George Orwell wrote about a confluence of consequences of everyday pusillanimity and mendacity.
I guess it makes sense to read Orwell’s 1984 as dystopic fantasy, but Orwell was writing about tendencies everpresent in every stratum of every society albeit hypertrophied in some. The University of Puget Sound illustrates those tendencies even if it never approaches Orwellian extremes. Let’s look at everyday Orwellian rhetorics and practices.
As each of us fails of expectations and hides our shortcomings behind accounts [Do not try to explain connections between such accounts and accountability to colleagues who cling to the Confidentiality Con -- the pretense that administrators and apparatchiks would be accountable if only confidential proceedings permitted -- lest they sputter and bluster!], we play our parts in a social system of deceptions. When governors [administrators, apparatchiks, and other decision-makers] dare not be honest, they spin and prevaricate so extensively that soon they can no longer tell deceptions from ascertainable realities. Such is the ending of Orwell’s Animal Farm: humans and pigs become indistinguishable as pigs consolidate their control of other animals. Our governed animals, colleagues who are equal to governing animals only less so, are fed a steady diet of propaganda and lies until they crave deceptions and depend on illusions to make everyday campus life understandable, predictable, and pleasant. Fantasies, fictions, folderol, factlets, and factoids each and all manifest underlying social systems of mutual deception.
So it was in 1984. Big Brother deceived the masses with their active complicity. Passivity no more sufficed in Oceania than it would at an Pentacostal tent-meeting. To be seduced by Big Brother or Jim Jones, members of the audience must actively seduce themselves. [Please re-read my earlier posting (“Who’s to Blame?”) on these points.]
When faculty play the passive victims of administrators and apparatchiks to excuse their impotence and debasement, their pretense is convenient but dishonest. If one cannot fight Jones Hall, then one need not fight Jones Hall. But one can fight Jones Hall. Even feckless faculty may resist, evade, decry, expose, and otherwise harry Jones Hall. Fighting Jones Hall and oppression or other faulty governance takes time and energy away from teaching, research, family, and other valued pursuits, but each faculty member can strike a blow for better governance or greater justice IF HE OR SHE IS WILLING TO EXPEND TIME AND ENERGY AND WILLING TO RISK HIS OR HER RESPECTABILITY. [Cf. “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable,” 4 March 2007 in this blog]
Most colleagues most of the time take an easy way out [Not the easy way out! Part of the problem is that so many paths offer escape that keeps the escapee in good with administrators and apparatchiks.] Absurdities to which faculty first silently accede sooner or later reputable, respectable faculty must loudly aver if they are to stay within the spotlight of favor and favors. Thus do otherwise rational intellectuals persuade themselves that standards that are impossible to fulfill have for the most part been fulfilled by the tenured and the promoted.
As noted, to accept misinformation meekly, is insufficient. Reliable, reputable, respectable faculty spread disinformation boldly and in front of monitors and patrons. Every passive self-betrayal becomes yet another reason to traduce others to betray their own better selves. Like Winston Smith, they betray what they once claimed they loved and embrace with stronger faith what they once loathed. Orwell closes his novel with the observation that Winston Smith now loves Big Brother. All too many faculty cling to campus leaders because all too many academics are followers who have bought the official story so long and so often that the story owns them even if administrators do not.
Craven, craving credulity is not the only symbiosis between administrators and faculty. Other faculty bury themselves in their work and ignore apparatchiks’ and administrators’ misleading. Like buying in, opting out permits Big Brother to rule and ruin with impunity and without much notice,
Winston Smith was the particular. Social entities and processes are more general instances of Orwellian processes and rhetorics. The Puget Sound community is not immune to Orwell’s horrors because Puget Sound faculty soon or late practice what Orwell preached against.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Friday, July 13, 2007
M Stands for Mediocrity
Fear faculty malevolence less than faculty mediocrity because many colleagues are trying to hide a lack of talent already widely perceived.
Every educational institution will have mediocre faculty. Any school that has not given up hope will make some efforts to improve its faculty so that the unavoidable mediocrity presently at their school surpasses the unavoidable mediocrity in the past. Of course, exaggerating the mediocrity of faculty no longer present is the easiest way to simulate “progress” without the trouble of achieving advancement.
The University of Puget Sound has elevated its mediocrity over the last decades. When President Phibbs and Dean Davis determined to turn a jock-and-party school in North Tacoma [remember that such a retroctive characterization is more than a little convenient to "measuring" Phibbs' and Davis's progress!] into a national liberal arts school, oral historians inform us, they had to replace sinecures with more productive faculty. Because Phibbs and Davis could raise the centroid of the faculty but a little in reality, top-down imagery and bottom-up fakery raced ahead of faculty capacity. Indeed, the University rewrote its Faculty Code to conjure a faculty beyond Lake Wobegon – not merely all above average, everyone tenured is declared excellent in teaching and excellent in professional growth. [If you immediately inferred that some colleagues got tenure without being excellent either at teaching or at professional growth, you have been paying attention.]
For many years since, administrators and apparatchiks have skillfully exploited public-relations multipliers to seek in flim-flam what they could not secure in fact. They could not counterfeit quality on their own, so patronage and clientage complemented public relations. Patronage had to be skillfully targeted toward would-be apparatchiks who would never flirt with critical or independent perspective and who would be unlikely to achieve or to merit glory or respect among faculty by other means. Thus, patronage flowed to mediocrities.
However, the sheer number of mediocre faculty outstripped the patronage available to administrators. This led to clientage: a reserve army of the undeployed eager to be used by the regime. Wannabe clients strive to head programs, departments, or schools so that they might demonstrate their loyalty to an entity greater than themselves. Wannabes parse mission statements and cosset legitimating myths to show how higher truths that “emerged” from some Fall Faculty “Conversation” are actually far more consistent with what this or that Great Leader had been saying all along than mere facility with English would have indicated.
Faculty too disorganized or scattered or daffy would not be promoted to the ranks of apparatchiks but might retain their jobs if they did not threaten the illusions or epigons of the regime [or if they already had tenure]. Faculty who truly were accomplished teachers and/or productive scholars would be allowed to remain but would be marginalized lest they question pedagogical or scholarly fads or otherwise make reference to realities.
Since the above is standard at many schools, why raise the matter? We must acknowledge these usual processes lest we conclude that many faculty who head schools or departments or programs, appointees to the Faculty Advancement Committee or to the Professional Standards Committee, and various other holders of key positions – the apparatchiks – are malevolent. They are often merely mediocre. They are colleagues trying to get respect to which their talents do not entitle them. All too often, apparatchiks are faculty with some gaping flaw(s) who imagine that being well thought of by administrators will camouflage their shortcomings and who discover too late that their being used by administrators magnifies their shortcomings.
In sum, do not let service at the University of Puget Sound lead you to loathe the apparatchiks. Pity them. Fear them but disguise your anxiety as respect. Do not provoke or annoy them, for many are desperate to disguise their weaknesses. Publicly acknowledge their authority and acuity, but do not believe them lest you become lost. Do not let their mediocrity become your mendacity.
Next – “N Stands for Nineteen Eighty-Four” – George Orwell wrote about a confluence of consequences of everyday mendacity.
Every educational institution will have mediocre faculty. Any school that has not given up hope will make some efforts to improve its faculty so that the unavoidable mediocrity presently at their school surpasses the unavoidable mediocrity in the past. Of course, exaggerating the mediocrity of faculty no longer present is the easiest way to simulate “progress” without the trouble of achieving advancement.
The University of Puget Sound has elevated its mediocrity over the last decades. When President Phibbs and Dean Davis determined to turn a jock-and-party school in North Tacoma [remember that such a retroctive characterization is more than a little convenient to "measuring" Phibbs' and Davis's progress!] into a national liberal arts school, oral historians inform us, they had to replace sinecures with more productive faculty. Because Phibbs and Davis could raise the centroid of the faculty but a little in reality, top-down imagery and bottom-up fakery raced ahead of faculty capacity. Indeed, the University rewrote its Faculty Code to conjure a faculty beyond Lake Wobegon – not merely all above average, everyone tenured is declared excellent in teaching and excellent in professional growth. [If you immediately inferred that some colleagues got tenure without being excellent either at teaching or at professional growth, you have been paying attention.]
For many years since, administrators and apparatchiks have skillfully exploited public-relations multipliers to seek in flim-flam what they could not secure in fact. They could not counterfeit quality on their own, so patronage and clientage complemented public relations. Patronage had to be skillfully targeted toward would-be apparatchiks who would never flirt with critical or independent perspective and who would be unlikely to achieve or to merit glory or respect among faculty by other means. Thus, patronage flowed to mediocrities.
However, the sheer number of mediocre faculty outstripped the patronage available to administrators. This led to clientage: a reserve army of the undeployed eager to be used by the regime. Wannabe clients strive to head programs, departments, or schools so that they might demonstrate their loyalty to an entity greater than themselves. Wannabes parse mission statements and cosset legitimating myths to show how higher truths that “emerged” from some Fall Faculty “Conversation” are actually far more consistent with what this or that Great Leader had been saying all along than mere facility with English would have indicated.
Faculty too disorganized or scattered or daffy would not be promoted to the ranks of apparatchiks but might retain their jobs if they did not threaten the illusions or epigons of the regime [or if they already had tenure]. Faculty who truly were accomplished teachers and/or productive scholars would be allowed to remain but would be marginalized lest they question pedagogical or scholarly fads or otherwise make reference to realities.
Since the above is standard at many schools, why raise the matter? We must acknowledge these usual processes lest we conclude that many faculty who head schools or departments or programs, appointees to the Faculty Advancement Committee or to the Professional Standards Committee, and various other holders of key positions – the apparatchiks – are malevolent. They are often merely mediocre. They are colleagues trying to get respect to which their talents do not entitle them. All too often, apparatchiks are faculty with some gaping flaw(s) who imagine that being well thought of by administrators will camouflage their shortcomings and who discover too late that their being used by administrators magnifies their shortcomings.
In sum, do not let service at the University of Puget Sound lead you to loathe the apparatchiks. Pity them. Fear them but disguise your anxiety as respect. Do not provoke or annoy them, for many are desperate to disguise their weaknesses. Publicly acknowledge their authority and acuity, but do not believe them lest you become lost. Do not let their mediocrity become your mendacity.
Next – “N Stands for Nineteen Eighty-Four” – George Orwell wrote about a confluence of consequences of everyday mendacity.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
L Stands for Lilliput
How much malfeasance at Puget Sound shall we attribute to its being a small school?
Does size matter? Many Puget Sound faculty explain malfeasance by noting that UPS is much smaller than the graduate institutions whence most faculty secured their degrees. Larger schools, they presume, have more experienced administrators selected from outside the institution via more rigorous vetting than that at UPS. Larger schools have more extensive staff to save faculty and administrators from missteps. Seattle’s large, state school has a suite of offices for the State Attorney General’s deputies, for example.
Confounding factors undermine confidence in “Size Matters” hypotheses. First, state schools are held to much higher standards for due process under U. S. and state constitutions, and as a consequence administrators and staff at state institutions have been professionalized and sensitized beyond the flaccid habits of non-state schools. Since many large institutions are state schools, size alone need not account for much.
Second, smaller institutions tend to be less visible, and anonymity of personnel and unawareness of institutional history may explain as much as smallness itself. A dust-up at some school somewhere creates too many unknowns for most academics to resolve, master, or monitor.
Third, some small places are more prestigious than others. The more that an academic institution depends on national or international recognition of faculty or on significant, refereed publications, the more that such merit will shape hiring and firing. More, the absence of professional reputation or of publications is far less likely to be remediable at the better small schools than it is at UPS. This implies that many “close calls” at UPS would at more intellectually imposing but small institutions be “no-brainers” in multiple senses. Size alone need not account for flaccid or malleable standards.
Size does matter. At places as small as UPS, for instance, faculty from this scientific discipline know much more about the average humanist than would be usual at a larger school and hence may be more tempted to hazard judgments. Socializing with colleagues in other departments breeds sympathy for one’s friends in those departments, and more inter-departmental socializing is likelier at smaller schools. When “administrative prerogative” rears its tyrannical head, far fewer faculty at smaller schools have the smarts, stamina, and courage to oppose depredations. At an “intimate” institution, smarmy veterans habituated to silence and servility will intone that administrators are colleagues due every consideration that one professor extends to another; at larger institutions, greater distance between colleagues encourages greater attention to disparate interests between administrators and teachers and to the myriad ways in which power and authority are masked behind civility and collegiality.
Does size matter? Many Puget Sound faculty explain malfeasance by noting that UPS is much smaller than the graduate institutions whence most faculty secured their degrees. Larger schools, they presume, have more experienced administrators selected from outside the institution via more rigorous vetting than that at UPS. Larger schools have more extensive staff to save faculty and administrators from missteps. Seattle’s large, state school has a suite of offices for the State Attorney General’s deputies, for example.
Confounding factors undermine confidence in “Size Matters” hypotheses. First, state schools are held to much higher standards for due process under U. S. and state constitutions, and as a consequence administrators and staff at state institutions have been professionalized and sensitized beyond the flaccid habits of non-state schools. Since many large institutions are state schools, size alone need not account for much.
Second, smaller institutions tend to be less visible, and anonymity of personnel and unawareness of institutional history may explain as much as smallness itself. A dust-up at some school somewhere creates too many unknowns for most academics to resolve, master, or monitor.
Third, some small places are more prestigious than others. The more that an academic institution depends on national or international recognition of faculty or on significant, refereed publications, the more that such merit will shape hiring and firing. More, the absence of professional reputation or of publications is far less likely to be remediable at the better small schools than it is at UPS. This implies that many “close calls” at UPS would at more intellectually imposing but small institutions be “no-brainers” in multiple senses. Size alone need not account for flaccid or malleable standards.
Size does matter. At places as small as UPS, for instance, faculty from this scientific discipline know much more about the average humanist than would be usual at a larger school and hence may be more tempted to hazard judgments. Socializing with colleagues in other departments breeds sympathy for one’s friends in those departments, and more inter-departmental socializing is likelier at smaller schools. When “administrative prerogative” rears its tyrannical head, far fewer faculty at smaller schools have the smarts, stamina, and courage to oppose depredations. At an “intimate” institution, smarmy veterans habituated to silence and servility will intone that administrators are colleagues due every consideration that one professor extends to another; at larger institutions, greater distance between colleagues encourages greater attention to disparate interests between administrators and teachers and to the myriad ways in which power and authority are masked behind civility and collegiality.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
K Stands for Kyrie Eleison
Roman Catholic liturgy and Faculty Senate practices share some features.
Perhaps the most acute revelation of serving Roman Catholic mass was that liturgy mostly moves things along through mindless repetition. In the midst of the Latin Mass, the following rite was thought meaningful:
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
Congregation: Kyrie Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
Congregation: Christe Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Christe Eleison
Congregation: Christe Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
Congregation: Kyrie Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
What about this rite reminds me of the rites of the Faculty Senate?
First, amid a Latin service the Church slips in a little Greek because most of the congregation does not know the difference. Understanding neither Greek nor Latin, the assembled repeat what they learned by rote. Drop a catchphrase before the Faculty Senate and you’ll get the same response, albeit not with the creedal passion of Catholic youth.
Second, the liturgy probably predates Christianity and, thus, represents an accommodation of presumption and prejudices by rulers. In the same way over decades, administrators have accommodated faculty shibboleths – e. g., the faculty control the curriculum – while using the conformist majority of the senate to legitimize decanal depredations.
Third, the stylized surrender to the mob followed by reassertion of control makes this rite almost Kabuki Theater. Content to ask mercy from the Lord, the priest then confronts deviance in the second round when the crowd demands not Barabbas but that Christ give mercy. The priest gives in to the call for a singular lord to grant mercy, gets an echo from the congregation, then reasserts the more general “Lord, have mercy.” To this direction the crowd meekly submits. The Faculty Senate could not have staged a perfectly safe exertion of autonomy followed by meek submission better, but then the Church has had more practice and better command of classical languages.
Fourth, the stunning emptiness of the issue – Shall we appeal to the Lord for mercy or to Christ specifically? – reminds one of countless Senate meetings in which much ado was lavished on nothing and little or no ado was wasted on something. Electronic voting does not comport with bylaws regarding elections because electronic voters have no envelopes to sign? Holy plebiscite, Batman! Let’s change the bylaws post haste! The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] has for more than a decade flouted the demand of the bylaws that every committee have a chair? Let’s not bother with mere technicalities that might cost the FAC a minute or two each September before any files have reached the committee.
Next – "L Stands for Lilliput" – How much malfeasance at Puget Sound shall we attribute to its being a small school?
Perhaps the most acute revelation of serving Roman Catholic mass was that liturgy mostly moves things along through mindless repetition. In the midst of the Latin Mass, the following rite was thought meaningful:
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
Congregation: Kyrie Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
Congregation: Christe Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Christe Eleison
Congregation: Christe Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
Congregation: Kyrie Eleison
Priest-Celebrant: Kyrie Eleison
What about this rite reminds me of the rites of the Faculty Senate?
First, amid a Latin service the Church slips in a little Greek because most of the congregation does not know the difference. Understanding neither Greek nor Latin, the assembled repeat what they learned by rote. Drop a catchphrase before the Faculty Senate and you’ll get the same response, albeit not with the creedal passion of Catholic youth.
Second, the liturgy probably predates Christianity and, thus, represents an accommodation of presumption and prejudices by rulers. In the same way over decades, administrators have accommodated faculty shibboleths – e. g., the faculty control the curriculum – while using the conformist majority of the senate to legitimize decanal depredations.
Third, the stylized surrender to the mob followed by reassertion of control makes this rite almost Kabuki Theater. Content to ask mercy from the Lord, the priest then confronts deviance in the second round when the crowd demands not Barabbas but that Christ give mercy. The priest gives in to the call for a singular lord to grant mercy, gets an echo from the congregation, then reasserts the more general “Lord, have mercy.” To this direction the crowd meekly submits. The Faculty Senate could not have staged a perfectly safe exertion of autonomy followed by meek submission better, but then the Church has had more practice and better command of classical languages.
Fourth, the stunning emptiness of the issue – Shall we appeal to the Lord for mercy or to Christ specifically? – reminds one of countless Senate meetings in which much ado was lavished on nothing and little or no ado was wasted on something. Electronic voting does not comport with bylaws regarding elections because electronic voters have no envelopes to sign? Holy plebiscite, Batman! Let’s change the bylaws post haste! The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] has for more than a decade flouted the demand of the bylaws that every committee have a chair? Let’s not bother with mere technicalities that might cost the FAC a minute or two each September before any files have reached the committee.
Next – "L Stands for Lilliput" – How much malfeasance at Puget Sound shall we attribute to its being a small school?
Thursday, May 17, 2007
J Stands for Jokers and Jokes
Evaluators all too often consist of jokers rather than colleagues whose judgments should be taken seriously.
The University of Puget Clowns – a label that President Pierce repeatedly justified before and after she uttered it at graduation – must consistently replenish its bag of tricks and its complement of tricksters. While the sources of jokes – the folderol, fictions, flim-flam, factoids, figments, and fabrications that I have discussed above and will cover anew in future entries – vary, jokers recruited by departments and evaluated by departments, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], and one or more administrators tend to resemble one another. Viewed as mordant self-parody, the output of such jokers would be infotainment if the jokers were better informed or dispensed more information.
Because the process by which we staff the FAC is farcical, all too often the jokers who climb thereon augur jokes that will issue therefrom. I have remarked in this blog about features or factors that select for false-positives, faculty who should never have been hired or tenured or promoted. To eke out tenure or promotion increases one’s odds of nomination and appointment to the FAC. Of course, faculty nominate false-positives more often relative to their proportion in the faculty than false-negatives because most false-negatives are being shown the exit. Perhaps faculty nominate false-positives more often than true-positives relative to their proportion in the faculty because colleagues hope that someone who has been subjected to savagery, fickleness, and unfairness might be especially sensitive to miscarriages of procedural or substantive justice. Perhaps this sensitivity to injustices inheres immediately after monkeys escape false-positives’ asses.
Of course, false-positives are usually more available for service on the FAC than faculty who are more talented and accomplished. Other service demands talent, efficiency, and effectiveness to a far greater extent than the FAC. The FAC functions more smoothly with faculty who will follow the choreography and mark stage directions. Critical, analytic, or intellectual faculties get in the way of scripts and foil hoaxes and pranks. You cannot have buffoons actually running into one another as they race around. Someone other than evaluees might get hurt. The buffoons must cooperate in operatic obtuseness and dramatized obliviousness. The FAC's routines can withstand only so much independence, intelligence, and integrity.
However recruited, jokers are socialized by the FAC in much the way that departmental jokers are indoctrinated by programs or schools. As this blog has shown, the FAC overlooks, circumvents, or flouts rules when it pleases to, so the Faculty Bylaws and the Faculty Code shape boilerplate more and more foten than they shape decision-making. In challenging cases, the FAC augments extant authority with figments and folderol. This provides members ample wiggle room, for they may invoke the letter or spirit of rules when the rules get them where they want to go but deviate when they feel a whim coming on or when they may court favor with administrators or colleagues. The process described in rules and procedures provides the set-up; absurd decisions deliver the punch line. Zaniness ensues.
FAC gags are inevitable because explicit flaws in procedures yield risible results irrespective of substantive merits. In any review during the third year of an assistant professor, for instance, the Faculty Code directs that the FAC recommend reappointment [or not] to the Academic Vice President [AVP]. The AVP then makes a decision that is not subject to any explicit criteria or standards.
One great flaw in this process is that the AVP sits with the FAC while the FAC is deciding what to recommend. The FAC considers the file and recommends to the AVP, who has been sitting in the room all along! Members of the FAC easily learn of the AVP’s concerns and orientation. The AVP automatically learns the issues and concerns lurking behind the official letter. The FAC releases to the evaluee and her or his department a rationalization of the committee’s recommendation(s), but a host of considerations, suspicions, and pretexts never make the FAC letter although they made the FAC’s decision.
The potential for groupthink to prevail and for other forms of cross-fertilization or cross-contamination to afflict decisions should be obvious to everyone except a practiced FAC apologist. The code nearly guarantees collusion in hackneyed [yet inadvertent] humor.
In third-year assistant reviews as in other momentous evaluations, FAC letters are redolent of stale shtick and practiced pratfalls from the moment that the diminutive FAC fire truck pulls into the center ring under the big top that is the University of Puget Clowns.
"Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am / ..."
Next -- "K stands for Kyrie eleison" --
The University of Puget Clowns – a label that President Pierce repeatedly justified before and after she uttered it at graduation – must consistently replenish its bag of tricks and its complement of tricksters. While the sources of jokes – the folderol, fictions, flim-flam, factoids, figments, and fabrications that I have discussed above and will cover anew in future entries – vary, jokers recruited by departments and evaluated by departments, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], and one or more administrators tend to resemble one another. Viewed as mordant self-parody, the output of such jokers would be infotainment if the jokers were better informed or dispensed more information.
Because the process by which we staff the FAC is farcical, all too often the jokers who climb thereon augur jokes that will issue therefrom. I have remarked in this blog about features or factors that select for false-positives, faculty who should never have been hired or tenured or promoted. To eke out tenure or promotion increases one’s odds of nomination and appointment to the FAC. Of course, faculty nominate false-positives more often relative to their proportion in the faculty than false-negatives because most false-negatives are being shown the exit. Perhaps faculty nominate false-positives more often than true-positives relative to their proportion in the faculty because colleagues hope that someone who has been subjected to savagery, fickleness, and unfairness might be especially sensitive to miscarriages of procedural or substantive justice. Perhaps this sensitivity to injustices inheres immediately after monkeys escape false-positives’ asses.
Of course, false-positives are usually more available for service on the FAC than faculty who are more talented and accomplished. Other service demands talent, efficiency, and effectiveness to a far greater extent than the FAC. The FAC functions more smoothly with faculty who will follow the choreography and mark stage directions. Critical, analytic, or intellectual faculties get in the way of scripts and foil hoaxes and pranks. You cannot have buffoons actually running into one another as they race around. Someone other than evaluees might get hurt. The buffoons must cooperate in operatic obtuseness and dramatized obliviousness. The FAC's routines can withstand only so much independence, intelligence, and integrity.
However recruited, jokers are socialized by the FAC in much the way that departmental jokers are indoctrinated by programs or schools. As this blog has shown, the FAC overlooks, circumvents, or flouts rules when it pleases to, so the Faculty Bylaws and the Faculty Code shape boilerplate more and more foten than they shape decision-making. In challenging cases, the FAC augments extant authority with figments and folderol. This provides members ample wiggle room, for they may invoke the letter or spirit of rules when the rules get them where they want to go but deviate when they feel a whim coming on or when they may court favor with administrators or colleagues. The process described in rules and procedures provides the set-up; absurd decisions deliver the punch line. Zaniness ensues.
FAC gags are inevitable because explicit flaws in procedures yield risible results irrespective of substantive merits. In any review during the third year of an assistant professor, for instance, the Faculty Code directs that the FAC recommend reappointment [or not] to the Academic Vice President [AVP]. The AVP then makes a decision that is not subject to any explicit criteria or standards.
One great flaw in this process is that the AVP sits with the FAC while the FAC is deciding what to recommend. The FAC considers the file and recommends to the AVP, who has been sitting in the room all along! Members of the FAC easily learn of the AVP’s concerns and orientation. The AVP automatically learns the issues and concerns lurking behind the official letter. The FAC releases to the evaluee and her or his department a rationalization of the committee’s recommendation(s), but a host of considerations, suspicions, and pretexts never make the FAC letter although they made the FAC’s decision.
The potential for groupthink to prevail and for other forms of cross-fertilization or cross-contamination to afflict decisions should be obvious to everyone except a practiced FAC apologist. The code nearly guarantees collusion in hackneyed [yet inadvertent] humor.
In third-year assistant reviews as in other momentous evaluations, FAC letters are redolent of stale shtick and practiced pratfalls from the moment that the diminutive FAC fire truck pulls into the center ring under the big top that is the University of Puget Clowns.
"Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am / ..."
Next -- "K stands for Kyrie eleison" --
Thursday, May 10, 2007
I is for Inter-disciplinary
If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary or interstitial.
At the University of Puget Sound, ironic labels rule. The “Susan Resneck Pierce Atrium” is a foyer, not an atrium. Ostensibly endowed chairs have no matching funds but all the pedigree and fecundity of a mule. A colleague is named the “Alfred Packer Professor of Culinary Studies” despite his inability to boil water or make S’mores. Racial and ethnic “diversity” are fabricated largely absent Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. And “inter-disciplinary” programs do not cross disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of truth so much as they elude disciplines in pursuit of marketing.
Take International Political Economy [IPE]. At most universities across the United States, IPE is a quarter or a third of International Relations, one of four or so official subfields of Political Science. What makes UPS think that a sub-sub-discipline crosses disciplinary lines? Ironic labels do.
If one calls a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs do most dogs have? Four – because calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make a dog’s tail a leg. If one calls a certain breed of dog a cross between a dog and bear, that does not make the critter inter-speciated unless reifying ironic expressions and substituting labels for actualities is an institutional habit.
This is yet another “Iron Law of Emulation.” Curricular con artists adorn some existing sub-sub-discipline with dilettante doo-dads and wannabe widgets to hoodwink the unwary [students, parents, the Curriculum Committee, and trustees] but, so they will not lose recruits to pre-existing majors, copy the name of the established area of study. Professors eager to “branch out” and departments that long to be rid of dabblers untrained in what they now would teach dignify their exodus with marketing slogans. “Political economy” sounds like it ought to cross disciplinary lines, despite the dozen or more offerings in Politics and Government that concern political economy among other things and several in Economics that do the same. “International Studies” will not work because that is what the offshoot actually is or resembles. Where is the ease of emulation, the security of redundancy, or the thrill of deception in that?
At UPS, programs soon enough will be taken for what the faculty wish they were. The labeling and the marketing work. IPE has become at once inner-disciplinary [that is, enlarging a part of a part of Political Science into a major] and interstitial far more than inter-disciplinary. Interstitiality is effected by excluding from the enterprise those disciplines whose boundaries are allegedly being crossed. The most demanding, most discipline-specific features of economics and of political science must be diluted or dispensed with altogether to create the mislabeled international studies program that UPS knows as IPE.
Dilettantism was the inevitable result once the mislabeling had been executed. Marketing expenditures and extra-campus publicity dictated that the enterprise not be allowed to fail. Courses had to be staffed, so IPE turned to colleagues with credentials, expertise, and experience at best peripheral to economics or to political science. Such instructors proclaimed to be crossing disciplinary boundaries careened across, around, and about the edges of disciplines about which they knew little or nothing. They might have made excellent dabblers for an international studies multi-disciplinary program, but they were scarcely fit for inner-disciplinary or interstitial work.
Those who guard the borders of longstanding disciplines do condemn work that “falls between the stools” of established lines of study, so truly inter-disciplinary incursions or excursions are needful. Truly inter-disciplinary work, however, does not consist in declaring that one missed the barstools because the barroom floor is a frontier of learning. Still less does work become inter-disciplinary through throes of anti-disciplinary humbug [see www2.ups.edu/ipe/whatisipe.htm] by which the floor is declared to be up and the barstools down.
At the University of Puget Sound, ironic labels rule. The “Susan Resneck Pierce Atrium” is a foyer, not an atrium. Ostensibly endowed chairs have no matching funds but all the pedigree and fecundity of a mule. A colleague is named the “Alfred Packer Professor of Culinary Studies” despite his inability to boil water or make S’mores. Racial and ethnic “diversity” are fabricated largely absent Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. And “inter-disciplinary” programs do not cross disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of truth so much as they elude disciplines in pursuit of marketing.
Take International Political Economy [IPE]. At most universities across the United States, IPE is a quarter or a third of International Relations, one of four or so official subfields of Political Science. What makes UPS think that a sub-sub-discipline crosses disciplinary lines? Ironic labels do.
If one calls a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs do most dogs have? Four – because calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make a dog’s tail a leg. If one calls a certain breed of dog a cross between a dog and bear, that does not make the critter inter-speciated unless reifying ironic expressions and substituting labels for actualities is an institutional habit.
This is yet another “Iron Law of Emulation.” Curricular con artists adorn some existing sub-sub-discipline with dilettante doo-dads and wannabe widgets to hoodwink the unwary [students, parents, the Curriculum Committee, and trustees] but, so they will not lose recruits to pre-existing majors, copy the name of the established area of study. Professors eager to “branch out” and departments that long to be rid of dabblers untrained in what they now would teach dignify their exodus with marketing slogans. “Political economy” sounds like it ought to cross disciplinary lines, despite the dozen or more offerings in Politics and Government that concern political economy among other things and several in Economics that do the same. “International Studies” will not work because that is what the offshoot actually is or resembles. Where is the ease of emulation, the security of redundancy, or the thrill of deception in that?
At UPS, programs soon enough will be taken for what the faculty wish they were. The labeling and the marketing work. IPE has become at once inner-disciplinary [that is, enlarging a part of a part of Political Science into a major] and interstitial far more than inter-disciplinary. Interstitiality is effected by excluding from the enterprise those disciplines whose boundaries are allegedly being crossed. The most demanding, most discipline-specific features of economics and of political science must be diluted or dispensed with altogether to create the mislabeled international studies program that UPS knows as IPE.
Dilettantism was the inevitable result once the mislabeling had been executed. Marketing expenditures and extra-campus publicity dictated that the enterprise not be allowed to fail. Courses had to be staffed, so IPE turned to colleagues with credentials, expertise, and experience at best peripheral to economics or to political science. Such instructors proclaimed to be crossing disciplinary boundaries careened across, around, and about the edges of disciplines about which they knew little or nothing. They might have made excellent dabblers for an international studies multi-disciplinary program, but they were scarcely fit for inner-disciplinary or interstitial work.
Those who guard the borders of longstanding disciplines do condemn work that “falls between the stools” of established lines of study, so truly inter-disciplinary incursions or excursions are needful. Truly inter-disciplinary work, however, does not consist in declaring that one missed the barstools because the barroom floor is a frontier of learning. Still less does work become inter-disciplinary through throes of anti-disciplinary humbug [see www2.ups.edu/ipe/whatisipe.htm] by which the floor is declared to be up and the barstools down.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
H is for Half-Assed
Between administrators and apparatchiks above and rank-and-file faculty below lie the tools and fools of the Faculty Senate.
Previous entries in this blog have covered the deceptions and delusions of rulers [e. g., administrators and apparatchiks] and the attention-deficit disorders of the ruled [except when more than $1.27 of their benefits or some empty praise focuses their appetites]. Between rulers and ruled the Faculty Senate occasionally surfaces: a dozen or so faculty perpetually in search of courage and purpose who perpetually content themselves with half-measures in service of their betters. Half-afraid and half-annoyed, the half-wits of the Senate form a halfway house of enablers always half a step from licking ass and faking aims.
The Senate meeting on 7 May 2007 revealed anew the canine pleasantries [see the entry on responsible, reputable, reliable faculty dogs] of senators. The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had flouted the Faculty Bylaws [hereafter, Bylaws] despite repeated notice from the Senate and elsewhere that the Bylaws mandate that each committee have a Chairperson. The FAC has no chair. It is fortunate for the FAC scofflaws, therefore, that the Faculty Senate has neither integrity nor intestinal fortitude.
The Chair of the Faculty Senate half-pusillanimously pandered that one passage of the Bylaws might be read to permit the FAC to report to the Senate despite its chairlessness. Good point, sir! If only O. J. Simpson had thought to point out how many Commandments do not proscribe murder!
Numerous senators reiterated their fidelity to the bylaws, then turned away from confrontation and retreated behind “Let’s make just this one exception for now.” Imagine that marines resembled faculty senators. “Semper fi!” would be replaced by “Semper flee!” “Gung ho!” would give way to “Gangway!” On the other hand, were the Faculty Senate the Marines, the United States would be out of Iraq: senators would have invaded Iceland in the first place and would have determined that occupying geysers was an important first step toward capturing the populace. "Today the spa; tomorrow space, the final frontier!"
The Academic Vice President [AVP] mumbled half-truths easily debunked by two veterans of the FAC, neither of whom cared or dared to point out that the interchangeability and equality of FAC members were truer by assumption than in actuality. One senator did note that such arguments, even if true, would be irrelevant. The Bylaws make no exceptions for committee Kum Ba Yah. The absence of an exception did not impress the AVP, who dismissed the rules as some "technicality." Yet another member of the Professional Standards Committee yet again transcends mere rules. As Peter Townshend might have put it, “Meet the new boss / The same as the old boss.”
All but two of the senators acknowledged what the Bylaws commanded, praised principle, and emulated Byron’s Julia: “And whispering 'I will ne'er consent' – consented.” Profiles in Porridge!
To summarize: the FAC continues ostensibly semi-cephalus; the Faculty Senate persists blissfully quasi-gonadal; the faculty suffer blindly pseudo-governing.
Next -- "I is for Inter-disciplinary" -- If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary.
Previous entries in this blog have covered the deceptions and delusions of rulers [e. g., administrators and apparatchiks] and the attention-deficit disorders of the ruled [except when more than $1.27 of their benefits or some empty praise focuses their appetites]. Between rulers and ruled the Faculty Senate occasionally surfaces: a dozen or so faculty perpetually in search of courage and purpose who perpetually content themselves with half-measures in service of their betters. Half-afraid and half-annoyed, the half-wits of the Senate form a halfway house of enablers always half a step from licking ass and faking aims.
The Senate meeting on 7 May 2007 revealed anew the canine pleasantries [see the entry on responsible, reputable, reliable faculty dogs] of senators. The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had flouted the Faculty Bylaws [hereafter, Bylaws] despite repeated notice from the Senate and elsewhere that the Bylaws mandate that each committee have a Chairperson. The FAC has no chair. It is fortunate for the FAC scofflaws, therefore, that the Faculty Senate has neither integrity nor intestinal fortitude.
The Chair of the Faculty Senate half-pusillanimously pandered that one passage of the Bylaws might be read to permit the FAC to report to the Senate despite its chairlessness. Good point, sir! If only O. J. Simpson had thought to point out how many Commandments do not proscribe murder!
Numerous senators reiterated their fidelity to the bylaws, then turned away from confrontation and retreated behind “Let’s make just this one exception for now.” Imagine that marines resembled faculty senators. “Semper fi!” would be replaced by “Semper flee!” “Gung ho!” would give way to “Gangway!” On the other hand, were the Faculty Senate the Marines, the United States would be out of Iraq: senators would have invaded Iceland in the first place and would have determined that occupying geysers was an important first step toward capturing the populace. "Today the spa; tomorrow space, the final frontier!"
The Academic Vice President [AVP] mumbled half-truths easily debunked by two veterans of the FAC, neither of whom cared or dared to point out that the interchangeability and equality of FAC members were truer by assumption than in actuality. One senator did note that such arguments, even if true, would be irrelevant. The Bylaws make no exceptions for committee Kum Ba Yah. The absence of an exception did not impress the AVP, who dismissed the rules as some "technicality." Yet another member of the Professional Standards Committee yet again transcends mere rules. As Peter Townshend might have put it, “Meet the new boss / The same as the old boss.”
All but two of the senators acknowledged what the Bylaws commanded, praised principle, and emulated Byron’s Julia: “And whispering 'I will ne'er consent' – consented.” Profiles in Porridge!
To summarize: the FAC continues ostensibly semi-cephalus; the Faculty Senate persists blissfully quasi-gonadal; the faculty suffer blindly pseudo-governing.
Next -- "I is for Inter-disciplinary" -- If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary.
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