Z Stands for Zanzibar

As Juli McGruder retires, "Rump Parliament" salutes a fighter and her fight.

The Faculty Senate resolved in December 2007 that Juli McGruder had been a boon to the university. I could not agree more. I add my own resolution below to complement the necessarily bland pronouncement of the senate.

First and most important, Dr. Juli McGruder for almost thirty years strove to deny students, faculty, and staff at the University of Puget Clowns what she demurely called “the luxury of ignorance.” By this she meant that discriminations against women, racial and ethinic minorities, and those who have less income and wealth proliferate in part because people claim not to realize what they want very much not to realize. Juli shook colleagues and pupils. She made them admit that they should have known what they claimed not to know. More, she made them admit that they now knew what they claimed not to have known. Like Neil Young in “Ohio,” Juli Mack asked, “How can you run when you know?”

Second and almost as important, Professor McGruder was credentialed in Occupational Therapy, Anthropology, and cognate disciplines or specialties, making her that rarest of UPS faculty: she possessed rather than merely professed interdisciplinary learning and expertise. Juli did not fake interdisciplinary. She earned interdisciplinary. On a campus where many faculty extol interdisciplinary research and teaching but exemplify dilettantism, Professor McGruder tantalized colleagues with what might not merely seem but be.

Third and not as important, Juli McGruder tried to make faculty governance more accountable and less corrupt. Her Sisyphean labors included service on the Faculty Senate and on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Many senators quietly contradicted decanal subtrefuges and presidential mendacity; Senator McGruder called bullshit in senate meetings and in plenary meetings of the faculty. Many toadies and tools were ensconced on the FAC despite garnering fewer votes from peers; Professor McGruder took being passed over as the compliment that it was and won election until finally a dean let her serve. Members of the senate and FAC alike often serve as if campaigning for promotion or other favors or as if they lusted after respectability. [And those are the relatively heroic. Lesser senators and FACers cannot recall authenticity or independence!] McGruder did not want to be a “reliable, responsible” member of the faculty or anything else that required major surgery on spine or gonads. Instead, McGruder committed candor, a habit disgusting to administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists alike.

As Dr. McGruder exits the University of Puget Clowns, she acknowledges honestly that students and faculty still walk and talk without acknowledging the privileges and patronage that they receive, without admitting that “interdiscplinary” is more shibboleth than modifier, and without concerning themselves about which “contract of depravity” [The Hustler, 1961] shapes them. Juli sees that the luxury of ignorance, the dilettantism, and the docility remain as she leaves. Nonetheless, Juli McGruder tried. She tried the patience of presidents and deans. She tried to induce faculty to stand and speak their truths. She tried to live up to intellectual ideals.

So here is my toast to Professor Juli McGruder: Like Randall P. McMurphy [Are the initials “R.P.M.” coincidental? I think not.], you tried to set other inmates free. Unlike Randall P. McMurphy, you leave the asylum with your frontal lobes connected. If you see Nurse Ratched on your way off campus, slap her for us, would you?

I is for Inter-disciplinary

If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary or interstitial.


At the University of Puget Sound, ironic labels rule. The “Susan Resneck Pierce Atrium” is a foyer, not an atrium. Ostensibly endowed chairs have no matching funds but all the pedigree and fecundity of a mule. A colleague is named the “Alfred Packer Professor of Culinary Studies” despite his inability to boil water or make S’mores. Racial and ethnic “diversity” are fabricated largely absent Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. And “inter-disciplinary” programs do not cross disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of truth so much as they elude disciplines in pursuit of marketing.

Take International Political Economy [IPE]. At most universities across the United States, IPE is a quarter or a third of International Relations, one of four or so official subfields of Political Science. What makes UPS think that a sub-sub-discipline crosses disciplinary lines? Ironic labels do.

If one calls a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs do most dogs have? Four – because calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make a dog’s tail a leg. If one calls a certain breed of dog a cross between a dog and bear, that does not make the critter inter-speciated unless reifying ironic expressions and substituting labels for actualities is an institutional habit.

This is yet another “Iron Law of Emulation.” Curricular con artists adorn some existing sub-sub-discipline with dilettante doo-dads and wannabe widgets to hoodwink the unwary [students, parents, the Curriculum Committee, and trustees] but, so they will not lose recruits to pre-existing majors, copy the name of the established area of study. Professors eager to “branch out” and departments that long to be rid of dabblers untrained in what they now would teach dignify their exodus with marketing slogans. “Political economy” sounds like it ought to cross disciplinary lines, despite the dozen or more offerings in Politics and Government that concern political economy among other things and several in Economics that do the same. “International Studies” will not work because that is what the offshoot actually is or resembles. Where is the ease of emulation, the security of redundancy, or the thrill of deception in that?

At UPS, programs soon enough will be taken for what the faculty wish they were. The labeling and the marketing work. IPE has become at once inner-disciplinary [that is, enlarging a part of a part of Political Science into a major] and interstitial far more than inter-disciplinary. Interstitiality is effected by excluding from the enterprise those disciplines whose boundaries are allegedly being crossed. The most demanding, most discipline-specific features of economics and of political science must be diluted or dispensed with altogether to create the mislabeled international studies program that UPS knows as IPE.

Dilettantism was the inevitable result once the mislabeling had been executed. Marketing expenditures and extra-campus publicity dictated that the enterprise not be allowed to fail. Courses had to be staffed, so IPE turned to colleagues with credentials, expertise, and experience at best peripheral to economics or to political science. Such instructors proclaimed to be crossing disciplinary boundaries careened across, around, and about the edges of disciplines about which they knew little or nothing. They might have made excellent dabblers for an international studies multi-disciplinary program, but they were scarcely fit for inner-disciplinary or interstitial work.

Those who guard the borders of longstanding disciplines do condemn work that “falls between the stools” of established lines of study, so truly inter-disciplinary incursions or excursions are needful. Truly inter-disciplinary work, however, does not consist in declaring that one missed the barstools because the barroom floor is a frontier of learning. Still less does work become inter-disciplinary through throes of anti-disciplinary humbug [see www2.ups.edu/ipe/whatisipe.htm] by which the floor is declared to be up and the barstools down.