Neglected Beauty of the Obvious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confederacy of Naked Emperors

How redolent the phrase; how repulsive the image!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it's gotta be "confederacy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's Wrong with Collusion?

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

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

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

Some Puget clowns no longer pull the blinds down.





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