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.

D is for Deals

Buying the school’s way out of malfeasance limits exposure and accountability more than litigation or loss.

Some veterans, when confronted about the University’s buying its way out of its failings rather than correcting the failings, pose as sages: “Well, sometimes the payoff is the best thing.”

Not to make too much out of yet another thought-free remark from old parrots – I intend to make just enough out of it – faculty should realize two "A's" that buyouts betoken:

• Aversion to litigation and, even more, to exposure

• Affinity for unaccountability and irresponsibility.

Aversion to Litigation and especially Exposure

The Ad Hoc Committee on Tenure [AHCT] – the four fools who took accountability seriously, crafted findings bravely, and endured brickbats stoically – worried about the University’s procuring protection from litigation and from adverse publicity at too great a price. The AHCT asked whether the University was spending freely rather than using such less expensive means of warding off litigation as doing the right thing in the first place or policing processes and professors when they go awry. The AHCT hazarded a conjecture that following the Faculty Code might be cheaper than flouting the Faculty Code and paying off a few victims who secure legal representation, evi­dence from Ford’s Pinto litigation notwithstanding. However, once that ad hoc committee released findings at odds with pronouncements from Jones Hall, their concerns about payoffs large­ly disappeared beneath ostensibly methodological, actually mythological critique.

Colleagues who were not gulled by the caterwauling of those who can abide anything but candor were nonetheless taken in by the myth of litigious America. They assured themselves and others that Puget Sound would win the litigation but only after enormous legal bills, so that the better part of jural valor might be to throw money at colleagues who objected to being ill-used. [If you do not object to being ill-used, wait for the named chair in your future!] Why not let the school off cheap, they ask, before some benighted jury fails to understand that violations of the rules are actually evidence of fidelity to higher ideals. [It is distressing how few jurors have read 1984 as a guide to institutional self-help!]

Yet many buyouts come before victims have engaged counsel or contemplated litigation. The school is expending thousands of dollars to fend off lawsuits that might never be? I suppose the pre-emptive surgeries work, but removing tonsils and adenoids at birth seems precipitous.

Maybe the school actually wants to buy the silence of victims. The aggrieved must be shut up lest faculty, staff, students, or trustees be wised up. More than litigation or negotiation, the University fears exposure.

What if colleagues found out that a whistleblower was induced to take a buyout before the whistleblower’s file reached the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]? [Naturally, the serial plagiarist on whom the naïve junior faculty blew the whistle not only continued on the faculty but also participated in dismissing the whistleblower – exactly the sort of process with which unsophisticated jurors might have some difficulty!] Why need the University fear that a third-year review might be read by five faculty [on the FAC or a hearing board] sworn to secrecy? If the University worried that the negative letters might expose the University to litiga­tion, wouldn’t it have been more straightforward and just to wait for a hearing board or the FAC to screen the file for unfairness, inadequacy, or incompleteness? Did the University fear that some faculty might conclude that more than 20 pages written against the whistle­blower by the spouse of the serial plagiarist might fall short of the objectivity that the Faculty Code commands? [Another detail that pesky jurors might not understand!] Or was the worry that five or more professors might learn what the AHCT called “departmental meltdown?”


Affinity for Unaccountability and Irresponsibility

Buyouts, especially preemptory buyouts, do more than gag those in the know and protect practices and processes from exposure and judgment. They instruct the few faculty in the know that malefactors will not be held responsible or accountable.

Consider the erstwhile faculty plagiarist. How did a third-year assistant professor get through her departmental review unscathed after two of her plagiarized works were ex­posed by the whistleblower before deliberations? Most faculty probably will never know. Two witnesses to the depart­mental deliberation have been sent away. The remaining participants are unlikely to take responsibility for any ineffectual or indifferent responses to the revelations. The chair of the depart­ment had been informed about each plagiarism be­fore the deliberations. What steps, if any, did he take? Did one or more departmental col­leagues excuse or minimize the plagiarisms [one set imperiling a faculty co-author and one set endangering a then-undergraduate co-author]?

We have been told that the FAC “addressed” this matter. Exactly what does that mean? We cannot know, which is precisely why we are told only that the FAC spoke or wrote some words that had something to do with the file. More than that we are not permitted to learn.

The FAC recommends a disposition of the file to the Academic Vice President [AVP], who decides whether to reappoint a third-year assistant professor. Whatever addressing or recommending the FAC did, the AVP was ultimately charged to dispose of the matter. If a serial plagiarist was reappointed by the AVP – and since she was working in Fall Semester 2005 one might infer that she had been reappointed – how can colleagues believe that the AVP took the sets of plagiarisms seriously? Did that AVP inform himself about the particulars, or did he reach his decision without additional information? If we intone that the AVP took faculty plagiarism seriously, what does that say about colloquial usage of “taking seriously?”

And what of the whistleblower’s effort to acquaint the President with the sets of plagiarisms before the whistleblower left town? Did the President “take seriously” faculty plagiarism to such an extent that he refused to look at the evidence? The faculty do not know, courtesy of the buyout.

Some faculty had hoped that, when the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] was created to deal with, among other matters, campuswide disquiet over facul­ty plagiarism and its apparent mishandling [when it was handled at all], the AHCPS might answer some ques­tions. Instead, the AHCPS issued no findings about faculty plagiarism. The AHCPS issued no explanation for why the formal grievance against the plagiarist was withdrawn. The AHCPS covered up anew, thereby completing the lack of accountability and the ir­res­ponsibility worked by buyouts. What a coincidence that senators who had attacked the earlier ad hoc committee welcomed the vacuities of the later committee's report!

When buyouts and payoffs obstruct accountability, responsibility, cognizance, and governance, Jones Hall's “Deal or No Deal” keeps faculty in the dark.


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

B is for Burden of Proof

The Faculty Advancement Committee can simulate fidelity to the code under almost any conditions.


“A is for Accounting” revealed some actualities of how some colleagues fail of tenure. Perhaps as enlightening is how colleagues who do not merit tenure – the “False Positives” I have discussed above – are awarded tenure nonetheless. False negatives and false positives slip through because the burdens of proof on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] are far from onerous.

Let us start with what should have been obvious in the immediately previous post: for all the arbitrary decisions and specious justifications flowing about campus, the Faculty Code’s standards and criteria relate strongly to decisions. That is, the code places the burden of proof on an evaluee to make her or his case. Schools, programs, or departments [hereafter abbreviated as “departments”] may help or hinder the effort to get tenure as well. If evidence regarding teaching and/or professional growth is insufficient, the code directs that tenure should not awarded. If conflicts with colleagues can be claimed to impair teaching or professional growth, then evaluators have their way of the evaluee. Burdens on evaluees and departments are so heavy that subsequent evaluators' burdens are light.

Let us see in some detail how the actuall allocation of the burden of proof licenses great discretion by the FAC.

If the FAC claims to espy some negatives in students’ evaluations that no one in the department saw [or will, on further review, see], the evaluee and the department are unarmed against claims that the necessary evidence or explanation is absent [the “A” claims in the immediately previous posting]. Each will sit before the Committee poleaxed when the Committee conjures a novel, sometimes fanciful reading of the file. How were they to have headed off an interpretation or a fabrication that they could not or did not anticipate? The question is rhetorical. The burden is on them, not the Committee.

The FAC will have its way with the evaluee and/or the department because neither will have met the burden of proof that they could not or did not see. The Committee will intone gravely that the burden of proof is on the evaluee or department [see the “B” claims in the immediately previous posting]. The Faculty Code says so for all to see! Thus does patent language mask latent subjectivity. By the time that the evaluee and his or her department learn what the Committee is up to, it is too late to remedy the file.

In a similar manner, conflicts [“C” factors in the immediately previous posting] furnish an occasion for the FAC to transcend squabbling and tantrums or to accede to the harsh reality that it is easier to fire one evaluee than multiple departmental malefactors, especially if scalawags are tenured. Whatever the Committee elects to do, the code will likely rationalize the result because the FAC effectively creates much of the file that the President and trustees will see.

For the foregoing reasons, FAC recommendations and rationalizations will almost always successfully allude to the Faculty Code. The Committee will take far greater care to appear to adhere to the code when the Committee is ranging furthest from the code’s letter or spirit. When favoring an evaluee by finding excellent professional growth where many colleagues would have difficulty finding any professional growth or by certifying excellent teaching when pedagogy has been desultory, the Committee will be crafty and clever in ways unnecessary when an evaluation is routine. When a negative recommendation is a close call, the Committee will be even cagier but will have to bamboozle the President and the trustees, not the department or the evaluee far more familiar with the file in detail.

If members of the FAC break through groupthink to compose minority reports, expect such reports to be buried. I presume that minority reports have usually reached the President. I do not know if they have routinely reached the trustees. In at least one instance, an FAC minority report did not reach a hearing board until that hearing board accidentally discovered the report.

In sum, even when the FAC does not manifestly violate the code, the Committee need not have adhered to the code. The Committee enjoys such useful presumptions and deference that there are few practical limits to the loads that it can forklift.


Next: “C is for Cooneying” – The Bush Administration’s bowdlerizing of scientific reports provides colleagues a useful verb.

Yo-Yo Motions

If you would discern what Power Committees are up to, watch for contradictory rulings in identical instances or for initiatives that contradict interpretations.


The immediately previous blog – “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007 – argued that the very vehemence of proclaimed authority indicates a consciousness of culpability. But how does one detect deviance when Power Committees [PC] claim quietly that they were only following orders?

One method to detect misbehaviors behind pseudo-authority is to look for irreconcilable rulings on identical or nearly identical matters. Even the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] have difficulty claiming both that they assiduously followed authority and that they arrived at diametrical results in indistinguishable instances. [Be forewarned, however! PCs will quibble that the results are not really opposed diametrically – as if deciding identical issues in ways that are just, say, 160° removed from one another is a defense – or that instances may be distinguished due to factors that are confidential.]

For example, in the 2003-2004 academic year the PSC – Yes! That PSC again! – formally heard two grievances. Having resolved the first grievance, the PSC sent the grievant [a faculty member] and the respondent [the then Academic Vice President] copies of their report at the same time as they sent their report to the President. Less than six months later, the same members informed another grievant and another respondent [neither an administrator] that the Faculty Code authorized the PSC only to send its report to the President [that is true] and thus prohibited the PSC from doing what it had done months before [that is not true]. If the President wished, he might share the report with the parties to the grievance.

Since the PSC favored its member [the Academic Vice President serves on the PSC] with a simultaneous release and withheld its report from two faculty who were not members of the PSC, a double standard seemed afoot. Moreover, the respondent in the second grievance was not an administrator [a venial sin of omission] and had challenged multiple departures from the Faculty Code by that selfsame PSC and especially its chair [a mortal sin of commission]. What a coincidence that a respondent who had vigorously protested that rulings internally inconsistent with other PSC decisions or externally inconsistent with applicable authority had seriously disadvantaged him would be treated worse than the dean permanently on the committee!

The double standard notwithstanding, these protean procedures make patent what PCs normally keep latent. Usually, the vacillations or the favoritism of a PC may be hidden behind confidentiality or denial so that a PC’s inconsistencies cannot be demonstrated. When the 2003-2004 PSC was of two minds, however, its public acts went on display. This provided that rare opportunity: a departure from the Faculty Code that the PSC could not deny.

The most that the PSC could claim was that one or more of their members [at a weekend PC retreat?] read the Faculty Code between the first grievance and the second grievance. That is not a very flattering claim, but a flat-out contradiction is hard to explain away even for master dissimulators. The claim is more flattering than telling the parties that the PSC made a special concession for one of its members. [That was the first “explanation” that the PSC chair gave the respondent in the second grievance. Imagine that a PC lurched into candor – “We favored a member of our committee who is also a powerful administrator.” – before settling for a different tale: “In Fall Semester we did not know what the Faculty Code ‘required,’ but by Spring Semester we conveniently discovered another way to abuse a second-year colleague who had the audacity to grieve faculty plagiarism and the temerity to point out that the PSC does as it pleases when it is not a Star Chamber at the service of the dean.” Each quotation is an expository device—the PSC is never that candid!]

[Even worse, the Faculty Code neither authorizes the PSC to provide the parties the report nor forbids the PSC from doing so. The PSC’s “improved” reading is a misreading! Can anyone around here play this game?]

Our first lesson at detecting PC artifice and fabrication, then, is what Izzy Stone long ago told us: any modern government publishes so many decisions and rulings that sooner or later it will betray its misdeeds if one pays attention. Too bad we do not have an Izzy Stone to help out our easily misdirected, easily distracted, and easily acquiescent faculty.


Such flat-out contradictions rarely surface, so we need to be vigilant about other PC “tells.” A second device is to ask questions to reveal inconsistencies that have not surfaced on their own. For example, when the 2005-2006 PSC proposed that the 15 days within which the PSC must schedule a grievance hearing be amended to be 15 working days, all ten faculty in the know should have inquired [aloud, if they are tenured] why that had not already been done. After all, the authoritative interpreters of the code [the aforementioned PSC] declared it so for two grievances in December 2003. Does the PSC fear another yo-yo? What if a future PSC looks at the Faculty Code and" discovers" that “working” days was neither intended nor implied? How would the expedient delays of December 2003 then appear?


Confronted concerning such yo-yoing, the 2003-2004 PSC wrote to the Faculty Senate that their consciences were clear and that they made no apologies. As one senator responded, “That’s the problem!”

It was a problem. It is a problem. Cult-like decision-making will be a problem again and again. All that good citizens of the University of Puget Sound can do about PC cults is to catch them out when they are compelled to release materials. If a PC yo-yos and no one notices, con games and cant will frustrate faculty oversight and neuter faculty governance.


Next – Zone of Caprice – Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.

Plagiarisms

Does anyone remember what led to the formation of the AHCPS?


The Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] arose out of concerns expressed in the Faculty Senate that plagiarisms by a faculty member had been “addres­sed” in a manner that no senator was permitted to learn. Senators and other faculty al­lowed that it was so difficult to oversee this “addressing” that it was tempting for senators to overlook the whole matter. Despite claims that the University took faculty plagi­ar­ism seriously, senators wanted to know what “addressing” and “taking seriously” meant. To the best of my knowledge, no senator yet knows what apparatchiks and apologists meant.

The AHCPS did not address these questions, so let me do so here. One de­part­ment, two Power Committees, one Academic Vice President, and one President “ad­dres­sed” severe serial plagiarisms so assiduously and took faculty plagiarism so seriously that almost no one knew what, if anything, had been done. What more need we know or hear?

Thus, questions asked at senate on 14 November 2005 should answer themselves. The claim that instances of faculty plagiarism were “addressed” supplies no information be­yond the invi­ta­tion to stop asking embarrassing questions. To declare that the University takes faculty plagiarism seri­ously amounts to an account that itself obstructs accounta­bil­ity. Empty assurances supplant information. “Trust us” substitutes for justification. Thus is oversight defeated.

Before oversight could be evaded, some senators offered excuses for overlooking the whole matter in the senate. Perhaps the plagiarisms were few or minor, some naifs said. The plagiarisms were many and major, as multiple members of the senate might have attested if anyone present had cared enough to inquire sincerely. Even if the sets of plagiarisms had been a few tech­ni­cal mistakes or missteps, wouldn’t we hold our students responsible for such mistakes or missteps? Mightn’t a PhD be held to a higher standard than someone thirteen weeks removed from high school? Yet the first impulse of a few senators was to advance a cover story, any cover story. Perhaps they thought that the civil thing to do. Their evolution from apologists to apparatchiks will be interesting to observe.

About two years after the sets of plagiarisms had been discovered, the discoverer of the plagiarisms and his primary defender had been driven from the University of Puget Sound, yet the plagiarist was still on the faculty. Those facts should be enough to show the assurances to be meaningless and the communications to be counterfeit.

Did the AHCPS encounter multiple narratives about the sets of plagiarisms? When the besieged grievant told the AHCPS that he withdrew his grievance concerning the second set of plagiarisms –plagiarisms on a paper written with a student – after expressing reservations about the conduct of the Professional Standards Committee in other matters and pleading for someone to police acts of intimidation and reprisals to which he had been subjected, did the AHCPS discover some way to multiply narratives beyond the grievant’s own account?

The AHCPS has excused its failure to reach findings regarding the (mis)conduct of the Professional Standards Committee and assorted other faculty and administrators. The AHCPS has yet to explain away the absence of findings regarding what one member of the AHCPS has admitted to senators was the reason for the ad hoc committee’s creation. What an oversight!


Next – “Quibbles” – Nit-picking signals that nothing is substantially amiss.

Litigiousness

When substantive and procedural inequities propel faculty members to pursue their rights, such faculty are denounced as litigious. Would that litigiousness were rampant!


Administrators, trustees, and faculty may lament American litigiousness because multiple attorneys for plaintiffs have profited from our inability to fol­low even the simplest procedures. Despite costly legal reverses, faculty and administrators blunder along, cour­ting more legal disasters, so fear of litigation seems to have made little difference. Perhaps campus elites understand that the university’s lawyers will almost always fend off substantive or procedural claims and that facul­ty win lawsuits against educational institutions far less often than myths of litigiousness have misled laypersons to believe.

If faculty had the access to litigation that such a myth suggests, power committees and ad­minis­trators might be less prone to procedural injustices. Campus lore tells us that legal debacles in the mid-1990s for a while scared straight even doughty and dotty members of the Professional Stan­dards Committee [PSC]. While memories of legal losses were fresh, old-timers claim, the PSC’s procedural punctiliousness peaked. As those memories have faded, this revisionism goes, PCs and administrators have “backslid.”

Nonsense! Our persistent procedural shortcomings do not result in more litigation because resort to court is actually far more circumscribed than lamenters presume and because appeals and other procedural provisions in the rules enable our university to cover up missteps.

Consider a woman who stood for tenure in the very year [1994] in which a former member of the faculty was awarded nearly $2,000,000 and the gender discrimina­tion suit by a woman denied tenure two years before was settled. The evaluation in 1994 had been so botched procedurally that the President asked the evaluee to forego a for­mal hearing board and consent to be re-evaluated. [The President had in the interim assured herself that the evaluee would face more departmental resistance the second time around.] The evaluee decided that following the code might be a better idea and easily prevailed in the hearing board. When the evaluee was re-evaluated and denied more than a year after she originally submitted her file, an attorney told her he did not see how she could prevail despite myriad violations of the Faculty Code. This former colleague – who went on to tenure, a campus wide teaching award, and a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean – learned that even filing a lawsuit was far more difficult than the mythology of litigiousness instructs us.

As the next evaluation season dawned in Fall 1995, the President met with the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] to inform them that a dozen faculty were can­di­dates for tenure and that the President was not about to recommend to the trustees that a dozen faculty be tenured. The President, apparently unchastened by her legal losses the previous year but perhaps emboldened by the denial of the embattled woman from 1994, also discussed her reluctance to accept a dozen affirmative recommendations with three faculty over lunch. Such presidential proclamations would seem to set an arbitrary [and self-serving] ceiling on the number or percentage of faculty recommended for tenure. I have no doubt, however, that apologists could make the repeated, explicit warning sound more like a forecast. I guess that is the beauty of multiple narratives, especially multiple revisionist narratives in service of seeming malefactors.

When the FAC forwarded twelve affirmative recommendations, the President balked at two women. [To the best of my recollection, that president said no to two women and no men in that president’s first tenure “season,” to one woman and no men in her third “season,” and two women and no men in her fourth “season,” but only radicals would detect any gendered pattern in that president’s decisions or in the decisions of the departments that trashed evaluees.] The President informed each woman that a member of the FAC had filed a minority report. That minority report – a sentence indicating disagreement with the recommendation of the five non-administrators on the FAC – issued from the Academic Vice President, who had not notified the rest of the FAC what he had done. [One member of the FAC later resigned over the actions of the President and the Academic Vice President.] Both women “won” hearing boards but were rejected for tenure after some of the procedural missteps at the departmental and FAC levels were corrected. One woman accepted money to move on before her ter­minal year. The other rejected the buyoff and sued. Her efforts were crushed by the new legal team. This litigant learned that the University’s losses in 1994 had taught adminis­tra­tors that litigators able to stymie resort to court and attempts at redress could free decision-makers from bothersome rules, proprieties, and due process.

These examples [and others that I might provide] reveal that, while faculty aware of their rights and willing to assert them may be derided as litigious louts, the ill-treated will surrender their rights in return for a modest sum or be steamrolled by a law firm in the unlikely event that they can interest a plaintiff’s attorney in rolling the dice to vindicate substantive or procedural rights.

The women above and other tenure aspirants also learned throughout the 1990s how Pyrrhic victories in hearing boards tend to be. Indeed, hearing boards usually give departments or the FAC an opportunity to polish up their acts. I should supply stunning examples of misbehaviors eliminated from files after which that president reached the same decision, but I participated in those hearing boards and so may be barred by the Faculty Code from specific references.

If administrators and their collaborators on power committees genuinely feared that faculty might assert their rights successfully, decision-makers might adhere to procedures more often. Litigiousness, were it more than mythical, might induce power committees and administrators to pursue procedural and perhaps even substantive justice.

Campus elites do not fear lawsuits. They fear exposure. They score litigiousness because litigation threatens to reveal arbitrariness and injustices. Were faculty able to litigate rights and justice with some hope of prevailing, campus elites might have to follow rules. Indeed, they might have to read the rules. What a nightmare that would be!


Next – “Multiple Narratives” –The “multiple narratives” dodge is bad enough, but the nescience it portends or presumes is even more troubling.