Have faculty and students at this university been "sorted by fate" to enjoy classics?
Ten to twelve years ago a now-retired colleague shared with me that he addressed students on the first day of class with the sentiment that they were all fortunate to have been "sorted by fate" to be in that class and that classroom to contemplate some classic texts.
Someone is rather full of himself, what? Fate must be omnicompetent to bother with a dozen or two humans in Tacoma, Washington.
How do I ridicule my erstwhile colleague's sentiment? Let me count the ways.
Unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I actually count the ways below. She said she would count the ways, then she did not count.
On the other hand, in every other respect, Elizabeth Barrett Browning counts far more than I.
First, "fate" usually holds a place for and thus supplants understanding. Fate makes thinking and understanding less likely. We invoke destiny when we have no better explanation or when we do not want to formulate a more concrete, more accurate explanation. Who invokes fate relies on, if not revels in, ignorance.
"Ignorance is strength!" said some author in some classic that I was sorted by fate and assigned by a summer reading list to read.
Second, the perfect, passive participle "sorted" saves us the trouble of identifying agency beyond "fate." This usage is very close to the British "sort out," which [when transitive] means that someone arrays something by class or type, but [when intransitive] is used utterly impersonally to indicate unexplored evolution, unexplained developments, or blind contingencies without little human design. "Let's wait and see how things sort out" invites listeners to be patient while some unspecified force(s) determine advantages and disadvantages.
I suffered some Catholic guilt until I realized that heretics and the faithful had been sorted by divine will. His will be done!
Third, taken together the words "fate" and "sorted" attribute a situation to an abstract, ineffable and impersonal entity that separated us fortunates from those less fortunate, that ordered the universe to bring us into the presence of greats and greatness, and that therefore must like us -- must really, really like us.
Hard not to be happy with ourselves, the class and our class, our status, our situation, our breeding, our genetics, our . . . after that introduction to what is, after all, a college course.
Fourth, "sorted by fate" euphemizes past factors so chronic, common, and substantial that disciplines define themselves thereby. Whatever sorting fate did was ably assisted by stratification, kinship, subculture, class, status, party, conformity, courtesy, credulity, and other factors or forces about which social sciences have nattered from time to time.
You may have already won big prizes!
Fifth, the inevitability of fate excuses us from any trace of guilt or shame that our advancement comes at the expense of many others who cannot afford to attend the University of Puget Clowns or who suffer from some disadvantage(s) related to anthropology, sociology, or other subjects that might complicate moral or personal responsibility. This is especially important for self-esteem on Graduation Day: We stand at commencement like self-made men and women in part because kindly professors conditioned us to believe that fate got us into the classroom and we [great author, great expositor of author, and about 15 receptive admirers of author and expositor] did the rest.
"Sorted by fate" my ass! No wonder Plato opted to rid his ideal state of poets!
Shall we demystify just a little? Maybe a little less ignorance will make for a little more strength, Big Brother to the contrary notwithsianding?
Students who think themselves in the presence of Plato do not comprehend that multiply translated words do not make the man or the thinker. At most students circle an honored text while a teacher circuits his or her notes. Hey, kiddies. It's called a "course"* for a reason. Or as Dr. Joni Mitchell phrased the refrain:
And the seasons they go round and round,
And the painted ponies go up and down.
We're captive on the carousel of time.
We can't return; we can only look
Behind from where we came,
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.
* Sorted by Sister David into Seattle Preparatory School, I learned that "course" evolved from "cursus," the Latin for track or a road or circuit to run.
Showing posts with label folklore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label folklore. Show all posts
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
X Stands for X-Rays
Institutional occlusion is the next best thing to transparency.
They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.
Robinson Jeffers wrote the line above as Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Jeffers’ line reminded me that reaccreditation looms. Among other horrors “the culture of evidence,” a shibboleth crafted by rascals in the 1990s to generate propaganda for the reaccreditation report and to surveil faculty and staff, will echo. “The culture of evidence” or some other reheated then over-heated argot will summon the credulous and the taskless to heap information without provenance or consequence onto the Logger version of a Texas A&M bonfire. This agglomeration will collapse before it can light academe but not before it secures reaccreditation. No one will be killed as a result, for reaccreditation reports are designed to implode neatly to bury unsightly truths.
Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but … men favorably
Representative of massed humanity.
The reaccreditation heap will fill some room where outside authorities will inspect exhibits before conversing with campus notables. Artifices, fabrications, and rationalizations that make up the heap will reveal images that institutional potentates think efficacious, which in turn will give the visitors something to gab about in their report. Ritual requirements met, the accreditation team will file a report, our school will be certified anew, and various ministries of truth will claim that all is well because a collage was warmly received.
Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant.
As Jeffers counsels us, we should not fulminate or ridicule what we might perceive and understand. The reaccreditation report will be an official narrative. As such it will emphasize the institution’s struggles, accomplishments, and dreams as well as the institution’s complacency, failures, and fears. Every major claim in the report will as much deny perceived shortcomings as affirm perceived strengths, so the few faculty who take what is on the surface and ask what the surface occludes will behold an institutional X-ray. Most faculty will contribute little to the report and will read less of the report.
Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.
Thanks, Robinson! I now feel better about reaccreditation than about blitzkrieg.
They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.
Robinson Jeffers wrote the line above as Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Jeffers’ line reminded me that reaccreditation looms. Among other horrors “the culture of evidence,” a shibboleth crafted by rascals in the 1990s to generate propaganda for the reaccreditation report and to surveil faculty and staff, will echo. “The culture of evidence” or some other reheated then over-heated argot will summon the credulous and the taskless to heap information without provenance or consequence onto the Logger version of a Texas A&M bonfire. This agglomeration will collapse before it can light academe but not before it secures reaccreditation. No one will be killed as a result, for reaccreditation reports are designed to implode neatly to bury unsightly truths.
Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but … men favorably
Representative of massed humanity.
The reaccreditation heap will fill some room where outside authorities will inspect exhibits before conversing with campus notables. Artifices, fabrications, and rationalizations that make up the heap will reveal images that institutional potentates think efficacious, which in turn will give the visitors something to gab about in their report. Ritual requirements met, the accreditation team will file a report, our school will be certified anew, and various ministries of truth will claim that all is well because a collage was warmly received.
Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant.
As Jeffers counsels us, we should not fulminate or ridicule what we might perceive and understand. The reaccreditation report will be an official narrative. As such it will emphasize the institution’s struggles, accomplishments, and dreams as well as the institution’s complacency, failures, and fears. Every major claim in the report will as much deny perceived shortcomings as affirm perceived strengths, so the few faculty who take what is on the surface and ask what the surface occludes will behold an institutional X-ray. Most faculty will contribute little to the report and will read less of the report.
Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.
Thanks, Robinson! I now feel better about reaccreditation than about blitzkrieg.
Monday, March 5, 2007
Standards are Performative and Adjustable
Most faculty cannot meet the literal standards for tenure and promotion, which makes subterfuges and “terms of art” indispensable.
Try this thought experiment. Posit a system in which faculty, to keep their jobs, must be superior teachers while achieving superior growth professionally. If 80% of faculty do keep their jobs, to what exactly must such faculty be “superior?”
The 80% must be superior to the 20% rejected! Beyond that trivium, however, we may say little. The 20% might have been rejected for being in the lowest quintile of teaching. Some of the 20% rejected may have manifest an insufficient quantity or quality of professional growth. Maybe a few rejects were grossly deficient in both teaching and professional growth.
Trivial as our inference may be, it matches results better than published standards. The code and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] inform us that tenure is conditioned on “excellence” in teaching and professional growth, yet at no educational institution on this planet are 80% of the faculty excellent both at teaching and at professional growth. [Don’t you just hate it when the obvious clashes with factoids, folklore, fabrications, and other fantasies?] Clearly, “excellence” in the Faculty Code has little to do with “excellence” in a dictionary of English.
Faculty who receive tenure at Puget Sound become excellent by definition. Tenured faculty are excellent performatively – that is, because official declarers have declared them excellent. No other inferences are warranted.
Beyond this performative wordplay, evaluators to some extent follow the criteria in the code – excellent teaching, excellent professional growth, a record of service, and departmental and university need – but not one criterion can be applied literally and affirmatively to most evaluees. If 80% of all faculty are adjudged “excellent” in teaching and in professional growth, then those doing the judging must not be using “excellent” literally or rigorously. Every evaluee has a record of service; the code does not state any minimal service that the evaluee’s record must exceed. Taking “need” in any strong sense of the word would doom almost every evaluee. [Many faculty admit that they have no idea what “departmental need” means: The department will expire absent the evaluee’s courses, if not the evaluee? This evaluee is indispensable to the continued existence of the department? …]
In practice, standards are not literal but adjustable. The four official criteria figure prominently, but other factors condition how stringently or flaccidly the four will be employed. An evaluee insufficiently deferential to powers that be in a school, department, or program will have to survive heightened scrutiny if not flat-out reprisals. An administration favorite will, by contrast, be forgiven this or that shortfall, especially a shortfall of scholarly production, especially if members of the FAC have little recent, personal experience with publication. A paucity, even an absence, of published work can be pronounced excellent professional growth. [Over whom does the unpublished evaluee excel? Some graduate students? Most undergraduates? The man in the street?] Those who have served only themselves will be lauded for position rather than performance [“Even if he never attended committee meetings, could he have shirked had he not accepted appointment to the committee in the first place?”] provided evaluators consider the artful dodger useful or at least docile. As already noted, no department, school, program, or university literally needs anyone except donors, which makes judgments of “need” nearly infinitely elastic.
All of the foregoing should be evident to every faculty member, yet standards that are at once factoids [that is, taken for fact because they are published in the code], folklore [that is, shibboleths selected for solidarity more than for accuracy], and fabrications [that is, "responsible” and “reliable” faculty vouch that the FAC assiduously applies the official criteria] will hide deviance. The Confidentiality Con, the usual cover-ups, and other folderol will not hide all of the record from those few faculty who want to know and to acknowledge what is going on but will, I concede, continue to distract the busy faculty who are the large majority of our colleagues.
Among the few cognoscenti, base colleagues embrace the malleability of the standards. The chief virtue of sliding standards, these candid connivers aver, is that departments and universities may rid themselves of “the wrong sort” while flaunting the rigor of their standards. Having never been the excellent teachers or excellent scholars that they might have become but having often been excellent tools and sycophants, our tenured and promoted sharp operators mock credulous colleagues and exult in how much smarter and more successful their corrupt cynicism has made them. This is yet another way in which a member of the tenured and promoted 80% may be said to be superior.
Meanwhile this truly excellent teacher or that truly excellent scholar is dismissed for refusal to swell the ranks of genial frauds.
Next – “Taking the Fifth” – Those who hide behind confidentiality that they have contrived do not get to play the victim when faculty call for genuine oversight.
Try this thought experiment. Posit a system in which faculty, to keep their jobs, must be superior teachers while achieving superior growth professionally. If 80% of faculty do keep their jobs, to what exactly must such faculty be “superior?”
The 80% must be superior to the 20% rejected! Beyond that trivium, however, we may say little. The 20% might have been rejected for being in the lowest quintile of teaching. Some of the 20% rejected may have manifest an insufficient quantity or quality of professional growth. Maybe a few rejects were grossly deficient in both teaching and professional growth.
Trivial as our inference may be, it matches results better than published standards. The code and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] inform us that tenure is conditioned on “excellence” in teaching and professional growth, yet at no educational institution on this planet are 80% of the faculty excellent both at teaching and at professional growth. [Don’t you just hate it when the obvious clashes with factoids, folklore, fabrications, and other fantasies?] Clearly, “excellence” in the Faculty Code has little to do with “excellence” in a dictionary of English.
Faculty who receive tenure at Puget Sound become excellent by definition. Tenured faculty are excellent performatively – that is, because official declarers have declared them excellent. No other inferences are warranted.
Beyond this performative wordplay, evaluators to some extent follow the criteria in the code – excellent teaching, excellent professional growth, a record of service, and departmental and university need – but not one criterion can be applied literally and affirmatively to most evaluees. If 80% of all faculty are adjudged “excellent” in teaching and in professional growth, then those doing the judging must not be using “excellent” literally or rigorously. Every evaluee has a record of service; the code does not state any minimal service that the evaluee’s record must exceed. Taking “need” in any strong sense of the word would doom almost every evaluee. [Many faculty admit that they have no idea what “departmental need” means: The department will expire absent the evaluee’s courses, if not the evaluee? This evaluee is indispensable to the continued existence of the department? …]
In practice, standards are not literal but adjustable. The four official criteria figure prominently, but other factors condition how stringently or flaccidly the four will be employed. An evaluee insufficiently deferential to powers that be in a school, department, or program will have to survive heightened scrutiny if not flat-out reprisals. An administration favorite will, by contrast, be forgiven this or that shortfall, especially a shortfall of scholarly production, especially if members of the FAC have little recent, personal experience with publication. A paucity, even an absence, of published work can be pronounced excellent professional growth. [Over whom does the unpublished evaluee excel? Some graduate students? Most undergraduates? The man in the street?] Those who have served only themselves will be lauded for position rather than performance [“Even if he never attended committee meetings, could he have shirked had he not accepted appointment to the committee in the first place?”] provided evaluators consider the artful dodger useful or at least docile. As already noted, no department, school, program, or university literally needs anyone except donors, which makes judgments of “need” nearly infinitely elastic.
All of the foregoing should be evident to every faculty member, yet standards that are at once factoids [that is, taken for fact because they are published in the code], folklore [that is, shibboleths selected for solidarity more than for accuracy], and fabrications [that is, "responsible” and “reliable” faculty vouch that the FAC assiduously applies the official criteria] will hide deviance. The Confidentiality Con, the usual cover-ups, and other folderol will not hide all of the record from those few faculty who want to know and to acknowledge what is going on but will, I concede, continue to distract the busy faculty who are the large majority of our colleagues.
Among the few cognoscenti, base colleagues embrace the malleability of the standards. The chief virtue of sliding standards, these candid connivers aver, is that departments and universities may rid themselves of “the wrong sort” while flaunting the rigor of their standards. Having never been the excellent teachers or excellent scholars that they might have become but having often been excellent tools and sycophants, our tenured and promoted sharp operators mock credulous colleagues and exult in how much smarter and more successful their corrupt cynicism has made them. This is yet another way in which a member of the tenured and promoted 80% may be said to be superior.
Meanwhile this truly excellent teacher or that truly excellent scholar is dismissed for refusal to swell the ranks of genial frauds.
Next – “Taking the Fifth” – Those who hide behind confidentiality that they have contrived do not get to play the victim when faculty call for genuine oversight.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Nescience
Perhaps most faculty know little about what goes on at most universities; however, many colleagues at Puget Sound take measures to make certain that what goes on cannot be known.
Ignorance and indifference are problems for faculty self-governance and for evaluation of faculty. Nescience, however, is even a greater problem. Faculty succumb to folklore, folderol, factoids, and fabrications when they believe that they can never know [nescience] more so than when they do not know but believe that they might learn [ignorance] if they could overcome their overwork and distractions [indifference].
Particular abuses of confidentiality trade on ignorance but need not lead to systematic nescience. The particularized Confidentiality Con goes, “You would be satisfied with what we insiders decided if only you were privy to matters that are confidential.” This “short con” expires as soon as faculty turn from some immediate injustice to the teaching, research, service, and other responsibilities that weigh more heavily. The faculty member still does not know the specifics of this matter but is assured that his betters knew and made their best judgment call.
A longer con, however, succeeds or fails by making systemic or chronic characteristics of evaluation or governance unknowable by the faculty. Braced by confidentiality actual or apparent, by narratives plausible or implausible, and by other devices valid or fraudulent, decision-makers inform the faculty that legal rights, administrative prerogative, university policies, and/or collegial decency command that information be so closely guarded that systemic, longitudinal information that would attest to the veracity of decision-makers and the validity of decisions “cannot” be distributed. The trustees and administrators, who have some access to such data, are well satisfied, so critical faculty [e. g., those who are not indifferent to ignorance] implicitly insult their betters. This long con makes the administrators and trustees victims of distrust and criticism that – more’s the pity – laws and policies do not permit them to dissipate.
Faculty ignorance is facilitated by specific con jobs, and faculty indifference by repeated short cons. However, lengthy, generalized confidence games are needed to inculcate nescience and impassivity among the mass of veterans.
Long cons in turn demand potent individual, social, and cultural inducements to keep insiders from reverting to the critical, skeptical, scholarly ways that might demystify decisions and activities. As individuals, members of Power Committees must accept folderol, folklore, factoids, and other fictions if they are to keep collective accounts straight and, more important, believe them. As social beings, decision-makers find collective responsibility easier to assume than individual accountability, for mutually reinforcing accounts, groupthink, and shared recollections enable many hands to make light work of otherwise onerous justification. The culture of Power Committees generates an enduring mindset in which insiders commune, a mindset that reinforces individual and social beliefs even as it displaces ambiguities and uncertainties. Groupthink in time begets group mind as members of Power Committees reconstruct processes and procedures to mask from others as well as from themselves those errors, inconsistencies, and injustices that would unmask decision-making and decisions.
When members of the 2003-2004 Professional Standards Committee [PSC] bristle at the slightest suggestion that they might have erred [even though the PSC confessed error explicitly] or when they deny that a member of that committee threatened a member of a hearing board or mocked another member of that hearing board [even though a member of the hearing board insists that he was mocked and another member threatened], please do not imagine the bristling or the denial to be insincere. Instead, understand that umbrage and disavowals follow from the very nescience that Power Committees have long abetted. Insiders do not merely recreate and reinforce useful fictions; they accept the fictions as elements of ideologies that integrate insiders’ personal and communal attachments both to the PSC and to the campus community. Once the circuit has been closed in this manner, faculty who cycle off Power Committees [PCs] in three years become such thralls that they no longer are capable of perceiving or conceiving other than in the approved mindset.
After all, what would it profit PCs if insiders recanted or recovered once they left the PC and rejoined the general population? If nescience is to be sustained, nescience must be sustainable. Factlets, factoids, folklore, folderol, and fabrications fend off exposure in the short run and in the longer run make it seem impossible.
Next – “Oversight and Oversights” – Faculty oversight is more careless than vigilant.
Ignorance and indifference are problems for faculty self-governance and for evaluation of faculty. Nescience, however, is even a greater problem. Faculty succumb to folklore, folderol, factoids, and fabrications when they believe that they can never know [nescience] more so than when they do not know but believe that they might learn [ignorance] if they could overcome their overwork and distractions [indifference].
Particular abuses of confidentiality trade on ignorance but need not lead to systematic nescience. The particularized Confidentiality Con goes, “You would be satisfied with what we insiders decided if only you were privy to matters that are confidential.” This “short con” expires as soon as faculty turn from some immediate injustice to the teaching, research, service, and other responsibilities that weigh more heavily. The faculty member still does not know the specifics of this matter but is assured that his betters knew and made their best judgment call.
A longer con, however, succeeds or fails by making systemic or chronic characteristics of evaluation or governance unknowable by the faculty. Braced by confidentiality actual or apparent, by narratives plausible or implausible, and by other devices valid or fraudulent, decision-makers inform the faculty that legal rights, administrative prerogative, university policies, and/or collegial decency command that information be so closely guarded that systemic, longitudinal information that would attest to the veracity of decision-makers and the validity of decisions “cannot” be distributed. The trustees and administrators, who have some access to such data, are well satisfied, so critical faculty [e. g., those who are not indifferent to ignorance] implicitly insult their betters. This long con makes the administrators and trustees victims of distrust and criticism that – more’s the pity – laws and policies do not permit them to dissipate.
Faculty ignorance is facilitated by specific con jobs, and faculty indifference by repeated short cons. However, lengthy, generalized confidence games are needed to inculcate nescience and impassivity among the mass of veterans.
Long cons in turn demand potent individual, social, and cultural inducements to keep insiders from reverting to the critical, skeptical, scholarly ways that might demystify decisions and activities. As individuals, members of Power Committees must accept folderol, folklore, factoids, and other fictions if they are to keep collective accounts straight and, more important, believe them. As social beings, decision-makers find collective responsibility easier to assume than individual accountability, for mutually reinforcing accounts, groupthink, and shared recollections enable many hands to make light work of otherwise onerous justification. The culture of Power Committees generates an enduring mindset in which insiders commune, a mindset that reinforces individual and social beliefs even as it displaces ambiguities and uncertainties. Groupthink in time begets group mind as members of Power Committees reconstruct processes and procedures to mask from others as well as from themselves those errors, inconsistencies, and injustices that would unmask decision-making and decisions.
When members of the 2003-2004 Professional Standards Committee [PSC] bristle at the slightest suggestion that they might have erred [even though the PSC confessed error explicitly] or when they deny that a member of that committee threatened a member of a hearing board or mocked another member of that hearing board [even though a member of the hearing board insists that he was mocked and another member threatened], please do not imagine the bristling or the denial to be insincere. Instead, understand that umbrage and disavowals follow from the very nescience that Power Committees have long abetted. Insiders do not merely recreate and reinforce useful fictions; they accept the fictions as elements of ideologies that integrate insiders’ personal and communal attachments both to the PSC and to the campus community. Once the circuit has been closed in this manner, faculty who cycle off Power Committees [PCs] in three years become such thralls that they no longer are capable of perceiving or conceiving other than in the approved mindset.
After all, what would it profit PCs if insiders recanted or recovered once they left the PC and rejoined the general population? If nescience is to be sustained, nescience must be sustainable. Factlets, factoids, folklore, folderol, and fabrications fend off exposure in the short run and in the longer run make it seem impossible.
Next – “Oversight and Oversights” – Faculty oversight is more careless than vigilant.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Factlets, Factoids, Folderol, Folklore, and Fabrications
Fabrications are the last refuge of “Power Committees;” usually, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore do the trick.
Please do not imagine that the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] manipulate most colleagues most of the time. Expedient or bad-faith fabrications are such risky tactics that they are to be invoked only in emergencies. Most of the time, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore are means by which respectable faculty rationalize unauthorized discretion and acquiesce in injustices. Committees mislead faculty only when faculty will not deceive themselves.
Faculty most often deceive themselves by accepting factlets.* Factlets are inconsequent tidbits of information. Take the tidbit that the FAC “addressed” an evaluee’s serial plagiarism, for example. How much or how little did the FAC know about the plagiarisms? Ordinary faculty cannot know, for the very selection of “address” occludes understanding. Thus did a vague or ambiguous factlet supplant information. Campus “civility” cannot long abide skepticism, so inquiring colleagues risk being thought as ill-mannered as credulous colleagues are ill-informed.
Faculty are also suckers for factoids.** Factoids are presumptions believed because they are published. [Once the tidbit about the FAC’s addressing plagiarism made The Trail, a factlet became a factoid.] Likewise, misapprehensions about the code grow from confident, often comforting, proclamations of half-truths or misinformation in faculty meetings or faculty minutes. Factoids, being publicized, outstrip and outlast facts not publicized or covered up. Perhaps it is needless to add that factoids that encourage quiescence among faculty and staff will be disseminated ritually and routinely from committees, while facts that call widespread beliefs into question will be routinely and ritually obscured.
Worse, there is no folderol so preposterous that most colleagues will disbelieve it. Folderol is the campus equivalent of urban legend. Folderol may have originated in fabrications, factoids, or factlets, but its etiology cannot be traced. Around Puget Sound, one should not be surprised to hear folderol 170 degrees removed from even the official record. For instance, minutes of faculty meetings in 1994-1995 make it unmistakable that the faculty, with the support of President Pierce and the university’s attorneys, tried to eliminate “personal and professional characteristics” as a category for evaluations for tenure. Nonetheless, some on the losing side of that fight now claim that all that the faculty decided was that assessments of personal and professional characteristics were no longer mandatory. Many of these veterans evince failing memories in their scholarship and teaching, so we should not doubt the sincerity with which they cling to this folderol. By contrast, those who recall the meetings accurately and adequately must denounce the folderol as a subversion of faculty governance. The most important point is that folderol enshrines a frustration of the will of the majority to masquerade for majority will.
Why read the code or the bylaws, which may not support your own position, when you may invoke folklore that you select for its utility? Folklore consists of precedents and traditions – real and imagined – that veterans believe to be valid authority. I have heard dozens of colleagues who have been here for many years state that one who appeals a departmental denial of tenure, for example, must stick to procedural defects and cannot raise substantive violations. A glance at the code instantly disproves this canard, yet multiple hearing boards have dismissed appeals based on a misconception that reading the code would remedy. Folklore spares our colleagues from reading actual authorities, a shortcut that most colleagues deny their students. Recall that the very first folklore raised in "Rump Parliament" was the Confidentiality Con.
Fabrications, by contrast, fester when rogue committees are cornered. Sometimes, they have imprudently relied on factlets, factoids, folderol, or folklore that some bounder exposes as bogus. In other instances, they have improvidently presumed that no one will read the rules or raise a ruckus. Once a committee realizes that sins of omission or commission have been detected, fabrications flow. Usually fabrications are utterly implausible renderings of explicit, unequivocal authorities [implicit or ambiguous authority would have provided the committee plausible deniability already].
Absent plausible deniability, committees deny or affirm implausibly through risible interpre-tations. In 2003-2004, for example, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] postponed a grievance hearing beyond the fifteen days provided for by the Faculty Code. They “interpreted” the utterly unambiguous “fifteen days” to mean “fifteen working days.” When the PSC then blew past fifteen working days, the committee “interpreted” as a “hearing” a meeting of the PSC to which neither grievant nor respondent was invited. How was this contradiction of the express direction of the code justified? It wasn’t. A fabrication was merely asserted to cover the PSC’s delinquencies and a hearing to which grievant and respondent were invited occurred more than two months after the grievance reached the Dean [the code allows 20 days total]. Little wonder, then, that the PSC of 2003-2004 has been dubbed by some faculty "the Professional Standards Cult."
Only a few faculty, however, have the knowledge and courage to denounce even such obvious fabrications. When those few try to raise such issues, they are met with the Confidentiality Con, with disinformation and misinformation, and with suggestions that faculty should be prospective and civil. Insistence on honesty, integrity, and accountability in the presence of fabrications lacks civility, of course.
Outright fabrications are rare but reveal so much. Fabrications reveal the PSC to be at best lackadaisical about the very authority that apologists routinely invoke to justify PSC Confidentiality Cons. Fabrications also reveal the PSC’s contempt for the faculty that the PSC is supposed to serve. When exigencies loom, the PSC treats colleagues as marks, as rubes ripe for the taking. And woe betide anyone entangled with the PSC should he or she dare to invoke actual authority against fabricated authority. The PSC and FAC are called “the Power Committees” [PCs] both because they have the means by which to silence or to sanction the recalcitrant and because the Academic Vice President has, to say the least, been a member of both committees.
Usually, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore will spare the PSC or the FAC from revealing insiders’ disrespect for the faculty and facukty rules and will save administrators from broadcasting their disregard for citizenly virtues. Pseudo-authority, cover-ups, and buyouts usually manage acquiescence from colleagues busy with teaching, research, service, and family. The few faculty who learn what the PCs do will then easily be marginalized by the Confidentiality Con, by cover-ups, and by groupthink.
*I have borrowed this usage of "factlet" from Professor Michael Saks' 1992 University of Pennsylvania Law Review article.
**Norman Mailer invented this usage of factoid in his book on Marilyn Monroe.
Please do not imagine that the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] manipulate most colleagues most of the time. Expedient or bad-faith fabrications are such risky tactics that they are to be invoked only in emergencies. Most of the time, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore are means by which respectable faculty rationalize unauthorized discretion and acquiesce in injustices. Committees mislead faculty only when faculty will not deceive themselves.
Faculty most often deceive themselves by accepting factlets.* Factlets are inconsequent tidbits of information. Take the tidbit that the FAC “addressed” an evaluee’s serial plagiarism, for example. How much or how little did the FAC know about the plagiarisms? Ordinary faculty cannot know, for the very selection of “address” occludes understanding. Thus did a vague or ambiguous factlet supplant information. Campus “civility” cannot long abide skepticism, so inquiring colleagues risk being thought as ill-mannered as credulous colleagues are ill-informed.
Faculty are also suckers for factoids.** Factoids are presumptions believed because they are published. [Once the tidbit about the FAC’s addressing plagiarism made The Trail, a factlet became a factoid.] Likewise, misapprehensions about the code grow from confident, often comforting, proclamations of half-truths or misinformation in faculty meetings or faculty minutes. Factoids, being publicized, outstrip and outlast facts not publicized or covered up. Perhaps it is needless to add that factoids that encourage quiescence among faculty and staff will be disseminated ritually and routinely from committees, while facts that call widespread beliefs into question will be routinely and ritually obscured.
Worse, there is no folderol so preposterous that most colleagues will disbelieve it. Folderol is the campus equivalent of urban legend. Folderol may have originated in fabrications, factoids, or factlets, but its etiology cannot be traced. Around Puget Sound, one should not be surprised to hear folderol 170 degrees removed from even the official record. For instance, minutes of faculty meetings in 1994-1995 make it unmistakable that the faculty, with the support of President Pierce and the university’s attorneys, tried to eliminate “personal and professional characteristics” as a category for evaluations for tenure. Nonetheless, some on the losing side of that fight now claim that all that the faculty decided was that assessments of personal and professional characteristics were no longer mandatory. Many of these veterans evince failing memories in their scholarship and teaching, so we should not doubt the sincerity with which they cling to this folderol. By contrast, those who recall the meetings accurately and adequately must denounce the folderol as a subversion of faculty governance. The most important point is that folderol enshrines a frustration of the will of the majority to masquerade for majority will.
Why read the code or the bylaws, which may not support your own position, when you may invoke folklore that you select for its utility? Folklore consists of precedents and traditions – real and imagined – that veterans believe to be valid authority. I have heard dozens of colleagues who have been here for many years state that one who appeals a departmental denial of tenure, for example, must stick to procedural defects and cannot raise substantive violations. A glance at the code instantly disproves this canard, yet multiple hearing boards have dismissed appeals based on a misconception that reading the code would remedy. Folklore spares our colleagues from reading actual authorities, a shortcut that most colleagues deny their students. Recall that the very first folklore raised in "Rump Parliament" was the Confidentiality Con.
Fabrications, by contrast, fester when rogue committees are cornered. Sometimes, they have imprudently relied on factlets, factoids, folderol, or folklore that some bounder exposes as bogus. In other instances, they have improvidently presumed that no one will read the rules or raise a ruckus. Once a committee realizes that sins of omission or commission have been detected, fabrications flow. Usually fabrications are utterly implausible renderings of explicit, unequivocal authorities [implicit or ambiguous authority would have provided the committee plausible deniability already].
Absent plausible deniability, committees deny or affirm implausibly through risible interpre-tations. In 2003-2004, for example, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] postponed a grievance hearing beyond the fifteen days provided for by the Faculty Code. They “interpreted” the utterly unambiguous “fifteen days” to mean “fifteen working days.” When the PSC then blew past fifteen working days, the committee “interpreted” as a “hearing” a meeting of the PSC to which neither grievant nor respondent was invited. How was this contradiction of the express direction of the code justified? It wasn’t. A fabrication was merely asserted to cover the PSC’s delinquencies and a hearing to which grievant and respondent were invited occurred more than two months after the grievance reached the Dean [the code allows 20 days total]. Little wonder, then, that the PSC of 2003-2004 has been dubbed by some faculty "the Professional Standards Cult."
Only a few faculty, however, have the knowledge and courage to denounce even such obvious fabrications. When those few try to raise such issues, they are met with the Confidentiality Con, with disinformation and misinformation, and with suggestions that faculty should be prospective and civil. Insistence on honesty, integrity, and accountability in the presence of fabrications lacks civility, of course.
Outright fabrications are rare but reveal so much. Fabrications reveal the PSC to be at best lackadaisical about the very authority that apologists routinely invoke to justify PSC Confidentiality Cons. Fabrications also reveal the PSC’s contempt for the faculty that the PSC is supposed to serve. When exigencies loom, the PSC treats colleagues as marks, as rubes ripe for the taking. And woe betide anyone entangled with the PSC should he or she dare to invoke actual authority against fabricated authority. The PSC and FAC are called “the Power Committees” [PCs] both because they have the means by which to silence or to sanction the recalcitrant and because the Academic Vice President has, to say the least, been a member of both committees.
Usually, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore will spare the PSC or the FAC from revealing insiders’ disrespect for the faculty and facukty rules and will save administrators from broadcasting their disregard for citizenly virtues. Pseudo-authority, cover-ups, and buyouts usually manage acquiescence from colleagues busy with teaching, research, service, and family. The few faculty who learn what the PCs do will then easily be marginalized by the Confidentiality Con, by cover-ups, and by groupthink.
*I have borrowed this usage of "factlet" from Professor Michael Saks' 1992 University of Pennsylvania Law Review article.
**Norman Mailer invented this usage of factoid in his book on Marilyn Monroe.
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