Apparat-Chicks and Maid Men

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?

Coining "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?

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The Good Ol' Days

The University of Puget Sound in the early 1990s: The Myth of the Cave playing to rave reviews from prisoners inured to shackles.

A Puget Sound retiree reminded me today of this university in the early 1990s. I may have conveyed some of this narrative, but I want to contribute to the oral history of those times.

When the president of Puget Sound announced that he intended to retire in one year, administrators and one or more executives of the Faculty Senate conferred on the process for selection of the next CEO of UPS. In those days, Faculty Senate chairs tended to shill for the administrators to a far greater degree than in the later 1990s and early 21st century. The administrators and their apparatchiks announced, among other things, that faculty would select three faculty for the presidential selection committee via the process used for seating faculty on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. That is, faculty would submit names and, pending approval of the trustees, the three named faculty would be on the committee.

No other faculty would know the names of candidates or interviewees. No one interviewing on or near campus would meet faculty. The Dean of the University, through the chair of the Faculty Senate, distributed photocopies of arguments for such secrecy. Indeed, the chair of the Faculty Senate reminded senators than PLU had recently been poised to hire a new president but had been prevented owing to an upsurge from faculty who disliked the choice. When an as-yet-untenured senator asked why it was better for faculty to suffer whomever the committee selected rather than to voice objections prospectively, I was rebuffed.

Then I asked why the indirect election was needful. The Dean intoned, as he sometimes did in defense of administrative brakes on direct election of members of the FAC, that otherwise the faculty might directly elect faculty from the same department or representative of some clique. This pretended solicitude for representation of the faculty made me wince, for even in my early years I had seen through the pretense.

I was somewhat surprised, nonetheless, when three faculty approved by the trustees [or administrators -- other than what administrators or their flunkies told trustees, trustees knew little about faculty then or later] included two faculty with PhDs in chemistry and not a single humanist. As a political scientist, I was not surprised that the selected faculty were more representative of administration dogma than of the teaching faculty. The Dean's concern for representation of the faculty failed elementary skepticism: "What would one expect an administrator to say?" That administrators and trustees were audacious enough to undermine their only announced rationale for indirect election surprised me. Usually deceptions are better protected from detection. [This eerily foreshadowed the presidency of the successful candidate: she probably fibbed about as often as her predecessor, but she did so in ways that made it unmistakeable to everyone except the most reputable and reliable faculty that she was fibbing; indeed, she seemed to me to revel in having power to mislead with impunity.]

When the Chair of the Board of Trustees later spoke to a faculty meeting, I asked him why the trustees were keeping faculty away from would-be presidents. His face reddened. He sputtered that he knew nothing about that and that trustees did not care who represented the faculty or how many faculty met with candidates. The chair of the board thus exposed as deceitful those who had claimed that the trustees wanted the process to proceed in the way it did.

Once the deceit of the Chair of the Faculty Senate and the Dean of the University had been exposed, the process went forward. I could not find a dozen faculty who knew and cared that all but three of the faculty had been closeted lest candidates or trustees meet the zany loons who do the teaching. When I raised the matter with a 15-year veteran, he croaked, "You'd argue with dean if he said it was raining." I must concede his point. If the dean complained about the rain on a dry day, I should argue. I thought the more pertinent hypothetical was that if that if the dean told that veteran that black was white, that veteran would act as if he believed the dean if rewards sufficed.

The rewards must have flowed because, to my knowledge, that 15-year veteran confronted mendacious, manipulative administrators exactly twice before he retired. Mostly, he mumbled protests and deconstructed absurdities that issued from Jones Hall. Still, that put him far ahead of most of the faculty who had been hired in the 1970s and had prospered in the 1980s. Those faculty not only held their peace but also reveled in their obsequiousness. Veterans traduced newbies who doubted the dubious or observed the obvious. Every day in every way, the university was improving. Pavlovian faculty "freely" associated improvements with going along with each administrative gag. Those who gagged at administrative euphemisms or misdirection lacked the appropriate "personal and professional characteristics" for Puget Sound. Faculty evaluation procedures and other discipline would deal with thralls less than grateful for their subjection.

And why shouldn't the uninquisitive and the credulous rejoice in their shackles? Cheerful credulity and instrumental ignorance profit the shackled in honors, programs, and a reputation for being respectable and responsible. In addition, docile and reticent apologists and apparatchiks have more time for pursuits they value, like pretending to do research.

Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Most alternatives, Kenneth Burke reminded us, need not exclude other alternatives. Many trade-offs can be transformed into syntheses or amalgams.

I derived Haltom's 14th Law from the literary analyst/theorist Kenneth Burke. Beyond the obvious advice to avoid false dichotomies, Burke counseled analysts to consider ways in which contrasting perspectives or passages might complement or mutually reinforce. Perhaps Certs is both a candy mint and a breath mint. To those with numb palates, Miller Lite may both taste great and be less filling. The nuns insisted that Jesus was both man and God.

Both/and!

Perhaps the most dispiriting either/or afflicts campus when one presumes that advance(s) by a peer come at one's expense. Your contract, publication, or opportunity makes the rest of us look bad, these envious dogs believe. Since there are always fewer people with some honor or accomplishment than without [even in a three-person department], such either/or, zero-sum attitudes guarantee more misery and jealousy than celebration and community. Those who want "no great woman or man to walk among us" guarantee mediocrity, sniping, and schadenfreude. That is how middling and weak departments stagnate.

Both/and!

Around campus, the either/or versus both/and problem arises whenever colleagues assert a sanitized, selfless motive as if such a motive precludes a corrupt, selfish motive. When I first raised concerns about permitting colleagues to take Fridays off by offering courses on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:00 p. m. until 4:20 p.m., proponents of four-day weekends quickly corrected me. "The point is not to take Fridays off but to clear Fridays for tasks other than teaching." These colleagues knew that this was a false either/or. As I showed in "U Stands for Unchained Malady" [the 10-27-07 entry in "Rump Parliament"], those pressing to be on campus fewer than a five days per week include slackers, shirkers, shuckers, and other cynics who hide behind few sincere colleagues who would put "free days" to good use. Long weekends reward both colleagues who put days away from campus to good use and far more numerous colleagues who sleep in, leave town, watch TV, luxuriate in tubs, swap spouses, or pursue other leisure activities. The slot on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1500 hours to 1620 hours may be devoted by some to legitimate pedagogy, but it is available for other purposes as well.


Both/and!

How many colleagues have presumed that one publishes only at the expense of one's teaching? Usually such a presumption excuses those who do not publish. While it is true that publishing more means that one must do less of something else, one may do less service, less hobnobbing, less dissipating, less kvetching, less traveling, or less bar-hopping. Publication feeds into teaching less directly and less often than some colleagues claim in personal statements, yet each has been known to improve the other. Thus, the zero-sum tradeoff between publishing and teaching is a false dichotomy. Publishing and teaching may have some positive-sum combinations, and publishing may come at the expense of activities other than teaching.

Both/and!

For decades decision-makers have presumed that the university needed ever-increasing SAT medians and other indicia of academic prowess to continue its transition from a local party-school to a national liberal-arts college. [Why it could not be both was never explained to me. Perhaps it is assumed that fun and learning are mutually exclusive.] Such concerns precluded diversification of our student body by classes, ethnicities, and other demographics we were told. This was more than an empty excuse for temporizing; it was another unnecessary choice dangled before credulous, craven faculty.

Both/and!

When some brave undergraduates in Spring 1993 held an event called "Sex, Lies, and Tenure," one or more members of the Faculty Advancement Committee spoke to students and assured them that recent firings of women had been based on considerations other than the women's facilitation of undergraduates' complaints against multiple members of the women's department. For some reason, the students were not taken in by the claim that this or that overt rationalization precluded certain covert motivations. [That is, the students were not drooling morons.] Indeed, students reasoned that overt rationlizations based on "personal and professional characteristics" might be a cover story that permitted decision-makers to punish whistle-blowers and those who sided with prey against tenured predators. Where did the students get such ideas? Well, many majored in Politics and Government.

Both/and!

Members of the Wigger Patwol insist that one cannot be both rigorous and supportive. This either/or concerns more than men with very small penises who argue about which of them assigned crummier grades to disoriented first-years. Faculty committed to being supportive take all or almost all students as those students enter courses. The supportive teachers strive to make students better. Supportive faculty do not believe that support makes them flaccid, any more than they believe that giving rotten grades makes them better teachers. The deluded in the Wigger Patwol, by contrast, insist that instructors may either be harsh and belittling or permissive and hand-holding. That is scarcely the only dimension along which Wigger-Patwol boneheads exhibit unusual thickness.

Both/and!

The Wigger Patwol, however, may exceed in IQ those who believe that any emphasis on careers, jobs, or practical education defeats attempts to run a liberal-arts curriculum. Need I explain how established liberal-arts colleges teem with alums who get jobs and pursue careers other than post-graduate education? We do not have to crank out professional students to prove that we are not "vocational."

Both/and!

Is there a faculty member who actually believes that paucity of majors demonstrates strength of the major? Cannot strong majors nonetheless be popular or attractive?

Both/and!

Thank God the current president believes the university can and should sport and support students who are engaged in Tacoma and other matters local while at the same time they think about big questions and enduring puzzles.

Both/and!

Now if we could only imagine a faculty both critical and loyal.

Coming Soon: Haltom's Fifteenth Law -- Academic sub-units can be inferior far longer than superior to their larger institutions.

Year-End Review -- 2007

2007 brought the faculty and the university some welcome developments.



In 2007 the University of Puget Clowns gave some signs of improving on the master intellectual of our age, Yogi Berra. As we slouch toward 2008, let us remember some advances of the last year.

“You can observe a lot by watching,” Yogi is reputed to have said. At the University of Puget Clowns, “You can learn a bit by reading.” On 17 April 2007, a lawyer for the uni­ver­sity read the Faculty Code to assembled PhDs. She uncovered the startling truth that “personal and professional characteristics” [hereafter, P&PC] became an illicit criterion for tenure after the faculty and trustees banned P&PC from the criteria for tenure. [Please review “E is for Etiquette,” posted 20 April 2007 in this blog, for some details of the facul­ty meeting.] Many faculty who struggled to prevent removal of P&PC from the Faculty Code proceeded in the ensuing dozen years as if P&PC were still available. Now that faculty have been informed that they open the university to liability if they invoke P&PC obviously, we may expect them to hide their use of P&PC behind official criteria. Like Yogi, these recalcitrants remain convinced that the faculty didn’t really say every­thing they said.

Moroever, this year our own Professional Standards Committee [PSC] concluded that the text of the Faculty Code might be an excellent starting point for interpretation of the Faculty Code. This means that the current PSC, too, came to believe that one could learn a lot by reading, a proposition that would not seem very newsworthy at a liberal arts college. I take this for evidence that, as Yogi put it, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” A PSC read the code literally, and, having concluded that the literal words of the code disposed of an issue, told the Dean that she could not circumvent the code. No other reading of the code would have been plausible, but that did not stop the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004. [Please review “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007, and “Yo-Yo Motions,” posted 25 March 2007, to see how the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004 ginned up alternatives to following directives in the code.]


If 2007 brought us a PSC that would behave legitimately, might a licit Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] be not so far in our future? Yogi would counsel us that “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” The Faculty Senate, especially Senator Emerita Juli McGruder, have for years pestered the FAC to obey the bylaws, which require the appointment of a chair as the first order of business of every faculty senate committee. Deans loathe reminders that the FAC is formally a committee of the Faculty Senate and of the faculty. It’s so much more expedient to preserve the tradition that the FAC operates as it – and often as the Dean – pleases. Pessimists may insist that “It's deja vu all over again” in that the FAC has yet to appoint a chair as the bylaws demand. Let’s have some New Year cheer: some senators give every evidence of insisting that the FAC cannot flout the rules and ex­pect faculty to believe that the FAC follows rules when it does not care to. The Faculty Senate, long a “big clog” in the UPS machine [as Yogi said of Ted Williams and the Red Sox], has spoken simple, literal truth to the FAC. That’s progress!

In another sign of progress, last February the Faculty Senate by one vote acknowledged recent mal­feasance and nonfeasance by university decision-makers. Yogi explained the Yankees’ loss to Pittsburgh in the 1960 World Series: “We made too many wrong mistakes;” the Senate by the thinnest of margins acknowledged errors. Senator Ostrom framed a resolu­tion so minimized as to be laughable whereby the senate would take responsibility for mistakes made by a recumbent senate and a rogue committee in 2003-2004. No one expected even that too little to pass. Once a secret ballot was called for, however, seven senators con­ceded what every informed, honest member of the faculty knew: “Mistakes were made.” Acknowledging the undeniable seems negligible to those unfamiliar with more than three years of denials, rationalizations, and untruths by which decisions and processes were defended. Those in the know, however, are aware of just how hard it has been to get decision-makers and their apologists to concede the indisputable. Maybe future committees and senates will make fewer wrong mistakes. That could lead to accountability to the faculty.

Decades of deficient accountability have made 2007 seem like a continuation of faculty woes, but there is at least one more bit of good news. The faculty’s silent, unorganized, persistent boycott of plenary meetings may also signify that more and more faculty see through farce and judge themselves too busy to attend. Yogi famously opined, “If the people don't want to come out to the ballpark, nobody's going to stop them.” So too with faculty. If faculty do not want to come to faculty meetings, you can’t stop them. Now if we can just get faculty to stay away from Fall Faculty “Conversations,” we may free minds by the dozens!

W Stands for Women against Women

If you would understand why women so often play important roles in firing women, cherchez les hommes.


When first I began to fathom promotion and tenure at Puget Clowns, I was sur­prised by the role of women in the firing of other women. In 1992 I observed that male sexists had difficulty attacking women because faculty females shredded women before the old boys could lumber over to the corpses. Were lionesses reducing pigs to scavenging through carrion? My seniors patiently explained how ingeniously the old boys had ar­ranged sanc­tions – negative as well as positive sanctions – to promote the appearance and the reality that women devoured women and that men merely came upon the carnage. The obvious killers, the “Women Against Women” [WAW], had adapted to the oldest old-boy imperative: a candidate for advancement must be “one of us.” Those who had pros­pered by making themselves unobjectionable to the men who then controlled the uni­ver­sity perpetuated the importance of such “personal and professional characteristics” as promised to stifle dissent and insure continuation of myths and rituals that routinized and legitimized control of the university. This control remained largely in the hands of the old boys.

My subsequent studies of WAW have confirmed the wisdom of the old hands who set me straight. A grown woman savaged sisters for the approval of an old boy to whom she had some twisted relationship resembling a school-girl crush. As females in his department tore apart evaluees centerstage, this old boy and his pals “reluctantly” put junior faculty females out of their [and his] misery behind the scenery. Another member of WAW seemed quite responsive to the will of males until females gained positions of power, at which time she was as ob­se­quious to fe­males as she had been to males. In instances of this second sort, at­trac­tion mattered less than self-advancement, although being flattered by old boys made the compliant fe­male feel more like lamb than the mutton she each day resembled more. A third but related class of women ravaging other women led in the 1990s to the “Crone Hypothesis,” whereby attractive females, especially blondes, were trashed in their depart­ments by sisters who had not attracted admiration from one or another sex for some time, if ever. Of course, Puget Clowns hosted a number of women who cherished their exclu­sive status enough to preserve it by leaving junior females to old boys who whispered what Justice McReynolds stated when he heard that a second Jew had been appointed to the Supreme Court: “Not another one.”

When the ravaged females escaped their departments, first-generation females [pro­fessors who had few or no female mentors or models when they were under 30] ap­pointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] were often more old-boyish than the old boys on the FAC, and thus camouflaged secondary victimization of self-admitted females. Once the university recruited and retained females who had had female models or mentors, self-described feminists assailed junior faculty women who were actual feminists. These second-generation females, too, legitimized the demise of women in the eyes of the credulous or the masculine or both. In my 22 years at Puget Clowns, pretenders to femininity and to feminism alike have masked sexism individual as well as institutional.

That first- or second-generation females trash their sisters was to be expected from the enduring misogyny of the institution and dependency of females on old boys for pa­tronage and permanence. Female instructors serving under a traditional chair often be­haved as “at will” employees or found themselves unemployed. Females who depended on potentates less for their jobs than for cherished classes, monetary advances, or collegial respect likewise tended to conform to the views of their betters, especially if those betters so lacked chivalry that they threatened overtly those whom they could not cow covertly.

Even women who were safely tenured or promoted to full professor behaved as if they were under some man’s gun. To be sure, some such cravenness followed from a decade or more of socialization at Puget Clowns. What once was calculation after a dozen years became rote, especially as security made it ever more imperative to deny how tenure had been achieved. Who once craved tenure and promotion came to crave respect, luxurious schedules, and time off. What once was done out of friendship or attraction or desire to hold onto one’s job soon enough became dirty deeds to ensure esteem from the FAC or the Professional Standards Cult [PSC] or some other source of sway. Indeed, to attain tenure and fullness, senior females sacrificed the moral to the mercenary so long ago that many could not re­call when they sold out. Soon enough, they no longer distinguished sell-outs from ship-outs lest they raise questions about how they themselves had managed to survive and to prosper. “Which trustee was your patron?”

Females who earned respect and spoils under the elder regime had to show that they could play like the boys, but they became more useful to the old boys than boys were because they were presumptively free from sexism. That meant that a woman had to be cruder and more thuggish than a man even to be suspected of being a self-loathing woman. If a colleague advanced herself by reminding concerned students and faculty that collegiate females could prey upon innocent male faculty, woe betide the colleague who observed that one might as well fixate on the perils that stam­peding lambs might trample sleeping lions. If a member of a power committee never managed to disagree with the dean, she nonetheless could coo agreeably when the special rigors of being a female in academia were inventoried because such lists made her survi­val all the more Homeric. It would have been uncivil or defamatory, of course, to ob­serve that some starlets and harlots resisted much more powerful men for far longer. Male fellows well met instead made a show of taking advancement of females for evi­dence of special merit, which amounted to a tacit admission of discrimination lost on most colleagues.

None of the above denies such usual dynamics as “the Queen Bee” who despises [female] rivals or jealousy over other attention to other women or “pulling up the ladder” after the first female clambers aboard the yacht. Indeed, the modal manner of success for females is the mode for males as well: lie low and do not be associated with losers. Nothing above lets women off the hook by attributing sole or overwhelming agency to men. Women who assail women are responsible for their Msdeeds whether they do so out of their own insecurity or from job insecurity wielded by men.

Still, promotion and tenure are to a large degree matters of whether an evaluee is “one of us,” and males continue to control the definition of “us.” As women assume more of the high offices on campus, the definition of “us” may benefit from women’s touches. It is more likely, however, that women at Puget Clowns will resemble Orwell’s pigs at the end of Animal Farm: would-be revolutionaries not easily distinguished except rhetorically from those against whom they revolted.

T Stands for Tlansrations

Argot is found wherever people to be manipulated are found, but argot at the University of Puget Clowns bamboozles on many levels.


In my senior year of high school, I wrote an occasional column called “Tlansrations” wherein I commented on absurd communications. I had learned to expose absurdity from MAD Magazine’s “What They Say / What They Mean” features. Down a left column MAD would list banalities that seemed straightforward. To the right MAD would list ironic meanings often masked by the banalities. I adapted MAD methodology to Blanchet High. Classmates were amused. Teachers were less amused: “What we have here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t teach.” One reaction was pretty much the same as the other to a teenager who was usually playing "I'm Looking Through You" in his head.

In looking over some previous entries in my blog, it appears to me that I have retraced “Tlansrations” by discussing the latent usages of “responsible,” “civil,” “professional,” and “inter-disciplinary,” among other terms of art deployed about the campus. Although the movie Cool Hand Luke and the newspaper feature “Tlansrations” explain much about “The University of Puget Clowns,” administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices at our school use ironic expres­sions in a manner far more nuanced that my teachers at Blanchet or Luke's bosses. [Of course, the foregoing juxtaposition between my high school and a road prison was strictly unintentional. The prison did not teach theology, for example.]

“The Senate has raised a technical objection.” tlansrates to “To invoke explicit rules is in poor taste and perhaps malicious.”

When apologists for campus rule-breakers thus dismiss violations of the Faculty Code or Bylaws, they go beyond Harry Callahan’s beliefs that rights and rules are for prisses. They explicitly or implicitly claim that rule-breakers have pursued higher justice by any means necessary. [Stop laughing! They are serious!] What is more, this “mere technicality” trope subtly incorporates the Confiden­tiality Con: if confidentiality permitted decision-makers to explain their actions, faculty of good will would understand and applaud but, alas, such accountability is not per­mitted by custom. By a remarkable, pithy sentence, then, practices warranted by no explicit authority overpower mandated rules. What the Faculty Code states in so many words becomes the merest trifle; decanal self-aggrandizement and/or committees' evasions and delusions that contradict the explicit rules become controlling authority.

“This is getting personal.” tlansrates to “This may expose too much truth.”

In ordinary usage “personal” denotes what is private or individuated, but campus usage incorporates the connotation “inappropriately candid, open, or transparent.” When a person or side with whom a colleague identifies is being confronted by truths that hurt, the colleague may say that “this has gotten personal,” especially when the truths relate to governance and are vigorously being denied. “Personal issues” include matters elimi­nated from public discussion by decree or by confidentiality, no matter how crucial the matter to governance, understanding, or integrity. The variability of subtext that invoca­tions of “personal” permit boggles the mind, which is of course the political purpose be­hind the professed solicitude for feelings. “This is getting personal” tlansrates sometimes to “I do not care to answer,” sometimes to “I do not know what to say,” sometimes to “You are very rude to raise what I cannot plausibly deny,” sometimes to "I have a very small penis," and on occasion to “How un­kind of you to respond in kind to my attacks on you.” In governance, “pursuing per­sonal agenda” or “for personal reasons” connotes that actions or arguments are not consis­tent with the personal agendas or motives of the speaker who deploys “personal.”

Although “personal” might be used in a sincere attempt to elevate discussion or de­bate, I know of no instance in which that usage has been employed on campus.

“Are we being rigorous enough?” tlansrates to “Are you as exacting and severe as I claim to be?”

It is well known across campus that a moment before his death, Goethe uttered, “More rigor!” “Rigor” combines common, straightforward understandings of scholarly virtue or virtues with presumptions about the scholarly superiority of whoever wields the Sword Rigor. This or that peer may from time to time exemplify rigor, especially if the peer bought the first round or a recent autobiographic anecdote, but the campus Wigger Pat­wol – those so busy es­pous­ing rigor that they leave themselves little energy for practicing rigor – epitomize rigor in their febrile fantasies. Such self-glorification is a common symp­tom of inferiority complex, so academe teems with variants on this demand that col­leagues’ prowess measure up to one’s own. That persons of actual prowess so seldom make such demands underscores the insidiousness of Wiggerspeak: no one can measure up to rigor that cannot be detected.


The examples above do not exhaust my trove of tlansrations. I shall note more in future postings and highlight those that I have incorporated in past postings. Watch this blog for such campus favorites as “mandated confidentiality” [what a decision-maker would just as soon not explain], “personal and professional characteristics” [respectable camouflage for why we really don’t like you], and, of course, “interdisciplinary” [matters covered by an existing discipline in which one has no competence or credentials].


However, we must remember that some tlansrations are so common in academia that campus usage and users merely follow longstanding fashion:

“We have decided to be prospective, not retrospective.” on many campuses tlansrates to “We have decided to minimize accountability and maximize chances of recurrence.”

“Let’s be proactive on this matter.” on many campuses tlansrates to “Let’s make sure that this does not happen to me or mine, but otherwise let’s avert our eyes.”

“Civility” on many campuses tlansrates to “Use ineffective argumentation that reinforces existing elites or authorities.” All too often, civility is a proper synonym for servility.

“Collegial” or “collegiality” on many campuses tlansrates to “Serving [my/our] greater good.”

“Culture of evidence” on many campuses tlansrates to “A cult worshipping spin.”

“That matter has been addressed by the appropriate body.” on many campuses tlansrates to “We have covered that matter up and would appreciate its staying buried.”

E is for Etiquette

When colleagues call for "civil" discourse, what they mean is mannered discourse that serves over-dogs better than under-dogs.

Old dogs [see an earlier entry, “Respectable, Reliability, Reputable,” regarding faculty dogs] at UPS know the usages of “civility” on campus. On the surface, civility exhorts faculty to exhibit politeness, tact, sensitivity, orthodoxy, and other artifices of manners and breeding. The latent meaning of civility on this campus is that the disadvantaged should cheerfully accept their lots and should pro­test, if at all, privately when colleagues backstab, cork­screw, prevaricate, dissimulate, or misstate. Both sorts of civility are called for when administrators, apparatchiks, and other decision-makers inform lesser faculty of what their betters have decided. This dual sense of “civil” may be labeled “meekspeak.”

Meekspeak is directional – one must kiss up but may piss down – so incivility toward one’s betters will be sanctioned more copiously than unpleasantness directed toward one’s inferiors. As preceding entries in this blog have shown, it is especially “uncivil” for colleagues who have been fired to protest that rules have violated or that there are no standards. After all:

1. Rules are violated by each such entity every year, so why bring up deviance in your case? Is everything about you, selfish?

2. Colleagues summon standards that they neither understand nor follow, so what difference would standards make? What are you, disappointed colleague, a lawyer?

The condemned are expected to accede to the superior wisdom of their departments, schools, or programs and to the superior judgment of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and one or more administrators. The fired should cooperate in their degradation and separation – for the greater glory of the university and comfort of faculty. At the “University of Puget Clowns,” respectable, reputable, reliable faculty meekly go along with the jokes from on high.

One is expected to kiss up even to faculty who have fired one, but selected faculty get to piss down as well. That top-down communications are often far from meek, civil, or decent was revealed anew when an attorney for the University informed the faculty that use of “personal and professional characteristics” violated the Faculty Code and risked litigation against the University and, in egregious cases, against individual evaluators. Old dogs who long for respect and often pronounce themselves responsible decision-makers [usually with some jibe at colleagues for being insufficiently rigorous] did not greet their legal responsibilities warmly on 17 April 2007.

Most faculty in the room greeted the attorney’s banal reaffirmations with a “Duh,” but a few old dogs struggled to propose ways in which they might snipe at or smear evaluees without risking legal reprisals. One yappy dog “recalled” that the faculty and trustees had banned personal characteristics but not professional characteristics and seemed to be aghast that personal and professional characteristics had both been excised from the Faculty Code. Well, implementing decisions of faculty and trustees within 12 years is rushing it for some of the slower dogs with weaker noses. A bulldog from the same department concocted hysterical hypotheticals in which he might be able to lob information from outside a file against an evaluee and seemed disconsolate that civil litigation might impair his ability to assail and to assault junior faculty. [Nietzsche warned us to distrust those whose most powerful urge is to punish.] Yet another member of the pack from that department then opined that he had objected to prognostications based on personal and professional characteristics more than the use of such characterizations themselves. A mad dog who ran away from the same department could not reprise his damnable misinformation that the faculty and trustees in 1994-1995 merely eliminated colleagues’ obligation but not their license to consider personal and professional characteristics.

While we may all hope that in the 10-12 years in which “personal and professional characteristics” has been proscribed none of these flouters of the express will of the trustees and the faculty have indulged themselves in forbidden assaults on evaluees, we know that each almost certainly has.

However, the far more interesting probability is that each has lamented some lack of civility and demanded more deference to veteran faculty over the years. Each has probably welcomed or rewarded meekspeak on numerous occasions, all the while lauding liberal learning and academic freedom.

What most interests me is how such colleagues can regard their behaviors and their advocacy as somehow “civil” within the manifest usage of the term.

Next: "F is for Fakery" -- When things are not quite what they seem, faculty enablers make deceptions and delusions work.