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.

Haltom's Fifth Law: No one who whistles in public can

It is a melancholy truth that whistlers pollute the atmosphere.



Haltom's Fifth Law is unprepossessing. No one to whose whistling I have been subjected in some public place has been able to carry a tune via whistling. I do not know why this should be; I know that it is the case. I suppose that there are exceptions. If the University of Puget Clowns bestows an honorary degree on Jean "Toots" Thielmans, then I may come into the presence of someone who might whistle in public and who can. Until that day, I insist that the classes "People who whistle loudly before strangers" and "People who can whistle well" seldom if ever overlap.



I have not been able to ramify this observation. I have heard the occasional lout drive by with an explosive stereo bombarding the avenues with his musical tastes, but his tastes coincided with mine. So I regard it as a mere probability that those who play their car stereos at "setting eleven" [This Is Spinal Tap] will select truly awful music. So some people who play music that is amplified beyond all reason select music that should be heard loud and often -- say "Sympathy for the Devil."



Of course, I could use Haltom's Fourth Law to inflate Haltom's Fifth Law. Although it isn't true that "No One Who Sings in Public Can," I could force the proposition by denying the exceptions. Barring such Procrustean exertions, however, I must admit that I have heard people sing in public, even on street corners for change, who sing pleasantly. Whistling, by contrast, might as well be fingernails on a chalkboard or an operatic aria.


I have never heard a co-worker or a colleague whistle about campus in a pleasing manner. Indeed, usually the whistling is as pleasant as "overhearing" a conversation in an airport terminal. One boob screams into a cellular phone as if it were a tin can the vibrations from which had to reach out and tickle some other tin can across a cord; thank God that he is using a walkie-talkie style phone so that we may all hear the interlocutor's responses re crab lice, death threats, or car racing -- the usual topics of the loudest talkers. As Bill Maher has observed, included among these aural oafs are many folks who are incensed that the FBI or CIA should monitor their phone calls. These oafs should worry not. Let one agent overhear them in a terminal and the oaf's phone number will be taken off any watch list lest those listening file for workman's comp.


I cannot explain why Haltom's Fifth Law should be so. Perhaps many tin-ears whistle when they are happy and their good humor deafens them to the foul airs they issue.


Maybe the bombardiers are trying to drown out the meanness and repetition in their lives, a la the dwarves before Snow White.


Just whistle while you work / Put on that grin and start right in to whistle loud and long /

Just hum a merry tune / Just do your best and take a rest and sing yourself a song /

When there's too much to do / Don't let it bother you /

Forget your troubles / Try to be just like a cheerful chick-a-dee /



After all, many colleagues act as if they work the salt mines, so maybe they believe that they do.

However, this explanation does not fit the most prominent faculty whistlers. They do no work, so how could they be whistling to make more bearable that which they never do? Maybe they would be explained by an alternative hypothesis from The King and I, another song in another movie for which I do not care:


Whenever I feel afraid / I hold my head erect /
And whistle a happy tune / So no one will suspect I'm afraid. /
While shivering in my shoes / I strike a careless pose /
And whistle a happy tune / And no one ever knows I'm afraid.

The result of this deception / Is very strange to tell /
For when I fool the people / I fear I fool myself as well!




Coming Soon -- Haltom's Six Law: Those who are committed should be.