. Carollens, who for decades was a strong candidate for the most addled member of the faculty.

¶ Amid discussion of electives that seniors tended to select, a professor observed with disgust that many advisees chose ceramics to complete their degrees. "Ceramics!" the colleague snarled as if seniors were choosing a practicum in child abuse. Many colleagues marveled for weeks that the University of Puget Clowns was so fortunate to have such minor foibles pass for problems at a faculty confab. What they may have missed was the virtuosity of the professor's preening. To identify a happy feature of the undergraduate experience at Puget Clowns as a blot on the rigorousness of the curriculum was genius!

Where else but the circus could one luxuriate in such pretentious nonsense?

¶ Munching potato chips, a colleague wandered into a meeting of the faculty just as a dean completed a curricular rant. The dean insisted that the most reckless thing that the faculty could do was to pass the measure on the floor without much further deliberation and debate. A colleague suggested that the eater of potato chips should call the previous question. This he did without realizing what the dean had just said. The dean glared at Professor Potato Chip as the faculty voted in favor of the measure and against the dean.

Stop it! You're killing me!

¶ A legendary psychotic appeared late in a meeting, moved to adjourn, then left. Could anyone do better than that?

Always good to hear from Professor Rebel Screwtrout!

¶ And what of likening a perfectly respectful presentation to denial of the Holocaust? You cannot make this crap up -- unless you're David Lodge or Richard Russo or Jane Smiley.

Who pulled her finger?

Quo Warranto?

2011-02-06T20:14:00.000-08:00

By what authority did the Starr Chamber proceed?

My immediately previous entry in "Rump Parliament" -- for senior faculty, that is the blog you are presently reading -- recalled that the Professional Standards Committee of 2003-2004 [always designated "The Starr Chamber" in this blog but only sometimes "the Professional Standards Cult"] was the worst Faculty Senate committee in my nearly 25 years at this university.

Below I list some reasons why I single out The Starr Chamber for dishonor. I do not list all of the missteps and misprisions of the Starr Chamber below.

In each instance below, I ask whence The Starr Chamber derived its authority. I tried to ask members of the Starr Chamber directly and indirectly, but they spurned me repeatedly. The Senate tried to bring these renegades to account, but the renegades did not care to explain themselves and an ad hoc committee colluded with the renegades to cover up the Starr Chamber's record. On another ad hoc committee four senators courageously noted some of the Starr Chamber's shortcomings; the only answer on behalf of the Starr Chamber came from one senator who relentlessly defended the Starr Chamber as acting other authority higher than The Faculty Code. [This dogged, mulish defender did not specify what higher authority he was invoking. I guess that higher authority is confidential.]

My abbreviated list:

The Starr Chamber took over the evaluation of a member of the faculty and directed a departmental evaluation. Whence did The Starr Chamber get the authority to involve itself in any department’s evaluation?

The Starr Chamber set aside recommendations of a formal hearing board. What discernible authority in The Faculty Code or the by-laws permitted the Professional Standards Cult [PSC] such sway?

When the chair of the hearing board protested The Starr Chamber’s takeover of the evaluation, a member of the hearing board not only mocked his stammering but threatened any member of the hearing board who discussed the remedy directed by the hearing board with anyone except the Professional Standards Cult. Is "contempt of PSC" authorized somewhere aside from the febrile mind of this or that tyrant?

The Starr Chamber, informed that it was overruling a hearing board by inverting the remedies that the hearing board had directed, declared that the hearing board had expired the moment the hearing board issued its directives. Where does the code say that? Was this a formal interpretation? If so, why wasn't the Faculty Senate informed and why weren't the trustees asked to approve? Was this an informal interpretation?

The Starr Chamber declared the hearing board to have completed its work despite the fact that the hearing board had held no hearing. The Faculty Code prescribes that hearing boards conduct hearings before making determinations and directing remedies. The Starr Chamber overruled The Faculty Code based on what higher authority?

Starr Chamber heard a formal grievance almost 60 days after that grievance reached the committee. The Faculty Code allows the PSC 15 days. The Starr Chamber overruled The Faculty Code based on what authority?

The Starr Chamber “interpreted” The Faculty Code to demand that the PSC hear a formal grievance within 15 “working” days rather than the 15 days explicit in the code itself. The Starr Chamber reported this “interpretation” to no one – not the grievant, not the respondent, not The Faculty Senate. Square that with the bylaws or the code, if you will.

Having reinterpreted the code to excuse the tardiness of The Starr Chamber, the committee then convened the grievance hearing more than 15 working days after the committee had received the formal grievance. Yep! The Starr Chamber concocted "15 working days" to excuse the PSC's tardiness, then dallied past its re-imagined code. It seems that for some of its decisions, even the Starr Chamber could not imagine authority.

The Starr Chamber then entertained a grievance that the grievance itself showed to have exceeded the 30 working days allotted by the code. Quo warranto, tyranni et tyrannae?

Having decided against the grievant, The Starr Chamber then issued a report to the President that criticized and characterized the respondent harshly. The Faculty Code authorizes the PSC to condemn anyone whom it chooses?

The President shared the report of The Starr Chamber with grievant and respondent because The Starr Chamber decided that The Faculty Code did not permit or allow The Starr Chamber to share its report with either party to the grievance. The Starr Chamber had shared its report immediately with grievant and respondent in a grievance earlier in that very academic year [2003-2004]. One or the other interpretation might be consistent with the code. It is hard to see how both could be. I am certain the fact that a member of the PSC was the respondent -- the person grieved -- in the first grievance had nothing to do with the differential treatment.

Has this list suggested one reason why the Professional Standards Cult had, over the years and the deans, invoked various sorts of confidentiality not to be found in The Faculty Code or elsewhere?

Do you now see why the staunchest senatorial defender of the Starr Chamber cited only double-secret authority higher than the code?

Did I just pose rhetorical questions?

Quo warranto? By what authority?

My Annual Salute to the 2003-2004 PSC -- The Starr Chamber

2011-02-05T08:36:00.000-08:00

As malfeasant as the Academic Standards Committee was 2008-2010, the 2003-2004 Professional Standards Committee was worse.

Reading over my seven posts between 3 and 7 December 2010, you might believe that the Academic Standards Committee between Fall 2008 and Fall 2010 was the worst Faculty Senate committee in my 24.5 years at the University of Puget Clowns. To the best of my reckoning, the nadir for committees still belongs to a committee so malfeasant that it merited designation as “The Starr Chamber” after Kenneth Starr and the English court [“The Star Chamber” – one “r”] renowned for abusing its powers.

As is my annual custom, I salute the Starr Chamber -- the "Professional" "Standards" Committee between September 2003 and May 2004 -- as the worst Faculty Senate Committee of my time at the University.

I begin from an elementary distinction to console the Academic Standards Committee [hereinafter abbreviated ASC] that its performance 2008-2010 did not descend to the depth to which the Professional Standards Committee [hereinafter abbreviated PSC] sank:

The ASC 2008-2010 performed as abominably as it could, but supervision by faculty got in the ASC's way; the PSC 2003-2004 plummeted far deeper because faculty could not even learn what the PSC was doing, let alone stop the PSC's doings.

While the ASC ran amuck in academic years 2008-2009 and 2009-2010, the faculty voted down the impostures of the ASC. By contrast, the Starr Chamber was policed neither by the Faculty Senate nor the faculty as a whole and was directed [in fact if not in theory] by an administrator far more powerful, far more cunning, and far more compromised than any fixture on the ASC.

The ineptitude, inequity, and iniquities of the Starr Chamber were Homeric, so there is no shame in the ASC's falling short. I am certain that individual members of the ASC have sunk and will again sink to the inanity and insanity that individual members of the Starr Chamber sustained in 2003 or 2004. Still, a collective effort demands just the right combination of arrogation and anarchy to produce truly malign results.

I need not in this entry rehearse the missteps and mendacity of the Starr Chamber. My entries in this blog for 11 February 2009 and 9 February 2010 preserve acts and statements of buffoonery and buncombe to which most faculty cannot aspire or conspire. Even in those entries taken together, I did not detail all of the failings and double/multiple dealings of the Starr Chamber.

Even the limited record in this blog establishes, however, the degree to which the Starr Chamber parlayed nonfeasance with malfeasance, audacity with mendacity, and recklessness with fecklessness.

Of course, holdovers from the 2003-2004 PSC, having earned their dubious distinction, then characterized a hearing board as "rogue." Don't you admire colleagues who leave the Caps Lock on when they type hypocrisy?

Five veterans of the Starr Chamber still walk among us on campus, so watch out for them.

Moreover, as I noted in my entry for 5 December 2010 [Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses III] in 2008-2009 the ASC featured three Starr Chamber veterans.

For those three veterans, for all five holdovers, for the two emeriti, and for the single most malign force on this campus over my 24.5 years here, I pray:

Áve Manía, deduco pléna, Dóminium técum.

Próspero Año y Felicidad

2011-01-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

Puget Clowns can get you down. Illegitimis non carborundum.

=========================================

Please raise your glass to a new year of focus.

Let no Puget Clowns wear you down.

----------------------------

Faculty:

Answer "Is our children learning?" [Dubya] in the affirmative or bust your butt to make the answer more affirmative more often. Your students matter far more than your colleagues. Make your teaching your highest priority; the rest of the campus will evanesce.

After your students, consider your intellectual or academic agenda. What was it you meant to accomplish beyond a paycheck in academia? You got a job. You acquired the means. Now, do you recall any ends worthy of your exertions to get the means? Once you take care of your students' needs and your desires, you will find you have too little time to waste on colleagues' psychoses, departments' intrigues, administrators' fecklessness, or other folderol. Pity!

----------------------------------------

Staff:

Listen to Willie Nelson sing "Hands on the Wheel:"

At a time when the world seems to be spinnin' hopelessly out of control,
There's deceivers an' believers an' old in-betweeners,
That seem to have no place to go.
Well, it's the same old song, it's right an' it's wrong,
An' livin' is just somethin' that I do.

...

I looked to the stars, tried all of the bars.
An' I've nearly gone up in smoke.
Now my hand's on the wheel, I've something that's real,
An' I feel like I'm goin' home.

...

Make working just something you do. Then go home. Give deceivers, believers, and in-betweeners not one thought.

They're clowns.

They're Puget Clowns.

Not even real clowns.

When the Puget Clowns are funny, the comedy is not deliberate. Hence, you are not supposed to laugh.

Pity.

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses VII

2010-12-07T14:34:00.000-08:00

a) the groupthink of fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee [See this blog, 3 December 2010];

b) hackneyed formulas that purport to justify the changes that the fixtures prefer & proffer [This blog, 4 December 2010];

c) veterans of THE rogue committee of all time [This blog, 5 December 2010];

d) inert and indifferent time-servers on the committee;

e) uncritical students [This blog, 6 December 2010];

and

f) a dozing Faculty Senate [This blog 7 December 2010]

let us now add the leadership of a rogue committee:

The Academic Standards train went off its tracks largely owing to the proclivities of its conductors and engineers.

::::::::::::::::::::::::

Explanation 7 -- Authoritarian Personalities

.....

..Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde:

misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb,

zu strafen, mächtig ist!

But thus do I counsel you, my friends:

distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

.......

The ASC 2008-2010 proved Nietzsche [Thus Spake Zarathustra] prescient. More than one authoritarian on the ASC longed to punish students who disappointed members of the committee. Students who chose other than the authoritarians would prefer disappointed the authoritarians. Students who elected options that authoritarians wished the students did not have disappointed the authoritarians. That is the way authoritarians think and behave. That is why I label them authoritarians.

:::::::::::::::::::::::

In the 4 October 2010 entry in this blog I noted with F. G. Bailey the preponderance of deceivers, especially self-deceivers, among those who dedicate themselves to the work of committees. I presume much delusion and many deceptions on any committee, so that is not what I am getting at with this seventh explanation.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Rather I intend to note that a will to power distorts the deceptions of delusional colleagues into tyranny. As it was with the Professional Standards Committee 2003-2004, so it was with the Academic Standards Committee 2008-2010:

members with powerful impulses to sanction, to coerce, and to punish drove committees to precipitate decisions that could not be defended before colleagues; as a result,
chairs of each committee mismanaged communications between their committees and overseeing or superordinate entities; and
chairs misled, misstated facts, or lied.:::::::::::::::::::::::::

.....

These tyrannical drivers of renegade committees are not fascists. They are fantasists. Deceived and deluded by their own dogma and doggerel, these tyrants must live up to images that they concocted to hide from colleagues shortcomings that their tyrannies make evident. As a result, these tyrants must redouble their efforts to seem to be what they cannot be. Denial and duplicity are overdetermined and overwhelming whenever an academic makes being himself or herself impossible.

..........................

I fault malfeasant and nonfeasant fantasists in the rank and file of the ASC, to be sure. They are supposed to be responsible and accountable. Yet, about the irresponsible, incompetent, unaccountable, and inexplicable fantasists what can we do? The fixtures are group-thinking apparatchiks who serve masters and missions over which faculty have little sway. Mantras that have bedeviled the "Academic" "Standards" Committee are immune to argument, instruction, reason, or suasion, so faculty can no more cure shibboleths and sloganeering than herpes. If we rid the ASC of these defective fantasists, those defective fantasists likely take their places.

---------

Membership on the ASC is largely self-selected. All too often, authoritarians bent by and bent on rigor elect to "serve" on the "Academic" "Standards" Committee. Fantasists with irresistible impulses to punish those who do not conform then re-imagine their own undergraduate triumphs and concoct spurious explanations for their own excellences. With each passing year the noncommissioned officers of the "Rigor Patrol" become retrospectively magnificent. Imbued with enthusiasm to transform undergrads into the intellectual figures that the rigorous refashion their autobiographies to conjure, these apostles of "hard love" then belch

"I never used pass-fail when I was an undergraduate."*
"I worked hard to get my degree; I expect our students to do the same."**
"I don't see why a senior at a national liberal-arts college should have to take a first-year-level course pass-fail."***
"Our students have to learn that grades do not matter."****

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Such statements, derived from members of the "Academic" "Standards" Committee 2008-2010, should dash any hopes of remedying the powerful draw of that committee for colleagues who misremember their past and prosecute that fanciful past on the undergrads of the present.

------------------------------

It may be, however, that faculty may do something about leadership of and in the ASC. Let the Faculty Senate attend to processes by which the willful ascend to authority and descend to tyranny.

Each time a committee elects as chair the member who arrives latest at the first meeting of the committee, that committee disdains competence for convenience.
Each time that shirkers elect a junior colleague chair, they risk that someone with something to prove will assume a position for which she or he will prove ill-suited.
Each time a member of the faculty yearns to chair a committee [or a department, program, or school], she or he marks herself or himself as a potential malefactor.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The Faculty Code leaves committee chairpersons to the accident and expedient of first-meeting elections. Thus the Code devalues design and deliberation from the start.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Given ASC leadership in 2008-2010, a rogue ASC should shock us about as much as we are shocked when a young Cuervo-drinker talking on a cell-phone is piloting a muscle car 50 mph the wrong way down a one-way street. You can pronounce the results an accident, but most adults would find the result predictable.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

It is now past time for the Faculty Senate and the trustees to amend The Faculty Code so that committee chairs are annually elected by faculty or appointed by the Faculty Senate.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Enough accidental amateurs! No more tyrannical tyros!

* And? So? Some of our colleagues do not use dental floss now, let alone when they were sophomores. Your assertion would be inconsequent if true, moron!

** If you worked hard to get an undergraduate degree in the 1970s or 1980s, you must be even dumber than your remark.

*** But you understand why careful drivers might carry insurance, Bozo?

**** Did you get into graduate school based on your looks or your personality, Doctor?
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

..........................................................

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses VI

2010-12-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

::::::::::::::::

....

None of the foregoing factors -- persistent bureaucrats, stale ideas, blundering faculty, time-serving faculty, or credulous undergrads -- need have been pernicious if The Faculty Senate had done its job.
......

Explanation 6 -- The Faculty Senate Overlooked More Than It Oversaw.............

When the Faculty Senate is respectful and deferential but vigilant and demanding, renegade committees cannot go as far wrong as when senators are so respectful and so deferential that committees know they are free to promulagte the policies that they please. However, not all Senates are watchful and not all senators are demanding. Indeed, some senators of late have been even timider and more sensitive than most faculty are, and more than one chair of the Senate has longed to be liked and respected.

Better colleagues than censors, the Faculty Senate has of late overlooked rather than overseen governance.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

In 2008-2009 the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] issued policies with little support either among senators or among faculty as a body. The minutes of the ASC disclose little debate about and no cogent arguments for those policies -- a sure indication that groupthink was afflicting the ASC. The Faculty Senate -- the executive committee of the faculty as a whole -- was and is charged to notice impulsive, precipitous lurches on Senate committees. Indeed, liaisons so much ballyhooed as an advance by recent senates exist to assure that the Faculty Senate will know what committees are doing and will exercise senate oversight. In 2008-2010 the Faculty Senate too often let ill-considered motions and policies reach meetings of the faculty. The senators thereby saved themselves time and trouble but wasted the time and exacrebated the troubles of the faculty.

.....

A slumbering Faculty Senate with desultory leadership and wavering attention accounts for some of the misdeeds of the ASC 2008-2010. The ASC had no adult supervision aside from plenary meetings of the faculty. That guaranteed that revolutions that should have been stifled without wasting the time of the faculty made it to plenary meetings. "The executive committee of the faculty" was apparently on hiatus 2008-2010.

..................

Senatorial indolence and deference enabled the fixtures on the ASC to mouth in meetings of the full faculty -- "full faculty," of course, stands for the one in seven members of the faculty who attend meetings -- refrains that pleased uncritical members of the ASC far more than the larger body.

But why did the failing gate-keepers have to keep the gates? Next time!

at the faculty

.......

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses V

2010-12-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

.....
So faculty who will go along with anything because they are merely killing time on the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] and recidivists from the Professional Standards Committee of 2004-2005 neither questioned nor opposed the ASC fixtures when those fixtures chanted stale shibboleths and conjured policy thereby. [See previous postings of this inventory of hypotheses, starting with the entry for 3 December 2010, if you please.]

Why didn't students on the ASC question policy proposals?

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Explanation 5 -- Stockholm-Syndrome Undergraduates Go Along with "Authorities."

.....

I suppose it is understandable that students appointed to the august Academic Standards Committee [ASC] strive to conform [group-think again] and to impress faculty, staff, and others. Even when the ASC is stifling students' choices and decrying students' preferences, undergraduates on the ASC are not likely to defend their peers or to wise up deciders who barely remember being students. Hostages to the "rigor" and respect of faculty, these undergraduates not only avoid abuse by acceding to posturing, preening professors and authoritative, authoritarian bureaucrats but also contribute other-adulation to festivals of self-adulation common on the ASC. Like about one-quarter of prisoners, these hostages identify with oppressors and join in oppression.

...........................

Whatever third-year student Winston Smith thought when he was appointed to the ASC, after a very few meetings Winston loves Big Brother and participates every few meetings in Two Minutes' Hate against enemies or vices on the agenda of the ASC, especially vices identified by fixtures or enemies identified.by faculty.

Stockholm Syndrome

Stockholm Syndrome may be unavoidable when vulnerable youngsters

are surrounded by accomplished academic poseurs. Students easily

admire sophisticates -- those who know the proper slogans and

shibboleths to chant and no arguments or reasons that support the

chanting or get in the way of damnable proposals -- and
want to be included among the cognoscenti.

Trouble is, these connoisseurs of rigor are conning tyros with noise.

[A false etymology of "con·nois·seur" = a CON man who deploys NOISE

to entice others into his SEWER. But I digress.]

To support mythic rigor, the con men and women invoke noise about

how rigorous their own undergraduate experiences were. Students are unlikely

to see through such blather as easily as colleagues do. A tyro does not

realize that this member of the Rigor Police cannot spell or that another

bunko artist glories in his or her fabled days at Our Lady of the Swamps

because that was the last time he or she actually completed any writing on time.

Trusting novices are likely to presume, in short, accomplishments when

the absence of accomplishments explains the origins of the noise.

..........

The five hypotheses I have so far identified explain why the ASC went beserk 2008-2010. But why did the Faculty Senate fail to intervene?

Next entry.

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses IV

2010-12-06T06:21:00.000-08:00

.....
In previous episodes [infra] Festering Groupthink among Fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee ["Rump Parliament" 3 December 2010] maturated into Captious Shibboleths, Slogans, and Other Rationalizations ["Rump Parliament" 4 December 2010] that were in turn carried by Recidivists from THE Rogue Committee of All Time ["Rump Parliament" 5 December 2010].

In this entry's episode, suppurating contagions meet little resistance from faculty who are simply punching a clock or a tenure-ticket on the ASC.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Explanation 4 -- Sentence-Servers

I do not claim that all or most faculty on the Academic Standards Committee were malfeasant in 2008-2010 or in any other period. A majority, to judge from the committee's minutes, were merely nonfeasant [or nonsapient or non-sentient]. Why?

...........................

Many faculty serve on committees the way convicts serve in prisons. They do their time.

......................................

They avoid displeasing colleagues who have loud voices or sharp remarks. To get along, they go along. They do not resist; they submit. They keep their heads down. They turn their senses off. They avert their eyes as ravishers commit ravages in the name of "Rigor."

.......................................

Indeed, I suspect that one of the recidivists who served on the Starr Chamber [as I call the Professional Standards Committee of 2003-2004] was barely cognizant of what was going on at the ASC because the goings-on had nothing to do with what he values. To my knowledge, that colleague has only seen matters that way for 25 years. This colleague on 3 May 2004 informed the Faculty Senate that the Starr Chamber could not keep track of its less substantial interpretations of The Faculty Code because the Starr Chamber was inventing interpretations too quickly and wildly even to write down what they were deciding.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

What a moment for the senators present!

....................................

Great defense of the committee, colleague!

......................................

"We work too fast and loose to keep track of what we're doing."

..................................

"I was never in the Texas Book Depository, officer. I was cleaning my carbine on the grassy knoll when it accidentally discharged a few times."

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

In short, the ASC or any other Faculty Senate committee teems with time-servers, especially dutiful junior faculty who will go along with any outrage or stupidity lest they be thought less than rigorous.

.......................

Just as human innards have reduced resistance to infections where evolution has not "anticipated" introduction of sepsis, time-serving shirkers and slackers barely resist groupthink and doubletalk, especially when blunders and blather are wielded by experienced dupes, dopes, and dodgers.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

But the students on the ASC know better, don't they? Why don't the students resist nonsense on the march?

.............................

Radar O'Reilly: "Wait for it!"

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses III

2010-12-05T06:58:00.000-08:00

What spread the suppurating discharges from the Academic Standards Committee into the Faculty Senate and infected plenary meetings over the last two years?

.................................

Shibboleths and slogans [Hypothesis II, 4 December 2010] that have long festered amid groupthink among ASC fixtures [Hypothesis I, 3 December 2010] do not explain why the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] extruded policies that garnered almost no support in plenary meetings of the faculty. The contagion of groupthink must radiate beyond fixtures into the faculty and students on the ASC. How did arguments so hokey that almost no faculty will support them in a public meetings gain consensus in the ASC?

...

Explanation 3 -- Starr-Chamber Deciders Erupt Anew.

...

In the most recent episodes, a rogue committee [the ASC] carried three faculty who had graced the rogue committee of all time, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of 2003-2004. Since two members of the rogue PSC have retired since 2004, 60% of the available veterans of the renegade 2003-2004 PSC voted to do away with pass-fail on the ASC in 2008-2009.

............

Frequent readers of this blog need not read "Malfeasant or Nonfeasant?" supra at 9 February 2010, but infrequent readers should. In that entry and some earlier entries, I chronicled and ridiculed the sheer ineptitude [at best] of the 2003-2004 PSC. Re-read the 2-9-10 entry to see why I call that PSC "The Starr Chamber" and why the 2003-2004 snagged my designation as the most renegade Faculty Senate committee of all time.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

An Iconic Interposition....

In 1961 President Kennedy likened the "vitality and devotion to public interest"

of President John Adams and various of his descendants to

a "scarlet thread throughout the entire tapestry"

of the history of the United States.

.............................

Faculty who fouled the Professional Standards Committee 2003-2004

evinced indifference to injustices and derelictions of duty

and so constitute a scarlet thread marring the white toga

of faculty governance.

..............................

Faculty who countenanced and complemented savagery against at least two untenured faculty in 2003 and 2004 could scarcely be expected to recognize what the ASC was doing, let alone to summon the courage and wit to stop the savaging of undergraduates. If those three members of the Starr Chamber believed what they said or wrote publicly in 2003-2004, they could go along with anything -- including hackneyed formulas and ASC hacks.

....................

Of course, to get consensus on the 2008-2009 ASC, policy contagion needed to spread beyond the Starr Chamber recidivists. In addition, a Starr Chamber recidivist susceptible to opportunistic infections of "Rigor-Osis" or "Self-Involvement-Itis" might spread policy contagion to similarly vulnerable faculty and students.

:::::::::::::::::::::::

So truly insipid ideas spread from the groupthink of the fixtures [Hypothesis I] via years of mindless sloganeering [Hypothesis II] to Starr Chamber" recidivists [Hypothesis III]. What explains the etiology beyond the fixtures and the recidivists?

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Next entry!

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses II

2010-12-04T10:57:00.001-08:00

Hypothesis One, the immediately preceding post in "Rump Parliament," proposed that chronic fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] have over the years indulged in groupthink. These ASC insiders accept orthodoxies and verities that students and faculty across campuses and eras have not shared. The immediately preceding post [3 December 2010] also noted, however, that these disjunctions between longtime ASC insiders and the broader campus community change slowly if at all. "Inside groupthink," then, is nearly constant. How can a constant predilection explain the ASC stampede 2008-2010?

.........................

Explanation 2 -- Stagnant Mantras Fend Off Information.

Once a long-(dis)serving member of the ASC substitutes shibboleths for reasons, he or she is unlikely to stop or to learn. Instead, she or he will recite formulas that spread a contagion to credulous colleagues who cycle onto the ASC. Even if mantras evolve slowly, sooner or later such mantras will find faculty or students more credulous than most.

Please permit me to illustrate how shibboleths can long gestate before breaking out when the makeup of the ASC permits.

.......

Long ago an associate dean who was technically a member of the faculty but who never to my knowledge taught a class at UPS or earned tenure in a department declared that many students were using pass-fail in ways not explicitly authorized by the faculty. Ensconced on the ASC, this dean so treasured his thought that he would voice it over and over. Over the years, he repeated his saying so often that he came to believe its truth more and more. Even as this Ass. Dean was persuading himself of the gravity and probity of his mantra over the years, he was winning converts among the fixtures on the committee [see Hypothesis One, 3 December 2010]

...............

This Ass. Dean emulated a caricature of a filiopietistic martinet in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall:"

He moves in darkness as it seems to me

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

--------------------------------------------------

Perhaps the key clause quoted above, for present purposes, is "... as it seems to me ... ." Frost, as it seems to me, presumed that his readers would agree with Frost that rebuilding stone fences between pine woods and apple orchards was largely wasted effort. So it was with this Ass. Dean when I served with him on the ASC. He would intone his inconsequent drivel that students used pass-fail for purposes other than taking risks. Most faculty with whom I served stifled the obvious response: "No shit!" Most members of the ASC presumed that most motions that elicit faculty agreement have one or more official rationales and multiple ulterior motivations. I suspect that most members of the ASC presumed that the Ass. Dean knew that faculty meetings consist of good reasons and real reasons and that good reasons are voiced more often and more loudly than some real reasons are. The Ass. Dean was being disingenuous because he had no stronger arguments to advance and because he did not want to admit his own ulterior motivations and real reasoning: pass-fail is bad because grades promote rigor and because pass-fail coursework may promote inflation of GPAs.

------------------------------

More than once I invited this Ass. Dean to move against Puget Sound core curricula, which faculty explicitly designed to do what the core curricula never did. He never did. Nor to my knowledge did he protest when a reaccreditation report claimed that the core at that time ensured undergraduates a "unifying experience." This reaccreditation document -- to keep matters short and clear -- lied about the core curriculum. That was no problem for Jones Hall or for the Ass. Dean. But when students use pass-fail for any purpose not explicitly authorized by faculty but tacitly acknowledged by every colleague who recalls his or her undergraduate years, the Ass. Dean and a few fixtures espy a problem.

None of the foregoing is very mysterious. Many long-serving members of the campus community have never reconciled themselves to pass-fail. They repeat mantras to mask their long-standing opposition to decisions of the faculty. Repetition makes slogans and shibboleths seem less fatuous and less reactionary than they are. Uncritical faculty accept repeated nonsense. If intra-committee sloganeering is insulated from colleagues' questions and disputation, the mantra persists.

For the very reasons noted in the 3 December 2010 post, however, we must see that shibboleths and slogans cannot alone explain how policies that garner almost no support in plenary meetings of the faculty could issue from the ASC. Such mantras must be adopted by students and faculty on the ASC. What spread the long suppurating discharges through the ASC and into the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings?

.......

Stay tuned to "Rump Parliament for the answers to that query.

...

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses I

2010-12-03T04:07:00.000-08:00

...............................

Too many hypotheses chase too few data when we try to understand why the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] went astray or ran amok over the last two years. Undeterred, I inventory explanations that might be offered.

.....
Explanation 1 -- Stable Misrepresentation Foments Groupthink.

The ASC habitually features a representative of the Academic Vice President who is usually the only faculty member of the ASC who serves more than three consecutive years. In addition, the Registrar, the head of advising, and a representative of the Dean of Students repeat on the ASC year after year while faculty and student members come and go.

........

Faculty or staff who fester on the ASC for more than three years tend to acquire and to generate beliefs or presuppositions that most faculty need not share. This can lead to groupthink: "... a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink> ASC fixtures will tend to share enduring dogmas, doctrines, anecdotes, and shibboleths as well as perspectives and orientations that may diverge starkly from the beliefs, frames, concerns, or priorities of students and faculty "outside" the ASC sub-culture.

..................

When the fixtures as a group UNDER-represent students and faculty and/or OVER-represent the distinctive problems, concerns, and goals of a department or office, the fixtures lose touch with what most of the community sees, believes, thinks, or wants. The fixtures become fixed upon in-group perspectives.

Is the current policy regarding incomplete courses troubling this repeater on the ASC? Then the ASC should finally do what the repeater has long recommended. From the view of insiders/fixtures, the ASC has repeatedly failed to act on the insiders' preferences for policy.
Another fixture on the ASC has for years argued that permitting students choices is permissiveness? Then clearly [to insiders and fixtures] the ASC newbies and especially the ASC students should accede to the expertise of and the "history" brandished by that fixture.
A long-serving administrator on the ASC abhors what he calls grade inflation? The moment he chants "grade inflation" or uses "grade inflation" to explain anything, the fixtures will "observe" that "grade inflation" has troubled the ASC acutely and repeatedly. Insiders' lamentations and liturgy will conjure what no serious attention to evidence and inferences can disclose -- grade inflation..........

Thus do repeat performers recycle their causes and their prejudices over the years, especially if faculty who were around for the last epidemic of groupthink have cycled off the ASC so that the ASC's "history" may be not simply brandished but brandied.

Explanation 1, then, invites us to look to the beliefs, values, prejudices, shibboleths, and blarney of those who persist on the ASC for more than three years. Perhaps unwitting victims of groupthink themselves, these repeating members encourage groupthink [and lack of wit] among transient students and faculty on the ASC. This is especially the case with faculty who are merely serving their time on the committee, a special matter to be considered in a subsequent part of our inventory.

........

But the fixtures together constitute largely a constant. Constants seldom explain variables.

What If Governance Worked?

2010-11-17T07:05:00.001-08:00

How different is faculty life when faculty governance works?

Very different from normal.

Hell, if faculty governance works, faculty committees might serve faculty.

?ty

***********

¶ Let 16 November 2010 go down as the date on which, for one fierce, shining moment, faculty governed themselves as they should. Gilbert Keith Chesterton's donkey once brayed about "one far fierce hour and sweet." For the tattered outlaw of the Earth who blogs here, Tuesday was all that -- the meeting took but an hour. A donkey of a different sort brayed about "one brief shining moment that was known / As Camelot. /" The faculty had such a moment without swordplay. For that fierce, shining hour, the faculty corrected an errant committee and disciplined some arrogant colleagues.

********

¶ The faculty scooped droppings from a rogue, irrational Academic Standards Committee [ASC] off the floor of a faculty meeting for what I hope is the last time but fear is merely the latest time. The ASC decided to prevent students from taking courses in their majors or minors pass-fail; perhaps six faculty supported the ASC's position in the plenary meeting. The ASC voted to restrict pass-fail coursework to juniors and seniors; maybe ten faculty endorsed that change in the plenary meeting. These results might have been as humbling and as enlightening as they were predictable if willful members of the ASC were open to "outside" views from, say, the vast majority of their colleagues. I have never seen the authoritarians who tend to populate the ASC learn. Maybe this time? Don't bet on it!

¶ For years the ASC has been indifferent to information and evidence when not outright scornful of each. In recent years the ASC has routinely arrogated policy-making based on scant evidence and reckless presumption. Told of a problem, the ASC overreacts by lurching to a "solution" dizzyingly more extensive than the problem reported to [and usually by a member of] the ASC. Confronted about ASC effrontery, ASC members feign being affronted. Then ASC veterans adduce inconsequent numbers as if those statistics bore on any issue. [Of course, if any members of the ASC have facility with statistics or quantitative analysis or argument, such numbers might evince bad faith rather than questionable judgment.]

¶ The immediate instance of changes in pass-fail originated when a member of the ASC said that her class relied on groupwork that was compromised by pass-fail shirkers. She wondered how she could restrict pass-fail enrollments in that course. The ASC pondered the matter and, much to the surprise of its own members, voted quickly and without much argument, thought, evidence, or information to eliminate the option of pass-fail at the University of Puget Sound. This revolutionary purge the faculty promptly overruled -- as any experienced member of the faculty would have told the cloistered authoritarians would happen had the ASC deciders cared what a majority of the faculty might think.

¶ [If apologists would respond that the ASC passed the ban to provoke discussion among senators or the faculty, I should like to know why the ASC did not solicit views from faculty or from senators before precipitously and insouciantly banning pass-fail. I do not deny that some colleagues may elect to believe that the ASC was encouraging inquiry or raising the issue. I doubt that such was the ASC's primary motivation.]

¶ The ASC's decision-making looked and looks insipid relative to the wisdom of the faculty once faculty were eventually informed of the problems. The plenary faculty meeting capped the number of pass-fail registrations at the discretion of the instructor. Instructors whose pedagogy could not bear pass-fail loafers could set the number of pass-fail registrations in their course or courses at zero. Other instructors could welcome every pass-fail registration for their courses. The problem articulated by a colleague who is no longer a member of the faculty nor of the ASC had been addressed with minimal violence to the options of students or faculty. Unless the ASC were acting out some vendetta against pass-fail itself, the faculty solved the problem brought to the ASC. What is more, the faculty tailored the solution to the problem. Try conveying that concept to recidivists on the Academic Standards Committee!

¶ Demonstrating the tin ears for which the ASC has of late been renowned across campus and learning nothing from the faculty's dismissal of the ASC's original over-reach/over-reaction, the ASC proposed solutions for problems too microscopic to be worthy of the time of the Faculty Senate:

Perhaps one-tenth of 1% of all students' decisions resulted in students' opting to take pass-fail an elective in their major; the ASC was not going to suffer that affront with equanimity.
Perhaps a dozen students per year [accounting for less than six one-hundredths of 1% of all student-selections] came to regret their having taken a course pass-fail because they wanted to major in that course's department; the lone faculty-member from the ASC in the meeting yesterday assured faculty that either the department or the ASC easily remedied these rare problems, yet she defended the ASC's eliminating options for perhaps 100 times as many 1st- or 2nd-year students!

¶ If the ASC were capable of opening their decision-making and their minds to the experiences and views of colleagues, they might not be upbraided so often in faculty meetings. And if my aunt Marilyn were a man, she'd be my uncle.

¶ Many or most faculty thought problem 1 so trivial that they could not understand why the ASC bothered with the matter [again, unless animus toward pass-fail impelled the ASC to see in this or that sniffle an epidemic]. Amid Tuesday's meeting the faculty saw clearly that the ASC had put so little thought or craft into the first proposal that their rule would have prevented a French major from taking a course in another language pass-fail. [It was fortunate that the sole faculty member of the ASC who deigned to attend the meeting pointed out that the rule would under those circumstances not be enforced as written and that the ASC or some other decider would permit the student to use pass-fail in, say, Spanish 101 despite the student's having majored in French. Like so many faculty, I welcome assurances that whatever motions the faculty pass will be subordinate to what authorities decree from Jones Hall.]

¶ You read the above correctly: The ASC misphrased its motion so abjectly that the sole member of the faculty from the ASC had to disavow the language of the motion to save the motion. Great work, apostles of rigor!

¶ Problem 2 made the ASC look even more foolish. Presiding over the meeting, President Thomas asked whether instructors' grades were preserved after the computer assigned passing or failing grades. Instructors do not know which students are taking courses pass-fail and so assign ordinary letter grades. The registrar and the computer have those grades, as anyone who considered the matter for even a moment would expect. When the President then asked why a pass-fail grade could not be converted to the letter grade assigned by the instructor if a student decided to major after taking a class pass-fail, the inanity of the ASC's second proposal was clear to everyone not on a crusade to rid the campus of the sloth and laxity of pass-fail.

¶ Given the silliness of the ASC changes in policy, who could be surprised that nearly all members of the ASC 2008-2010 dodged the faculty meeting? Their absence did not remedy the absence of reasons or reasoning and of evidence or inference for the ASC's excrescence of policies over the last two academic years. The Faculty Senate heard on Monday [11-15-10] that the ASC was demoralized because ASC decreees were so resoundingly and so routinely discarded in faculty meetings. Deciders who, to judge from ASC minutes, devoted very little time, thought, or discussion to problems or to solutions before lurching into major changes did not care to be second-guessed by colleagues who cheated by thinking proposals through then voting them down or by a President who eliminated a problem with a few seconds' reflection.

¶ Petty overlords of rigor had been overruled. Woe is they or them!

¶ Nor did the singularity of the membership of the ASC who dared to appear obscure the ASC bullies' getting their comeuppance from a student at the faculty meeting. The ASUPS President tolled the irrationality of the ASC by reproducing ASC minutes that showed that the committee's feces had no theses. ASC decision-makers so bold when it came to punishing students for deciding other than how the scions of rigor would have students decide left a staffperson and an associate dean to answer for the presumptuous, precipitate policies that would regiment 2500 students to eliminate the problems of a few students or even fewer faculty.

¶ I doubt not that the ASC absentees have prepared excuses for their absences. I denounce their claims in advance without hearing or reading them. [In other words, I ASC them.] If any aspect of attacks on pass-fail had been passable, the absent ASC members would have made the meeting.

¶*** **ns.

¶To sum up: A committee behaved recklessly and irrationally. The Faculty Senate did not directly discipline the committee but did set the reckless, irrational rogues up for rebuke by the faculty as a whole. The faculty scorned the deciders' decisions. The President of UPS and the President of ASUPS seemingly effortlessly exposed the ASC deciders as clowns who are not quite in on their own jokes.

¶ When an object of a self-parody does not know that his or her parody is [self-]parodic, it's a UPS faculty meeting.

¶ Will a future ASC learn from the rebuke? We shall see. Do not bet on it. One does not join the Wigger Patwol unless one is compensating for shortcomings actual or imagined.

The Dark Side Two

2010-10-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

On the dark side look for decanal types and those who revel in being on committees.
#####
#####
In The Prevalance of Deceit [xi], anthropologist F. G. Bailey alludes to the Lapps, deans, and dedicated members of committees:

#####My academic colleagues who have risen above
#####scholarship and teaching to become administrators
#####or dedicated committee members could benefit
#####from this example of Saami,* who are at least
#####straightforward about their own lack of virtue.
#####The academic arena, too, is populated by deceivers,
#####whether sporty or malicious or obsessed with
#####triviality, public-spirited gamesters enjoying their
#####politics. But very few would concede that mostly
#####it is a game (the spoils being often of little substantive
#####value); still less would they admit to enjoyment.
#####But most of them do little harm. Moreover, if my
#####argument is correct, since they are contenders for
#####power, they could not do otherwise than practice
#####deceit while being enthusiasts for truth.

W#####
What do I love about this quotation?

First, I shall steal the phrase "My academic colleagues who have risen above scholarship and teaching to become ... dedicated committee members ..." because I shall laugh at that phrase every time I write it, say it, or see it or hear it. What could be more pathetic than one dedicated to being a member of a committee in academe? Even being a dedicated member of a bowling team would be better.

Second, I love of course the caricature of deceivers who can or will admit neither their deceptions and their mendacity nor their enjoyment of deceiving and lying as they compete for next-to-nothing than getting their way.

Third, Bailey's pity is devastating but hilarious: the deans and dedicated committemen or committeewomen do little harm. Since they do little, I guess they can do little harm.

Fourth, I love the "syllogism:" Committeemen and committeewomen would have power; therefore, they must endorse truth even as they must exemplify deceit. Nyuk!

Fifth, academe is populated by deceivers? Who knew?

What's not to love about this quotation?
#####
#####

*F. G. Bailey quotes Myrdene Anderson on the Lapps, as we know the Saami: "Lying, bluff, secrecy, and espionage are all coordinated into their dealing with non-Saami and nonhumans and in their daily routines with other Saami, to form an instrumental and expressive drama. The challenge for Saami actors resides in orchestrating a distinctive social character in which one's reputation as a humorous, clever and sporty deceiver exceeds that as an excessive, trivial and malicious one. Moreover, individuals expect others, including herding dogs, reindeer, and ethnographers, to behave deceptively."

Titular Inflation

2010-09-09T08:30:00.001-07:00

Anyone notice the entitlements across campus?

From time to time one learns from local "mass" media what title a colleague has provided reporters or editors. It could sadden us that colleagues concoct ties to departments that do not exist at the University of Puget Sound, just as we feel sorry for colleagues who mistake a designation from the Faculty Advancement Committee for genuine distinction or who wear their Phi Beta Kappa keys too often [or, in my view, ever].

Instead, let us all enjoy this pretense. Shall I lead off?

First, I steal from "The Flim-Flam Man" for my title. [Nyuk!] Mordecai Jones awarded himself the designation "M.B.S.C.S.D.D -- Master of Backstabbing, Cork-Screwing, and Dirty-Dealing." Isn't every political scientist at least a student of chicanery, perfidy, double-talk, and shucking? True, I am not a humanist and so not entitled to call myself a distinguished professor of posing and pretending. Still, might I play one in the media or on campus?

I teach "Law and Society" every year, so I suppose I am Professor of Law at the University of Puget Sound. Since we sold our law school, I guess I am the final remaining professor of law at the University of Puget Sound. Does that make me "The Last Standing Professor of Law" despite my having spent not even a minute in law school? Quite the accomplishment! What about the colleagues who hold a J. D.? Can they be professors of law or law and ethics or social control or normative studies irrespective of the University's not having such departments?

I teach "Public Opinion" every other year. Dare I relabel myself "The Commata Gallup Professor of Occasional Polling and Perpetual Trolling" to follow the lead of my colleagues?

I also teach "Constitutional Law" every year. Does that justify "Professor of Inconsequent, Intermittent, and Over-Hyped Barratry and Litigiousness in Lieu of Rational Governance" perhaps?

How about my introduction to U. S. politicking and governing? May I please claim to be a proctologist?

The Dark Side

2010-07-31T07:43:00.000-07:00

#########
Each member of the faculty is in some measure a perpetrator, a bystander, and a victim. However, when faculty become dean-like, perpetration increases, bystanding becomes more active, and victimization decreases.
##########
In Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945, Professor Raul Hilberg differentiated those who created or expedited the Holocaust [perpetrators] from those who did little to stop the Holocaust [bystanders] and from those who died in or suffered through the Holocaust [victims]. Academic politics and government, to be sure, are far less important and far less murderous than the Holocaust was, so I intend no comparison between the misdeeds I cover below and the crimes and outrages of the Nazis and others. Rather I aim to use the concepts "perpetrator," "bystander," and "victim" to explain how administrators go over to the dark side.

In this entry I shall not differentiate the doers, the done-to, and the done-too-little for the University of Puget Clowns [® Susan Resneck PieRce]. Rather, I aggregate those roles or descriptors. Every academic, I presume, is to some extent a perpetrator of and a victim of and a bystander amid the lesser outrages and delicts of academe. I further presume that the modal academic is mostly a bystander, occasionally a victim, and only rarely a perpetrator. Hence, the mix of roles or dispositions interests me in this post.

I expect that any increase in administrative responsibilities or expectations will increase perpetration even if it does not reduce victimization. What may be less obvious is that the more administrative one's duties, the more that one is expected to be a bystander. Although administrators may often be bystanders, administrative roles require less passive and more active standing by than professorial roles require.

Recall from my entry "Standing By" for 26 June 2010 in "Rump Parliament" that passive bystanders stand by apparently idly and inertly. Passive bystanders know little and want to know less unless a matter or issue lines their pockets or threatens their positions or interests. Compelled or induced into some academic fray, passive bystanders avoid controversy, agree with and reaffirm the basic goodness of as many colleagues as possible, decide nothing, and establish no truths or facts. Passive bystanders want all of us to get along. Indeed, the passive are so averse to conflict that they avert their eyes and close their minds to injustices and improprieties. Even if passive bystanders do not become apologists, they strive not to know, try not to hear, euphemize in every way, and thereby resist being drawn into frays or phrase.

Faculty have far more opportunities for passivity and apathy than dean-like or dean-light figures do. Untenured faculty had better be active apologists, accomplices, or enablers at least some of the time lest they run into "Double Secret Personal and Professional Characteristics," but professing to know almost nothing and to be unconcerned about whatever senior faculty tell junior faculty to be unconcerned about secures tenure and promotuion most of the time. Unternured and tenured alike will usually strive to be credulous and conforming. Knowing and caring get in the way of conformity and credulity. To be sure, passive bystanders must declare their basic decency: "Oh, our colleague got shafted? I had not heard that. How dreadful for her! I am so saddened by this news -- which I had not heard anything about -- that I am not certain I shall recover by my nap."

By contrast, dean-like or dean-light colleagues must be more active and less passive than even sinecures. Associate deans, assistant deans, or petty decanal figures [e.g., chairs or directors or members of Power Committees] may be expected to be cover up administrative decisions or non-decisions rather than to ignore them, to rationalize or apologize for policies or ukases rather than to describe them and conform to them, or actively to support or to cheer on actions or inactions, especially when actions or inactions are indefensible. Hence, a shift to an administrative role may not change the degree to which one is a bystander but will change bystanding from more passive to more active standing by. Administrators are expected to stand by what their superiors have dictated.

Members of Power Committees tend to stand by administrators and other superiors, so their bystanding will be more active while they occupy committees and more passive when they do not so serve. After service on a Power Committee, faculty may revert to passive bystanding, but they may be more active bystanders if the acts they perpetrated on the Power Committee especially rankled departments, programs, or a few conscious colleagues. On rare occasions when Power Committees or the Confidentiality Con is challenged, veterans of Power Committees will stand by the actions of "their" committees with aggressive and defensive rhetoric and, of course, the usual stonewalling.

Some chairs of programs, schools, or departments quite predictably become aggressive bystanders when they are not flat-out perpetrators. Indeed, some departmental chairs were so obviously perpetrators-in-waiting that I am reluctant to pronounce them bystanders at all, except in the sense that a Rottweiler on a short chain is "standing by." A colleague salivating at the thought of having her or his way with a school or program may actively stand by her or his administrative betters to get into positions from which to tyrannize. Such colleagues range between bystanding and perpetrating.

When we reassure ourselves and others that a professor will not be changed by becoming decanal, we probably have in mind that the professor is no perpetrator. But we are not thinking matters through. Even if a decanal figure evades stark perpetration for some months or years, administrative office will move him or her toward more active bystanding. [It should go without my adding that members of Power Committees, chairs, directors, and deans sooner or later become perpetrators. It comes with each job, even if one is temporarily chairing the smallest program. Indeed, for some chairs, perpetrating tyrannies is their reason for accepting responsibilities.]

Multiple members of the faculty have not merely claimed that becoming an assistant dean or associate dean or a chair would not change them but boldly proclaimed such immunity. Understanding more active bystanding explains why such predictions have proved misleading.

Many of the predictions, of course, were designed to mislead. After one professor served in a decanal position, any colleague with three digits of IQ knew what a tyrant he would be if he ever became an assistant dean or an associate dean or, God help us, a "full" dean. To my knowledge, he was tyrannical only in two dean-like or dean-light capacities. So when he explicitly reassured long-serving colleagues that he did not want his "accession" to change relations with colleagues, he was at best being clever. In theory he did not want relations to change; in practice they would. They must.

More than one member of the faculty has counseled a colleague to get out of a position that requires deception or distortions. More than one member of the faculty has asked what happened to a colleague who became more administrative and began to parrot nonsense or support malfeasance. At such times, faculty exclaim, "He's gone native!" or "She's gone over to the dark side." I have shown above why that should be expected.

So when a veteran warns that someone has "gone over to the dark side," the veteran is not necessarily committing to the prediction that decanal darkness will involve flat-out misconduct or corruption. Some combination of dishonesty, misprision, malfeasance, and nonfeasance is highly probable but not inevitable.

On the other hand, the probability that a decanal figure will be victimized is far less than the likelihood that she or he will victimize. Thus, I define "going over to the dark side" as increasing one's propensity to victimize, decreasing one's propensity to be victimized, and increasing one's active bystanding. Those trends are inevitable. That is "going over to the dark side." That is why colleagues caution against taking decanal positions.

If you would be a chair, a director, an assistant dean, an associate dean, or worse, remember your Dante: Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'entrate. Abandon hope for your own soul. Abandon hope for your colleague's soul. Those who enter Jones Hall or chair a department or serve on a Power Committee plummet into active or aggressive standing by, into covert or overt sins of commission or omission, and into a spiral of rationalizing and covering up.

Yes, I am serving my third year on the Professional Standards Committee after two stints on the Faculty Advancement Committee. Why do you ask?
##############

Letting Meanings Choose Words -- Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!

2010-07-30T06:36:00.000-07:00

Eric Arthur Blair's ~~palliative~~ measure that masks symptoms but does not actually cure underlying conditions does not suit The University of Puget Clowns [ ® Susan Resneck PieRce]

In his classic essay "Politics and the English Language," Eric Arthur Blair informed me that

######What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word,
######and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can

######do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a
######concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want
######to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably
######hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it.
######When you think of something abstract you are more
######inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a
######conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect
######will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense
######of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably
######it is better to put off using words as long as possible
######and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and
######sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the
######phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round
######and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make
######on another person.
##########
##########
Kindly overlook the many aspects of that passage that are patent blather and focus please on the blather that may be latent:

If you let your meaning choose your words and if your meaning is at all nuanced or complicated, almost no reader will be able to understand you amid post-literacy, and you will run afoul of Mr. Blair’s own rules.

That is my contention and my meaning in this entry. Let me now choose my words.

I know not when literacy gave way to post-literacy. The first person whom I heard call ours the Post-Literate Era was Jerry Collins. I'll have to ask him to fix a threshold or period.

I know that academics live unabashedly in post-literacy because colleagues have taught me as much over the years. I have often relied on a colleague to proofread my drafts intended for academic audiences. My Proofreader has counseled me to keep things simple even at severe costs in oversimplification. In other words, let simplicity and facility of wording and phrasing shape or bound my meaning. When I have protested that I have chosen exactly the words that should convey my meaning and my case, My Proofreader has patronized me and my audience by the reminder that I must dumb down even prose intended for faculty.

Mr. Proofreader must regard his colleagues as clowns!

In this counsel My Proofreader has often reiterated the tactical advice of another Puget Clown, who claims that one always prevails in campus forensics if one says something like: "I am clear; my opponents are confused." If one's opponents are confusing a meeting of faculty by admitting realities or sorting through tradeoffs or thinking carefully, precisely, and honestly aloud, the opponents have delivered themselves into the clutches of a gibe. What the faculty cannot understand they will not vote for, so assure colleagues that they do not understand the novel, the logical, or the seldom uttered because the originator of an argument is himself or herself confused. In effect, The Tactician advises that one deploy this "syllogism:"

##########
##########The speaker has said something unexpected.

##########The unexpected is harder to understand than the predictable.

##########The difficulty of understanding lies either with the speaker
####################or the audience.

##########The lack of understanding cannot be yours.

##########Thus, whenever you are not speaking, the absence of
####################understanding is due to shortcomings
####################of the speaker, not of you.

##########Hence, what confuses you is not your fault but the speaker's.

##########Hence, you should adhere to the familiar, the clichéd,
####################and the reassuring and reject the
####################speaker's confusion.
##########
##########

The Tactician revels in his own superiority to stooges who, like recently unthawed cave people or a recently assembled monster, fear what they have never heard and do not want to trouble themselves to think about, let alone to understand. My Proofreader at least has the grace to lament post-literacy, but The Tactician spies an opportunity to get his way and to have his way with colleagues.

The Tactician assuredly regards faculty as jokers ... at best.

The Tactician and My Proofreader have taught me that the sort of writing that Mr. Blair was on about is overly optimistic for governance of and politicking at Puget Clowns. If, following Mr. Blair, I determine my meaning precisely and select just the right words or phrases to convey that meaning, I will make myself obscure to colleagues.

Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am

Perhaps worse, I have been advised by colleagues who do not acknowledge an implication that My Proofreader and The Tactician accept:

We are so deeply into Post-Literacy that an academic who uses vocabulary beyond common usage or the SAT [whichever bound comes first] insults his or her colleagues.

More than once a sensitive fussbudget has warned me not to phrase matters as I have lest most colleagues be unfamiliar with a key term. When I have found ways to elaborate, in notes or in the main text, precisely why the unfamiliar word or phrase or concept conveys my meaning, Dr. Fussy Wuzzy has protested explicitly that colleagues would be put off and put out that I should teach faculty arcane vocabulary – say, words once found on the GRE.

How presumptuous! How insulting! How didactic! What kind of fool am I? What must Dr. Wuzzy think of the Puget Clowns?

Please do not misunderstand me. I accept the notion that one parades learning or teaches readers at great peril to readers’ understanding or patience. I do not accept, however, the contention that a self-proclaimed "community of lifelong learners" get(s) to protest that thinking in novel terms or viewing matters from a different perspective or altering one's language to get matters exactly right is so challenging that the writer may fairly be said to insult readers who have PhDs but too little facility with what was, until recently, academic or intellectual English. I am not defending argot, jargon, or jactitation for the sake of showing off.

I know what you're thinking! "Jactitation?" I learned the word in the fifth grade from Stanley Kramer's movie of "Inherit the Wind" (1960). Doctor, do you know less than a fifth grader? ... a fifth grader watching a movie in Ballard? Sheeesh!

I am saying that stating matters as clearly as one can and informing hearers or readers why one has used a complicated concept or a rare word once was a norm for intellectual discourse.

Indeed, need I note that My Proofreader, The Tactician, and Fussy Wuzzy have each and all lamented the laziness of students who will not learn vocabulary and concepts and ideas?

I should be so fortunate that I might write what I mean and let my meanings choose my words, Mr. Blair [writing as "George Orwell," a name that there is no reason for me to suppose is familiar to a PhD on the roster of Puget Clowns]. After I figure out what I think and should like to convey, I then must settle for 11th-grade words and phrases [My Proofreader] that do not in any way challenge or inform or awaken or alarm fellow faculty [The Tactician] lest sensitive faculty feel hurt that I should use English in way that demands close reading, an active mind, and a willingness to learn [Fussy Wuzzy].

Do I insult post-literate readers if I alert them to a transition ["segue" is shorter, no?] in my entry as I move from letting the meaning select the words to the inconsistencies between letting the meanings select the words and Mr. Orwell's rules? How about if I call him "Orwell" below for contrast with "Blair" above?

What's more, Mr. Orwell in the very same essay enumerated rules that contradict his advice to let my meanings select my words:

##########(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. So I let meanings choose my words, then eliminate familiar idioms and tropes even if those tropes and idioms articulate exactly what I meant?

##########(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. So I let my meanings choose my words, then let the inability of my audience to handle longer words -- more syllables? more letters? -- drive out the longer even if it is clearer and more familiar than the shorter word? If I mean "understand" or "perceive," I use "ken?"

##########(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. [I'll try not to take your order literally, Mr. Orwell, since word-processors make cutting words out always possible.] So I select the words that most perfectly convey my meaning, then I see how many of them I can eliminate? After I exclude some words because I may/can, do I re-evaluate their ability to convey my meaning exactly and clearly?

##########(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. [Again, the literal reader concludes that one always should use the active voice.] So I should eliminate any meanings that might select for passive constructions? So words should not select my meanings but grammatical voice should?

##########(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. How will I know if the everyday English equivalent will convey the meaning by which I selected the foreign word -- schadenfreude -- before I applied your fifth rule?

##########(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. So I should avoid thinking or averring meanings, visualizations, or ideas that might lead to expressions that could be seen as alien, different, or issuing from some linguistic or cultural others?

I sum up Orwell's advice: Avoid communication with humans. If you must communicate with humans, do not use "palliative." Instead, say "measure that masks symptoms but does not actually cure underlying conditions." Always use "assay" rather than "assess" or "evaluate" because "assay" is shorter. Never use "professoriate" or "professoriat" but know that either spelling is accepted and that you might save an "e" by going with "professoriat" when writing in your diary.

Sordid by Faith

2010-07-17T05:59:00.000-07:00

Have faculty and students at this university been "sorted by fate" to enjoy classics?

Ten to twelve years ago a now-retired colleague shared with me that he addressed students on the first day of class with the sentiment that they were all fortunate to have been "sorted by fate" to be in that class and that classroom to contemplate some classic texts.

Someone is rather full of himself, what? Fate must be omnicompetent to bother with a dozen or two humans in Tacoma, Washington.

How do I ridicule my erstwhile colleague's sentiment? Let me count the ways.

Unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I actually count the ways below. She said she would count the ways, then she did not count.

On the other hand, in every other respect, Elizabeth Barrett Browning counts far more than I.

First, "fate" usually holds a place for and thus supplants understanding. Fate makes thinking and understanding less likely. We invoke destiny when we have no better explanation or when we do not want to formulate a more concrete, more accurate explanation. Who invokes fate relies on, if not revels in, ignorance.

"Ignorance is strength!" said some author in some classic that I was sorted by fate and assigned by a summer reading list to read.

Second, the perfect, passive participle "sorted" saves us the trouble of identifying agency beyond "fate." This usage is very close to the British "sort out," which [when transitive] means that someone arrays something by class or type, but [when intransitive] is used utterly impersonally to indicate unexplored evolution, unexplained developments, or blind contingencies without little human design. "Let's wait and see how things sort out" invites listeners to be patient while some unspecified force(s) determine advantages and disadvantages.

I suffered some Catholic guilt until I realized that heretics and the faithful had been sorted by divine will. His will be done!

Third, taken together the words "fate" and "sorted" attribute a situation to an abstract, ineffable and impersonal entity that separated us fortunates from those less fortunate, that ordered the universe to bring us into the presence of greats and greatness, and that therefore must like us -- must really, really like us.

Hard not to be happy with ourselves, the class and our class, our status, our situation, our breeding, our genetics, our . . . after that introduction to what is, after all, a college course.

Fourth, "sorted by fate" euphemizes past factors so chronic, common, and substantial that disciplines define themselves thereby. Whatever sorting fate did was ably assisted by stratification, kinship, subculture, class, status, party, conformity, courtesy, credulity, and other factors or forces about which social sciences have nattered from time to time.

You may have already won big prizes!

Fifth, the inevitability of fate excuses us from any trace of guilt or shame that our advancement comes at the expense of many others who cannot afford to attend the University of Puget Clowns or who suffer from some disadvantage(s) related to anthropology, sociology, or other subjects that might complicate moral or personal responsibility. This is especially important for self-esteem on Graduation Day: We stand at commencement like self-made men and women in part because kindly professors conditioned us to believe that fate got us into the classroom and we [great author, great expositor of author, and about 15 receptive admirers of author and expositor] did the rest.

"Sorted by fate" my ass! No wonder Plato opted to rid his ideal state of poets!

Shall we demystify just a little? Maybe a little less ignorance will make for a little more strength, Big Brother to the contrary notwithsianding?

Students who think themselves in the presence of Plato do not comprehend that multiply translated words do not make the man or the thinker. At most students circle an honored text while a teacher circuits his or her notes. Hey, kiddies. It's called a "course"* for a reason. Or as Dr. Joni Mitchell phrased the refrain:

And the seasons they go round and round,
And the painted ponies go up and down.
We're captive on the carousel of time.
We can't return; we can only look
Behind from where we came,
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.

* Sorted by Sister David into Seattle Preparatory School, I learned that "course" evolved from "cursus," the Latin for track or a road or circuit to run.

Standing By

2010-06-26T14:35:00.000-07:00

Behold the Ballast! Fear the Inert!

###########

I complied with a request from on high the other day and of course regret my cooperation. Asked to respond to a survey despite my having no dependents, I responded that I had no dependents. The web-apparatus thanked me for my participation and terminated. Perhaps I had little to contribute on that subject. Still, the survey might have solicited my views before dismissing me. That was survey etiquette when I attended graduate school.

Doubtless, my colleagues with dependents will be more solicitous of my views than the survey proved. If my views advance the interests of colleagues, I expect those colleagues to solicit my full cooperation. Many of those who seek my assistance or support will have been chronic bystanders: those who do little or nothing for others and seek to know little or nothing about others until they perceive that they have something at stake. Until they demand allies, that is, bystanders stand by.

The mass of bystanders have evinced little interest when I have served as mouthpiece for students, faculty, and staff abused by my university. Bystanders usually bear up under insults, injuries, or injustices not directed at bystanders but make appropriate sounds to extract themselves unscathed from an interaction. "I'm so sorry to hear that," they say, and they seem quite sorry to have heard anything about the university or "the community" that might get them sideways with administrators, apparatchiks, or colleagues.

"I am very sorry to hear that."

"Don't worry. In minutes it will be as if you had not heard and did not know. Next time, dive into a doorway to avoid me."

Bystanders distrust their perceptions and immobilize their cognitions unless they think that they stand to gain or to lose. Then bystanders belch platitudes, imagine insults, concoct injuries, and discover that they have always cared about justice and propriety. Then they chat up colleagues as if bystanders had not been above or beyond nearly every fray for years or decades.

Bystanders might seem to present yet another instance of economic collegiality and the hypocrisies that rationalize economic collegiality. At an individual level, bystanding may be simply self-regarding behavior. Considered as a class, however, bystanders form a mass that empowers and emboldens administrators and apparatchiks. As forces in campus policy-making, bystanders are perpetually potential and never actual. Bystanders standing by form the mass of predictable, inertial, and feckless faculty. They give administrators every benefit of every doubt by tirelessly suppressing doubt and evading information. They let apparatchiks assist the administrators by keeping themselves perpetually naive and, they think, innocent.

That the bystanders impassively stand by need not imply that they stand still. Among the most nimble bystanders are the hustlers of equality and equity. Because they are supposed to oppose injustices, they must simulate sympathy and feign surprise that sexism or racism or clientilism or favoritism have tainted personnel processes, although their ideology and rhetoric would dictate that such inequities are to be expected.

John Garfield:  "Somebody told a story.

Sure, a man at a dinner table told a story ...

and the nice people didn't laugh.

They even despised him, sure.

But they let it pass.  ..."



Dorothy McGuire:  "If you don't stop with that joke,

where do you stop?

Is that what you mean?  ...

Where do you call the halt? ...

I've been getting mad at Phil [Gregory Peck

in "Gentleman's Agreement," whence this dialogue comes]

because he expected me to fight this instead of

getting mad at those who help it along ..."



John Garfield:  "What about the rest of the dinner guests?

They're supposed to be on your side.

They didn't ..."



Dorothy McGuire:  "No, they didn't, and I didn't.

That's the trouble.

We never do."

I cannot summon much dudgeon against the gender- or race-mongers, however. Usually they are smothered by bystanders. The bystanders natter until they can excuse themselves on whatever excuse. After the nattering and amid their flight, I imagine that they congratulate themselves on fighting the good fight. Supposed to be on the side of equality and justice, they didn't. They never do. That's the trouble. Instead:

"Graffiti? How dreadful! You know, students really shouldn't be marking up school property in any manner, let alone in a sexist or nativist manner. ... "

"He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die, and he never sees the writing on the walls.” [Buffy St. Marie, "The Universal Soldier;" see "Who's to Blame?" 16 March 2007 in this blog.]

Less adroit bystanders must feign ignorance and practice impassivity. No matter what they believe that they have learned, they know nothing yet are eager, almost frantic, to learn no more. Until they have something at stake, one not only cannot fight city hall or Jones Hall but one should not. It roils campus and disrupts the community to dispute official accounts or to note Orwellian communiques.

Bystanders acquiesce. Bystanders go along that they might advance themselves as reliable, reputable, responsible colleagues in the eyes of patrons. [See "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" in this blog, 4 March 2007.] Bystanders dare to avoid conflict, awareness, and at times sapience. Confronted with a problem not defined by administrators or apparatchiks, bystanders suspend judgments and back away.

Neil Young: "How can you run when you know?" ["Ohio"]

The Bystander: "I do not know."

Bystanders know that the only problems are identified by proper authorities. Beyond such authorized, official problems, there are no problems -- except those faculty who see problems. Faculty who see problems that they have not been authorized to see are themselves problems. Bystanders do not want to augment such problems.

But we all are bystanders some of the time. When staff are sacked or furloughed or sanctioned, most faculty know little about who the staff were or are. Informed that so-and-so was dismissed for questionable reasons, we do not question. We do not even commit to a Panglossian "I suppose it is all for the best!" We cannot even "rise" to apologetics.

Instead, we preachers of civility and community stand by.

So shall I stand by when parents who were counting on benefits for their offspring rouse themselves from inertia and indifference? Shall I nod my understanding and ooze my sympathy for the parents' predicament? Shall I seem to attend to their complaints and concerns while I rehearse in my head the times when the grievant strived not to know or to know as little as possible?

Please stand by.

###########

University of Puget Clowns

2010-06-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

President PieRce called this school "The University of Puget Clowns" at graduation ceremonies. Why do I delight in that moniker?

Faithful readers of this blog know that I delight in "The University of Puget Clowns" [® Susan Resneck PieRce].

To understand why, recall dialogue from a movie now forty years old:

"Frank Burns does not know his way around an operating theater, he does not know his way around a body. And if you will have observed anything, you will have observed that Major Frank Burns is an idiot. He has flipped his wig, that he's out of his head, that he's a lousy surgeon."

"Oh on the contrary, I have observed. And Major Burns is not only a good technical surgeon, he is a good military surgeon. I have also noticed that nurses as well as enlisted men address you as 'Hawkeye.' "

"Yes because that's my name, Hawkeye Pierce. "

"Well that kind of informality is inconsistent with maximum efficiency in a military organization."

"Oh come off it, MAJOR. You put me right off my fresh fried lobster, do you realize that? I'm now going to go back to my bed, I'm going to put away the best part of a bottle of scotch... And under normal circumstances, you being normally what I would call a very attractive woman, I would have invited you back to share my little bed with me you might possibly have come. But you really put me off. I mean you... You're what we call a regular army clown"

[Thank you Internet Movie Database!]

Every time I write "University of Puget Clowns," I think of the movie MASH. I think of the armies of "regular clowns" with whom I have worked over the last 24 years. I think that I am reputed to be a funny guy yet am intentionally far less comical than many colleagues are unintentionally.

Of course, the men and [too often] women rejected by the University of Puget Clowns may not see the humor in the holders of the "Hot Lips" O'Houlihan or Frank Burns professorships.

Apparat-Chicks and Maid Men

2010-05-18T19:21:00.000-07:00

Given how few women have been employed here, this university has had more than its share of female apparatchiks.

Reflecting on "Women Against Women's Advancing" [WAWA] the other day, I reviewed the tormenters, abettors, and bystanders who have made this campus unfriendly to females over my years here.

And what got me thinking about women afflicting other women these days?

Slide 2Coining "Women Against Women" in 1991-1996 to point out a disadvantage that sexist pigs and patriarchs faced at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], I pretended to lament that male colleagues who wanted to fire or otherwise torment women usually found the victim beset by too many female colleagues to participate fully. Relatively and absolutely few women were in decision-making positions in the 1980s and 1990s, yet the women who were in such spots often beat many men to the punching. Moreover, such women took the lead in defending decisions because firing women just looks better if it appears done by women.

Elder boars could not make their way through old sows to get at, so to speak, women standing or stooping or crawling for tenure. Those old sows founded WAW, which I now have restyled "WAWA." Please compare "W Stands for Women Against Women," 24 November 2007.

Know why the Old Girls were displacing the Old Boys?

I dispensed anew with one hypothesis common in the 1990s. "The Crone Hypothesis" posited that attractive, young professors annoyed colleagues of a certain age who were losing their looks, in some cases declining little from a less than lofty start. In 1991, 1992, 1994, and 1995, fans of The Crone Hypothesis argued, women denied tenure were far too fetching for their own good.

Recall that attractive young women who spurned advances from senior colleagues would be vulnerable, but such is a different hypothesis.

Crone-hypothesizers must know, however, that tenure-rejections were less about fetching females than about Stepin Fetchit. Attractive but accommodating women got tenure and promotions. Not particularly attractive but particularly accommodating women got tenure and promotions. The Crone Hypothesis, thus, mistook a spurious subset for the general relation. The Crone Hypothesis was always more about disappointed and disappointing males disparaging females for their looks than about explaining thuggery.

He who quite occasionally despises thuggery attacks the looks of female thugs. How convenient.

No, a more persuasive if incomplete explanation follows from what one victim of thuggery called "The Asshole Clause." "The Asshole Clause" abased all of its deployers, females more than males. Let us see how.

Excellence in teaching and professional growth aside, in the 1980s and 1990s candidates for tenure had to manifest "personal and professional characteristics" lest they be rebuffed. The Faculty Code explicitly demanded that evaluees "possess" qualities that promised to make them personable and professional for decades to come. In practice, this standard for decorum and congeniality was deployed when decision-makers wanted to deny tenure [or other rewards] to candidates who too evidently had met academically and intellectually appropriate criteria.

Really? How could awarding tenure according to congeniality lead to women who obstruct or injure other women?

In the view of most academics, "personal and professional characteristics" must be anathema. To self-respecting scholars, any evaluator who would deny tenure to an otherwise qualified evaluee owing to "personal and professional characteristics" would degrade himself or herself and the process of evaluation. Indeed, "The Asshole Clause" was what most sets of standards and criteria were designed to deny. What other schools tried to fend off as a calumny, this school enunciated as a calling card.

Simply explain The Asshole Clause to colleagues from elsewhere. They only half-believe that such a standard could have been explicit. They concede that such considerations taint tenure decisions everywhere. They cannot believe that any school announced it. "That seems like an invitation to litigation."

Lo it was that, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], evaluators were expected to embrace and to enforce what most institutions denied: that personality, docility, obedience, and deference were expected of junior faculty who wanted to retain their positions.

Our musical interlude -- "I've Become Accustomed to Disgrace" from "My Fair Lady"

Worse, personality, docility, obedience, and deference were qualities gendered in application if not in conception. Male faculty might be colorful, skeptical, rambunctious, and independent without threatening or upsetting the old boars who ran the school. Females lacking in orthodoxy or orthopraxy were improper, unladylike, bitchy, or prickly. Traditional, quiet, submissive females might be dismissed and derided, but females who challenged men would be targeted. Women who made themselves useful to men would be favored. Women who showed men up would be fired.

Rogues who objected to sexual misconduct were especially dangerous and instantly targets.

Intelligent maidens who became academic "maid men" under this gendered system did not much care to acknowledge how they had become responsible, respectable, reliable colleagues, so they had to erase acknowledgement of their own humiliation and subjugation by valorizing the system of faculty evaluation and by humiliating, subjugating, and firing junior faculty who would not submit to degradation rituals.

Encounter anew, please, my entry from 4 March 2007 in this blog. Males or females who craved a reputation for respectability, reliability, and responsibility had to degrade themselves all the while praising the degradation. They still do, readers. This Stockholm Syndrome is not peculiar to Puget Clowns but is endemic and ongoing.

When the faculty in 1994-1995 moved to delete "The Asshole Clause" from the code, many of those who had imposed that clause defended it assiduously. Even among the women, this was understandable. Women who had fired women for being uppity and women who had attained their decision-making positions by being obsequious could not have been expected to acknowledge their subservience, their opportunism, and their supple spines. Instead, like Winston Smith at the close of 1984, they loved Big Brother -- or proclaimed that they did for so long that it became true.

Is a colleague -- male or female -- regaling the faculty with professions of commitment to equality or justice? Ask "How much of whose blood is this professor trying to wash away?"

Now, some women destined for the WAWA leadership went further. Some so identified with their trainers and their trainers' values that they had long since incorporated patriarchy into their psyches. Their patina of feminist sensibilities disguised their willingness or longing to please the Old Boys as some women became more Old Boy than the old boys were. By the time I arrived on campus, then, many self-proclaimed [yet male-derided] "feminists" extolled and executed orthodoxy and orthopraxy all while denying that the process was gendered at all. Long since having submitted, they saw submission not as surrender but transcendence. They were apparatchiks, defined in this blog [4 March 2007] as those beneath the level of Vice President who collaborate with administrators and justify decisions.

Not long ago, a male colleague wanted to deny what a female denied tenure had said about advancement at this school. "You cannot map gender onto everything," he told me. That phrase is clown-talk. On campus it means "You cannot notice any use of gender that I'd prefer not to acknowledge," which soon enough amounts to "You cannot map gender onto anything." [Please see other tlansrations in the entry at 19 October 2007 in this blog.]

Even so, not all socialization into the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] was gendered. Some was general, which made submission and surrender seem less gendered. To advance, tyros female or male had to voice their agreement with policies; had to honor traditions, myths, and rituals; and had to master local newspeak and doubletalk. Male and female at first acted as if they believed so that they would not be disreputable and vulnerable. Soon enough, they did believe. Worse, they forgot what it was not to believe. Tenured and promoted, these women and men were no longer at Puget Clowns. They had become Puget Clowns.

Recall a twice-told tale: The single leader of WAWA perhaps most instrumental to the demise or detriment of women on this campus was walking away from a faculty meeting with a female colleague when she waved toward me and said that I'd never get tenure at this campus because I mouthed off at faculty meetings. She was on the FAC that recommended me for tenure but not the woman she was talking to. Interesting coincidence?

Norman Bates had to deny his matricide; so too those who had to disgrace themselves to get tenure had to deny the disgrace by which they secured permanent employment. Who could deny the disgrace if assertive, candid, loud-mouthed, threatening, disruptive females were parading about campus? Better that such women not torment the maid men by their presence.

Observe and mark well women who are touted for service to this university, for employment at the University of Puget Clowns once demanded especially from women service qua SubsERVIenCE.

Who will join "Women Against Women's Advancing" next?

?

?

?

At Least One Senator Tried

2010-05-12T12:46:00.001-07:00

Amid bad faith and cynical evasions, the incoming chair of the senate offers hope.

After Randall P. McMurphy tried but failed to lift a heavy machine, he offered a resounding phrase in the screenplay to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:"

"But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that." http://sfy.r/?script=one_flew

I rehearsed that phrase several times in my head in an attempt to calm down before a report to the Faculty Senate last Monday [10 May 2010]. The always wily, always deceptive Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had reported via one of its six chairs. See "The Persistence of Blather" [11 December 2009] and "O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here" [immediately previous entry in this blog, 24 April 2010].

The incoming Chair of the Faculty Senate, in his capacity as mere senator, had asked whether the FAC might move to change the Bylaws [one chair] to match FAC practice [six allegedly co-equal chairs]. He said that he preferred adjusting the Bylaws to circumventing the Bylaws. A novel notion that! Yes, we could follow the rules and, if we would not follow the rules, change the rules so that they resemble our practice.

The feckless, accommodating, thankfully outgoing chair of the Faculty Senate produced a communication from the FAC in which the FAC updated its deceptions and evasions. Does any member of the faculty remember when we had a Faculty Senate Chair who was not supine?

The member of the FAC presenting the report declined to pursue such a change. It would be unsual for a member of the FAC to take a straight path to any object or to acknowledge the authority of the faculty or the senate!

Then, in a usurpation that would have been merely hilarious were it not so pathetic and fatuous, the spokesperson attempted to "charge" the incoming chair to change the Bylaws himself. Ya gotta love FAC logic. A senator attempting to induce the FAC to follow the rules is asked to serve the FAC by changing rules that the FAC is content to flout.

Then senators were regaled with a flagrant misreading of a passage in the Bylaws that, if one were unfamiliar with standard English, might fool a dull sophomore. But let's keep it positive: how many FAC members have failed of our expectations for dull sophomores?

Rather than in anger, how might I respond to such vaudeville?

Shall I repeat "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown?"

Shall I rejoice that the spokesperson for the FAC wore flame-resistant pants amid her rendering of the Bylaws?

Shall I remind myself that many members of the FAC could not have found the meeting?

Shall I rebuke the faculty anew for electing to the FAC colleagues of so little credibility or ability?

Nope. Nope. Nope. And nope.

Shall I rejoice that the incoming chair of the Faculty Senate will not subvert the rules or suborn those who do?

Yep.

At least he tried.

God damn it! At least the new chair did that.

Amid the loons, one sane senator spoke truth to a Power Committee.

At the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], that is a miracle.

On the other hand, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], loons run the asylum.

Let's see if the new chair will be leader or loon.

Can he do much worse than his predecessors?

O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here

2010-04-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

Why do we let "souls undone undoing others" on the Faculty Advancement Committee preach at naifs?

A member of the faculty for almost two years went to a meeting with erstwhile members of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] to hear their advice for faculty who will undergo their third-year assistant professor review, the first full-scale assessment of their teaching, service, professional growth, and likableness. She learned so much that she returned to her department asking if one really cannot have an open file for tenure.

Well played, FAC authorities! The faculty have in this century made ONE change regarding tenure files, and you clowns managed to fuzz it up so that a PhD walks away from "mentoring" confused about a matter that she understood correctly when she entered the room. And you teach for a living?

That some former members of the FAC push closed files cannot surprise us. Members of the FAC have complained that since 2005 -- when candidates for tenure were permitted to select an open file -- letter-writers have been guarded in their assessments. [Can't have guarded letters. Calumnies provide the FAC "complete" information.] Now FAC emeriti instruct virgins that closed files are truly advisable. Maybe the "sophomore" who spoke to me misunderstood, but how coincidental that she misunderstood in a manner that suited the view of some FAC conspirators of recent years. And what a coincidence that, according to one or more attendees, each FAC veteran present indicated a strong preference for closed files.

To get, through deception of the uninformed and unwary, what they cannot get through meetings of the faculty, will closed-minded FAC bunko artists stop at nothing?

I do not blame the selected FAC alums alone. I also blame the decision-maker(s) who selected these closed-minded FAC alums for this forum. More important, I blame faculty who larded the FAC with fatheads. Those who have made careers from duping naifs in classrooms can scarcely be expected to develop new skills and proclivities once appointed to the FAC. When we faculty nominate shuckers and jivers to the FAC, we enable blatherers to bamboozle the gullible.

Not content to muddle through evaluation of personnel for three years or less, the few, the proud, the cloying suffuse campus with their baleful blarney even after their terms have ended.

Once deceivers and believers make the FAC, misdirection and bad faith become part of the way of working if not the way of life. The bylaws require the FAC to appoint one chair; the members of the FAC knowingly ignored the bylaws for years, then engaged in the subterfuge of naming every member of the FAC chair. This flouting too may be blamed in part on the faculty, for the Faculty Senate knows that the FAC is rejecting a mandate for which they do not care. Chairs of the Faculty Senate and senators do nothing about it.

But of course colleagues pretend to believe the FAC when the FAC says it assiduously adheres to authority.

On the FAC colleagues exemplify Orwell's proposition that the great enemy of clarity is insincerity. Like essays from desultory students, FAC letters celebrate murk and sloppiness as if they were virtues. Euphemistic encomia laud for their excellent professional growth evaluees with no professional growth but friends on the FAC or patrons in high places. Disfavored evaluees find their students' evaluations categorized in ways obviously at variance with the most straightforward readings to conjure an "excellence gap" in teaching. [Why should the FAC limit its bad faith to readings of the code or the bylaws?] The FAC then stonewalls the president on the rare occasions when he troubles himself to inquire into their "reasoning" and why it makes little sense.

Thus do "made men" unmake themselves.

None of the above should surprise anyone who has been at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] for even a few years.

As a prior entry in "Rump Parliament" [1-14-10] counseled, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

What may surprise even jaded veterans, however, is just how doltish FAC parolees can be. Did a recent member of the FAC truly say that he advises colleagues to select closed files for the same reason that he advises his students to waive access to letters of recommendation? He claimed that he tells faculty and student alike that readers take confidential letters more seriously, did he?

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Please permit me to advise Dr. Dumkopf about colleagues and about students/advisees in turn.

Favoring or disfavoring colleagues because they selected open or closed files flouts the Faculty Code. If one makes a habit of violating the code, I suppose that admitting violations forthrightly is more virtuous than concealing one's misdemeanors.

As for advisees or students, counsel your recommendees to waive their right to see the letter, then give them copies. That way, you protect your students and advisees both against the prejudices of the closed-minded and against any temptations to write what you would just as soon the subject of the letter not know you wrote. If you would not have your advisee or student read it, do not write it; if you must write what you would not have your student or advisee read, do not agree to write "for" the student or advisee.

Why do the simplest professional and ethical puzzles stymie the simple-minded?

I admit readily that the FAC might advise naifs to go with a closed file for their first FAC evaluation. That is one way to smoke out the assassins in the ranks of a program, department, or school. If mentors communicated that stratagem clearly and repeatedly, they might assist tyros.

However, if we advise newcomers to choose closed files to elicit negatives while probationary faculty may remedy defects real or concocted, wouldn't probationary faculty immediately infer that come tenure time they must select open files to be able to counter negatives that dissemblers will pour into the process?

Beyond that, junior colleagues should seek colleagues with reputations for candor and awareness and should neither seek nor accept mentoring from the apologists or apparatchiks. How are inexperienced faculty to sort apologists or apparatchiks from candid and aware veterans? They should inquire of those who proffer advice the capacities in which they have served the university. Apologists and apparatchiks do not work for free. They work for patrons who sanction negatively or positively. Colleagues frequently appointed over the years to positions of responsibility owing to their reputations for reliability have, in effect, been outed by their appointers. [Re-read "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" in this blog, 4 March 2007.] Many who have done time on the FAC are seldom or never paraded before junior faculty because of the likelihood that they will commit candor or acknowledge truths inconvenient for the powerful.

Joanne Herring: "Why is Congress saying one thing and doing nothing?"
Charlie Wilson: "Well, tradition mostly."

Naifs: "Why do so many members of the FAC advise faculty so poorly?"
Wild Bill: "Well, tradition mostly."

Third-year assistant professors should never listen to FAC members who are ignorant of "local" presuppositions, habits, or traditions. The FAC members will argue for stripped-down files because that makes the work of the FAC easier. They are prosecuting their own lassitude and preserving their own latitude. Having counseled evaluees to "keep it simple," members of the FAC will then sniff that the code explicitly burdens evaluees with making the case for advancement and will resolve silences or gaps against those who have listened to FAC advice.

"And you'll be amazed at the gaze / On their faces as they sentence you"

Rather, preparation of the newbie's file should be informed by the newbie's "local" culture, peers in department, program, or school. The third-year assistant should ask those who will supply specialized, expert assessments what those evaluators would prefer to be available.

Don't tell anybody, but the members of the FAC read only a small subset of submitted materials anyway.

Oh? The FAC members did not make that tidbit clear while urging skinny files?

I am shocked and amazed!

Miscreants Out Themselves

2010-04-07T14:41:00.000-07:00

What our colleagues decry, they often make needful.

Amid his monologue in the meeting of the full faculty held 6 April 2010, a colleague professed concern about the second duty proposed for the Faculty Senate's Committee on Diversity. He claimed that many colleagues or departments would object to the Diversity Committee's participation "... in the development of initiatives that enable the university to hire new faculty from historically under-represented populations and to support better the retention and success of such faculty."

Yes, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] such a provision passes for audacity.

I suppose he was correct. Many colleagues would object to hiring from under-represented populations and supporting new faculty. After all, what we have done so far has worked so well! Do we have to keep priming the pump? And, of course, catering to social Luddites is the way to plan for the future.

That the speaker hailed from a department infamous for its shortcomings in hiring and support should have surprised no long-time observer. After all, faculty who object to scrutiny or assistance almost always come from departments, programs, or schools that should be scrutinized and assisted most.

To assist the objector and his department, I offer infra some generalizations about diversity at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce].

The more a department opposes scrutiny of any kind [not just diversity], the more that department should be scrutinized.

The more strenuously a department refuses assistance, the more that department needs assistance.

Departments, programs, or schools should have nothing to hide from colleagues or administrators. Indeed, competent departments, like competent scholars, welcome comments and criticisms because that is how competent scholars and competent departments perform their best. In evaluation of students or of peers, confident professionals welcome additional pairs of eyes because "outsiders" may catch errors or misjudgments that insiders missed.

In hiring as in scholarship, if you fear error or injustice more than criticism or questioning, you seek the opinions of other professionals. Referees for journals or publishers do not know as much about my data or topics as I do, yet they manage to alert me to missteps and misphrasings. Go figure!

When departments, programs, or schools hide from scrutiny or supervision, they invite us all to ask what they are hiding. If recruitment is on the up and up, why dodge review? If you believe you did your work well, why not have someone check that work? If candidates from chronically under-represented groups tend not to make the cut in your searches for good reasons, why not share those good reasons with others?

Experienced Puget Clowns faculty know that these questions answer themselves. Recruitment all too often is not on the up and up; the work was done sloppily or deviously; the reasons, far from good, would be unacceptable if known.

------------------------

By the way: Ever notice how perverse arguments and arguers become whenever diversity issues arise?

This colleague argues that BHERT [Bias-Hate Emergency Reaction Team] or something like it is utterly necessary. In the course of her argument, she makes it plain that she should never serve on BHERT because she is overzealous, self-righteous, and dopey.

After the meeting, another colleague argues that the meeting revealed the zealotry that makes diversity programs so dangerous. In making his argument, however, he reveals the atavism that makes diversity programs so necessary.

Am I the only one who notices these things?

Confederacy of Naked Emperors

2010-03-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

How redolent the phrase; how repulsive the image!

Long ago on a campus far away from Tackytown, a few academics came to characterize faculty meetings as a "confederacy of naked emperors."

"Naked emperors," of course, recalls "The Emperor's New Clothes" [see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes]. Hans Christian Andersen told a variant on the tale of tricking a none-too-bright monarch into acting as if non-existent raiment were resplendent. Told that the sartorial splendor will be obvious to the competent and the innocent, the emperor must first act as if his new suit does not leave him naked lest the trickster tailors "discover" the emperor to be incompetent and corrupted. Then the emperor must delude himself of the magnificence of his new "threads" so that he can parade in the nude among his subjects. In some versions, the emperor even gets past the child so innocent that he can say, "Look! The emperor is naked." Now that is self-delusion. But do not overlook the subjects who professed to admire the new suit.

"Naked emperors" captures the vanity and pretentiousness of academics. Among academics as among others, wily operators can only con those who are not honest. Moreover, attend to the sequencing. Incompetent or corrupt academics encourage flatterers and clientele to lavish praise for virtues that the praised do not possess but ought to. Fulsome flattery or flatulence then turns the head of the academic [and the stomach of anyone with common sense and powers of perception at least equal to their powers of suspending disbelief]. Convinced that their colleagues manifest incompetence or malice if they do not join the praises for those not praiseworthy, the flattered cleaves to confederates who get, prolong, and further the delusions. Taken in by their own blather, these nudists glory in their greatness. They fool themselves about fooling others. They find other naked emperors, who must maintain the pretense, and the emperors confederate to delude one another as they delude themselves.

Usually, one does not want an academic to be unclothed in the presence of sentient beings, but "naked" conveys the more pleasing image of pretentious fops who fool themselves while attempting to fool others. The nudity conveys the peril: woe unto all colleagues who see through the pretense and behold the nakedness. Holy Medusa! Wholly Medusa?

In addition, I think that the term "confederacy" works as no synonym quite would. "Conspiracy" or "cabal" might connote practicality or planning, both unlikely among academics. "Confederacy" suggests, by contrast, an aloof alliance preserved by exchanges of favors. The exchanges need not be planned. Fidelity need not last into the next exchange. Opportunism reigns among all who must hide from themselves and from others their inadequacies.

Most "coalitions" involve candid acknowledgment of opportunism and interest, so "coalitions" might not capture the mutual interdependence of pretenders and those who pretend along with the pretenders.

"Congress" has more talented dissemblers, so "confederacy" works better than "congress."

"Collusion" might understate the sheer necessity behind confederation. Collusion may be ephemeral. Those who collude this year may be subjected to collusion that excludes themselves next year. "Confederacy" builds on the Latin for a treaty or compact. This imparts an ongoing character to pretenders and pretending-alongside, to an ongoing "contract of depravity" between/among flattered and flatterers.

So it's gotta be "confederacy."

At the next faculty meeting, watch as lunatics swap stories, favors, and spit. Colleagues by turns preen and posture before admiring confederates, then join the audience to swoon at the blather of others.

After a short lecture, a colleague rises to praise the lecturer and poses a question that the lecturer answered in the opening three minutes of the lecture. ADHD [Attention Deficit Hypocritical Disorder] is common among naked emperors.

A naked emperor regales the assembled with an impassioned speech utterly unrelated to any business in a meeting and utterly unburdened with facts. The other naked emperors join the formation renowned as "The Loon Coalition" to reiterate the necessity of the first emperor's eloquence and erudition.

A narcissistic blatherskite intones a blatantly obvious point then luxuriates as other naked emperors argue about whether the blatherskite has displayed more perspicuity or perspicacity.

When you see episodes such as the above, it is important to translate. "Professor Dithers makes a fascinating observation that we all are liable to overlook," for example, is the emperor's code for "My, Professor Dithers, but you are looking very fashionable today. Are those trousers new? They nicely display your manly bulges."

For a second example, "I want to thank Professor Dodders for all of the hard work that obviously went into her utterly unrehearsed remarks" is emperor's code for "Professor Dodders, you are as much a fashion plate as you are a scholar."

In classrooms and other venues in which the credulous and the cowed congregate, nudists glory in inadequacies displayed but never pronounced.

Recalling My Letter

2010-03-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

Waiting out a colleague's fate, I remember my own tenure-decision.

As I await for a colleague "the lame feet of salvation" (Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks") from a committee that too often plays "death the redeemer" (Ibid.), I recall waiting for word from the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] when I was considered for tenure.

I had a unanimous endorsement from my department and letters from colleagues at Harvard and other creditable institutions. Still, I had not kept my mouth shut and "the asshole clause" -- possession of appropriate personal and professional characteristics -- had yet to be excised from the Faculty Code. In the semester I stood/stooped for tenure, I had noted in the Faculty Senate that the general education core had yet to pass according to rules that the faculty had agreed to. Throughout the renegotiation of general education in 1990-1991, I had questioned such prescriptions as "Science in Context," calling them pork-barrel projects and an "International POlitical Economy" syllabus that was risible. Before that, I had questioned the delay of fraternity and sorority rush on the ground that the faculty had no business saying when clubs could recruit.

Moreover, a member of the FAC had warned me not to disagree with the dean again after a dean so calm that he was nearly comatose had struck me over a governance dispute. At first I thought the member of the FAC was joking, but he made it clear he was serious. "You're saying that this university is so chickenshit that my disagreeing with the dean and my getting struck by the dean might doom me?" I asked rhetorically. One sixth of the FAC there and then assured me that this university did not need troublemakers. [This was before I learned to say, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Please see the entry in this blog for 14 January 2010.]

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had at least two advantages. First, I was a male. It would be some years before I learned just how advantageous that Y-chromosome was. Second, a contemporary bereft of a Y-chromosome was given to obeying federal law on sexual harassment despite sentiments in her department such as the immortal, "If she followed the law, then that law is wrong!" The FAC lavished ammunition on the whistleblower. Maybe they ran out of ammunition (Admiral Stockdale, 1992) before me. [The university ran out of ammunition when she sued and got a huge settlement. She threw a great party, but I still miss her.]

By the time the FAC sent me its letter, I was in Vermont. I opened the letter and smiled that the FAC had recommended me for tenure. Then I read the letter aloud to my friend. She was a voracious reader and learned, so she gasped along with me as solecisms and errors in the letter accumulated. I do not think that she was much impressed with the institution at which I had just received tenure. "This letter was written by a professor?" she asked. "Nope," I answered. "It was written by six professors."

In the final paragraph of the letter, the FAC explicitly hoped that I would conform more and squawk less than I had in my probationary period. I found the FAC's presumption droll. [Think Victor Laszlo in "Casablanca:" "If I didn't give {names of the underground leaders} to you in a concentration camp where you had more persuasive methods at your disposal, I certainly won't give them to you now."]

When I returned to Tacoma, the main author of that letter took me to dinner to explain away its final paragraph. He apparently did not want me to think that the letter, especially in that final paragraph, meant what it said. I cut him off. "My letter will always say what the words literally meant. Anything you say now is gloss beside the point." My interlocutor seemed flummoxed and frustrated by my unwillingness to go along with his re-mystifying. How lacking in civility of me after all he had done for me!

Thus did I come to understand why my pre-tenure period was called probationary. When I completed my probation, I received a lifetime sentence.

Sunshine Thugs

2010-03-06T08:37:00.000-08:00

Are you a Sunshine Thug?

Our colleague is a Sunshine Thug. He may even be The Sunshine Thug.

The Sunshine Thug beams to see me as he asks me how my life is going. The Sunshine Thug's face shines on everyone most of the time. The Sunshine Thug radiates diffidence about his own competence as a means of suggesting that whomever he speaks with is a far better member of the faculty than he.

Do not be taken in! The pleasantries are mannered rather than truly civil or cordial. His sunshine is shtick.

If his betters close a door and grant Dr. Sunshine confidentiality, his dark side will come out. If it nets him a course release, he'll support a decision to push you down a well. Give him a title, no matter how trivial, then watch him dispatch his good friends, his cherished colleagues, his longtime department, or anyone else if it might please those who can grant him favors or save him bother. Smiling all the while and professing to be uncertain what has happened or why, this Mack the Knife flashes his shark teeth as he fingers the blade out of sight.

Having alluded to Bertolt Brecht, I am uncertain whether I now should steal from Edmond Rostand. Rostand has his hero Cyrano denounce some Sunshine Thugs. These folks "seek for the patronage of some great man, and like a creeping vine on a tall tree, crawl upward, where [they] cannot stand alone ..." Clinging to the lofty, Sunshine Thugs "... play the buffoon in the vile hope of teasing out a smile on some cold face ..." and make their "knees callous, and cultivate a supple spine ... ." Shaded by their patrons and protectors, the Sunshine Thugs "[t]ickle the horns of Mammon with [their] left hand, while their right, too proud to know his partner's business, takes in the fee ..." Betraying whatever smidgeon of talent they may have and usually do not need, Sunshine Thugs "[u]se the fire God gave [them] to burn incense all day long under the nose of wood and stone ..." even as they burn vulnerable colleagues out of the sight of most colleagues. In sum, Rostand/de Bergerac might say that Sunshine Thugs "[c]alculate, scheme, [live in fear], love more to make a visit than a poem, seek introductions, favors, influences..." all while acting the part of the affable, slightly daffy academic too distracted to have any part in dastardly deeds in which they play a prominent but latent part.

Shall I invoke Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, MN, instead?

You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning

You got a lotta nerve
To say you gota helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that's winning

...

You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, "How are you?" "Good luck"
But you don't mean it

When you know as well as me
You'd rather see me paralyzed
Why don't you just come out once
And scream it

...

If in public you praise excrement as excellence while in private you serve anyone who can do you any good or any harm, you may be a Sunshine Thug. If you loudly, proudly endorse independence even as you punish independents in any circumstance that hides your other face, you may be a Sunshine Thug. If you are craven in the shadows but gay in the daylight, you may be a Sunshine Thug.

Please do not be a Sunshine Thug.

What's Wrong with Collusion?

2010-02-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

Do veterans of the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] hear what they have become when they quibble over corruptions of peer evaluation?

Upon hearing scuttlebutt about collusion in a tenure evaluation, colleagues with 50 years of service at our fine university independently inquired, "What's wrong with collusion?"

Such a question asked without irony limns a depravity* of faculty evaluation here. I have quoted from "The Hustler" more than once the jarring characterization of Sarah Packer [Piper Laurie]: "We have a contract of depravity. All we have to do is pull the blinds down."

Some Puget clowns no longer pull the blinds down.

* To go all etymological on your butt, to deprave is to descend ["de-"] into crookedness ["pravus"]. Perhaps our colleagues were straight and whole when they arrived so long ago. Their speech illuminates what has become of them.