“Professional,” like other dialectical descriptors, depends for its meaning(s) on vices being denied more than virtues being affirmed.
When colleagues call themselves “professional,” they do so for varying reason(s). Positive reasons emphasize conformity to selected norms. Meliorative invocations of professionalism dramatize individual solidarity with the collective and sympathy for the ideals of the collective, especially when the self-praise may serve promotion or evaluation or some honor. “Professional” may be brandished for negative, defensive reasons as well. Colleagues emphasize conformity lest they expose themselves to disparagement or gossip for failing to be like others or, more commonly, like others demand that they be. Faculty direct attention to professional conduct to deny one or more suspected shortcomings or to distract attention from proved unprofessional conduct. And, of course, positive and negative assignments of “professional” and “unprofessional” may be teamed to differentiate professional us from unprofessional them.
A dialectical adjective, “professional” varies with positives being affirmed and with negatives being denied. Affirmed positives form a public account crafted to be accepted if not quite believed. To understand the positive, however, one often must suss out negative(s) being contradicted. When professions of professionalism are not harmless self-promotion, they mask fears that identity will be damaged. Colleagues’ sins and terrors are often private until their self-praises and self-exculpations expose the private terrors and latent sins.
Professors who prey upon their students, for example, will stress their professionalism in myriad ways to construct a positive persona accepted by a credulous majority to be inconsistent with abuse of students and trust. Worried that dalliances might become known or rumored, predators advertise the ways in which they are thoroughgoing professionals. They dramatize their punctiliousness and punctuality. They regale all who will listen about the high regard in which they are held by professional associates. Of course, they would be self-promoting even if they were not predators because self-promotion yields praises and raises. Because self-promotion is ubiquitous, especially among faculty who are not very accomplished, most colleagues will not ask what ulterior motives such self-promotion could serve. Rubes in robes will “gape at you in dull surprise” [Janice Ian, “Seventeen”] if they realize that a cover story was at best partially true.
Of course, professors prey upon colleagues as well and so require a concept of professionalism that hides their personal animus and tactical dishonesty. When a psychopath savages an evaluee – merely a hypothetical example until it happens to you – he or she will list a myriad of ways in which he or she struggled to find the evaluee worthy until diligence and love of truth compelled an honest evaluation. The psychopath will note that evaluee – the ingrate! – reacted against this open, sincere, professional evaluation with fury that only proved just how unworthy the evaluee was. As in sports in which the initial aggression goes undetected but the retaliation is noticed, the unprovoked assault is professional assessment but self-defense is unprofessional revenge against an honest servant of the university. All who perceive a stake in defending the procedural and substantive justice of evaluations irrespective of actualities will cluck at how unprofessional, even personal, the victim of assault or assassination is being and will praise the psychopath for remaining above the fray. Any foibles or faults of the aggressor will be ignored. Whatever foibles or faults will transmogrify the victim into an unprofessional, unworthy pariah will be inventoried as they are invented.
For another common example, candor defines professionalism in both negative opposition and in positive alliance. To seem professional one must be candid judiciously while emphasizing how brutally candid one is being. When Thomas More told Henry VIII that the latter’s musical composition was “frankly” splendid [Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”], even the ninth grader in the back row grasped that “frankly” affirmed that More was not mincing words with his liege lord, which of course meant that More was lying like a convict to keep on the good side of Henry. [More’s genuine candor regarding the King’s second marriage affixed More’s head to Traitor’s Gate.] The genius of this usage on campus is that it makes one “unprofessional” to speak truth and another “professional” to obscure the truth. Any colleague who blows a whistle on shoddy academic programs or fraudulent practices marks himself or herself as “unprofessional;” it being far more “professional” in this usage to ignore, condone, or laud misconduct or mendacity in anticipation that colleagues will reciprocate when one’s own shortcomings become evident. In this usage, “professionals” a) conceal poor instructors, approve weak courses, and salute slapdash majors; b) dispense inadequate advice that may imperil advisees but will keep one on the good side of incompetents and incompetence; and c) otherwise flaunt their integrity and probity in the very act of flouting those virtues. When poseurs preen and pretend, “professionals” at least avert their eyes and remain silent but sometimes attack those who deconstruct the pretenses for being “unprofessional.” These “pros” see no scams, admit no disappointments, and defer to any justifications offered by their betters, all the while accentuating how costly their candor has been to their [usually unmerited] advancement.
Nothing gives away tactical use of “professional” more than passionate concern for one’s or one’s department’s reputation. Such fervent, febrile concern is almost always undue. It is undue because almost no one due a good reputation is denied one for long. Gossip, rumors, and yarns do not adhere to well-reputed colleagues, and well-reputed colleagues almost always laugh off this disparagement or that assertion. The ill-reputed usually have desperate concern for their reputations because they fear exposure. Desperation is also undue because well-established infamy is reinforced more than amplified when misdeeds are publicized. It may be ironic but it is assuredly true: those who most often tout high regard for their reputations do not possess such reputations but wish that they did and strive mightily to deny characterizations that would exacerbate their deserved bad names, even though in many cases their bad names could scarcely be worse.
What is true of individuals overwrought about their perceived “professionalism” is truer still of departments. I once met with two members of a department that has been viewed as a campus weak spot for only a few decades. They were concerned that something that I had written members of my own department might defame their department [as if anything short of complicity in 9/11 could]. They defended their concern by observing that, had anyone similarly disparaged my department, my department would likewise protest. After I stopped chuckling at this flaccid riposte, I responded, “My department would neither say nor do anything. Who would believe that my department would do what your department did?” As I recollect, the two did not grasp the differences between departments that made their contention risible.
So beware of those who excuse self-indulgent behavior because “my personal and professional reputation is at stake.” They almost always protest criticisms or observations too close to a truth that they cannot handle. What was true in high school is if anything truer in academia: what individuals or departments protest that they resent, they all too often resemble or even represent. Those who behave in a truly professional manner do not have to tell others how professional they are any more than high school athletes who are truly accomplished have to tell their classmates what jocks they are. Mildly observant people already know or will not believe. If they do not know or do not believe, self-serving bloviation does not substitute well for the real thing but actually inclines savvy audiences to assume that some opposite is nearer to the truth of the matter. While high school chums or campus colleagues smile and nod amicably if absently, they are asking themselves what unprofessional act(s) this wretch must be denying.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
O Stands for Orwellian
Orwell taught us how systems of irrationalizations denied vices whenever underlings relabel them virtues.
It follows from the immediately preceding entry [26 August 2007] that when we describe usage as Orwellian we invoke systems of “irrationalization.” By irrationalization I mean accounts or catch-phrases with great credence-value but little truth-value that, through repetition, make nonsense sound like sense. Through irrationalizations, account-givers and account-accepters mutually assent to equations between vices and virtues, goods and evils. Once formalized, organized, and routinized, irrationalization-systems reaffirm rational, honest, legitimate governance by means of groundless, misleading, illicit proclamations and practices. With misinformation and disinformation, leaders and followers alike seduce themselves and traduce others. Methodically and inexorably, an Orwellian system corrupts the virtues it simulates and celebrates. That corruption is a collective effort. [Review the entry “Who’s to Blame?” from 16 March 2007, please.]
To persist, such systems must comprise simultaneously individuals and masses and must redress through trite, rehearsed formulas particular insufficiencies real, imagined, or conjured. Because they are stylized, even ritualized, the formulas do not so much overcome criticism as evade criticism. Colleagues given to empirical observation and logical inference must be socialized as new recruits or dismissed as old cranks lest the credulity and thoughtlessness essential to the survival of the system be corrupted. Thus, truly critical or audacious comments must be condemned as lacking in civility or sophistication and those given to such comments must be marginalized as enemies of the collective. Those who note that the faculty have been misinformed must be condemned as spreaders of calumnies. Through such system-defenses, irrationalizations transcend actualities and reach liturgical excellence when esteemed colleagues identify with cynical inventions and craven conventions as if they fulfilled collective or personal mission-statements.
Of course, no one expresses irrationalizations via equations as in 1984. Campus catchphrases must be subtler because our university lacks a formal Ministry of Truth to re-educate recalcitrant individuals to the collective consensus. Professor Winston Smith does not, for example, get sent to the rat lab. Still, only a deliberately obtuse or obstinately deluded majority misses the Orwellian overtones in our “contract of depravity” [The Hustler, 1961].
CIVILITY ENTAILS SERVILITY ― Through how many Fall Faculty Conversations have veteran faculty languished in silence as administrators and shills – whom one of our colleagues calls “the born, the bought, or the beaten” – test-drove claims and slogans? Then, for a box lunch, professionals who may have syllabi to prepare and should have manuscripts that need attention coalesce into herds [again, the individual must be incorporated into the collective lest heterodox thoughts intrude] to troubleshoot formulas and to perfect irrationalizations. Thus do cynical inventions become craven conventions.
When an apparatchik or administrator, for example, asks how a member of the faculty attains the standing to raise an issue before the Faculty Senate, that incivil inquiry contradicts pretensions to openness in faculty governance. If a senator were to unmask the disdain for equality among faculty and the preference for hierarchy barely latent in such a query, the defender of open, egalitarian, liberal self-governance would be reckoned incivil.
AGREEABILITY SUBSTITUTES FOR DISTINCTION ― If a colleague known to lack a quality requisite for an honor or position nevertheless is awarded the honor or position, deficiency of merit has likely been overcome with superfluity of conformity, credulity, and utility. As long as some colleagues deserve positions and honors, the deserving camouflage the undeserving. Tenuring a rambunctious loudmouth disguises the firing of multiple colleagues for “personal or professional characteristics” such as candor, awareness, or honor.
When a peer is awarded a grant or a title that contradicts extant evidence – say some classroom slug becomes designated the “Scrooge McDuck Professor of Exemplary Pedagogy” – the peer’s CV may not disclose contributions to campus orthodoxy or orthopraxy that secured the honor. By contrast, when a member of the faculty has greatly outperformed many who have received a distinction, it is latent treason to wonder which act of resistance, independence, or idiosyncrasy doomed the wretch. Likewise, when coworkers become more affable when up for awards or honors, a campus citizen does not link such behaviors to “merit” as implemented by those who grant honors. It is double-treason even to imagine that craven conformity on a Power Committee garners rewards. These are but a few examples of campus thought-crimes.
ACCOUNTABILITY AMOUNTS TO ANARCHY ― If Power Committees [the FAC and the PSC] must explain the inexplicable or defend the indefensible, the system of irrationalizations cannot inspire confidence [etymologically, a mutuality of faith or trust]. Apparatchiks and administrators keep each other’s secrets and cover for each other via accounts that will not and therefore must not withstand scrutiny. If conspiracies of confidentiality are exposed, the hierarchy feels exposed. Exposure will not be tolerated.
For example, when colleagues who consider themselves critical thinkers, progressive scholars, and even radicals say that Power Committees need not answer to the Faculty Senate or that the Faculty Senate has too much sway, they extol deference to decision-making by the few because they identify with the decision-makers every bit as much as Winston Smith ended up identifying with Big Brother. True, shielding decision-makers from accountability often shields members of Power Committees and other insiders, but insiders protest lesé majésty sincerely. They know not just that calls for accountability are futile but that they must be futile lest the Confidentiality Con Game be busted.
DEFICIENT QUANTITY SIGNIFIES SUPERABUNDANT QUALITY ― Not many academics make it through graduate school without encountering a professor or graduate student who excuses his or her lack of productivity as evidence for his or her perfectionism. Such a cliché when I was in graduate school that such “defenses” elicited sardonic chuckles from second-year graduate students and derision from first-year faculty, such hollow pleas have greater currency the less research-oriented a faculty or the college in fact is.
What veteran cannot recall which colleague, renowned for a world-class writer’s block, argued repeatedly that those who publish should be docked salary to demonstrate that they valued their own publications enough to lose income? Who cannot remember the fellow who won multiple honors for erudition but managed perhaps two book reviews in his decades at our school? Behold our campus variant on the French saw that less is more!
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATION REFLECTS NEGLECT OF TEACHING ― On the self-serving canard that hard-working teachers have no time to publish, colleagues persuade themselves and others that an absence of publication betokens strict attention to pedagogy rather than, say, lassitude or a lack of ability.
When campus grants are used as affirmative action for unproductive scholars, the compensatory logic must never be admitted publicly lest the priority of patronage over professional growth be undeniable. When a member of the FAC approaches a recent evaluee to ask how he manages to be so productive in scholarship while attaining gaudy numbers on teaching evaluations, you may be certain of two things: 1) The evaluee has not published much; and 2) someone got on the FAC because he or she believes that few Puget Sound colleagues are capable of productivity in the classroom and in research simultaneously.
TOP-DOWN SURVEILLANCE; BOTTOM-UP TRUST ― The system of irrationalizations demands surveillance to ensure subservience. Surveillance is best sustained, of course, by informers who challenge deviations from prescribed behavior or speech. If necessary, however, administrators may announce university policies depriving faculty or staff or students of rights or privacy so that right thinking and behavior may be enforced. When hierarchy becomes manifest, pretensions to self-governance and openness and liberty are imperiled, so those who identify strongly with elites redouble their denunciations of critical or skeptical questions as evidence of incivil distrust.
It would be too obvious were informers and denouncers publicly to declare that “Resistance is futile,” so circumlocutions are necessary. Thus, this colleague chides faculty for asking committees or administrators to explain what has been done in the name of the university: “Collegiality involves trust.” [“Trust your colleagues” sounds better than “Credulity is loyalty and citizenship is treason.”] Thus, that colleague declares that documented evidence of violations of the Faculty Code or the Bylaws represents some personal problem rather than any flaw in governance. [After all, it will not do to proclaim, “No one noticed a problem until now, so those who note problems are the problem.”]
*****
In sum, whenever you hear an attractive phrase – “a culture of evidence” during the last reaccreditation, for example – know that each shibboleth has been invented and vetted to substitute a catch-phrase for a remedy, pretended virtue for chronic vice. But keep your knowledge to yourself and never admit that you see actualities behind the spin. Prepare yourself for encounters with those from off campus, lest you end up like a certain Senate Chair during our last reaccreditation:
OUTSIDE EVALUATOR: “Puget Sound’s self-study says that the general-education core is a unitary experience. Do you agree that that is true?”
SENATE CHAIR: “Well, the core does consist of units.”
Granted, I escaped via a lame pun, but at least I did not admit that I had read the reaccreditation report on the web and had warned the authors of that report that no one would believe that the core was unitary.
It follows from the immediately preceding entry [26 August 2007] that when we describe usage as Orwellian we invoke systems of “irrationalization.” By irrationalization I mean accounts or catch-phrases with great credence-value but little truth-value that, through repetition, make nonsense sound like sense. Through irrationalizations, account-givers and account-accepters mutually assent to equations between vices and virtues, goods and evils. Once formalized, organized, and routinized, irrationalization-systems reaffirm rational, honest, legitimate governance by means of groundless, misleading, illicit proclamations and practices. With misinformation and disinformation, leaders and followers alike seduce themselves and traduce others. Methodically and inexorably, an Orwellian system corrupts the virtues it simulates and celebrates. That corruption is a collective effort. [Review the entry “Who’s to Blame?” from 16 March 2007, please.]
To persist, such systems must comprise simultaneously individuals and masses and must redress through trite, rehearsed formulas particular insufficiencies real, imagined, or conjured. Because they are stylized, even ritualized, the formulas do not so much overcome criticism as evade criticism. Colleagues given to empirical observation and logical inference must be socialized as new recruits or dismissed as old cranks lest the credulity and thoughtlessness essential to the survival of the system be corrupted. Thus, truly critical or audacious comments must be condemned as lacking in civility or sophistication and those given to such comments must be marginalized as enemies of the collective. Those who note that the faculty have been misinformed must be condemned as spreaders of calumnies. Through such system-defenses, irrationalizations transcend actualities and reach liturgical excellence when esteemed colleagues identify with cynical inventions and craven conventions as if they fulfilled collective or personal mission-statements.
Of course, no one expresses irrationalizations via equations as in 1984. Campus catchphrases must be subtler because our university lacks a formal Ministry of Truth to re-educate recalcitrant individuals to the collective consensus. Professor Winston Smith does not, for example, get sent to the rat lab. Still, only a deliberately obtuse or obstinately deluded majority misses the Orwellian overtones in our “contract of depravity” [The Hustler, 1961].
CIVILITY ENTAILS SERVILITY ― Through how many Fall Faculty Conversations have veteran faculty languished in silence as administrators and shills – whom one of our colleagues calls “the born, the bought, or the beaten” – test-drove claims and slogans? Then, for a box lunch, professionals who may have syllabi to prepare and should have manuscripts that need attention coalesce into herds [again, the individual must be incorporated into the collective lest heterodox thoughts intrude] to troubleshoot formulas and to perfect irrationalizations. Thus do cynical inventions become craven conventions.
When an apparatchik or administrator, for example, asks how a member of the faculty attains the standing to raise an issue before the Faculty Senate, that incivil inquiry contradicts pretensions to openness in faculty governance. If a senator were to unmask the disdain for equality among faculty and the preference for hierarchy barely latent in such a query, the defender of open, egalitarian, liberal self-governance would be reckoned incivil.
AGREEABILITY SUBSTITUTES FOR DISTINCTION ― If a colleague known to lack a quality requisite for an honor or position nevertheless is awarded the honor or position, deficiency of merit has likely been overcome with superfluity of conformity, credulity, and utility. As long as some colleagues deserve positions and honors, the deserving camouflage the undeserving. Tenuring a rambunctious loudmouth disguises the firing of multiple colleagues for “personal or professional characteristics” such as candor, awareness, or honor.
When a peer is awarded a grant or a title that contradicts extant evidence – say some classroom slug becomes designated the “Scrooge McDuck Professor of Exemplary Pedagogy” – the peer’s CV may not disclose contributions to campus orthodoxy or orthopraxy that secured the honor. By contrast, when a member of the faculty has greatly outperformed many who have received a distinction, it is latent treason to wonder which act of resistance, independence, or idiosyncrasy doomed the wretch. Likewise, when coworkers become more affable when up for awards or honors, a campus citizen does not link such behaviors to “merit” as implemented by those who grant honors. It is double-treason even to imagine that craven conformity on a Power Committee garners rewards. These are but a few examples of campus thought-crimes.
ACCOUNTABILITY AMOUNTS TO ANARCHY ― If Power Committees [the FAC and the PSC] must explain the inexplicable or defend the indefensible, the system of irrationalizations cannot inspire confidence [etymologically, a mutuality of faith or trust]. Apparatchiks and administrators keep each other’s secrets and cover for each other via accounts that will not and therefore must not withstand scrutiny. If conspiracies of confidentiality are exposed, the hierarchy feels exposed. Exposure will not be tolerated.
For example, when colleagues who consider themselves critical thinkers, progressive scholars, and even radicals say that Power Committees need not answer to the Faculty Senate or that the Faculty Senate has too much sway, they extol deference to decision-making by the few because they identify with the decision-makers every bit as much as Winston Smith ended up identifying with Big Brother. True, shielding decision-makers from accountability often shields members of Power Committees and other insiders, but insiders protest lesé majésty sincerely. They know not just that calls for accountability are futile but that they must be futile lest the Confidentiality Con Game be busted.
DEFICIENT QUANTITY SIGNIFIES SUPERABUNDANT QUALITY ― Not many academics make it through graduate school without encountering a professor or graduate student who excuses his or her lack of productivity as evidence for his or her perfectionism. Such a cliché when I was in graduate school that such “defenses” elicited sardonic chuckles from second-year graduate students and derision from first-year faculty, such hollow pleas have greater currency the less research-oriented a faculty or the college in fact is.
What veteran cannot recall which colleague, renowned for a world-class writer’s block, argued repeatedly that those who publish should be docked salary to demonstrate that they valued their own publications enough to lose income? Who cannot remember the fellow who won multiple honors for erudition but managed perhaps two book reviews in his decades at our school? Behold our campus variant on the French saw that less is more!
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATION REFLECTS NEGLECT OF TEACHING ― On the self-serving canard that hard-working teachers have no time to publish, colleagues persuade themselves and others that an absence of publication betokens strict attention to pedagogy rather than, say, lassitude or a lack of ability.
When campus grants are used as affirmative action for unproductive scholars, the compensatory logic must never be admitted publicly lest the priority of patronage over professional growth be undeniable. When a member of the FAC approaches a recent evaluee to ask how he manages to be so productive in scholarship while attaining gaudy numbers on teaching evaluations, you may be certain of two things: 1) The evaluee has not published much; and 2) someone got on the FAC because he or she believes that few Puget Sound colleagues are capable of productivity in the classroom and in research simultaneously.
TOP-DOWN SURVEILLANCE; BOTTOM-UP TRUST ― The system of irrationalizations demands surveillance to ensure subservience. Surveillance is best sustained, of course, by informers who challenge deviations from prescribed behavior or speech. If necessary, however, administrators may announce university policies depriving faculty or staff or students of rights or privacy so that right thinking and behavior may be enforced. When hierarchy becomes manifest, pretensions to self-governance and openness and liberty are imperiled, so those who identify strongly with elites redouble their denunciations of critical or skeptical questions as evidence of incivil distrust.
It would be too obvious were informers and denouncers publicly to declare that “Resistance is futile,” so circumlocutions are necessary. Thus, this colleague chides faculty for asking committees or administrators to explain what has been done in the name of the university: “Collegiality involves trust.” [“Trust your colleagues” sounds better than “Credulity is loyalty and citizenship is treason.”] Thus, that colleague declares that documented evidence of violations of the Faculty Code or the Bylaws represents some personal problem rather than any flaw in governance. [After all, it will not do to proclaim, “No one noticed a problem until now, so those who note problems are the problem.”]
*****
In sum, whenever you hear an attractive phrase – “a culture of evidence” during the last reaccreditation, for example – know that each shibboleth has been invented and vetted to substitute a catch-phrase for a remedy, pretended virtue for chronic vice. But keep your knowledge to yourself and never admit that you see actualities behind the spin. Prepare yourself for encounters with those from off campus, lest you end up like a certain Senate Chair during our last reaccreditation:
OUTSIDE EVALUATOR: “Puget Sound’s self-study says that the general-education core is a unitary experience. Do you agree that that is true?”
SENATE CHAIR: “Well, the core does consist of units.”
Granted, I escaped via a lame pun, but at least I did not admit that I had read the reaccreditation report on the web and had warned the authors of that report that no one would believe that the core was unitary.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
N Stands for 1984
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.
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.
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" --
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