Rank-and-file faculty collude in fakery when they trust guileful communications.
The immediately previous entry in this blog argued that we faculty must assist fakery if various shams are to come off. The credulous among us are to an extent blameworthy, for if frauds concerned our own promotions or programs we each would be quick to deconstruct ersatz communications. Concerning malfeasances and nonfeasances, we usually do not know because we do not want to know.
Even more blameworthy, however, are wily communicators, especially decision-makers who explain away or excuse their chicanery. It is a pity that colleagues become too caught up in their own careers, families, and affairs to be critical or even attentive. An expectation of lenient, lazy audiences for explanations and excuses has emboldened the guileful, who disrespect the analytic capacities of almost all faculty.
Consider a paragraph written by one or more members of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of the 2003-2004 academic year. That group responded to an empty motion barely passed by the Faculty Senate on 5 February 2007 within two weeks, a remarkable feat for a committee that could not hear a grievance within the 15 days that the Faculty Code mandates. [It was of course encouraging to learn that these colleagues could react quickly when they cared to.]
Given the passage of this motion, one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC. Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation. Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006. In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.
Let us consider each sentence in turn to reveal the guile of these special pleaders.
[1] “… one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC.”
Someone who read the minutes of 5 February 2007 – minutes not yet approved and thus not yet available to senators, let alone to others – might presume that the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation, if that someone were ignorant of Senate meetings and minutes from 3 May 2004 to the present.
As respondents knew or should have known, the Senate had been stonewalled by those who endorsed the response. The Senate had appointed two ad hoc committees to investigate, among other matters, perfidies perpetrated by the PSC 2003-2004. One committee found – as any impartial, complete investigation would have to find – PSC violations of the Faculty Code. Members of the latter ad hoc committee witnessed the abuse of the first ad hoc committee by apologists and apparatchiks, which may account for why that committee’s report [October 2006] featured no findings.
The response thus reveals a tactic that the PSC has cunningly deployed for years: spin trivially true but utterly misleading. True, the Senate could be said never to have investigated PSC misprisions carefully. The Senate did not do so; two ad hoc committees appointed by the Senate did. True, the Senate had not found mistakes after a careful investigation; the Senate did so after two ad hoc committees had found mistakes [albeit that the second ad hoc committee did not issue explicit findings].
Maybe the respondents used “conclude” rather than “infer” or “assume” or other more apt terms because the respondents so routinely leapt to self-serving conclusions in 2003-2004 that they cannot imagine peers proceeding more systematically. [In fairness, the response may have been a rush job to which erstwhile members of the PSC gave too little thought. Usually, the PSC takes its time before reaching thoughtless interpretations and indefensible decisions.]
[2] “Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation.”
The key subterfuge of this second sentence has been debunked supra: the Senate conducted no such investigation but assigned two ad hoc committees to do so. The second ad hoc committee sought interveiws with members of the 2003-2004 PSC despite explicit warnings from two members of that committee to senators that confidentiality would prevent any member of the PSC from cooperating. [Recall from early entries in this blog that such statements are at best erroneous and, if members of the PSC are as familiar with the Faculty Code as they habitually claim, mendacious.]
[3] “Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006.”
This is a “nondenial denial,” the technique Ron Ziegler made famous in Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein lampooned in All the President’s Men. The respondents do not specify which allegations, if any, they believe to be the least bit inaccurate. They do not deny the allegations. Instead, they dispute the procedures by which a majority of senators came to hear and to believe the allegations. [One should not fault the response for its nondenial denials. Most if not all of Senator Ostrom’s allegations cannot plausibly be denied, as the failure of the response to specify even one example should reveal.]
[4] “In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.”
One familiar with the PSC cannot but marvel at the chutzpah of the PSC in this fourth sentence. Members who unanimously flouted the Faculty Code and due process on multiple occasions in 2003-2004 now charge the Senate with failure(s) of due process. Members who have steadfastly stonewalled senators’ attempts to gather evidence or testimony complain that the Senate did not gather evidence from all parties. The very people most responsible for the Senate’s having to work around uncooperative, unaccountable colleagues blame the Senate for proceeding with what little they themselves left the Senate. The PSC kills its parents then pleads for mercy because it is now an orphan.
This risible paragraph ought to embarrass every colleague who assented to it, but it will not because the PSC members have no audience before which to be embarrassed. How many faculty will trouble themselves to read the Faculty Code to discover that the PSC’s extravagant claims about confidentiality are folderol? How many faculty read Senate minutes, especially a response from a long-ago committee to a nearly meaningless motion? Among those who read the minutes, how many will be able to deconstruct the four sentences in the second paragraph, let alone cunning phrasings throughout the response?
To ask those three questions is to answer them. To answer them is to understand how workaday faculty collude in the acts of rogue committees and tyrannical administrators. Until more faculty participate in governance, faculty committees will remain unaccountable and, from time to time, unconscionable.
Therefore, let us not thunder at the PSC, "How dare you?" The PSC's audacity follows from faculty lassitude.
Next -- "H is for Half-Assed" -- The Faculty Senate goes off half-cocked unless it might displease administrators.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Thursday, May 3, 2007
F is for Fakery
When things are not quite what they seem, faculty enable deceptions and delusions.
At the University of Puget Clowns [so called by President Pierce at graduation], administrators and apparatchiks rely on audience participation. As sad-sack deans, slapstick chairs, and supporting jesters engage in deliberate irony and inadvertent parody, rank and file faculty must suspend disbelief, credit performances, and accept verisimilitude as verity.
Most of the time, ordinary faculty suspend disbelief easily because most performances approximate reality. Many professors that the Faculty Advancement Committee (FAC) dubs distinguished, for example, have outperformed colleagues. Many recipients of teaching awards are good teachers. Many promotions are merited. These decisions at least roughly meet standards, criteria, and expectations and need little or no help or credence from faculty enablers.
From time to time, the FAC will deviate from rules or expectations and will have to counterfeit honors, designations, or decisions. When this happens, faculty enablers are indispensable. Colleagues must under such circumstances believe the unbelievable, credit the incredible, and deny the undeniable. More, colleagues must shore up accounts where they are obviously faulty lest innocents who are not enablers catch on to the fakery.
As we saw in “Evaluating Committee Performance,” an earlier entry in this blog, whatever social production appears to be exactly what one would expect probably is what it seems; if a performance is not what it seems, most likely it is a perfect fake (as Erving Goffman taught us).
Veteran faculty routinely perfect fakery to nudge the FAC within range of practice and precedents. A few colleagues stretch the facts or bury inconvenient truths to enable the FAC to award a mediocrity a teaching award; far more colleagues at the Fall Faculty Dinner clap politely and avoid obvious mismatches between the evidence and the outcome. When a colleague who is distinguished from other full professors mostly or only in a negative direction is designated “Distinguished,” colleagues avert their eyes at the Fall Faculty Dinner then acted surprised that such designees claim to be “Distinguished” on business cards or on correspondence as if such designation were equivalent to “Distinguished Professor of This or That” at a genuine university. Colleagues must assist in the fakery.
So when next one marvels at ersatz evaluation, give some thought to the bozos piling out of the little car. They perform their parts so that featured actors can fake out the unwary.
At the University of Puget Clowns [so called by President Pierce at graduation], administrators and apparatchiks rely on audience participation. As sad-sack deans, slapstick chairs, and supporting jesters engage in deliberate irony and inadvertent parody, rank and file faculty must suspend disbelief, credit performances, and accept verisimilitude as verity.
Most of the time, ordinary faculty suspend disbelief easily because most performances approximate reality. Many professors that the Faculty Advancement Committee (FAC) dubs distinguished, for example, have outperformed colleagues. Many recipients of teaching awards are good teachers. Many promotions are merited. These decisions at least roughly meet standards, criteria, and expectations and need little or no help or credence from faculty enablers.
From time to time, the FAC will deviate from rules or expectations and will have to counterfeit honors, designations, or decisions. When this happens, faculty enablers are indispensable. Colleagues must under such circumstances believe the unbelievable, credit the incredible, and deny the undeniable. More, colleagues must shore up accounts where they are obviously faulty lest innocents who are not enablers catch on to the fakery.
As we saw in “Evaluating Committee Performance,” an earlier entry in this blog, whatever social production appears to be exactly what one would expect probably is what it seems; if a performance is not what it seems, most likely it is a perfect fake (as Erving Goffman taught us).
Veteran faculty routinely perfect fakery to nudge the FAC within range of practice and precedents. A few colleagues stretch the facts or bury inconvenient truths to enable the FAC to award a mediocrity a teaching award; far more colleagues at the Fall Faculty Dinner clap politely and avoid obvious mismatches between the evidence and the outcome. When a colleague who is distinguished from other full professors mostly or only in a negative direction is designated “Distinguished,” colleagues avert their eyes at the Fall Faculty Dinner then acted surprised that such designees claim to be “Distinguished” on business cards or on correspondence as if such designation were equivalent to “Distinguished Professor of This or That” at a genuine university. Colleagues must assist in the fakery.
So when next one marvels at ersatz evaluation, give some thought to the bozos piling out of the little car. They perform their parts so that featured actors can fake out the unwary.
Friday, April 20, 2007
E is for Etiquette
When colleagues call for "civil" discourse, what they mean is mannered discourse that serves over-dogs better than under-dogs.
Old dogs [see an earlier entry, “Respectable, Reliability, Reputable,” regarding faculty dogs] at UPS know the usages of “civility” on campus. On the surface, civility exhorts faculty to exhibit politeness, tact, sensitivity, orthodoxy, and other artifices of manners and breeding. The latent meaning of civility on this campus is that the disadvantaged should cheerfully accept their lots and should protest, if at all, privately when colleagues backstab, corkscrew, prevaricate, dissimulate, or misstate. Both sorts of civility are called for when administrators, apparatchiks, and other decision-makers inform lesser faculty of what their betters have decided. This dual sense of “civil” may be labeled “meekspeak.”
Meekspeak is directional – one must kiss up but may piss down – so incivility toward one’s betters will be sanctioned more copiously than unpleasantness directed toward one’s inferiors. As preceding entries in this blog have shown, it is especially “uncivil” for colleagues who have been fired to protest that rules have violated or that there are no standards. After all:
1. Rules are violated by each such entity every year, so why bring up deviance in your case? Is everything about you, selfish?
2. Colleagues summon standards that they neither understand nor follow, so what difference would standards make? What are you, disappointed colleague, a lawyer?
The condemned are expected to accede to the superior wisdom of their departments, schools, or programs and to the superior judgment of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and one or more administrators. The fired should cooperate in their degradation and separation – for the greater glory of the university and comfort of faculty. At the “University of Puget Clowns,” respectable, reputable, reliable faculty meekly go along with the jokes from on high.
One is expected to kiss up even to faculty who have fired one, but selected faculty get to piss down as well. That top-down communications are often far from meek, civil, or decent was revealed anew when an attorney for the University informed the faculty that use of “personal and professional characteristics” violated the Faculty Code and risked litigation against the University and, in egregious cases, against individual evaluators. Old dogs who long for respect and often pronounce themselves responsible decision-makers [usually with some jibe at colleagues for being insufficiently rigorous] did not greet their legal responsibilities warmly on 17 April 2007.
Most faculty in the room greeted the attorney’s banal reaffirmations with a “Duh,” but a few old dogs struggled to propose ways in which they might snipe at or smear evaluees without risking legal reprisals. One yappy dog “recalled” that the faculty and trustees had banned personal characteristics but not professional characteristics and seemed to be aghast that personal and professional characteristics had both been excised from the Faculty Code. Well, implementing decisions of faculty and trustees within 12 years is rushing it for some of the slower dogs with weaker noses. A bulldog from the same department concocted hysterical hypotheticals in which he might be able to lob information from outside a file against an evaluee and seemed disconsolate that civil litigation might impair his ability to assail and to assault junior faculty. [Nietzsche warned us to distrust those whose most powerful urge is to punish.] Yet another member of the pack from that department then opined that he had objected to prognostications based on personal and professional characteristics more than the use of such characterizations themselves. A mad dog who ran away from the same department could not reprise his damnable misinformation that the faculty and trustees in 1994-1995 merely eliminated colleagues’ obligation but not their license to consider personal and professional characteristics.
While we may all hope that in the 10-12 years in which “personal and professional characteristics” has been proscribed none of these flouters of the express will of the trustees and the faculty have indulged themselves in forbidden assaults on evaluees, we know that each almost certainly has.
However, the far more interesting probability is that each has lamented some lack of civility and demanded more deference to veteran faculty over the years. Each has probably welcomed or rewarded meekspeak on numerous occasions, all the while lauding liberal learning and academic freedom.
What most interests me is how such colleagues can regard their behaviors and their advocacy as somehow “civil” within the manifest usage of the term.
Next: "F is for Fakery" -- When things are not quite what they seem, faculty enablers make deceptions and delusions work.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
D is for Deals
Buying the school’s way out of malfeasance limits exposure and accountability more than litigation or loss.
Some veterans, when confronted about the University’s buying its way out of its failings rather than correcting the failings, pose as sages: “Well, sometimes the payoff is the best thing.”
Not to make too much out of yet another thought-free remark from old parrots – I intend to make just enough out of it – faculty should realize two "A's" that buyouts betoken:
Aversion to Litigation and especially Exposure
The Ad Hoc Committee on Tenure [AHCT] – the four fools who took accountability seriously, crafted findings bravely, and endured brickbats stoically – worried about the University’s procuring protection from litigation and from adverse publicity at too great a price. The AHCT asked whether the University was spending freely rather than using such less expensive means of warding off litigation as doing the right thing in the first place or policing processes and professors when they go awry. The AHCT hazarded a conjecture that following the Faculty Code might be cheaper than flouting the Faculty Code and paying off a few victims who secure legal representation, evidence from Ford’s Pinto litigation notwithstanding. However, once that ad hoc committee released findings at odds with pronouncements from Jones Hall, their concerns about payoffs largely disappeared beneath ostensibly methodological, actually mythological critique.
Colleagues who were not gulled by the caterwauling of those who can abide anything but candor were nonetheless taken in by the myth of litigious America. They assured themselves and others that Puget Sound would win the litigation but only after enormous legal bills, so that the better part of jural valor might be to throw money at colleagues who objected to being ill-used. [If you do not object to being ill-used, wait for the named chair in your future!] Why not let the school off cheap, they ask, before some benighted jury fails to understand that violations of the rules are actually evidence of fidelity to higher ideals. [It is distressing how few jurors have read 1984 as a guide to institutional self-help!]
Yet many buyouts come before victims have engaged counsel or contemplated litigation. The school is expending thousands of dollars to fend off lawsuits that might never be? I suppose the pre-emptive surgeries work, but removing tonsils and adenoids at birth seems precipitous.
Maybe the school actually wants to buy the silence of victims. The aggrieved must be shut up lest faculty, staff, students, or trustees be wised up. More than litigation or negotiation, the University fears exposure.
What if colleagues found out that a whistleblower was induced to take a buyout before the whistleblower’s file reached the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]? [Naturally, the serial plagiarist on whom the naïve junior faculty blew the whistle not only continued on the faculty but also participated in dismissing the whistleblower – exactly the sort of process with which unsophisticated jurors might have some difficulty!] Why need the University fear that a third-year review might be read by five faculty [on the FAC or a hearing board] sworn to secrecy? If the University worried that the negative letters might expose the University to litigation, wouldn’t it have been more straightforward and just to wait for a hearing board or the FAC to screen the file for unfairness, inadequacy, or incompleteness? Did the University fear that some faculty might conclude that more than 20 pages written against the whistleblower by the spouse of the serial plagiarist might fall short of the objectivity that the Faculty Code commands? [Another detail that pesky jurors might not understand!] Or was the worry that five or more professors might learn what the AHCT called “departmental meltdown?”
Affinity for Unaccountability and Irresponsibility
Buyouts, especially preemptory buyouts, do more than gag those in the know and protect practices and processes from exposure and judgment. They instruct the few faculty in the know that malefactors will not be held responsible or accountable.
Consider the erstwhile faculty plagiarist. How did a third-year assistant professor get through her departmental review unscathed after two of her plagiarized works were exposed by the whistleblower before deliberations? Most faculty probably will never know. Two witnesses to the departmental deliberation have been sent away. The remaining participants are unlikely to take responsibility for any ineffectual or indifferent responses to the revelations. The chair of the department had been informed about each plagiarism before the deliberations. What steps, if any, did he take? Did one or more departmental colleagues excuse or minimize the plagiarisms [one set imperiling a faculty co-author and one set endangering a then-undergraduate co-author]?
We have been told that the FAC “addressed” this matter. Exactly what does that mean? We cannot know, which is precisely why we are told only that the FAC spoke or wrote some words that had something to do with the file. More than that we are not permitted to learn.
The FAC recommends a disposition of the file to the Academic Vice President [AVP], who decides whether to reappoint a third-year assistant professor. Whatever addressing or recommending the FAC did, the AVP was ultimately charged to dispose of the matter. If a serial plagiarist was reappointed by the AVP – and since she was working in Fall Semester 2005 one might infer that she had been reappointed – how can colleagues believe that the AVP took the sets of plagiarisms seriously? Did that AVP inform himself about the particulars, or did he reach his decision without additional information? If we intone that the AVP took faculty plagiarism seriously, what does that say about colloquial usage of “taking seriously?”
And what of the whistleblower’s effort to acquaint the President with the sets of plagiarisms before the whistleblower left town? Did the President “take seriously” faculty plagiarism to such an extent that he refused to look at the evidence? The faculty do not know, courtesy of the buyout.
Some faculty had hoped that, when the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] was created to deal with, among other matters, campuswide disquiet over faculty plagiarism and its apparent mishandling [when it was handled at all], the AHCPS might answer some questions. Instead, the AHCPS issued no findings about faculty plagiarism. The AHCPS issued no explanation for why the formal grievance against the plagiarist was withdrawn. The AHCPS covered up anew, thereby completing the lack of accountability and the irresponsibility worked by buyouts. What a coincidence that senators who had attacked the earlier ad hoc committee welcomed the vacuities of the later committee's report!
When buyouts and payoffs obstruct accountability, responsibility, cognizance, and governance, Jones Hall's “Deal or No Deal” keeps faculty in the dark.
Next: "E is for Etiquette" -- When colleagues call for "civil" discourse, what they mean is mannered discourse that serves over-dogs better than under-dogs.
Some veterans, when confronted about the University’s buying its way out of its failings rather than correcting the failings, pose as sages: “Well, sometimes the payoff is the best thing.”
Not to make too much out of yet another thought-free remark from old parrots – I intend to make just enough out of it – faculty should realize two "A's" that buyouts betoken:
- Aversion to litigation and, even more, to exposure
- Affinity for unaccountability and irresponsibility.
Aversion to Litigation and especially Exposure
The Ad Hoc Committee on Tenure [AHCT] – the four fools who took accountability seriously, crafted findings bravely, and endured brickbats stoically – worried about the University’s procuring protection from litigation and from adverse publicity at too great a price. The AHCT asked whether the University was spending freely rather than using such less expensive means of warding off litigation as doing the right thing in the first place or policing processes and professors when they go awry. The AHCT hazarded a conjecture that following the Faculty Code might be cheaper than flouting the Faculty Code and paying off a few victims who secure legal representation, evidence from Ford’s Pinto litigation notwithstanding. However, once that ad hoc committee released findings at odds with pronouncements from Jones Hall, their concerns about payoffs largely disappeared beneath ostensibly methodological, actually mythological critique.
Colleagues who were not gulled by the caterwauling of those who can abide anything but candor were nonetheless taken in by the myth of litigious America. They assured themselves and others that Puget Sound would win the litigation but only after enormous legal bills, so that the better part of jural valor might be to throw money at colleagues who objected to being ill-used. [If you do not object to being ill-used, wait for the named chair in your future!] Why not let the school off cheap, they ask, before some benighted jury fails to understand that violations of the rules are actually evidence of fidelity to higher ideals. [It is distressing how few jurors have read 1984 as a guide to institutional self-help!]
Yet many buyouts come before victims have engaged counsel or contemplated litigation. The school is expending thousands of dollars to fend off lawsuits that might never be? I suppose the pre-emptive surgeries work, but removing tonsils and adenoids at birth seems precipitous.
Maybe the school actually wants to buy the silence of victims. The aggrieved must be shut up lest faculty, staff, students, or trustees be wised up. More than litigation or negotiation, the University fears exposure.
What if colleagues found out that a whistleblower was induced to take a buyout before the whistleblower’s file reached the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]? [Naturally, the serial plagiarist on whom the naïve junior faculty blew the whistle not only continued on the faculty but also participated in dismissing the whistleblower – exactly the sort of process with which unsophisticated jurors might have some difficulty!] Why need the University fear that a third-year review might be read by five faculty [on the FAC or a hearing board] sworn to secrecy? If the University worried that the negative letters might expose the University to litigation, wouldn’t it have been more straightforward and just to wait for a hearing board or the FAC to screen the file for unfairness, inadequacy, or incompleteness? Did the University fear that some faculty might conclude that more than 20 pages written against the whistleblower by the spouse of the serial plagiarist might fall short of the objectivity that the Faculty Code commands? [Another detail that pesky jurors might not understand!] Or was the worry that five or more professors might learn what the AHCT called “departmental meltdown?”
Affinity for Unaccountability and Irresponsibility
Buyouts, especially preemptory buyouts, do more than gag those in the know and protect practices and processes from exposure and judgment. They instruct the few faculty in the know that malefactors will not be held responsible or accountable.
Consider the erstwhile faculty plagiarist. How did a third-year assistant professor get through her departmental review unscathed after two of her plagiarized works were exposed by the whistleblower before deliberations? Most faculty probably will never know. Two witnesses to the departmental deliberation have been sent away. The remaining participants are unlikely to take responsibility for any ineffectual or indifferent responses to the revelations. The chair of the department had been informed about each plagiarism before the deliberations. What steps, if any, did he take? Did one or more departmental colleagues excuse or minimize the plagiarisms [one set imperiling a faculty co-author and one set endangering a then-undergraduate co-author]?
We have been told that the FAC “addressed” this matter. Exactly what does that mean? We cannot know, which is precisely why we are told only that the FAC spoke or wrote some words that had something to do with the file. More than that we are not permitted to learn.
The FAC recommends a disposition of the file to the Academic Vice President [AVP], who decides whether to reappoint a third-year assistant professor. Whatever addressing or recommending the FAC did, the AVP was ultimately charged to dispose of the matter. If a serial plagiarist was reappointed by the AVP – and since she was working in Fall Semester 2005 one might infer that she had been reappointed – how can colleagues believe that the AVP took the sets of plagiarisms seriously? Did that AVP inform himself about the particulars, or did he reach his decision without additional information? If we intone that the AVP took faculty plagiarism seriously, what does that say about colloquial usage of “taking seriously?”
And what of the whistleblower’s effort to acquaint the President with the sets of plagiarisms before the whistleblower left town? Did the President “take seriously” faculty plagiarism to such an extent that he refused to look at the evidence? The faculty do not know, courtesy of the buyout.
Some faculty had hoped that, when the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] was created to deal with, among other matters, campuswide disquiet over faculty plagiarism and its apparent mishandling [when it was handled at all], the AHCPS might answer some questions. Instead, the AHCPS issued no findings about faculty plagiarism. The AHCPS issued no explanation for why the formal grievance against the plagiarist was withdrawn. The AHCPS covered up anew, thereby completing the lack of accountability and the irresponsibility worked by buyouts. What a coincidence that senators who had attacked the earlier ad hoc committee welcomed the vacuities of the later committee's report!
When buyouts and payoffs obstruct accountability, responsibility, cognizance, and governance, Jones Hall's “Deal or No Deal” keeps faculty in the dark.
Next: "E is for Etiquette" -- When colleagues call for "civil" discourse, what they mean is mannered discourse that serves over-dogs better than under-dogs.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
C is for Cooneying
The Bush Administration’s bowdlerizing of scientific reports provides colleagues a useful verb.
Deans have over the years loaded Power Committees [PC] with sycophants and shills, especially when feckless senate executives have been more interested in the good will or patronage of deans. In like manner, failed “oilman” George W. Bush selected an energy lobbyist to lead his Council on Environmental Quality. The erstwhile lobbyist, Philip A. Cooney, proceeded to redact scientific reports on global warming to create or to nurture mysteries or uncertainties about the existence or extent of global warming and to undermine inconvenient truths. In Mr. Cooney’s hands, intelligence about greenhouse gases and climate changes was “fixed” around policy much as intelligence about Iraq was said by the “Downing Street Memorandum” to have been. Needless to add, Cooney had no more scientific expertise than the modal member of the Professional Standards Committee has aptitude for reading the Faculty Code. Cooney gave every appearance of being yet another loyal hack, another “Bushie” doing a heckuva job. When Cooney finally left the council, he got a job for Exxon Mobil. Perhaps in a future entry in this blog, I may explore such “revolving doors” at Puget Sound. Given similarities between governance on campus and in D. C., let us use “to Cooney” as a verb for various subterfuges by administrators or apparatchiks.
One may “Cooney” a colleague by calling a meeting to entertain the views of constituents and colleagues only to quarrel with every premise or critical observation any underling dares to offer. One opens the floor to “input,” then disputes unwelcome ideas and welcomes disputable notions. Fool and tools may, of course, point out how the current administration [in Washington as at Puget Sound] every day in every way gets better and better without fear of condemnation and with reasonable odds of commendation. The lowly are free to assent to their own debasement present or future without concern that they will be Cooneyed, but let some rambunctious neophyte wonder why certain questionable practices prevail and administrative hysteria breaks out.
A classic “Cooney” is to refute decisively an argument that no one ever has or ever would make. Al Gore and his allies are beset for positions that they have never endorsed, for beliefs that they have never entertained, and for policies that they would never embrace. They are subjected to caricature assassination as surely as “reliable faculty” mischaracterize proposals and critiques on campus.
One may also “Cooney” colleagues by refusing to release or even hiding reports or other key documents. Unsolicited, unwelcome information must be quarantined lest the impressionable be impressed. Better to ration information on a “need to know basis.”
Of course, in the Era of Dubya no true leader permits democratic or republican self-governance. Rather, the true leader expands administrative or executive prerogative as far as he or she can. The crafty leader sees instantly that every lacuna is permissive for betters but prohibitive to the masses. Whatever measures the common folk enact should be circumvented secretly and soon so that, through precedents and precedence, they may be subverted blatantly later.
There are many more ways in which the powerless have been or will be “Cooneyed.” Let the audacious seek ever more ways in which to stifle dissent and to enervate discourse. Only by comprising as many corruptions as possible may we truly honor the Great Cooney as he deserves.
Next: "D is for Deals" -- Buying the school’s way out of malfeasance limits litigation and other exposure.
Deans have over the years loaded Power Committees [PC] with sycophants and shills, especially when feckless senate executives have been more interested in the good will or patronage of deans. In like manner, failed “oilman” George W. Bush selected an energy lobbyist to lead his Council on Environmental Quality. The erstwhile lobbyist, Philip A. Cooney, proceeded to redact scientific reports on global warming to create or to nurture mysteries or uncertainties about the existence or extent of global warming and to undermine inconvenient truths. In Mr. Cooney’s hands, intelligence about greenhouse gases and climate changes was “fixed” around policy much as intelligence about Iraq was said by the “Downing Street Memorandum” to have been. Needless to add, Cooney had no more scientific expertise than the modal member of the Professional Standards Committee has aptitude for reading the Faculty Code. Cooney gave every appearance of being yet another loyal hack, another “Bushie” doing a heckuva job. When Cooney finally left the council, he got a job for Exxon Mobil. Perhaps in a future entry in this blog, I may explore such “revolving doors” at Puget Sound. Given similarities between governance on campus and in D. C., let us use “to Cooney” as a verb for various subterfuges by administrators or apparatchiks.
One may “Cooney” a colleague by calling a meeting to entertain the views of constituents and colleagues only to quarrel with every premise or critical observation any underling dares to offer. One opens the floor to “input,” then disputes unwelcome ideas and welcomes disputable notions. Fool and tools may, of course, point out how the current administration [in Washington as at Puget Sound] every day in every way gets better and better without fear of condemnation and with reasonable odds of commendation. The lowly are free to assent to their own debasement present or future without concern that they will be Cooneyed, but let some rambunctious neophyte wonder why certain questionable practices prevail and administrative hysteria breaks out.
A classic “Cooney” is to refute decisively an argument that no one ever has or ever would make. Al Gore and his allies are beset for positions that they have never endorsed, for beliefs that they have never entertained, and for policies that they would never embrace. They are subjected to caricature assassination as surely as “reliable faculty” mischaracterize proposals and critiques on campus.
One may also “Cooney” colleagues by refusing to release or even hiding reports or other key documents. Unsolicited, unwelcome information must be quarantined lest the impressionable be impressed. Better to ration information on a “need to know basis.”
Of course, in the Era of Dubya no true leader permits democratic or republican self-governance. Rather, the true leader expands administrative or executive prerogative as far as he or she can. The crafty leader sees instantly that every lacuna is permissive for betters but prohibitive to the masses. Whatever measures the common folk enact should be circumvented secretly and soon so that, through precedents and precedence, they may be subverted blatantly later.
There are many more ways in which the powerless have been or will be “Cooneyed.” Let the audacious seek ever more ways in which to stifle dissent and to enervate discourse. Only by comprising as many corruptions as possible may we truly honor the Great Cooney as he deserves.
Next: "D is for Deals" -- Buying the school’s way out of malfeasance limits litigation and other exposure.
Monday, April 2, 2007
B is for Burden of Proof
The Faculty Advancement Committee can simulate fidelity to the code under almost any conditions.
“A is for Accounting” revealed some actualities of how some colleagues fail of tenure. Perhaps as enlightening is how colleagues who do not merit tenure – the “False Positives” I have discussed above – are awarded tenure nonetheless. False negatives and false positives slip through because the burdens of proof on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] are far from onerous.
Let us start with what should have been obvious in the immediately previous post: for all the arbitrary decisions and specious justifications flowing about campus, the Faculty Code’s standards and criteria relate strongly to decisions. That is, the code places the burden of proof on an evaluee to make her or his case. Schools, programs, or departments [hereafter abbreviated as “departments”] may help or hinder the effort to get tenure as well. If evidence regarding teaching and/or professional growth is insufficient, the code directs that tenure should not awarded. If conflicts with colleagues can be claimed to impair teaching or professional growth, then evaluators have their way of the evaluee. Burdens on evaluees and departments are so heavy that subsequent evaluators' burdens are light.
Let us see in some detail how the actuall allocation of the burden of proof licenses great discretion by the FAC.
If the FAC claims to espy some negatives in students’ evaluations that no one in the department saw [or will, on further review, see], the evaluee and the department are unarmed against claims that the necessary evidence or explanation is absent [the “A” claims in the immediately previous posting]. Each will sit before the Committee poleaxed when the Committee conjures a novel, sometimes fanciful reading of the file. How were they to have headed off an interpretation or a fabrication that they could not or did not anticipate? The question is rhetorical. The burden is on them, not the Committee.
The FAC will have its way with the evaluee and/or the department because neither will have met the burden of proof that they could not or did not see. The Committee will intone gravely that the burden of proof is on the evaluee or department [see the “B” claims in the immediately previous posting]. The Faculty Code says so for all to see! Thus does patent language mask latent subjectivity. By the time that the evaluee and his or her department learn what the Committee is up to, it is too late to remedy the file.
In a similar manner, conflicts [“C” factors in the immediately previous posting] furnish an occasion for the FAC to transcend squabbling and tantrums or to accede to the harsh reality that it is easier to fire one evaluee than multiple departmental malefactors, especially if scalawags are tenured. Whatever the Committee elects to do, the code will likely rationalize the result because the FAC effectively creates much of the file that the President and trustees will see.
For the foregoing reasons, FAC recommendations and rationalizations will almost always successfully allude to the Faculty Code. The Committee will take far greater care to appear to adhere to the code when the Committee is ranging furthest from the code’s letter or spirit. When favoring an evaluee by finding excellent professional growth where many colleagues would have difficulty finding any professional growth or by certifying excellent teaching when pedagogy has been desultory, the Committee will be crafty and clever in ways unnecessary when an evaluation is routine. When a negative recommendation is a close call, the Committee will be even cagier but will have to bamboozle the President and the trustees, not the department or the evaluee far more familiar with the file in detail.
If members of the FAC break through groupthink to compose minority reports, expect such reports to be buried. I presume that minority reports have usually reached the President. I do not know if they have routinely reached the trustees. In at least one instance, an FAC minority report did not reach a hearing board until that hearing board accidentally discovered the report.
In sum, even when the FAC does not manifestly violate the code, the Committee need not have adhered to the code. The Committee enjoys such useful presumptions and deference that there are few practical limits to the loads that it can forklift.
Next: “C is for Cooneying” – The Bush Administration’s bowdlerizing of scientific reports provides colleagues a useful verb.
“A is for Accounting” revealed some actualities of how some colleagues fail of tenure. Perhaps as enlightening is how colleagues who do not merit tenure – the “False Positives” I have discussed above – are awarded tenure nonetheless. False negatives and false positives slip through because the burdens of proof on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] are far from onerous.
Let us start with what should have been obvious in the immediately previous post: for all the arbitrary decisions and specious justifications flowing about campus, the Faculty Code’s standards and criteria relate strongly to decisions. That is, the code places the burden of proof on an evaluee to make her or his case. Schools, programs, or departments [hereafter abbreviated as “departments”] may help or hinder the effort to get tenure as well. If evidence regarding teaching and/or professional growth is insufficient, the code directs that tenure should not awarded. If conflicts with colleagues can be claimed to impair teaching or professional growth, then evaluators have their way of the evaluee. Burdens on evaluees and departments are so heavy that subsequent evaluators' burdens are light.
Let us see in some detail how the actuall allocation of the burden of proof licenses great discretion by the FAC.
If the FAC claims to espy some negatives in students’ evaluations that no one in the department saw [or will, on further review, see], the evaluee and the department are unarmed against claims that the necessary evidence or explanation is absent [the “A” claims in the immediately previous posting]. Each will sit before the Committee poleaxed when the Committee conjures a novel, sometimes fanciful reading of the file. How were they to have headed off an interpretation or a fabrication that they could not or did not anticipate? The question is rhetorical. The burden is on them, not the Committee.
The FAC will have its way with the evaluee and/or the department because neither will have met the burden of proof that they could not or did not see. The Committee will intone gravely that the burden of proof is on the evaluee or department [see the “B” claims in the immediately previous posting]. The Faculty Code says so for all to see! Thus does patent language mask latent subjectivity. By the time that the evaluee and his or her department learn what the Committee is up to, it is too late to remedy the file.
In a similar manner, conflicts [“C” factors in the immediately previous posting] furnish an occasion for the FAC to transcend squabbling and tantrums or to accede to the harsh reality that it is easier to fire one evaluee than multiple departmental malefactors, especially if scalawags are tenured. Whatever the Committee elects to do, the code will likely rationalize the result because the FAC effectively creates much of the file that the President and trustees will see.
For the foregoing reasons, FAC recommendations and rationalizations will almost always successfully allude to the Faculty Code. The Committee will take far greater care to appear to adhere to the code when the Committee is ranging furthest from the code’s letter or spirit. When favoring an evaluee by finding excellent professional growth where many colleagues would have difficulty finding any professional growth or by certifying excellent teaching when pedagogy has been desultory, the Committee will be crafty and clever in ways unnecessary when an evaluation is routine. When a negative recommendation is a close call, the Committee will be even cagier but will have to bamboozle the President and the trustees, not the department or the evaluee far more familiar with the file in detail.
If members of the FAC break through groupthink to compose minority reports, expect such reports to be buried. I presume that minority reports have usually reached the President. I do not know if they have routinely reached the trustees. In at least one instance, an FAC minority report did not reach a hearing board until that hearing board accidentally discovered the report.
In sum, even when the FAC does not manifestly violate the code, the Committee need not have adhered to the code. The Committee enjoys such useful presumptions and deference that there are few practical limits to the loads that it can forklift.
Next: “C is for Cooneying” – The Bush Administration’s bowdlerizing of scientific reports provides colleagues a useful verb.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
A is for Accounting
How the FAC actually works.
We can all read the criteria in the code, but they do not answer the question “How do people actually fail to make tenure?” One erstwhile member of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] summarized his or her experience in terms of three factors, handled infra in order of diminishing importance.
A is for Absence: Absence or insufficiency of evidence in the evaluee’s tenure file regarding teaching and/or professional growth dooms the application for tenure.
A1. Student evaluations indicate some problem(s) with teaching but the evaluee or letter-writers
A1a. do not recognize or acknowledge problem(s) and/or
A1b. present no cogent analysis of problem(s) and/or
A1c. adduce no evidence of improvement or a convincing plan for remediation of problems.
A2. Evaluee or letter-writers present little evidence of professional growth.
B is for Burden of Proof: The burden of proof on candidates and departments is shirked, leaving the evaluee at the mercy of the FAC or the President. Some evaluees put shockingly little effort into building an adequate file. It is difficult to tell if some candidates’ colleagues simply do not care or are purposely damning with faint praise.
C is for Conflict: Interpersonal factors* related to conflict and/or to management of conflict are squeezed under official criteria. Some candidates do not handle conflict in a politic way. Some departments do not seem to tolerate conflict or handle it in a productive or decent way.
C1. One or more members of the department are hostile to the candidate due to factors not derived from A or B supra.
C2. An administrator is hostile to the candidate due to factors not derived from A or B supra.
C3. The evaluee, often in response to a perceived threat of C1 or C2 or both, makes asinine statements, requests, gestures, or moves at odds with a recommendation for tenure, and these are documented in the file by the evaluee or by detractors in the department or on the FAC.
C4. One or more members of the FAC are or grow hostile to the candidate.
This veteran of the FAC described four tenure-denial scenarios that he or she had personally witnessed:
A1b/c + mild B + C2
A1a + mild A2 + B
A1a/b/c + B
C1 + C2+ C3
* After the faculty and trustees purged the Faculty Code of the “personal and professional characteristics” criterion – the requirement that one be liked or at least not disliked by “the right people” – detractors and deniers, consisting in part of those who at the faculty meetings supported the idea that probationary colleagues be required to be nice to them, have become adept at smuggling “personal and professional characteristics” into the remaining official criteria. Indeed, some adventurers have simply denied that the “personal and professional characteristics” criterion was excised. For them, this "a**hole clause" persists as a double-secret criterion to sink junior faculty.
Next: "B is for Burden of Proof" -- The Faculty Advancement Committee can simulate fidelity to the code under almost any conditions.
We can all read the criteria in the code, but they do not answer the question “How do people actually fail to make tenure?” One erstwhile member of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] summarized his or her experience in terms of three factors, handled infra in order of diminishing importance.
A is for Absence: Absence or insufficiency of evidence in the evaluee’s tenure file regarding teaching and/or professional growth dooms the application for tenure.
A1. Student evaluations indicate some problem(s) with teaching but the evaluee or letter-writers
A1a. do not recognize or acknowledge problem(s) and/or
A1b. present no cogent analysis of problem(s) and/or
A1c. adduce no evidence of improvement or a convincing plan for remediation of problems.
A2. Evaluee or letter-writers present little evidence of professional growth.
B is for Burden of Proof: The burden of proof on candidates and departments is shirked, leaving the evaluee at the mercy of the FAC or the President. Some evaluees put shockingly little effort into building an adequate file. It is difficult to tell if some candidates’ colleagues simply do not care or are purposely damning with faint praise.
C is for Conflict: Interpersonal factors* related to conflict and/or to management of conflict are squeezed under official criteria. Some candidates do not handle conflict in a politic way. Some departments do not seem to tolerate conflict or handle it in a productive or decent way.
C1. One or more members of the department are hostile to the candidate due to factors not derived from A or B supra.
C2. An administrator is hostile to the candidate due to factors not derived from A or B supra.
C3. The evaluee, often in response to a perceived threat of C1 or C2 or both, makes asinine statements, requests, gestures, or moves at odds with a recommendation for tenure, and these are documented in the file by the evaluee or by detractors in the department or on the FAC.
C4. One or more members of the FAC are or grow hostile to the candidate.
This veteran of the FAC described four tenure-denial scenarios that he or she had personally witnessed:
A1b/c + mild B + C2
A1a + mild A2 + B
A1a/b/c + B
C1 + C2+ C3
* After the faculty and trustees purged the Faculty Code of the “personal and professional characteristics” criterion – the requirement that one be liked or at least not disliked by “the right people” – detractors and deniers, consisting in part of those who at the faculty meetings supported the idea that probationary colleagues be required to be nice to them, have become adept at smuggling “personal and professional characteristics” into the remaining official criteria. Indeed, some adventurers have simply denied that the “personal and professional characteristics” criterion was excised. For them, this "a**hole clause" persists as a double-secret criterion to sink junior faculty.
Next: "B is for Burden of Proof" -- The Faculty Advancement Committee can simulate fidelity to the code under almost any conditions.
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