Institutional occlusion is the next best thing to transparency.
They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.
Robinson Jeffers wrote the line above as Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Jeffers’ line reminded me that reaccreditation looms. Among other horrors “the culture of evidence,” a shibboleth crafted by rascals in the 1990s to generate propaganda for the reaccreditation report and to surveil faculty and staff, will echo. “The culture of evidence” or some other reheated then over-heated argot will summon the credulous and the taskless to heap information without provenance or consequence onto the Logger version of a Texas A&M bonfire. This agglomeration will collapse before it can light academe but not before it secures reaccreditation. No one will be killed as a result, for reaccreditation reports are designed to implode neatly to bury unsightly truths.
Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but … men favorably
Representative of massed humanity.
The reaccreditation heap will fill some room where outside authorities will inspect exhibits before conversing with campus notables. Artifices, fabrications, and rationalizations that make up the heap will reveal images that institutional potentates think efficacious, which in turn will give the visitors something to gab about in their report. Ritual requirements met, the accreditation team will file a report, our school will be certified anew, and various ministries of truth will claim that all is well because a collage was warmly received.
Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant.
As Jeffers counsels us, we should not fulminate or ridicule what we might perceive and understand. The reaccreditation report will be an official narrative. As such it will emphasize the institution’s struggles, accomplishments, and dreams as well as the institution’s complacency, failures, and fears. Every major claim in the report will as much deny perceived shortcomings as affirm perceived strengths, so the few faculty who take what is on the surface and ask what the surface occludes will behold an institutional X-ray. Most faculty will contribute little to the report and will read less of the report.
Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.
Thanks, Robinson! I now feel better about reaccreditation than about blitzkrieg.
Showing posts with label Office of Communications. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Office of Communications. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Thursday, May 10, 2007
I is for Inter-disciplinary
If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary or interstitial.
At the University of Puget Sound, ironic labels rule. The “Susan Resneck Pierce Atrium” is a foyer, not an atrium. Ostensibly endowed chairs have no matching funds but all the pedigree and fecundity of a mule. A colleague is named the “Alfred Packer Professor of Culinary Studies” despite his inability to boil water or make S’mores. Racial and ethnic “diversity” are fabricated largely absent Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. And “inter-disciplinary” programs do not cross disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of truth so much as they elude disciplines in pursuit of marketing.
Take International Political Economy [IPE]. At most universities across the United States, IPE is a quarter or a third of International Relations, one of four or so official subfields of Political Science. What makes UPS think that a sub-sub-discipline crosses disciplinary lines? Ironic labels do.
If one calls a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs do most dogs have? Four – because calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make a dog’s tail a leg. If one calls a certain breed of dog a cross between a dog and bear, that does not make the critter inter-speciated unless reifying ironic expressions and substituting labels for actualities is an institutional habit.
This is yet another “Iron Law of Emulation.” Curricular con artists adorn some existing sub-sub-discipline with dilettante doo-dads and wannabe widgets to hoodwink the unwary [students, parents, the Curriculum Committee, and trustees] but, so they will not lose recruits to pre-existing majors, copy the name of the established area of study. Professors eager to “branch out” and departments that long to be rid of dabblers untrained in what they now would teach dignify their exodus with marketing slogans. “Political economy” sounds like it ought to cross disciplinary lines, despite the dozen or more offerings in Politics and Government that concern political economy among other things and several in Economics that do the same. “International Studies” will not work because that is what the offshoot actually is or resembles. Where is the ease of emulation, the security of redundancy, or the thrill of deception in that?
At UPS, programs soon enough will be taken for what the faculty wish they were. The labeling and the marketing work. IPE has become at once inner-disciplinary [that is, enlarging a part of a part of Political Science into a major] and interstitial far more than inter-disciplinary. Interstitiality is effected by excluding from the enterprise those disciplines whose boundaries are allegedly being crossed. The most demanding, most discipline-specific features of economics and of political science must be diluted or dispensed with altogether to create the mislabeled international studies program that UPS knows as IPE.
Dilettantism was the inevitable result once the mislabeling had been executed. Marketing expenditures and extra-campus publicity dictated that the enterprise not be allowed to fail. Courses had to be staffed, so IPE turned to colleagues with credentials, expertise, and experience at best peripheral to economics or to political science. Such instructors proclaimed to be crossing disciplinary boundaries careened across, around, and about the edges of disciplines about which they knew little or nothing. They might have made excellent dabblers for an international studies multi-disciplinary program, but they were scarcely fit for inner-disciplinary or interstitial work.
Those who guard the borders of longstanding disciplines do condemn work that “falls between the stools” of established lines of study, so truly inter-disciplinary incursions or excursions are needful. Truly inter-disciplinary work, however, does not consist in declaring that one missed the barstools because the barroom floor is a frontier of learning. Still less does work become inter-disciplinary through throes of anti-disciplinary humbug [see www2.ups.edu/ipe/whatisipe.htm] by which the floor is declared to be up and the barstools down.
At the University of Puget Sound, ironic labels rule. The “Susan Resneck Pierce Atrium” is a foyer, not an atrium. Ostensibly endowed chairs have no matching funds but all the pedigree and fecundity of a mule. A colleague is named the “Alfred Packer Professor of Culinary Studies” despite his inability to boil water or make S’mores. Racial and ethnic “diversity” are fabricated largely absent Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. And “inter-disciplinary” programs do not cross disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of truth so much as they elude disciplines in pursuit of marketing.
Take International Political Economy [IPE]. At most universities across the United States, IPE is a quarter or a third of International Relations, one of four or so official subfields of Political Science. What makes UPS think that a sub-sub-discipline crosses disciplinary lines? Ironic labels do.
If one calls a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs do most dogs have? Four – because calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make a dog’s tail a leg. If one calls a certain breed of dog a cross between a dog and bear, that does not make the critter inter-speciated unless reifying ironic expressions and substituting labels for actualities is an institutional habit.
This is yet another “Iron Law of Emulation.” Curricular con artists adorn some existing sub-sub-discipline with dilettante doo-dads and wannabe widgets to hoodwink the unwary [students, parents, the Curriculum Committee, and trustees] but, so they will not lose recruits to pre-existing majors, copy the name of the established area of study. Professors eager to “branch out” and departments that long to be rid of dabblers untrained in what they now would teach dignify their exodus with marketing slogans. “Political economy” sounds like it ought to cross disciplinary lines, despite the dozen or more offerings in Politics and Government that concern political economy among other things and several in Economics that do the same. “International Studies” will not work because that is what the offshoot actually is or resembles. Where is the ease of emulation, the security of redundancy, or the thrill of deception in that?
At UPS, programs soon enough will be taken for what the faculty wish they were. The labeling and the marketing work. IPE has become at once inner-disciplinary [that is, enlarging a part of a part of Political Science into a major] and interstitial far more than inter-disciplinary. Interstitiality is effected by excluding from the enterprise those disciplines whose boundaries are allegedly being crossed. The most demanding, most discipline-specific features of economics and of political science must be diluted or dispensed with altogether to create the mislabeled international studies program that UPS knows as IPE.
Dilettantism was the inevitable result once the mislabeling had been executed. Marketing expenditures and extra-campus publicity dictated that the enterprise not be allowed to fail. Courses had to be staffed, so IPE turned to colleagues with credentials, expertise, and experience at best peripheral to economics or to political science. Such instructors proclaimed to be crossing disciplinary boundaries careened across, around, and about the edges of disciplines about which they knew little or nothing. They might have made excellent dabblers for an international studies multi-disciplinary program, but they were scarcely fit for inner-disciplinary or interstitial work.
Those who guard the borders of longstanding disciplines do condemn work that “falls between the stools” of established lines of study, so truly inter-disciplinary incursions or excursions are needful. Truly inter-disciplinary work, however, does not consist in declaring that one missed the barstools because the barroom floor is a frontier of learning. Still less does work become inter-disciplinary through throes of anti-disciplinary humbug [see www2.ups.edu/ipe/whatisipe.htm] by which the floor is declared to be up and the barstools down.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Who’s to Blame?
We’re the universal soldiers, and we really are to blame.
In her “Universal Soldier,” Buffy Sainte-Marie < http://www.creative-native.com/lyrics/univelyr.htm> helps us to fix blame for the concert of depravity that faculty governance has become and long been.
Sainte-Marie explains why members of Power Committees [PCs] mutually pledge confidentiality to defeat oversight, to promote unawareness, and to encourage apathy: “… he knows he shouldn't kill, and he knows he always will, kill you for me my friend and me for you.” PC insiders would just as soon not have to account for the indefensible. The Confidentiality Con means that they never have to.
Sainte-Marie accounts as well for how and why faculty allow themselves to shirk self-governance in favor of ignorance and equanimity amid injustices: “ … he says it's for the peace of all. 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.”
Apparatchiks, apologists, and administrators protest that they do not relish their decisions or duties and that they are only following orders, but “… without him, … Caesar would have stood alone. He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war, and without him all this killing can’t go on.”
All who believe in faculty governance rather than administrative prerogative should remember Ms. Sainte-Marie’s conclusion:
He's the universal soldier and he really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.
Whoever would exploit faculty expects faculty to be credulous, complacent, cooperative, and – above all! – civil. Whenever we trust administrators, apparatchiks, apologists, or their associates, we become accessories after the fact. Whenever our civility, credulity, complacency, and cooperation assure decision-makers that we will go along with almost any injustice or outrage, we become accessories before the fact for the next disappeared colleague.
If you do not care to be part of the problem, try a little civil disobedience. When you are told that a situation has been “addressed” by a power committee or “handled” by an administrator, regard that communiqué as itself lacking in civility.
Treat releases from the Office of Communications as if they were appeals for you to donate your child to the latest schemes of some neocon death cult.
And the next time some mouthpiece claims that the University of Puget Sound takes “academic honesty” seriously, screw up your courage and ask “And is the school for or against?”
Next – “X Marks the Spot” – Every communication stresses its misinformation most forcefully.
In her “Universal Soldier,” Buffy Sainte-Marie < http://www.creative-native.com/lyrics/univelyr.htm> helps us to fix blame for the concert of depravity that faculty governance has become and long been.
Sainte-Marie explains why members of Power Committees [PCs] mutually pledge confidentiality to defeat oversight, to promote unawareness, and to encourage apathy: “… he knows he shouldn't kill, and he knows he always will, kill you for me my friend and me for you.” PC insiders would just as soon not have to account for the indefensible. The Confidentiality Con means that they never have to.
Sainte-Marie accounts as well for how and why faculty allow themselves to shirk self-governance in favor of ignorance and equanimity amid injustices: “ … he says it's for the peace of all. 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.”
Apparatchiks, apologists, and administrators protest that they do not relish their decisions or duties and that they are only following orders, but “… without him, … Caesar would have stood alone. He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war, and without him all this killing can’t go on.”
All who believe in faculty governance rather than administrative prerogative should remember Ms. Sainte-Marie’s conclusion:
He's the universal soldier and he really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.
Whoever would exploit faculty expects faculty to be credulous, complacent, cooperative, and – above all! – civil. Whenever we trust administrators, apparatchiks, apologists, or their associates, we become accessories after the fact. Whenever our civility, credulity, complacency, and cooperation assure decision-makers that we will go along with almost any injustice or outrage, we become accessories before the fact for the next disappeared colleague.
If you do not care to be part of the problem, try a little civil disobedience. When you are told that a situation has been “addressed” by a power committee or “handled” by an administrator, regard that communiqué as itself lacking in civility.
Treat releases from the Office of Communications as if they were appeals for you to donate your child to the latest schemes of some neocon death cult.
And the next time some mouthpiece claims that the University of Puget Sound takes “academic honesty” seriously, screw up your courage and ask “And is the school for or against?”
Next – “X Marks the Spot” – Every communication stresses its misinformation most forcefully.
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