Stanley Arnold Read 1941 - 2015

             

Stan Read prepared me for a risible existence in Academe

                  

Upon my graduating high school, I proclaimed that I should never again take English or Mathematics.  I did not live up to that brash proclamation.  I took Calculus in my final undergraduate quarter.  What was worse, in my first three quarters as an undergraduate, I took three classes that resembled English classes!  Western Washington State College [now Western Washington University] required me to take six credit hours of Humanities for three quarters.  By chance, I landed in Stan Read's discussion section of Humanities 121 in Fall Quarter 1970.  Thereafter, I chose his sections in Winter Quarter and in Spring Quarter quite deliberately.  

Stan Read died six years ago today.  I recall him fondly for many reasons.  The most important reason was that he taught me that I could slog through classic works of literature but adhere to my own precepts.  Because of Mr. Read, I adhered to my contrarian views better than to my determination to avoid Math and English.            

Stan Read was, to this naïf of the Pacific Northwest, a good old boy such as I had seen in Montana, Wyoming, and other Western states. He chewed an unlighted cigar through class [in an era in which professors freely smoked if they pleased]. He put his cowboy boots on the table that situated 15-20 students. He occasionally wore his cowboy hat or an outsized belt buckle.  So costumed, Stan wielded great authority when he urged us to "Never let them make you take your jeans off."  [I should add that to my laws!]

Despite the getup, Stan had a master's degree in English Literature from Texas Christian University and soon would head to law school and, eventually, to a term as a District Judge in his native New Mexico.  Thus, he had some intellectual chops.  Beyond erudition, he oozed thaumazein, astonishment at the twists and vagaries in the physical world and especially the human condition.  I applied such thaumazein to bullshit from politics, politicians, and political scientists.

In his sections Stan encouraged free-ranging discussion and tried to keep first-year students on task [or within a few miles of task]. What an experience!  Stan could make all experiences and perspectives relevant to eighteen-year-olds but suggestive for adulthood.  He made of his sections a "Land of Enchantment," a marketing moniker that seemed to me at least somewhat true of New Mexico once I made it there 23 years later.

First, he liberated us from attending the three lectures per week in Humanities 121, 122, & 123.  Skipping class had been nearly a mortal sin at [Bishop] Blanchet High School, so I was exhilarated that such naughtiness should be sanctioned.  From the few lectures I attended, I did not imagine I missed much.  Plato, a philosopher, came to the conclusion that he and other students of Socrates should run society?  The soon-to-be political science major guffawed at such self-serving blather.  In nature, animals that drink as opposed to lap water are all vegetarians, so humans are by nature herbivores?  Humans are by dentition ominvores!  I should have profited from missing more such lectures.  Thanks, Stan.

Stan was partial to the phrase "putting the shuck on," as in "Don't let Plato put the shuck on you!"  [I do not recollect Stan's having views on vegetarianism.]  To encourage critical thinking that would pierce shucks, Stan assigned us to write a satire while we were reading The Satyricon.  My satire ended with "We are all liars," a sentiment that has run through my scholarship and life.  The license to doubt reinforced my continuing to break away from convention as well as The Church.  Stan was as much a master of "What if . . .?" as of "Wouldn't it be amazing if . . . ?" 

While I wish a career in academia had not disabused me of so many of the ideals, values, and aspirations in which Stan believed, he prepared me for the probability that academic shibboleths would be used against ideals, values, and aspirations.  I was forewarned.  He changed my life for the better.  Open, sensible, erudite, and thoroughly human, he prepared me to survive adulthood and its opposite, academia.

                

Post-Literacy at the University of Puget Clowns

           

The Good Man who Dashed Honesty, Hope, and Honor

Like my foregoing entries, this entry praises a bygone colleague.  I have been delinquent in praising this fellow.  I apologize to my exemplary erstwhile colleague for my delay.
                
The gist of my encomium is that at this university as at so many academic backwaters, committing candor [© William Haltom 1991] was risky.  A good man, my colleague may have been viewed by the few faculty or staff who knew him as disreputable, unreliable, irresponsible, and unrespectable even though his behavior and attitudes were diametrically opposed to each of those four descriptors.  The good man was reputable, reliable, responsible, and respectable.  Of course, at the University of Puget Clowns  [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] those four descriptors have distinctive, not quite Orwellian, usage.  [Please refer to "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" [Sunday, March 4, 2007] in this blog.]
                 
               
To colleagues who knew him rather than knew of him, the good man was an honest and honorable colleague deserving of praise and esteem of honest and honorable colleagues.  But to colleagues who will not abide a truth-teller in their midst, the good man was
      
disreputable because his integrity and uprightness exposed departmental and university colleagues as mean and mendacious incompetents;
            
unreliable because he served forthrightness and fairness rather than the expediency of administrators and other malefactors;
          
irresponsible because he abided by professional ethics and intellectual mores rather than craven conformity to power;  and
            
unrespectable because to respect the good man's virtues would have been to admit the vices of many faculty and administrators, decision-makers and committees, wannabes and never-weres.
                 
In sum, the good man was honest, honorable, brave, and intelligent;  thus, he could not abide the clowns, and they could not abide him.
                    
                                 
If the propositions above puzzle you, you must not have been a Puget Clown for long or must not have been paying much attention.  Since honest, honorable, brave, and intelligent colleagues have tended, over my third of a century of experience at this school, not to last long [especially if they are female], perhaps you have not run into many.
          
Or perhaps you yourself are a reputable, reliable, responsible, and respectable member of the faculty.  Please re-read "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" [Sunday, March 4, 2007] in this blog.  The gist of that entry -- "When reputations and rewards issue from administrators and apparatchiks rather than from critical faculty, respectability corrodes integrity" -- explains why bravery, honesty, honor, and intelligence long were at the University of Puget Clowns maladaptive and therefore rare.  Faculty [and even more so staff] who sought a favorable reputation with Jones Hall -- in this blog, "The House of Reptiles" -- had to sacrifice valid grounds for reputation and serve as fools or tools or both.  Those faculty or staff praised for reliability tended to be toadies lest they be toast.  Faculty or staff deemed "responsible" were those sensitive to sanctions positive and negative.  Those who craved respectability had to lose their self-respect and should have, if Puget Clowns were itself respectable, dropped in the esteem of peers.  With apologies to Janis Ian ["At Seventeen"]:
            
   

Remember those who win the game

Lose the love they sought to gain

In debentures of quality

And dubious integrity
               

ACT ONE
              

To the best of my knowledge and recollection, the good man ran into trouble first in a departmental meeting regarding workloads.  Junior faculty in that desultory department tended to teach service courses and other lower-division courses with larger FTEs;  senior faculty hoarded upper-division electives with smaller FTEs.  One senior member of the department was given to citing the department's special role in articulating, advocating, and practicing social justice, so the good man began from that premise.  Holding Puget clowns to their expressed ideals has been across venues and times fraught, for the expressed ideals existed to fend off having to practice preachments.  Holding clowns in the good man's department to their shibboleths was especially treacherous.  Doing so in his first year was suicidal.
                                   
The junior colleagues who had kvetched about iniquities most vociferously in private sat silent when the good man raised the issue in a meeting of the department.  This cowardice isolated the good man and perhaps one or two others.  After a raucous meeting in which senior faculty pronounced themselves both affronted and taken aback by the waking of exploited junior faculty, the good man walked over to the coffee shop with a senior colleague.  The good man joked that perhaps he should be lining up employment elsewhere amid what was his first year.  It surprised the good man at least a bit when the senior colleague in the department allowed as how that might be so.  
          

A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle, 

A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much?

           Robinson Jeffers, "Science"

                                  

Merest participation ought not to doom junior faculty even at parochial Puget Clowns, but showing departmental colleagues to be feckless hypocrites and "Neiman Marxists" was not to be tolerated.  Veterans of the department knew that senior faculty exploited junior faculty but touted the department's dedication to equity and social justice in part to cover up their exploitation.  [What would you expect cowardly conflict-averse hypocrites and poseurs to do?]  The exploiting senior faculty had protected themselves with rationalizations far too flimsy to withstand candor, so custom and etiquette in their department proscribed candor and conflict to bolster pretense.  The departmental member who had done the most to fend off threats to departmental and personal self-esteem let the good man know that debunking individual and collective blather was not tolerated.  The good man had spoken truth to self-seeking, self-serving weenies comfortable in their mutually assured depravities.  The good man must yield to the weakness of his department and colleagues or seek employment elsewhere.
              

. . .  You have meddled with the primal forces of nature

and you will atone!

Arthur Jensen [Ned Beatty] "Network"

          

ACT TWO

           

         

The weakness of both department and colleagues was reiterated within months when the good man delegated scut work to a colleague unlikely to publish much otherwise.  [Veterans of the University of Puget Clowns  {© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996} must cringe at doing a good turn for an object of professional pity, for too many objects of too much pity abound among the clowns.]  In return for annotating sources and supplementing text with figures, the delegated colleague would get an apparent co-authorship.  The good man barely noticed in time that the delegated colleague had economized on the delegated tasks by plagiarizing from marketing copy.  The good man thought he had plumbed the depths of junior colleagues' cowardliness until he confronted the handling of this plagiarism and subsequent plagiarisms.  Only then did the good man come to understand the perils of being honest at the Puget clownathon.

            

For how can you compete,

Being honor bred, with one

Who were it proved he lies

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbors' eyes?

Yeats, "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing"

           

           
ACT THREE
          
    

When in the good man's second year a departmental colleague was to be denied tenure, the good man's insistence on procedural and substantive fairness quickly plunged him into additional difficulties.  Multiple members of the department were not only averse to conflict but also so afraid of at least one unstable colleague in the department that they mangled departmental deliberations in ways too many and multifarious to rehearse herein.  For purposes of this encomium, I settle for stating that the good man's insistence on decorum and decency doomed him.  The lesson I repeatedly draw in this post is that -- at least in my third of a century in the Puget clown car -- to insist on decency, decorum, integrity, and professionalism is to imperil one's billet.

               

Chancellor Thomas More  "Then why does your Grace need my poor support?"

          

King Henry VIII  "Because you're honest, and, what is more to the purpose,

you're known to be honest. . . . "

Chancellor Thomas More  "I am sick to think how much I must displease Your

Grace."

King Henry VIII  "No, Thomas, I respect your sincerity.  But respect, man, 

that's water in the desert."

           

ACT FOUR
         

Having thoroughly experienced the banality of evil in departmental governance, the good man moved on to the evil of banality -- the Professional Standards Cult.  The Professional Standards Cult long had been at best a Privy Council for the Dean of the University and at worst a Star Chamber for cases trying in more than one sense, but the good man's experiences failed of even the meanest expectations for procedural or substantive justice.  The Starr Chamber -- in an entry in this blog I added an "r" to associate the Professional Standards Cult of an era with Kenneth Starr;  see  "Malfeasant or Nonfeasant?" 9 February 2010 in this blog -- flouted Faculty Code and Bylaws alike but always or almost always to the disadvantage of the good man.   In response the good man fearlessly scored the Starr Chamber and Professional Standards Cult for its earning disrepute, its lacking reliability, its failure to be responsible to rules, and its deserving the disrespect of the few who knew what the cult and chamber was [sic]  up to.  The cult and chamber, of course, responded by trampling rules and practices to strike back at the good man.
             

IN SUM
           
The good man went wrong by being a good citizen and an upright human being in a corrupt system.  At the University of Puget Clowns one acquired a reputation for reliability, responsibility, and respectability by tolerating dishonesty, subverting rectitude, excusing inequities, and assisting cover-ups.
      
I cannot be certain that the good man would have fared better years later, but I suspect as much.  Faculty hired in the last decade or decade and a half seem to me free agents mostly oblivious to governance and citizenship.  In general, Puget clowns nowadays "work to rule:"  they do what their contracts require and barely more.  That means that the modal member of the faculty may know almost nothing about what happens let alone how and why.  Newbies' naivete extends to few principles or practices, so they do not become enmired in misconduct or demoralized by the corruptions.  Many tyros keep bankers' hours and so could not find out what is going on beyond their departments.  Many regard a nine-to-five job as onerous and a three-course semester as cruel and unusual.  Perhaps a majority of the newcomers are so self-regarding that they do not see the relevance of misbehavior and malfeasance outside their own small circle, were it somehow to become known to them.  Within departments burger-flipping is rampant.  Even the erstwhile good man's department has since shed almost all of the miscreants who punished him for virtue.  
         
So here is to The Good Man.  Up to his neck in an immoral, unethical swamp, The Good Man practiced morality, ethics, principle, due process, and professionalism while swamp creatures from his department, the House of Reptiles, the Professional Standards Cult, and even a committee from the Faculty Senate obscured truth and dodged responsibility.  When The Good Man was here, to participate was to dishonor yourself in pursuit of clownish reputability, reliability, responsibility, and respectability.
              

     

Flowers for Cassandra

And here, man, here ’s the wreath I ’ve made
’Tis not a gift that’s worth the taking,
But wear it and it will not fade. A.    E. Housman A Shropshire Lad, XLIV {Please note that I invoked these lines at the end of my farewell to Wayne Rickoll}

I write in praise of Professor Cassandra, my colleague of 32 years who is retiring but never was shy.  I called my friend Cassandra because so often my buddy foresaw the future and forecast what other faculty at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] refused to believe could happen.  Even after what Cassandra had foreshadowed came to pass, colleagues refused to believe what had happened.  Thus was Cassandra twice-cursed:  like mythical Cassandra possessed of the power of prophesy but disbelieved;  beyond mythical Cassandra given to accurate recollection but disregarded.

Cassandra was honest and honorable.  Honesty and honor are rare among the Puget clowns but not on that account treasured.  Puget clowns prefer colleagues who are sycophants, some born, most bred, and not a few broken.  Cassandra was not a Puget clown.

My favorite reminiscence of Professor Cassandra is the time Cassandra slammed books into a pile, proclaimed, “Fuck it!” [¡Haltom’s First Law!], and stormed out of a meeting of the doggedly feckless, desperately faithless, deliberately factless Faculty Senate.  The senators in flagrante delicto had been fussing again, as always striving to find a way to seem to care about but not to do anything about the demise of junior faculty, especially junior faculty denied tenure for teaching while being female.  Professor Cassandra had seen such dawdling duplicity too often and the immediate rehearsal was too much to bear.

  

A prissy senator, Dr. Pecksniff, the day after the senate meeting faulted Dr. Cassandra for so rudely interrupting the dithering of posturers and pretenders.  I opined that the provocations were more than sufficient to drive one to profanity.  Dr. Prissy Pecksniff could not agree for, as despicable cowards do, Professor Pecksniff clung to the civility and decorum that tend to incapacitate institutions and institutionalized alike.  For Professor Pecksniff as for so many Puget clowns, injustices were to be lamented loudly while the Cahulawassee River [James Dickey] formed another Lake of Oblivion—calling it "another Lake Jocassee" [likewise from James Dickey's Deliverance] might be reckoned waggish or bookish or both—over colleagues strangled and tossed aside.  Those who recalled what departments and the Faculty Advancement Committee and administrators had done would soon shut their mouths or drown.  Soon faculty and campus would resume insisting—as a colleague did in a recent plenary meeting of the faculty—that The Faculty Code and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had insured that promotion and tenure at this university would never be gendered.  [Yes, and the check is in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and I won’t cum in your mouth.]

After years battling injustices, Cassandra gave up on the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  Dr. Cassandra did not give up all at once.  I hold it a testament to integrity and perseverance that Cassandra did not surrender sooner.  Swimming against the river and the lake for a third of a century is a challenge.  Cassandra gave up on faculty governance, but not until Cassandra had chaired the Faculty Senate and tried, mightily but unsuccessfully, to get the FAC to follow the faculty’s bylaws.  [It took more than eight years to get the FAC to conform minimally to the bylaws.]  Cassandra gave up on more than one department, but not before Cassandra used a named chair to try to build some camaraderie.  Cassandra never gave up on the students.  Thus did Cassandra die to the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] in segments yet preserve what matters most—the students.

Cassandra was hired by and into a department that, like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon, would be what it used to be.  That is, over Cassandra’s 35 years the department ticked up then dissolved into the mediocrity of years before.  When Dr. Cassandra arrived, the department was at best desultory.  Male faculty stalked and preyed upon students.  This or that professor kept in his departmental desk a flask of booze or a Playboy with snapshots of a colleague.  This honored [full] professor was provided a named chair despite his having offered the world no refereed publication.  [I am certain he has in his long retirement polished the manuscript he always spoke of – LOL.]  A departmental colleague admitted that the celebrated intellectual knew “the first line of every book ever published” but wondered if the celebrated intellectual knew any other lines of any other books.  A formerly respected [full] professor helped to found “Women Against Women Academics” [WAWA] to defend predators against rumors that, Professor Wawa insisted, had been found unfounded [and this enabler did so until the worst predator confessed to Professor Wawa].  Another colleague was already counting the years and days until retirement.  I have more reminiscences, but you get the picture of what greeted Cassandra in the 1980s and into the 1990s.

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-iba-syn&hsimp=yhs-syn&hspart=iba&p=george+harrison+wah+wah#id=2&vid=f17e81ec6443688182a44b3963af4e16&action=view

From time to time the department seemed to improve in the 1990s, albeit that newbies who committed too much candor were driven from the department or discovered that even lesser schools sported lesser and fewer vices.  Some of the newcomers denounced a professor who battered an undergraduate.  Other untenured folk thought it unseemly that a senior colleague forged academic credentials.  Professor Cassandra rejoiced that superior faculty joined Cassandra’s department and other departments and reveled that such notable improvements were not the butt-kissers and bootlicks and steaming frauds recruited by the crime family in the House of Reptiles [Jones Hall].  Cassandra deemed it miraculous that, unlike the scammers and schemers who had conspired with The House of Reptiles to run and to ruin departments and the university prior to Cassandra’s coming, the newer toadies were spurned by the better sort of faculty.  Alas, Cassandra lamented that talented tyros impervious to patronage [perhaps because they realized how little The House of Reptiles offered or delivered to genuinely talented teachers or publishers] could not be bought or even rented and so must be driven out.  If they committed candor in faculty meetings, refused to join or to excuse WAWA, or otherwise did not indulge the liturgy of respectable, sensitive colleagues who emoted regret at yet another colleague’s unjustified, unjustifiable denial of promotion, tenure, or swag, the improved younger faculty must go.

Thus Cassandra saw the inexorable Darwinian logic propagate Puget clowns within the department and across the university.  By the 21^st century self-promoting prima donnas and self-serving operators replaced teachers and publishers. As a result student-centered activities defined the worth of faculty less and less.  Cassandra could not hold back the tide of whiners as Wyatt Hall became the Whinery.  It was all Cassandra could do to preserve the jobs of instructors who were among the best teachers or publishers or both in the department.  [By some coincidence, these were with a single exception women.]  A department that had progressed regressed to its prior mean mean.  A writing component that so enriched the curriculum and populated the department with majors was dishonored and discarded.  Writing instructors diminished in influence and respect.  Fatigued with what we might politely term “procedural irregularities” [because “corruptions,” while accurate, is so unkind], Cassandra retired from a once bustling undergraduate department as it faded to a boutique.

Cassandra sought asylum in African American Studies [AAS].  Cassandra had helped to found AAS, which at its beginning was about aspiration more than branding, education more than self-promotion, and social justice more than marketing.  Cassandra focused on teaching and rediscovered the joy of shrugging off burdens of deception and pretense and grandiloquent badinage in favor of inducing students to see and to discern and to think.  Having come back around to teaching as Cassandra had foreseen it, Cassandra declared victory and left the slog to the Puget clowns.  “Smart lad, to slip betimes away /  From fields where glory does not stay. /”  Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XXXII

Note well that Cassandra did not slip away before serving two African American students in a characteristic manner.  While “the UPS Three” incited an ill-considered, risible letter that dozens of thoughtless faculty were eager to sign, and even as the Division of Student Affairs was conducting a kangaroo court against three students, two of whom were African American, Cassandra served the students rather than mentors turned tormentors.  One final time Cassandra spoke truth to power, both the power of administrators mad with authority and appearances and the power of a faculty mob.  Cassandra declined to cultivate the strange fruit that administrators and faculty harvested.  www.bing.com/search?q=strange%20fruit%20poem&pc=cosp&ptag=G6C999N1234D010518A316A5D3C6E&form=CONBDF&conlogo=CT3210127

I have not bothered with Cassandra’s curriculum vitae.  As Cassandra fades from institutional recollection, the collective CV of the department that hired Cassandra drops by at least half.  Anyone who sees irony in that has not yet apprehended the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  Cassandra, being an actual scholar who published, resembled amid the College of Puget Clowns Chesterton’s donkey:  “The tattered outlaw of the earth, /  . . .  Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, /  I keep my secret still.”

Good thing Professor Cassandra kept secret still, for Robinson Jeffers tells us what becomes of truth-tellers: 

 

The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers

Hooked in the stones of the wall,

The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra,

Whether the people believe

Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they'd liefer

Meet a tiger on the road.

Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion-

Vendors and political men

Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kind

Wisdom.
 Poor bitch be wise.

No: you'll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men

And gods disgusting—you and I, Cassandra.

Emeritus Rickoll

                  

For Wayne Rickoll’s birthday I compose the following entry.  Wayne should be by now emeritus professor at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  That he should be does not, of course, mean that he is.  At the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996], oughts amount to aren’ts as often as to ares.

             

When I met him on the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] in the early 1990s, Associate Professor Rickoll fit my stereotype of scientists in academia.  He was logical, straightforward, candid, unassuming, professional, honest, and humble.  He expected evidence to bolster contentions.  He expected colleagues to bend to the weight of what evidence was available and to speculate only after available evidence was exhausted.  More important, he expected colleagues to admit honestly and forthrightly when they ventured beyond what they knew into what they wished.  The “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] would dash those expectations for Associate Professor Rickoll as it has and had for so many faculty.  Still, Associate Professor Rickoll adjusted slowly.  He was adapting to his clown niche but unprepared to become a clown himself.

           

Hence, Associate Professor Rickoll did not expect the committee to transmogrify into chimpanzee feces-fights.  As members of the committee molded presumptions, anecdotes, and absurdities to suit the interests and limbic systems of colleagues and departments and administrators and staff but mostly them­selves, Dr. Rickoll would lower his brows, lower his expectations, and serve out his sentence.  What passed for arguments at “Disney Does Dartmouth” [© Diana Marre 1991] featured prominently on lists of fallacies at Dart­mouth, Dr. Rickoll knew, for he had taught at Dartmouth.  [To have taught at an actual university, of course, is advantageous and disadvantageous.] The head administrator—or, from the point of view of faculty self-governance, chief administraitor—on the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] would insinuate the preferences of Jones Hall as some “will of the faculty” that he conjured ad hoc.  Accommodating members of the committee—i.e., clowns-in-training—would then accede and defer to the administration as long as the concocted “will of the faculty” did not interfere with their individual or departmental whims.  Dr. Rickoll, unpracticed in the arts of deception [© Jagger-Richards 1968], did not understand academia as subordination or subornation of faculty and so did not suffer the committee gladly.

           

As the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] would pass something “new” and call it a policy then undo the “new” policy at its next meeting, Wayne Rickoll got his education in Puget Clowning.  It did not suit well any person who saw science as pursuit of knowledge and truth.  That it did suit so many scientists who passed through the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] like greasy hash augured ill for Dr. Rickoll.  For social scientists and especially humanists, of course, clowning required less adaptation from their classroom and, to go a little hypothetical in most cases, their researches.

            

Dr. Rickoll even endured nobly annual discussions of the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] around [and around and around . . .] “grade inflation” in which the decanal cutout would piously warn of evils not one of which he could substantiate.  Members of the committee would strut poses down the rhetorical runway, dramatizing their own rigor and thereby alerting all savvy witnesses that they assigned grades instrumentally.  Instead of “I’m Too Sexy,” developing clowns regaled the committee with “I’m Too Exacting” [among other shtick].  After each self-parodist had been self-serving for a sufficient time, the “Academic” “Standards” Committee [© William Haltom 1992] would rediscover its inability to do anything about grade inflation.  That inability masked unwillingness and lack of imagination, so it was for most on the committee a good.  For Wayne Rickoll it was a puzzling waste of time unworthy of serious professionals.  Professor Rickoll did not yet realize how short the supply of professionals was and would continue to be at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  Associate Professor Rickoll was not adept at statistics and admitted it, so he did not get to participate in self-parody in the manner of journeymen and journeywomen clowns who demonstrated the arithmetic they never quite mastered.  Still, Associate Professor Rickoll persisted and persevered in his laboratory and his classrooms.

        

Having arrived in the early 1990s as colleagues were denied tenure for their gender or for conforming to law or for other “local” sins, Associate Professor Rickoll was as perplexed by unprofessional evaluation as he was by unprofessional committee-work.  For Professor Rickoll as for the few other honest colleagues at our clown college, evaluation and promotion of colleagues presented the most puzzlement and eventually cynicism and fatalism over subsequent years.  Trained incapacities [Thorstein Veblen 1933—posthumously, which is of course when I expect publications from some leading lights of the university] of evaluators to follow rules, procedures, and sensible, decent practices enervated Professor Rickoll even as it energized scheming clowns [who would never measure up to standards and criteria except by making themselves useful to administrators and senior evaluators].  Evaluation practices and sometimes even procedures reflected studied avoidance of documents and records and any other verifiable evidence offended Professor Rickoll as it should offend others who call themselves scientists.  Willful, fanciful exaggeration of anecdotes into evidence seemed to Professor Rickoll the very opposite of intellectual honesty.  Other dark arts of preserving the College of Sleepy Hollow against minorities [or, in the case, of women, the majority of the population and a growing majority of undergraduates] impressed and depressed Professor Rickoll.  Professor Rickoll believed in science and in method and in disciplined evidence and logical inference, in the advancement of knowledge, and other practices that were, at his previous billets, less hopelessly idealistic than at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  At the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] such practices were professed piously at meetings, enshrined unreservedly in official documents, and invoked fulsomely at deliberations—so-called because calumnies and injustices were slow-paced cluster-fucks—but were elsewhere gag lines at which sophisticated, fully corrupted clowns hooted their derision.  Thus did Professor Rickoll’s honesty and decency mark him as unworthy of the clown college at which he was employed.  Yet in his classroom and in his laboratory Professor Rickoll persisted.  He had been warned, yet he persisted.

         

Professor Rickoll opposed hypocrisy and pretense, so in meetings of committees, of faculty, and of his department he decried those whom he labeled “face men.”  These poseurs saluted research that they seldom or never designed or executed.  These philosophasters feigned erudition they neither possessed nor fathomed.  These campus legends, in the words of another truth-teller hired in the 1990s who escaped the clown college rather than degrade himself, “knew the first sentences of everything ever published but nothing else.”  These hardliners inveighed against colleagues’ holding students’ hands while they themselves were spoon-feeding students blather that served more to glorify instructors than to instruct students.  Professor Rickoll came to see that campus became infested with imposters and phonies whenever the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] even pretended to virtues elsewhere deemed axiomatic.

             

Distinguished Professor Rickoll came to expect but never to accept corruptions from evaluation of colleagues at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996], which impeded his own decay into clownishness.  He could not believe me, for example, when I told him about the Faculty Advancement Committee Dispensation.  The FAC, the committee that recommends promotion and tenure, has long and often double-secretly conferred on its recent graduates immunity from strictures that those recent graduates had deployed against others while on the FAC.  No standard or criterion could be so explicit as to bind those who had just cycled off to measure up on formal, official merits, any more that departmental statements could induce evaluating departments to obey their own rules however clear.  Those who demanded rigor insistently when evaluating others need never practice rigor in their own teaching, research, or service [let alone in all three!].  The FAC alum need only flash a Cheshire grin and recy­cle some excuses at which the alum had scoffed a year before to complete just one of the FAC’s unwritten contracts of depravity [© Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen 1961].  Distinguished Professor Rickoll was not fooled and not amused.  He remained a stereotypic scientist:  straightforward, candid, and honest.  Honesty, candor, and forthrightness, of course, generally profit one at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] only if one is going along with some joke.  Instead, Distinguished Professor Rickoll’s virtues, not forsaken in order to secure tenure and promotion, made him gag at the joke.  Indeed, gagging on the joke, Distinguished Professor Rickoll grew ever more dyspeptic about contracts of depravity he was expected to honor and execute.  Distinguished Professor Rickoll was too decent to prosper or even to abide at the clown college.

             

Being acquainted with demonstrable reality, Distinguished Professor Rickoll came to understand, was the ordinary state neither of the “Academic” “Standards” Committee nor of plenary meetings of faculty who put the “clowns” into the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996].  To be competent pretenders, of course, preening, grifting posers would have to acquaint themselves with the actual and the concrete.  That they never did so acquaint themselves with reality meant that they could seldom be competent pretenders, which in turn further enmeshed “respectable,” “responsible,” “reliable,” and “reputable” faculty in deceptions and delusions.  Dr. Rickoll immersed himself in his researches and in his classes, finding in his laboratory and in his classroom the pursuit of truth and dedication to honesty by which he defined academia.  The carnival of buncombe [Mencken 2006] proceeded without him and without his lab and his classes. 

                    

Like Juli MacGruder, Bill Lyne, Dash Goodman, and a few others whom I shall salute when they retire or escape and are safe from association with me, Emeritus Distinguished Professor Wayne refused to become a clown and disdained to be clowned. 

           

I adapt from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad  XLIV:

       

Right you guessed the rising morrow

And scorned to tread the mire you must:

Dust's your wages, son of sorrow,

But men may come to worse than dust.

       

Souls undone, undoing others,--

Long time since that tale began.

You would not live to wrong your brothers:

Oh lad, you retired as fits a man.

Now to NOLA shall friend and colleague

With ruth and some with envy come:

Undishonored, clear of danger,

Clean of guilt, pass hence and home.

Turn safe to rest, no dreams, no waking;

And here, man, here's the wreath I've made:

'Tis not a gift that's worth the taking,

But wear it and it will not fade.

          

Spurious & Scurrilous

                   
Who are critics to conjure conflicts of interest or appearances of conflicts of interest in practices of campus security?
             

Of late, a few campus trash-talkers and too many faculty gadflies have disparaged the director of security at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] over multiple, overlapping conflicts of interest that only those with X-ray vision can espy.  By contrast, respectable, responsible, and reliable colleagues whose main trained incapacity is myopia peer through such disparagements to see illogical, ill-informed micro-management by faculty, staff, and students who are not sufficiently sympathetic to administrators or to authority in general.  As "Cool Hand" Lucas Jackson cautioned his fellow inmates, bosses at any road prison need all the help they can get. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVpNfjj2Atw about 18 minutes in]  Cooperative, collaborationist,  conformist and/or craven colleagues -- which is to say, the majority of the faculty -- will disparage the disparagers and disparagements.  It's our duty.
                              
Those who disparage the Director allege as a first-order conflict of interest that someone defamed on the "Bigots of Puget Sound" flier should minimize his involvement in any conduct processes following from the UPS3 flier incident of November 2016.  Cooperative, collaborative, conformist faculty and staff will note, however, that the UPS3 or confederates may have anticipated such an appearance of a conflict.  Indeed, those miscreants may have planned it!  What better way to get security out of your way than to hamstring the Director by naming and defaming him?  Lovers of good order and propriety intone that longstanding allegations of repeated discriminatory practices rehearsed on the UPS3 flier are stale and dated calumnies that respectable, respectful, reliable, and responsible members of the Puget Clowns community would not sink to consider.  Problems and allegations thus dismissed, the Director has neither a conflict of interest nor even the appearance of a conflict of interest in the first flier.  Along the lines of "The Emperor's New Clothes," the defenders of good order demand that respectable, respectful, responsible, and reliable colleagues view such matters innocently.  Besides, if the Director were barred by a conflict or the appearance of a conflict, would there be anyone else in security to substitute?  It's not as if the university has seven or more "Campus Safety Officers" whose names did not appear in the November flier.
                                          
Not content with their first-order canard, the disparagers of good order and prompt compliance conjure a supposed second-order conflict more specious than the first.  The fliers distributed at the installation of the new president named the selfsame Director anew. Are faculty of good will and excellent conformity to suppose this a coincidence?  Mustn't those disseminating the new flier have known that the Director, upon even the most preliminary inspection of the flier, would be hopelessly compromised because he could not then appear to be content-neutral in declaring the silent distribution of fliers to be disrupting the inauguration?  Note that disparagers and distributors do not claim to know who stymied the silent disruption of the latest affront to good order on campus.  For all that the disparagers know, the Director had nothing to do with censoring or evicting the two students.  How could craven, conformist faculty know whether the Director asked anything of those distributing the fliers?  They couldn't.  They shouldn't.
                            
Disparagements, alas, do not stop with the first- and second-order affronts above.  The nonconformists who believe in liberty take decent staff and faculty aback with aspersions of a third-order conflict.  The Director named in each flier then "criminally trespassed" an erstwhile student, a refugee from the University of Puget Clowns, who was sitting at the inauguration as if he were a member of the public and thus entitled to attend an event open to the public.  Have disparagers and nonconformists and libertarians no shame?  What did the transferred student have to do with the second flier?  What appearances of that conflict could security-blasphemers adduce?  If the Director could not escort the former student and poster of the first flier off campus, who would be available to do so?  What detractors claim to know whether the ever-vigilant Director revenged himself on one of the UPS3?  Such information has appeared in no approved account of the incidents.  Nor do carping critics know that the Director called Tacoma Police and for what reasons.  
                                
Every proponent of civility and order and docility and servility and obsequiousness on campus must denounce criticisms of the Director as spurious and scurrilous.