Translating the Trustees

A report on the most recent meeting of trustees of the University of Puget Sound included the following:




“Workshop: Brand Strategy Update



“Over the past year, Puget Sound has engaged in an initiative to strengthen its identity and visibility in an increasingly competitive environment. The goal of this work is to more clearly, accurately, and compellingly present Puget Sound to all audiences—internally and externally—in alignment with our institutional mission, values, and personality.



“In February 2012 the trustees participated in a workshop with consultants Maguire Associates and Pyramid Communications, who have been engaged to guide Puget Sound in the development of a brand strategy. During the May session, trustees reviewed a summary of findings based on a thorough analysis of previous research; interviews on campus with students, faculty, and staff; a comprehensive survey of current students; interviews with college counselors at private and public high schools; and an analysis of branding and positioning at six peer institutions. Trustees discussed opportunities for differentiating Puget Sound in an authentic way and reviewed next steps, which include delivery of brand strategy, positioning statements, and graphic standards during summer 2012.”



I begin with the obvious. The marketing-speak and electioneering-speak of the second paragraph deconstruct and demystify the first paragraph. That second paragraph depends on the reader’s credulity. If amid the verbiage the reader accords the magic words “in an authentic way” the weight for which the experts in flim-flam hope and on which the bamboozlers depend — that is, that the word cloud of consumerist claptrap will shade some substrate of reality — then readers will not notice that actuality has been and will be overshadowed by appearances. The “authentic” Puget Sound, whatever it might be said to have been or be, will succumb to “brand strategy.”



Interviews, surveys, and analyses of peer institutions cannot yield genuine, sincere, and accurate views of “mission, values, and personality” as held by staff, faculty, and students. Real, authentic, and objective information about individuals does not come that cheap, that quick, or that facile [triple sic]. But please pore over the release carefully! Consultants can retrofit statements of "our" institutional mission, "our" institutional values, and "our" institutional personality to the branding strategy, positioning statements, and graphic standards that the consultants are hawking. Thus, one word in that second paragraph is perhaps as important as the phrase “in an authentic way:”  “institutional.”


Whipsaw yourself between the individual and the institutional or between the authentic and the authorized; you will come to read the report in a manner less credulous than the elevation of appearance or actuality presumes.
 
The trustees, administrators, and consulting flacks control “institutional.” Indeed, “institutional” seizes control from those who might imagine that they know something about “individual” values, beliefs, attitudes, or opinions. Any authenticity thus generated is synthetic authenticity. Any identity, personality, or essence that Puget Sound will be claimed to exhibit will be adjusted — sometimes subtly, sometimes grossly, and always mendaciously — away from the academic qualities of the individuals and toward the advertising claims of the institution.



Please re-read that second paragraph. Watch the authentic, the genuine, and the real enveloped by the artificial, the ginned-up, and the seductive. Behold the import of the report of the trustees.



Only naïfs would see the first paragraph as anything other than blather. For those naïfs, however, let us translate the first paragraph:



“Over the past year, Puget Sound has engaged in an initiative to strengthen its identity and visibility in an increasingly competitive environment.”

Translation: “To compete with other schools, Puget Sound must baffle prospectives and their parents.”



“The goal of this work is to more clearly, accurately, and compellingly present Puget Sound to all audiences—internally and externally—in alignment with our institutional mission, values, and personality.”

Translations: ”Puget Sound must transmogrify its image into something that sells better without wising up faculty and staff.”  OR  "Puget Sound must propagandize externally as well as internally."



Puget Sound is strengthening its identity, trustees? What would that mean in plain English? Might it mean that Puget Sound is adjusting its mission and values to suit new imagery and revamped propaganda?

Once the imagery has been perfected and the propaganda fitted to the imagery, won't the trustees and administrators then have to fit the staff and faculty to the images and the propaganda?  How will that be done and by whom?

Or do the consultants and trustees anticipate a "bait and switch?"  We get students through our positioning, then retain students by whatever means, but we never admit that much of our sizzle will never accompany a steak.

New Support for Haltom's Third Law

Andrew Sullivan at his blog [http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/04/license-behave-badly.html] recalls Haltom's 3rd Law: "No one who professes ethics has any."

Here is what Dr. Sullivan published on 4 April 2012:

Eric Schwitzgebel ponders studies suggesting that professional ethicists behave about as morally as people who aren't paid to think about morality:

[W]e might consider some countervailing forces. One possibility is that there's some kind of "moral licensing" effect. Suppose, for example, that a consequentialist donates a wad to charity. Maybe then she feels free to behave worse in other ways than she otherwise would have. Suppose a Kantian remains rigorously honest at some substantial cost to his welfare. Maybe then he feels freer to be a jerk to his students. One depressing thought is that all this cancels out: Our efforts to live by our ethical principles exert sufficient psychic costs that we compensate by acting worse in other ways, only moving around the lump under the rug.

This entry seems to me to track my third law [Rump Parliament, 20 January 2008] and a discussion from this blog dated 24 December 2009 ["Up Is Down"].

You Can Judge a Book by its Cover

On Being Presidential:

A Guide for College and

University Leaders

Susan Resneck Pierce

Ha Ha Ha

Really?

Ha Ha Ha Ha

Seriously?

Pub-

lished

by

The

Onion?

If you do not recoil from the injustices and insincerity, the juxtaposition of that title and that name is pants-shittingly hilarious.

Collegiality, Civility, Cooperation, Collaboration

Can you believe that some faculty have long regarded calls for collegiality and cooperation as clumsy attempts to induce faculty to conform or to acquiesce?

At a plenary meeting of the faculty on 15 November 2011, the President of the University of Puget Sound explicitly replaced his "normal presidential report" with extended remarks in favor of cooperation, collaboration, and civility. He opened with some sententious smarm, counseled faculty on the merits of the only two major items on the agenda of that meeting, chastised leaders of the faculty for supposed breaches of ethics as well as of decorum, and closed with a call for administrators, staff, and faculty to work together.

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I shall not comment on the sententious smarm or the call to work together except to write "Gack!"

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I pass by the parliamentary impropriety of the presiding officer's delivering a screed in place of the report authorized on the agenda and staking out positions on motions without surrendering the gavel for the duration of discussions of those motions.

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Instead, I call attention to the incongruity of chastising two or more faculty and defaming one or more faculty before a meeting of faculty while extolling the virtues of collegiality, civility, and community. How civil! How civil?

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The president denounced as an ethical breach the distribution among Puget Sound faculty of some information that was property of others. He stated that he and another administrator would have to apologize to their counterparts at the other university for this ethical breach. I did not understand why Puget Sound administrators would apologize for an ethical breach by faculty at the other school, and I did not see that any release of a leak from the other school was a breach of ethics or etiquette on the part of Puget Sound faculty.

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What I did understand was that the president should not have accused any faculty of (mis)deeds in front of colleagues. To do so violated parliamentary procedure, Political Science 101, and professionalism. Worse, defamation clashed with an ostensible thesis of the president's remarks. The president decried divisive rhetoric by denouncing one or more leaders of his own faculty? And is Professor Kettle also blackened, President Pot?

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Matters got worse when faculty and administrators learned soon after the 15 November meeting that the information was not or no longer proprietary. That development made it apparent that the president had denounced one or more Puget Sound faculty for an ethical breach that was not a breach even for the faculty from the other university.

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At the meeting of the faculty on 7 February 2012 the president said not one word about his own violations of civility, propriety, or collegiality. He did not own up to his mistakes. He did not retract his attributions of unethical conduct.

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Why do so many veteran faculty regard calls for civil discourse to be one-way and top-down? That is, the calls are top-down; the expected civility, by contrast. is bottom-up.

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Why have I said for years that at Puget Sound the difference between civility and servility cannot be measured with existing technology?

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Can anyone here play this game?

The Starr Chamber

Five years or eight years and counting, the Starr Chamber stands as the worst committee of my time at Puget Sound.

Veterans of "Rump Parliament" must have wondered where my annual denunciation of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of 2003-2004 was. Never fear; it is here. Newbies who have stumbled across this blog may wonder about my recalling a committee eight years or five years -- depending on what and how one counts -- after its last malfeasance. Please find my entries in this blog for 6 February and 5 February 2011, 9 February 2010, or 11 February 2009 to catch up on the missteps of miscreant colleagues. The "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" of 2007, on which day at least five erstwhile members of the Starr Chamber disgraced themselves, is especially rewarding to read.

New or old readers should pay close attention to those old entries, for only three of the eight malefactors have left the University of Puget Sound. That leaves five fuck-ups colleagues who should not be trusted to make sensible or fair decisions.

As you read those old posts, please recall that a former Chair of the Faculty Senate called the Professional Standards Committee "the Star Chamber" long before I did. I added the extra "r" to the mocking to recall Judge Kenneth Starr, who exhibited similar fairness, objectivity, and sense in Javerrting President Clinton.

And to the five, if any of them read my blog: I have not forgotten who you were or what you did. I also have not forgotten that I volunteered to one of you more than eight years ago to argue the nonfeasance and malfeasance of the PSC before the self-same PSC. Yes, the prisoners in the dock and the jury in the box would have been the same eight persons. So confident was I that the errors committed by the PSC violated either The Faculty Code or commonsense fairness or both that I was willing to let the PSC adjudicate. My sucker bet generous challenge was not accepted. I wonder why.

I hope the members of recent Academic Standards Committees do not despair. [See "Rump Parliament" 7 December 2010 for a summary.] Those committees were every bit as wanton as the Starr Chamber, but there was far less at stake.

If anyone would like to learn more about how low colleagues can go, please stand me to martinis at Primo Grill.