Let's Fathom Pseudocracy

       
They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.
Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but the governments
Of the great nations; men favorably
Representative of massed humanity. Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.

Robinson Jeffers 1939
             

In a recent post at "The Dish" Dr. Andrew Sullivan took apart the response of former Vice President Richard B. Cheney to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture.  Please do not be put off by its title.  "The Depravity of Dick Cheney" portends about as much new information as "The Insanity of Charles Manson" or "The Fecklessness of Barack Obama" would.  I argue below that Dr. Sullivan's post interests me most by what Dr. Sullivan misunderstands or at least misstates.
               
Consider how Dr. Sullivan begins:

Perhaps the only saving grace of this sociopath formerly in high office is that he understands that his legacy could well be as a war criminal unlike any in American history before him. That’s my only explanation for why he has to be out there day after day, year after year, attacking his successor, lambasting America’s return to civilization, and insisting that hanging people from shackles, freezing them to near-death, near-drowning them so that their abdomens are distended with water, anally raping them, breaking their limbs, and keeping them awake so long they hallucinated … is not somehow torture. Ask yourself: have you ever met someone who believes that? Outside the professional criminal classes, that is.

             

Any reasonable or disinterested observer must assess Mr. Cheney as a crackpot, so Dr. Sullivan's first paragraph may seem unexceptionable.  For exactly that reason I take exception to Dr. Sullivan's opening.  Mr. Cheney need not be worrying about his legacy or how history will remember him.

• First, the obliviousness of Americans to history is the legacy of our mass mediated polity. Most Americans will not pick Cheney's name out of the possibilities on "Jeopardy" five years after Mr. Cheney dies.  That, of course, would not matter to Mr. Cheney, who is indifferent to what most Americans think [and do not know].  The lake in "Deliverance" does not cover [up] as well as our mass media cover [up].  Vice President Cheney knows that.  It follows that he is not worried.
•  Second, educated, mindful minorities of Americans consist of many partisans and ideologues who will believe what their dogmas and past actions demand.  What supporters of Mr. Cheney or former President Bush [43] must believe or what they long to believe to rationalize their support of indefensible decisions, they will believe.  They, too, will cover [up] for Mr. Cheney's crimes or sins; some even will praise criminal, sinful, and psychopathic/sociopathic acts and statements as patriotism, these days among the first refuges of scoundrels.  Vice President Cheney knows that.  It follows that he is not worried but confident.
• Third, Mr. Cheney operates like most modern U. S. politicians -- by means of short cons. Why would a savvy operator deploy some long con when he knows my first and second points above?  Denial almost always suffices until obliviousness [point one supra] and hive-mind [point two supra] kick in. Mr. Cheney, it seems obvious to me, is temporizing until political amnesia and political loyalties conduct him to the Grim Reaper.  While Mr. Cheney had better discount the theological beliefs many of his evangelical supporters lest Mr. Cheney's "longer run" include a hotfoot, Vice President Cheney is not worried here and now.
• Fourth, Mr. Cheney knows that other reports and issues will supplant the torture report soon enough. Even if forgetting what you prefer to forget [point one], denying what you prefer to ignore [point two], and stonewalling a short con [point three] did not work as well as they will, MSNBC and Fox News will give the torture report up once the Main Stream Media start blathering on other topics.

                             
I do not quite endorse Dr. Sullivan's claim that the following was most revealing or most telling of Mr. Cheney, but I agree that the quotations below are stunning:
             

I’ll tell you what my definition of torture is: what nineteen guys armed with airline tickets and boxcutters did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11.

Torture is what the al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11.

     
Vice President Cheney knows that he is misusing "torture" and knows he will get away with it.  Even the dull normal American smells this red herring.
             
I agree with Sullivan's assessments in the following passage:

What I take from these statements is that the torture program was, for Cheney, partly an amateur thug’s idea of how you get intelligence, but partly also simply a means of revenge. Yes: revenge. This was a torture program set up in order to vent rage and inflict revenge. It was torture designed to be as brutal to terror suspects as 19 men on 9/11 were to Americans. Tit-for-tat. Our torture in return for their torture; their innocent victims in return for ours. It was a program that has no place in a civilized society.

         
And I agree with Dr. Sullivan's quotation of yet another irrational howler from the former Vice President:

The problem I have is with all the folks we did release who ended up on the battlefield … I have no problem [with torturing innocent people] as long as we achieved our objective.

These two sentences mislead the unwary who believe that many released prisoners returned to the battlefield, but they permit Vice President Cheney to live down to his crackpot identity.
    
I disagree when Dr. Sullivan then intones, "It doesn’t get any clearer than that. The man is a sociopath. He is a disgrace to his country. And he needs to be brought to justice."  If Mr. Cheney sincerely believed any of the quoted language, he might thereby mark himself a sociopath or a disgrace.  But I invoke anew a premise I introduced above.  Vice President Cheney is a political operator whose experience spans at least four decades!  Why would two fellows with advanced degrees in political science [Dr. Sullivan and Dr. Haltom] take the former vice president to mean anything he says?
                   

I prefer to explain politicos by what news media and discourse will permit them to get away with. Moral cretins created a poster of a man falling from one of the towers on 9/11:
         

If I must detail the willed stupidity, obtuseness, and vacuousness of this caption, please read someone else's blog.  I do not concern myself about those incapable of learning or thinking.
   
Still, if Mr. Cheney is sociopathic, so are our media and our citizenry, many of whom would find the irrationality of the poster above no disgrace.  Some of our colleagues might find the poster "affective learning," if they could overcome their tendency to locate depravity solely in opponents or enemies.

The foregoing strongly suggests but does not prove that Richard Bruce Cheney, instead of going to graduate school in political science, ought to have pursued aan advanced degree in ethics.  [See the immediately previous posting -- 13 December 2014.]

The foregoing does require us to edit "The Soul's Desert" by Robinson Jeffers.

      

They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.
Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are criminals, hucksters, and little journalists, governors
Of nations great in might but weak in right; men

Representative of mass murderers. Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.

           

                    

Recalling Haltom's Third Law: No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any

"No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any" = Those who speak loudly about ethics soon fail of ethical scruples.

Longstanding reader(s) will vaguely recall Haltom's Laws. Some reader might even recall Haltom's Third Law :  "No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any."  I seize my keyboard today to rehearse what I mean to claim with my hopelessly overstated "law."
 
I phrased Haltom's Third Law in graduate school when I discovered how many proponents of moral or ethical theorizing failed miserably of what ordinary people deemed decency.  I did not yet suspect that I was at once over-generalizing and under-generalizing.  I was over-generalizing because I soon ran into moralists and ethicists who earnestly behaved as scrupulously as they could as often as they could even when it cost them dearly.  I was under-generalizing because academics as a class are disposed to pose as people of probity and honor while engaging "backstage" in perfidies and perversities.

I should rephrase my third law as a tendency or as a probabilistic statement, but then my law would lose impact.  In keeping with our regnant pseudocracy, then, I leave my third law misphrased.

I recently experienced anew the shock that led to my third law.  A sententious, moralizing, pedantic, empty-headed ideologue, given to stylish causes and silly pronouncements delivered with practiced sincerity and projected seriousness, disgraced herself in front of colleagues.  Her fall from grace would disgust if undertaken from cynicism.  However, she has neither the wit nor the intellect to be a cynic. She strikes me rather as a failed Machiavellian.  She is perfectly willing to repeat any blather that aligns her with fashionably left [sic] positions.  [This is the University of Puget Clowns -- thanks, President PieRce -- so the fashions are decades out of date.]  She wants to pursue her political ends but lacks the cunning to pull it off.  So, like a demented Prince[ss] taking advice from an erstwhile bureaucrat, she inflicts pain without achieving any victory.  She dishonors herself and others without achievement or advance.

This professed moralist and would-be Machiavellian attempted a McCarthy-like attack on a blameless person who was not present or even aware of her defamation.  At that moment I knew she was a living embodiment of my stereotype of the academic ethicist:  someone who preaches what she or he cannot practice when her or his interests intrude.

Note that this does not make the professional scold a hypocrite.  When we speak strictly and adhere to denotations once expected of users of English, the moralizer and would-be Machiavellian may believe in the scruples and strictures she invokes.  The hypocrite conjures principles in which he or she does not believe.  Since each of us routinely fails of standards we endorse, we are all hypocrites if we surrender to the modern abuse of "hypocrisy."  The moralizing Princess Machiavelli believes in the principles she blares;  she is no hypocrite.  Indeed, she believes so deeply in some of her ethical precepts that she is willing to lose possession of herself in pursuit of those precepts.

From all of the above, I reiterate that those who speak loudly and often about ethics will soon and solidly betray those ethics in pursuit of whatever ethics they feel most imperiled.  Almost anyone who professes "ethics" will over-pursue some ethical end and thereby violate other ethical ends resoundingly.  I do not know if this law is as true of those trained in ethics within Philosophy as it is of those who claim to have been schooled in another discipline.  One of the earliest malefactors from whom I generalized my third law was trained in Philosophy, so Philosophy itself is no prophylactic. However, many disciplines acquire normatively inclined practitioners who profess to be ethicists but are instead polemicists using ethics as a mask.

Still, to keep matters simple, presume that "No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any."
      

"Enhanced Interrogation Technique(s)" Spins Torture

Andrew Sullivan collected some tweets and other contributions that cut through the blather:
         
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/12/11/an-orwellian-acronym/

Live-Blogging the Fall Faculty Conversion

 
I showed up early, so I enjoyed the silence and solitude.  I pondered fundamental questions such as "Is Schneebeck not air-conditioned or is the air-conditioning inadequate?"
         
My luck could not last.  Shortly before the scheduled start staff were forced into Schneebeck Sweatbox. Shortly after the scheduled start faculty wandered in.  Faculty who most penalize tardiness trickled in last.
   
Who chose "Mission Impossible" to be playing as Ron Thom ascended the stage?  [I am not kidding!]
         
"It's great to see you all back," President Thomas claimed, looking at staff and faculty fronts.  "I always look forward to this conversation," he added.  Before it happened, he'd have to look forward, wouldn't he?
         
President Thomas asked us to imagine that we were not in a concert hall but in an orchestra pit.  I do not know about the orchestra part, but I had no difficulty imagining we all were in a pit.
   
"That Vision Thing" started promptly at 2:37 p. m.
   
Merriment, of course, ensued.
 
President Thomas then paraded bricks, mortar, and other accomplishments.  Visions of his accomplishments held the audience's attention like a vice clamp.
       
After five minutes of positive blather, President Thomas moved to the challenges ahead.
     
The humidity and temperature persisted.  Naptime loomed.
     
"Can we get out from under the sword of Damocles?"  President Thomas began to flash . . . his slides.
     
"We can hope for a miracle.  And every day, I do."  President Thomas warmed to his task, channeling Louis C. K.
     
President Thomas recalled the "Hail Mary" pass in the Orange Bowl in 1984 -- you know, the one that took place in Miami's home stadium on 23 November 1983.  [Hey!  He's an English PhD.  It's amazing he got the decade correct.]
 
President Thomas concluded his bullish commentary on Puget Sound by flashing . . . three words: mishmash   caricature   Vishnu,  that is,  "mission    character    vision."
         
Into this three-way verbal Rorschach, President Thomas then projected "Pioneering   Confident   Independent    Creative    Open."  These five words or concepts, which no sane observer would apply to any schools in Tacoma, President Thomas said defined the character of Puget Sound.  "Five Faces of Puget Sound" became transformed into an equation:  vision = [mission + character] x time.  Such precise folderol!

President Thomas next free-associated with other symbols and shibboleths.  He discussed compost, sewers, and fleas, then said "... but enough about the new servery in the SUB."   Stop it, Ron!  You're killing us!  What a wag!
     
By the way, President Thomas listens to KPLU.  I am unsure what that has to do with what President Thomas was babbling about.  However, it was provocative that Puget Sound's president listens to KPLU when he could listen to KUOW.  The crowd went wild.
   
He mentioned Peter Wimberger's name twice, Harry Velez's name once, and Suzanne Holland's once. I forget why, which may have been the reason El Presidente did so.
     
He used the word "bromide."  Given the content of his talk, it was a bold choice.  Imagine Charles Manson calling something "twisted" or Richard Nixon saying something was "dishonest."

President Thomas also referred to many articles and reports in popular media amid his random walk squawk talk.
   
26 minutes into his presentation, he told us what he'd like to do today.  [Pithy preface, Ron!]

Then he played a video from Stanford.  I missed its point.  I was checking my email and my pulse. The video roughly emulated "Tosh.0" without the nuances.  I thought "Foolish Pleasures" erred on April Fools Day.
     
The air was even less conditioned.  I was sweating.  How could I follow this scintillating, stimulating, content-free, multi-media extravaganza under such duress?
       
President Thomas used "paradigms."  He loves classics.  Or perhaps he was saying the capital campaign netted a pair of dimes.
         
The assembled readily agreed that Stanford and Puget Sound were identical twins separated at birth. Years ago Ron showed us a clip about Dartmouth.  This time St. Anford's School of and for the Rich. How does he keep finding home videos from Puget Sound doppelgangers?  Maybe next year he'll offer a video touting the Sorbonne . . . untranslated, I hope.
         
David Magnus used to claim that 100 years hence, the conventional disciplines of the present would not exist.  We all agreed then and agree now that non sequiturs make the best bases for arguments.
     
A whirlwind 43 minutes after he began, President Thomas threw up discussion out to the crowd. Having deprived faculty of any empirical referents, President Thomas was ready to hear the faculty out.
         
One attendee said that doing away with majors in favor of students' declaring a "mission" seemed a revolutionary move.  Another attendee said the video reframed established notions, then shocked me with "I like that."  Or maybe what he said was, "I like bright, shiny objects."

Each successive comment from attendees packed more and more shibboleths into Fantasyland.    
         
A member of the faculty lamented "googlfication" of the university.
     

President Thomas discussed the nuances of Legos on the screen during the video.

     
A language professor informed the faculty that one cannot learn language without studying hard and reprogramming one's mind.  Language-translating spectacles will not do the trick!  Good point!  I had taken that facetious remark from a student to be a mood-lightening device.  I profited greatly from learning that such glasses were fictional.  At this point the avatars of station identification began to seize the occasion. The professor next to me asked, "Why do faculty always begin from a defense of their own territory?"  [Because they like to cater to their loves?]
     
Last half hour.  I can endure.  I can make it to the door.
       
Zaixin Hong actually made sense.  Maybe knowing what you're talking about helps conversation! However, President Thomas instantly redirected "conversation" into a ditch, so faculty and staff could continue to brood about their/our being the problem.  Good save, Ron.
     
A speaker offered so many generalizations that one wondered who pulled his finger.  
     
Are we done yet?
       
Paging Rosemary Woods!  We need a 18.5 minute gap in this program.
   
Is the beer available yet?  Why don't we drink first, then endure the droolfest?
   
Multiple attendees endorsed a program much like that at Evergreen State College.  The aforementioned Dr. Wimberger proclaimed that the Stanford video invoked a slick version of Evergreen State.
   
"Blah, blah, blah." "Reflection good"
   

"Blah, blah, blah."  "Vocation-speak bad"
 

"Blah, blah, blah."  "Skills vary."
 

"Blah, blah, blah."  Word salad untranslated here
 

"Blah, blah, blah."   Education good
 

"Blah, blah, blah."   Employers might see this as blather.  [Might?]
 

"Blah, blah, blah."  Run out the clock!  Four-corner offense!
 

"Blah, blah, blah."  "Where's the wine?"
 

"Blah, blah, blah."   "When does the concert start?  Who's the warm-up group?"
 

"Blah, blah, blah."   Merciful Jesus!  Let us out of this oven!
 

"Blah, blah, blah."  There must be a way out of here!
 

"Blah, blah, blah."   Fantasyland University?
 

"Blah, blah, blah."   Will this affect my salary?
 

"Blah, blah, blah."   We almost made it out with no one bringing up the KIP/KNOW requirement.
     

Where is the food and drink?
   

The video did not comment on grades K-12!  [Nor did it refer to the Albigensian Heresy!]

       
Diploma Mill Good!
   

Protect Your Posters!

           
You can protect your wall art or door posters from being torn down.  Let Hermann Rorschach show the way!
    
For once I knew what was coming.  I started this blog-post last Friday [2 May 2014] because I knew what febrile minds would command undisciplined censors to do.  A poster making fun of the Ku Klux Klan no longer adorns the outside of my office door.  Sometime, over the weekend, that poster was torn down.
           
Alas, I am serious.  Perhaps someone too dunderheaded to realize that the poster parodied the KKK or too imbued with zeal to leave others to their own views practiced orthopraxy on my door.  Maybe someone hoping to foment conflict or induce me to blame proponents of diversity tore it down. "How would I know why should I care?" [The Zombies, "She's Not There"]
    
 Behold the offending image:
        
       


               
Those who dare to put up posters [or, in this instance, to leave up a poster put up by a sabbatical replacement] could make copies, but silly children or unscrupulous adults might tear the new versions down.  Wait until most of the pious and pusillanimous have gone home for summer, then risk returning provocations to your doors.
           
                             
 OR ... put up an inkblot!       

              


                 
No poster is safe from the conjuring of outrage or the simulation of sensitivity. The closest to safety we can get is to mount inkblots.  True, one must guard against partisans of the Holtzman inkblot.  Still, to object to the Rorschach would require learning, so you should be safe from self-righteous vandals and senseless censors.
                    

May I remind the sanctimonious of Haltom's Eighth Law? 
                     
rumpparliament.blogspot.com/2008/02/haltoms-eighth-law-no-one-may-be.html
             

No one may be offended; one must take offense.

            

Live Blogging the President's Salary/Benefit Confab

You want to talk about trauma? Forget Klan posters. Administrators and faculty talk, and I listen? I be hurt!
         
 
At 3:32 p.m. on 29 April 2014, President Thomas began a meeting concerning salaries and benefits at the University of Puget Clowns. Colleagues who could not make the meeting asked me to note what was said.
   
Who would want Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's version of events?
    

Then Ron Thom assumed the podium. The faculty's pal thanked everyone for attending.   Ron Thom validated the issues as important. He suggested that he and his entire cabinet ask themselves first thing each year how they can increase compensation for faculty. He then allowed that faculty compensation has been his greatest personal disappointment in the presidency of Ronald R. Thomas.
     
So far, so standard: President Thomas confirmed that he understood faculty concern(s) before he heard them expressed or pressed. Then Ron Thom confessed that, amid President Thomas's myriad successes in raising bricks and mortar and dough, Ron Thom has suffered the personal pain and humiliation of not being able to compensate faculty as much as he wished he could.  Faculty must recall that Ron Thom is a good guy who is very trying even as faculty acknowledge that Ronald R. Thomas is a hard-nosed, realistic Chief Executive.
    
        
"It's all up to you.  I can be a good guy, or I can be one mean son of a bitch.  It's all up to you."
   
          
Hard-charging University of Puget Sound CEO President Thomas then noted that he had asked his cabinet to attend so that discussion might be as "fulsome" as possible.
       
"Fulsome?"  Surf to dictionary.reference.com/browse/fulsome?s=t, please.  Evidently President Thomas meant definitions four or five:  

1.        offensive to good taste, especially as being excessive; overdone or gross:

            fulsome praise that embarrassed her deeply; fulsome décor.
            

2.

disgusting; sickening; repulsive:
        

a table heaped with fulsome mounds of greasy foods.
        

3.

excessively or insincerely lavish:  
         

fulsome admiration.
             

4.

encompassing all aspects; comprehensive:
              

a fulsome survey of the political situation in Central America.
           

5.

abundant or copious.

     
        
Denise Despres asked about the bloat of administrative structures across U. S. colleges and universities and its negative consequences for benefits and salaries of faculty.  U. P. S. is not good for faculty.  How can existing faculty recruit new faculty without lying?  Ron Thom asked for specifics.  Professor Despres suggested salaries and especially medical benefits have fallen behind.  Room-commanding CEO Thomas shouldered faculty pal Ron Thom aside to note that medical benefits were a knotty problem.
        
Message:  Ron Thom cares.  President Thomas cannot do anything about Ron Thom's caring, but you gotta love Ron Thom. 
      
President Thomas, by contrast, demands specifics that he knows faculty cannot obtain. Sooner or later faculty will characterize developments in terms that President Thomas can gainsay.  Plausible deniability suffices.
          
          
CEO Thomas then noted that every employee is still covered under the medical plan. Dependents can be covered, too.  Despite national problems, the University of Puget Clowns still covers basic medical matters for its personnel.

Message: It's not CEO Thomas's fault.  CEO Thomas and his administration are sailing over minimal expectations that they are striving to lower.
     
         
From his first year as CEO, President Thomas intoned, President Thomas had thought that the University of Puget Clowns had too often bootstrapped with next to nothing.  Then came the recession.
       
It's not Ron Thom's fault.  It's not President Thomas's fault.  It's Dubya's fault! [Unless trustees are present, in which case it's Obama's fault.]      
   
   
President Thomas then opined that the University of Puget Clowns remains a good place: "I still think that. Maybe you don't."
     
Ron Thom consoled long-suffering, hard-working, forlorn Denise;  President Thomas then invited Professor Despres to reaffirm that she is not a problem but still a loyal member of his extended team.
            
Doug Cannon said that in 1980 he was offered more from the University of Puget Clowns than he would have been at Yale.  He wondered if the trustees could establish an endowment to bump up faculty salaries.  
    
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
      
            
Tough-minded CEO Ronald Thomas then allowed that "We cannot continue to escalate tuition enough to compensate faculty well.  The times will not permit that." Ron Thom tried to say how much that pained him, but CEO Thomas directed attention from Ron Thom's empathy to President Thomas's fundraiser.  Dave Beers observed that $1,000,000 would yield about $50,000 per year, so it would take much endowment to "move the needle" on faculty salaries much
     
Ron Thom sagged.  CEO Thomas swaggered.
 
At this point my battery began to fail.  My computer's, too.
   

Nick Kontogeorgopoulos complained that administrators' salaries burgeon while faculty salaries have fallen to the bottom of comparison schools.  As a result, faculty morale has fallen into the dumper.  And a student said tuition was rising to accommodate faculty salaries/wages.  What will be done about the disparities?

Are all Puget Clowns equal, but some equaler than others?
        
      

Matt Warning, "Rick Brooks said faculty and administrators were not 'in it all together.' "
     

Ron Thom was sad to think that true;  President Thomas wondered what Professor Warning's point might be.
       
              
Matt Warning wondered why the faculty could pass a graduation requirement regarding inequality but campus cannot talk about inequalities on campus.
  
Ron Thom saw Warning's point;  President Thomas wondered what Professor Warning's point might be.
       
           
Lynda Livingston then saw Doug Cannon's gratuitous self-promotion about Yale's considering him and raised it with an anecdote about the Business School that established that administrators were buttheads.
             
Ron Thom wondered what Professor Livingston was talking about. President Thomas noted that faculty were wasting time in a most agreeable anarchy of special pleading.

     
Jonathan Stockdale brandished The Trail to the point that tuition increases were being blamed on faculty compensation.
          
Arches on 25 March?  The Trail on 29 April?  Is there a source so flimsy that Professor Stockdale will not cite it?
     
               
Sherry Mondou then attempted flimflam by noting that she had not talked to anyone at the The Trail but only emailed some remarks and had happened to be considering faculty compensation when she emailed.
     
Those pesky cub reporters at The Trail!  Who would take seriously an email from an administrator? What kind of journalist reproduces what administrators say?
          
                
"That's true, isn't it?"
         
"No.  But it's accurate."
       
             
Kris Bartanen followed with some detail-quibbling and distinctions that made little difference, at which quibbling Professor Despres channeled Joe Wilson [R SC] and shouted at Bartanen.  Bartanen's point was that Puget Clowns is really not the worst in its class.
     
Good point!  Professor Kontogeorgopoulos's point that UPS once led its class and aspired to head its class of schools but now trails was left utterly unrebutted, but ritual demands only that administrators answer, not that their answers make sense or make any difference.  "Nick, we may not be alpha these days but one could argue that we are not omega."  
   
   
Richard Anderson-Connolly suggested that Ron Thom consider Rawlsian budgeting: those paid most get raised least.
                  
Extremely busy CEO & President Thomas then noted the lateness of the hour and so began a filibuster of marketing nostrums and soothing faculty-relations.
       
           
Previously bellicose faculty now began to assure Ron Thom that they still loved him and President Thomas that they still feared him.
         
The Mass is ended.  Go and whine no more!
          
              

"There's no time to lose," I heard her say /
Catch your dreams before they slip away /
Dying all the time /
Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind /
Ain't life unkind? / 

She just can't be chained /
To a life where nothing's gained /
And nothing's lost, at such a cost. /
         
        

Post-Literacy

  
Can anyone at Puget Sound play this game read?
    

The faculty recently added to the graduation requirements:   

Learning Objectives  Courses in Knowledge, Identity and Power provide a distinct site for students to develop their understanding of the dynamics and consequences of power differentials, inequalities and divisions among social groups, and the relationship of these issues to knowledge representation and production.  In these courses, students also develop their capacity to communicate meaningfully about issues of power, disparity, and diversity of experiences and identities.
 
Guidelines   1.     These courses promote critical engagement with the causes, nature, and consequences of individual, institutional, cultural and/or structural dynamics of disparity, power, and privilege.
2.     These courses provide opportunities for students to:
a.     engage in dialogue about issues of knowledge, identity, and power, and
b.     consider linkages between their social positions and course themes related to these issues.
3.     Courses can also fulfill other program or graduation requirements.

   

A recent petition calls this the "diversity overlay."  Could the new requirement be diluted more and still serve as misleading evidence that the University of Puget Sound has said or done anything about diversity?  What is so scary about "diversity of experiences and identities?" 
       
         
Fear not, post-literate faculty, staff, and students!  The system of governance worked about as it has in my 28 years here:  An irresponsible, reckless, and extravagant proposal was shrunk to a responsible, feckless, and meager measure.  Zealots secured an empty symbol and ersatz status.  The status quo ante endures.  Unless the Curriculum Committee ignores the wording that the faculty endorsed, many popular, successful courses should be declared to fulfill the KIP/KNOW requirement.  This means that the worst excesses forecast by opponents of the KIP/KNOW requirement will likely never come to pass.  Faculty who long to evangelize captive audiences will continue to be "miserable merchants of unwanted ideas" [William O. Douglas, Dennis versus United States 1951] preaching to students who take the courses because they are already true believers. Meanwhile, competent instructors will try to coach students about what we all should know and how critical skeptics who nonetheless remain conversant with facts and evidence proceed.
                         
The PAP [Positionality / Affective Learning / Praxis] was drained from the proposal before it passed.  Read the new requirement, then stop whining.  Volunteer to offer terrific courses so that the dilettantes and ideologues do not offer substandard courses to many students.  Make the KIP/KNOW victory Pyrrhic.
        
Really, colleagues and students, this internal and external marketing game/scheme is not as challenging as many of you are making it seem. I realize that whining about supposed grave threats is itself an established game at Puget Sound as elsewhere in academia, but hysteria works least when it is most boring.
    
As I noted in "I'm Sorry," a posting published on this blog on 4 April, reading is fundamental.  Try reading instead of bleeding or bleating.
   

  
        

  


  

A Petition That Begs Condign Neglect

Not content to get their way, sophomoric thinkers demand to have their way with faculty.


Many faculty have expressed to me concern about a petition "crafted" by one or more Puget Sound students.  The faculty should not be concerned. One colleague got matters right when he said, "They're college students." That is, Spring Semester is always the silly season for students.  This silly season produced an uncommonly silly document.
     
The first published version of the petition was as laughable as some of my first drafts:

           

Petition for Transparency in Senate Faculty Vote

The faculty senate voted through Wednesday, April 9 on whether to accept the KNOW diversity overlay requirement. The measure passed by a vote of 123 to 88. We believe that this many professors voting against a diversity core overlay is unacceptable at a university claiming to be concerned about diversity and social justice. There is no excuse for the perpetuation of the old core requirements when so much of this campus remains exclusive to white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, upper middle-class students.

 

We demand transparency because:

1.      We are robbed of meaningful education when that education reflects only the standards and values of a hegemonic western culture. We believe that the professors who voted against the requirement must be held accountable for voting to perpetuate the unacceptable state of our curriculum prior to the introduction to the overlay requirement.

       

2.      We are not represented in this university’s governance structures when faculty who make decisions on the content of our curriculum are insulated from accountability for their votes that perpetuate an unacceptable educational program that considers critical analysis of power, social location, the construction of knowledge and identity a politically correct garnish rather than an integral part of a liberal arts education.

             

3.      We are irresponsible members of the campus community if we do not do everything we can to make this community more accessible to people from historically marginalized communities. Some of us are students from these communities who know that this university, despite its best efforts, continues to perpetuate social inequality. Faculty members who voted against the overlay requirement voted to uphold a curriculum that did not reflect the experience of students from historically marginalized communities and therefore perpetuated this social inequality.

         

We are not under any delusions that the overlay will resolve this campus’ failure to meaningfully address issues of diversity. But we think that it is less bad than where we were before. Any argument to the contrary is ridiculous because despite progress the university has made the state of our diversity efforts remain unacceptable because there are obviously members or groups within the administration and faculty resistant to change.

We therefore request the release of the names of all faculty who voted on the diversity overlay requirement and the names of those who abstained. Secrecy is antithetical to the democratic values of a liberal arts college and prevents students from engaging with the college administration and faculty. If the University of Puget Sound is serious about increasing diversity, we need to have a meaningful dialogue about what it means that eighty-eight faculty members voted against this requirement. Excuses for secrecy are not acceptable. We demand transparency.
 

My initial response to this initial petition was laughter.  The information in the petition was askew.  If we were to dignify the contents by calling them "arguments," the arguments in the petition were far from cogent.  The demand that became a request by petition's end could be met if someone provided the students with any document or website that lists all full-time faculty, for that would list all who voted or sustained.  I suspect the University of Puget Sound's Bulletin would suffice.  All the names are at 
   
<www.pugetsound.edu/files/resources/6782_Bulletin13-14_UG_WEB.pdf>.
     

          

<www.facebook.com/groups/1470043629893175/1470054679892070/> tidies the petition a bit, but it remains far from compelling [sic].  The petitioners are still undergraduates in an era after literacy. Rather than review the post-literate posturing, I suggest we continue to ignore the fatuous document.
    
Faculty who over-read the petition -- giving it a second glance, for example -- risk overreach.  Youths are entitled to tantrums.  Their naïve obstreperousness distresses me less than the disingenuousness of colleagues.
   




    

The Challenges and the Blather of the New Graduation Requirement

A proponent for the graduation "overlay," recently passed by the faculty, set a high standard for Puget Sound education and for faculty oratory.
    
Opening remarks on behalf of [sort of] proponents of a new graduation requirement articulated [sort of] the urgent needs [sort of] that the overlap might meet [sort of].  The speaker who formally moved the overbite asked whether a Puget Sound education would prepare Puget Sound students for the following situations [I draw from the speaker's own notes]:

• "Upon returning home, encountering an overworked, underpaid Molly Maid"
• "After graduating and buying a house, considering a roofing company staffed by undocumented immigrant laborers, who cannot bargain with the contractor for fear of deportation"
• "Alone in a elevator with three young black men"
• "Learning that the 'beau' of a sibling has undergone sex-change surgery and therapy."

This array of grueling dilemmas must daunt every reader as it did every awake listener last September 23rd.  Puget Sound students demand the graduation over/under so that they may handle the problems that await them in their Puget Sound afterlife. Otherwise, what will our students do? Work their maids less and pay them more?  Avoid elevators frequented by minorities?  Kill their siblings?
      

Still, how will Puget Sound faculty devise courses to cover the crises listed?  One thing is certain: administrators will have to supply swag and bring the booty to induce faculty to craft courses to meet the challenges.  We are talking major release-units and maximum marketing.  Is there enough blowsy vacuity [Mencken] even in Puget Sound faculty to deliver on the promise of the diversity overreach?

  
Which faculty possess education and experience commensurate with dealing with domestic help upstairs and down;  anticipating and indemnifying home repairs and enhancements; sharing elevators — not to mention escalators at Neiman Marcus or gondolas at Gstaad — with young adult males of perhaps indeterminate ancestry or sexuality; and other problems typical of the lives of alumnae and alumni of the University of Puget Sound?
   
Forget student loans!  Look past post-literacy!  We are talking real First-World problems of the one-percent, Puget People!
   
The First Speaker, great subwoofer that he was and is, not only set the tone for faculty discussion of the overpass requirement;  he established as well the epitome of faculty oratory.  As my mind drifted, I thought back to a like Demosthenes in 1984.
  

Several years ago I was given an assignment to write a letter. It was to go into a time capsule and would be read in 100 years when that time capsule was opened. I remember driving down the California coast one day. My mind was full of what I was going to put in that letter about the problems and the issues that confront us in our time and what we did about them, but I couldn’t completely neglect the beauty around me — the Pacific out there on one side of the highway shining in the sunlight, the mountains of the Coast Range rising on the other side, and I found myself wondering what it would be like for someone, wondering if someone 100 years from now would be driving down that highway and if they would see the same thing. And with that thought I realized what a job I had with that letter. I would be writing a letter to people who know everything there is to know about us. We know nothing about them. They would know all about our problems. They would know how we solved them and whether our solution was beneficial to them down through the years or whether it hurt them. They would also know that we lived in a world with terrible weapons, nuclear weapons of terrible destructive power aimed at each other, capable of crossing the ocean in a matter of minutes and destroying civilization as we know it. And then I thought to myself: what are they going to say about us? What are those people 100 years from now whether we used those weapons or not. Well, what they will say about us 100 years from now depends on how we keep our rendezvous with destiny. Will we do the things that we know must be done and know that one day down in history 100 years, or perhaps for those people back in the 1980′s, for preserving our freedom, for saving for us this blessed planet called earth with all its grandeur and its beauty. You know, I am grateful for all of you giving the opportunity to serve you for these four years and I seek re-election because I want more than anything else to try to complete the new beginning that we charted four years ago. George Bush, who I think is one of the finest vice presidents this country has ever had, George Bush and I have crisscrossed the country and we’ve had in these last few months a wonderful experience. We have met young America. We have met your sons and daughters.

I am encouraged that, as Puget Sound's faculty strive to stave off the Scylla and Charybdis of staffing manors and otherwise living large in the 21st century, Puget Sound students will be compelled to learn from faculty educated in such domestic sciences and experienced with the subtle arts of estate and leisure management.  More, I marvel that such education and experience pass for "diversity" over the rainbow at the University of Puget Sound.
   

Live Blogging a Buffalo Chip Throw

4:00 p.m.    OT/PT faculty whom I have seldom seen at faculty meetings filter in to pack the meeting-room.  May we anticipate self-interested, self-serving colleagues will populate meetings to come?  Will faculty repeat the 25 March 2014 bum-rushing in future meetings?  Will bum-rushing faculty continue to object to electronic ballots that negate or reduce stratagems and subterfuges?
   
4:04 p.m.   The President opens with minutes.  The minutes are accepted.  Thus ended the suspense.  Everyone now could relapse relax.
   
4:05 p. m. The President proceeded to another gratuitous report.  Thank God/god/gods that such reports are not sent via email.  Better to waste faculty time with transient factlets & factoids.
   
        4:09 p. m.  Then The Vice President provided information that might better adorn a memorandum.  The pedagogical Scam of the Month, it appears, is "experiential learning."  Branding, marketing, and shibboleths rained upon faculty again. Multiply the length of the report [5-6 minutes] by perhaps 50 attendees and divide by 60 to see how many hours of faculty time & attention we are pissing away every meeting.

          4:16 p. m.  The Chair of the Senate then intoned about, among other things, electronic voting.  How proponents of the new graduation requirement kept from hissing at the prospect of an outbreak of democracy I know not.

        4:20 p.m.   As tradition dictates, a member of the Curriculum Committee misstated the motion regarding degrees at the OT School.  Faculty, perhaps still snoring from earlier inaction, did not notice.
    
             Adjourned at 4:23 p.m. without further incident.  I got no chance to use my finger puppets to illustrate any points I might have made [see "I'm Sorry" from 4 April 2014].