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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus do "made men" unmake themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am shocked and amazed!

Why closed files guarantee innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt at least some evaluations.

Confidential evaluation files tend to feature more misinformation and disinformation than evaluation files that evaluees may inspect and police.

At the faculty meeting in the Rotunda on 8 December 2008, a former member of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] intoned that open files were inducing junior faculty to censor their remarks. One junior faculty member objected that the erstwhile evaluator was trafficking in anecdote. The FAC survivor asserted that his observations were not wholly subjective but were based on inquiries to junior faculty beyond merely reading their self-censored letters. The persistent junior faculty member scoffed that such "evidence" was nevertheless anecdotal. If only the 2007-2008 FAC had included a competent, candid social scientist to explain why many disciplines and scholars do not respond well to anecdotage, apocrypha, and other "evidence" too unreliable to be data, perhaps the FAC would not have issued its Fatwa Against Collegiality to the Faculty Senate in May 2008 [see "Open Files and Closed Minds" in this blog, 21 November 2008].

Let's not overcomplicate discussions of closed files [that is, those in which the evaluee waives her or his code-stated right to view letters from colleagues] versus open files [those in which the evaluee reserves his or her right to view letters]. At worst, the evaluee's right to inspect letters from colleagues may induce letter-writers to restrain themselves lest evaluees refute or retaliate. If the evaluee waives her or his right to review the letters, colleagues may write more freely. As a result, closed files may include more candor and more calumny. The issue need be little more complex than that.

Advocates of restricting the right of the evaluee to review letters that affect tenure or promotion often acknowledge the gain in candor and seldom acknowledge the increase in calumny. To advocate closing files, however, is to accept calumny as a price for securing candor. To advocate open files is to accept some diminution in information in return for some protection against misinformation [mistakes that would have been corrected if the evaluee could have known what falsehoods were introduced by evaluators] and disinformation [deliberately misleading or exaggerated "information" that evaluees are prudent to keep out of their files].

Amid the cavalcade of anecdotes and arguments to come on this topic, keep the foregoing in mind. As a class, closed files guarantee that mistakes, misstatements, innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt some evaluations. To fend off such corruption, circumscribing a few evaluators seems a reasonable prophylactic. Indeed, most scholars would rather suffer the rigors of correction and circumspection than to injure a colleague mistakenly or maliciously.

Which almost makes one wonder about tenured colleagues who ignore or minimize corruptions of evaluation that misinformation and disinformation work. What "information" do the proponents of concealment imagine vulnerable faculty to possess that would offset the pollution of the evaluation process? Could "evidence" available solely from vulnerable faculty be so dispositive and reliable as to make a substantial difference to the FAC or to the President and trustees?

And why is the FAC, as in its 2008 report to the Senate, trolling for and trafficking in the sorts of "evidence" more likely to turn up when closed files offer cover and camouflage?

Next: 'Tis the Season – Expect Decision-Makers to Bestow Surprising Gifts