Rank-and-file faculty collude in fakery when they trust guileful communications.
The immediately previous entry in this blog argued that we faculty must assist fakery if various shams are to come off. The credulous among us are to an extent blameworthy, for if frauds concerned our own promotions or programs we each would be quick to deconstruct ersatz communications. Concerning malfeasances and nonfeasances, we usually do not know because we do not want to know.
Even more blameworthy, however, are wily communicators, especially decision-makers who explain away or excuse their chicanery. It is a pity that colleagues become too caught up in their own careers, families, and affairs to be critical or even attentive. An expectation of lenient, lazy audiences for explanations and excuses has emboldened the guileful, who disrespect the analytic capacities of almost all faculty.
Consider a paragraph written by one or more members of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of the 2003-2004 academic year. That group responded to an empty motion barely passed by the Faculty Senate on 5 February 2007 within two weeks, a remarkable feat for a committee that could not hear a grievance within the 15 days that the Faculty Code mandates. [It was of course encouraging to learn that these colleagues could react quickly when they cared to.]
Given the passage of this motion, one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC. Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation. Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006. In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.
Let us consider each sentence in turn to reveal the guile of these special pleaders.
[1] “… one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC.”
Someone who read the minutes of 5 February 2007 – minutes not yet approved and thus not yet available to senators, let alone to others – might presume that the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation, if that someone were ignorant of Senate meetings and minutes from 3 May 2004 to the present.
As respondents knew or should have known, the Senate had been stonewalled by those who endorsed the response. The Senate had appointed two ad hoc committees to investigate, among other matters, perfidies perpetrated by the PSC 2003-2004. One committee found – as any impartial, complete investigation would have to find – PSC violations of the Faculty Code. Members of the latter ad hoc committee witnessed the abuse of the first ad hoc committee by apologists and apparatchiks, which may account for why that committee’s report [October 2006] featured no findings.
The response thus reveals a tactic that the PSC has cunningly deployed for years: spin trivially true but utterly misleading. True, the Senate could be said never to have investigated PSC misprisions carefully. The Senate did not do so; two ad hoc committees appointed by the Senate did. True, the Senate had not found mistakes after a careful investigation; the Senate did so after two ad hoc committees had found mistakes [albeit that the second ad hoc committee did not issue explicit findings].
Maybe the respondents used “conclude” rather than “infer” or “assume” or other more apt terms because the respondents so routinely leapt to self-serving conclusions in 2003-2004 that they cannot imagine peers proceeding more systematically. [In fairness, the response may have been a rush job to which erstwhile members of the PSC gave too little thought. Usually, the PSC takes its time before reaching thoughtless interpretations and indefensible decisions.]
[2] “Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation.”
The key subterfuge of this second sentence has been debunked supra: the Senate conducted no such investigation but assigned two ad hoc committees to do so. The second ad hoc committee sought interveiws with members of the 2003-2004 PSC despite explicit warnings from two members of that committee to senators that confidentiality would prevent any member of the PSC from cooperating. [Recall from early entries in this blog that such statements are at best erroneous and, if members of the PSC are as familiar with the Faculty Code as they habitually claim, mendacious.]
[3] “Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006.”
This is a “nondenial denial,” the technique Ron Ziegler made famous in Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein lampooned in All the President’s Men. The respondents do not specify which allegations, if any, they believe to be the least bit inaccurate. They do not deny the allegations. Instead, they dispute the procedures by which a majority of senators came to hear and to believe the allegations. [One should not fault the response for its nondenial denials. Most if not all of Senator Ostrom’s allegations cannot plausibly be denied, as the failure of the response to specify even one example should reveal.]
[4] “In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.”
One familiar with the PSC cannot but marvel at the chutzpah of the PSC in this fourth sentence. Members who unanimously flouted the Faculty Code and due process on multiple occasions in 2003-2004 now charge the Senate with failure(s) of due process. Members who have steadfastly stonewalled senators’ attempts to gather evidence or testimony complain that the Senate did not gather evidence from all parties. The very people most responsible for the Senate’s having to work around uncooperative, unaccountable colleagues blame the Senate for proceeding with what little they themselves left the Senate. The PSC kills its parents then pleads for mercy because it is now an orphan.
This risible paragraph ought to embarrass every colleague who assented to it, but it will not because the PSC members have no audience before which to be embarrassed. How many faculty will trouble themselves to read the Faculty Code to discover that the PSC’s extravagant claims about confidentiality are folderol? How many faculty read Senate minutes, especially a response from a long-ago committee to a nearly meaningless motion? Among those who read the minutes, how many will be able to deconstruct the four sentences in the second paragraph, let alone cunning phrasings throughout the response?
To ask those three questions is to answer them. To answer them is to understand how workaday faculty collude in the acts of rogue committees and tyrannical administrators. Until more faculty participate in governance, faculty committees will remain unaccountable and, from time to time, unconscionable.
Therefore, let us not thunder at the PSC, "How dare you?" The PSC's audacity follows from faculty lassitude.
Next -- "H is for Half-Assed" -- The Faculty Senate goes off half-cocked unless it might displease administrators.
Showing posts with label AHCPS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AHCPS. Show all posts
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
D is for Deals
Buying the school’s way out of malfeasance limits exposure and accountability more than litigation or loss.
Some veterans, when confronted about the University’s buying its way out of its failings rather than correcting the failings, pose as sages: “Well, sometimes the payoff is the best thing.”
Not to make too much out of yet another thought-free remark from old parrots – I intend to make just enough out of it – faculty should realize two "A's" that buyouts betoken:
Aversion to Litigation and especially Exposure
The Ad Hoc Committee on Tenure [AHCT] – the four fools who took accountability seriously, crafted findings bravely, and endured brickbats stoically – worried about the University’s procuring protection from litigation and from adverse publicity at too great a price. The AHCT asked whether the University was spending freely rather than using such less expensive means of warding off litigation as doing the right thing in the first place or policing processes and professors when they go awry. The AHCT hazarded a conjecture that following the Faculty Code might be cheaper than flouting the Faculty Code and paying off a few victims who secure legal representation, evidence from Ford’s Pinto litigation notwithstanding. However, once that ad hoc committee released findings at odds with pronouncements from Jones Hall, their concerns about payoffs largely disappeared beneath ostensibly methodological, actually mythological critique.
Colleagues who were not gulled by the caterwauling of those who can abide anything but candor were nonetheless taken in by the myth of litigious America. They assured themselves and others that Puget Sound would win the litigation but only after enormous legal bills, so that the better part of jural valor might be to throw money at colleagues who objected to being ill-used. [If you do not object to being ill-used, wait for the named chair in your future!] Why not let the school off cheap, they ask, before some benighted jury fails to understand that violations of the rules are actually evidence of fidelity to higher ideals. [It is distressing how few jurors have read 1984 as a guide to institutional self-help!]
Yet many buyouts come before victims have engaged counsel or contemplated litigation. The school is expending thousands of dollars to fend off lawsuits that might never be? I suppose the pre-emptive surgeries work, but removing tonsils and adenoids at birth seems precipitous.
Maybe the school actually wants to buy the silence of victims. The aggrieved must be shut up lest faculty, staff, students, or trustees be wised up. More than litigation or negotiation, the University fears exposure.
What if colleagues found out that a whistleblower was induced to take a buyout before the whistleblower’s file reached the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]? [Naturally, the serial plagiarist on whom the naïve junior faculty blew the whistle not only continued on the faculty but also participated in dismissing the whistleblower – exactly the sort of process with which unsophisticated jurors might have some difficulty!] Why need the University fear that a third-year review might be read by five faculty [on the FAC or a hearing board] sworn to secrecy? If the University worried that the negative letters might expose the University to litigation, wouldn’t it have been more straightforward and just to wait for a hearing board or the FAC to screen the file for unfairness, inadequacy, or incompleteness? Did the University fear that some faculty might conclude that more than 20 pages written against the whistleblower by the spouse of the serial plagiarist might fall short of the objectivity that the Faculty Code commands? [Another detail that pesky jurors might not understand!] Or was the worry that five or more professors might learn what the AHCT called “departmental meltdown?”
Affinity for Unaccountability and Irresponsibility
Buyouts, especially preemptory buyouts, do more than gag those in the know and protect practices and processes from exposure and judgment. They instruct the few faculty in the know that malefactors will not be held responsible or accountable.
Consider the erstwhile faculty plagiarist. How did a third-year assistant professor get through her departmental review unscathed after two of her plagiarized works were exposed by the whistleblower before deliberations? Most faculty probably will never know. Two witnesses to the departmental deliberation have been sent away. The remaining participants are unlikely to take responsibility for any ineffectual or indifferent responses to the revelations. The chair of the department had been informed about each plagiarism before the deliberations. What steps, if any, did he take? Did one or more departmental colleagues excuse or minimize the plagiarisms [one set imperiling a faculty co-author and one set endangering a then-undergraduate co-author]?
We have been told that the FAC “addressed” this matter. Exactly what does that mean? We cannot know, which is precisely why we are told only that the FAC spoke or wrote some words that had something to do with the file. More than that we are not permitted to learn.
The FAC recommends a disposition of the file to the Academic Vice President [AVP], who decides whether to reappoint a third-year assistant professor. Whatever addressing or recommending the FAC did, the AVP was ultimately charged to dispose of the matter. If a serial plagiarist was reappointed by the AVP – and since she was working in Fall Semester 2005 one might infer that she had been reappointed – how can colleagues believe that the AVP took the sets of plagiarisms seriously? Did that AVP inform himself about the particulars, or did he reach his decision without additional information? If we intone that the AVP took faculty plagiarism seriously, what does that say about colloquial usage of “taking seriously?”
And what of the whistleblower’s effort to acquaint the President with the sets of plagiarisms before the whistleblower left town? Did the President “take seriously” faculty plagiarism to such an extent that he refused to look at the evidence? The faculty do not know, courtesy of the buyout.
Some faculty had hoped that, when the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] was created to deal with, among other matters, campuswide disquiet over faculty plagiarism and its apparent mishandling [when it was handled at all], the AHCPS might answer some questions. Instead, the AHCPS issued no findings about faculty plagiarism. The AHCPS issued no explanation for why the formal grievance against the plagiarist was withdrawn. The AHCPS covered up anew, thereby completing the lack of accountability and the irresponsibility worked by buyouts. What a coincidence that senators who had attacked the earlier ad hoc committee welcomed the vacuities of the later committee's report!
When buyouts and payoffs obstruct accountability, responsibility, cognizance, and governance, Jones Hall's “Deal or No Deal” keeps faculty in the dark.
Next: "E is for Etiquette" -- When colleagues call for "civil" discourse, what they mean is mannered discourse that serves over-dogs better than under-dogs.
Some veterans, when confronted about the University’s buying its way out of its failings rather than correcting the failings, pose as sages: “Well, sometimes the payoff is the best thing.”
Not to make too much out of yet another thought-free remark from old parrots – I intend to make just enough out of it – faculty should realize two "A's" that buyouts betoken:
- Aversion to litigation and, even more, to exposure
- Affinity for unaccountability and irresponsibility.
Aversion to Litigation and especially Exposure
The Ad Hoc Committee on Tenure [AHCT] – the four fools who took accountability seriously, crafted findings bravely, and endured brickbats stoically – worried about the University’s procuring protection from litigation and from adverse publicity at too great a price. The AHCT asked whether the University was spending freely rather than using such less expensive means of warding off litigation as doing the right thing in the first place or policing processes and professors when they go awry. The AHCT hazarded a conjecture that following the Faculty Code might be cheaper than flouting the Faculty Code and paying off a few victims who secure legal representation, evidence from Ford’s Pinto litigation notwithstanding. However, once that ad hoc committee released findings at odds with pronouncements from Jones Hall, their concerns about payoffs largely disappeared beneath ostensibly methodological, actually mythological critique.
Colleagues who were not gulled by the caterwauling of those who can abide anything but candor were nonetheless taken in by the myth of litigious America. They assured themselves and others that Puget Sound would win the litigation but only after enormous legal bills, so that the better part of jural valor might be to throw money at colleagues who objected to being ill-used. [If you do not object to being ill-used, wait for the named chair in your future!] Why not let the school off cheap, they ask, before some benighted jury fails to understand that violations of the rules are actually evidence of fidelity to higher ideals. [It is distressing how few jurors have read 1984 as a guide to institutional self-help!]
Yet many buyouts come before victims have engaged counsel or contemplated litigation. The school is expending thousands of dollars to fend off lawsuits that might never be? I suppose the pre-emptive surgeries work, but removing tonsils and adenoids at birth seems precipitous.
Maybe the school actually wants to buy the silence of victims. The aggrieved must be shut up lest faculty, staff, students, or trustees be wised up. More than litigation or negotiation, the University fears exposure.
What if colleagues found out that a whistleblower was induced to take a buyout before the whistleblower’s file reached the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]? [Naturally, the serial plagiarist on whom the naïve junior faculty blew the whistle not only continued on the faculty but also participated in dismissing the whistleblower – exactly the sort of process with which unsophisticated jurors might have some difficulty!] Why need the University fear that a third-year review might be read by five faculty [on the FAC or a hearing board] sworn to secrecy? If the University worried that the negative letters might expose the University to litigation, wouldn’t it have been more straightforward and just to wait for a hearing board or the FAC to screen the file for unfairness, inadequacy, or incompleteness? Did the University fear that some faculty might conclude that more than 20 pages written against the whistleblower by the spouse of the serial plagiarist might fall short of the objectivity that the Faculty Code commands? [Another detail that pesky jurors might not understand!] Or was the worry that five or more professors might learn what the AHCT called “departmental meltdown?”
Affinity for Unaccountability and Irresponsibility
Buyouts, especially preemptory buyouts, do more than gag those in the know and protect practices and processes from exposure and judgment. They instruct the few faculty in the know that malefactors will not be held responsible or accountable.
Consider the erstwhile faculty plagiarist. How did a third-year assistant professor get through her departmental review unscathed after two of her plagiarized works were exposed by the whistleblower before deliberations? Most faculty probably will never know. Two witnesses to the departmental deliberation have been sent away. The remaining participants are unlikely to take responsibility for any ineffectual or indifferent responses to the revelations. The chair of the department had been informed about each plagiarism before the deliberations. What steps, if any, did he take? Did one or more departmental colleagues excuse or minimize the plagiarisms [one set imperiling a faculty co-author and one set endangering a then-undergraduate co-author]?
We have been told that the FAC “addressed” this matter. Exactly what does that mean? We cannot know, which is precisely why we are told only that the FAC spoke or wrote some words that had something to do with the file. More than that we are not permitted to learn.
The FAC recommends a disposition of the file to the Academic Vice President [AVP], who decides whether to reappoint a third-year assistant professor. Whatever addressing or recommending the FAC did, the AVP was ultimately charged to dispose of the matter. If a serial plagiarist was reappointed by the AVP – and since she was working in Fall Semester 2005 one might infer that she had been reappointed – how can colleagues believe that the AVP took the sets of plagiarisms seriously? Did that AVP inform himself about the particulars, or did he reach his decision without additional information? If we intone that the AVP took faculty plagiarism seriously, what does that say about colloquial usage of “taking seriously?”
And what of the whistleblower’s effort to acquaint the President with the sets of plagiarisms before the whistleblower left town? Did the President “take seriously” faculty plagiarism to such an extent that he refused to look at the evidence? The faculty do not know, courtesy of the buyout.
Some faculty had hoped that, when the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] was created to deal with, among other matters, campuswide disquiet over faculty plagiarism and its apparent mishandling [when it was handled at all], the AHCPS might answer some questions. Instead, the AHCPS issued no findings about faculty plagiarism. The AHCPS issued no explanation for why the formal grievance against the plagiarist was withdrawn. The AHCPS covered up anew, thereby completing the lack of accountability and the irresponsibility worked by buyouts. What a coincidence that senators who had attacked the earlier ad hoc committee welcomed the vacuities of the later committee's report!
When buyouts and payoffs obstruct accountability, responsibility, cognizance, and governance, Jones Hall's “Deal or No Deal” keeps faculty in the dark.
Next: "E is for Etiquette" -- When colleagues call for "civil" discourse, what they mean is mannered discourse that serves over-dogs better than under-dogs.
Friday, March 2, 2007
Quibbles
Nit-picking signals that our system is malfunctioning normally.
Some faculty get angry when our unaccountable elites claim that exposés are errant in some unspecified way. Quibbling does not anger me. It assures me that the expression of concerns is largely correct. If powerful people had more important objections, they would issue them.
Some faculty were chagrined when an administrator wrote that an article about faculty plagiarism in The Trail contained unspecified errors. I took this familiar quibble in stride because no one demanded or requested a retraction. Indeed, I chuckled at the cheek of the editors when they reproduced the trivial criticisms that The Trail had weathered: the article started from a mixed metaphor [A trenchant if mistaken critique!]; “serial plagiarism” was a lurid label [Should The Trail avoid terms used by The Chronicle of Higher Education?]; and so on. A repeat offender imperiled the reputations of a generous colleague and a credulous student [each a co-author of a plagiarized manuscript], yet our campus features folks ready to confront anything except serious violations of professional canons and ethics.
Of course, shams and spin deceive no one who does not want to miss the point or to overlook problems. When the Senate discussed faculty plagiarism, the minutes bowdlerized “plagiarism” to “academic honesty,” but such lipstick did not become the pig. I am told that “multiple narratives” explain why a colleague who reported the serial plagiarisms became so disgusted with the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] over retaliations against him that he withdrew his grievance. May we anticipate a singular story about why no administrator or other person in the know took up the matter? We have been told that the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] “addressed” the matter, but we know not which matter the FAC addressed or even knew about. Amid uproar over faculty plagiarisms, the Faculty Senate appointed an ad hoc committee to look into grievances [including the aborted grievance over the second set of plagiarisms]. By the time that ad hoc committee issued no findings about the plagiarism grievance or much of anything else, the tumult over faculty plagiarisms had become faint and quaint. Indeed, the ad hoc committee did not even inform the faculty that the plagiarism grievant stated in an email to the PSC that he wanted to withdraw his grievance because 1) he no longer trusted the PSC to behave in a procedurally or substantively fair manner and 2) he hoped that withdrawing his grievance would stop the harassment he had undergone since he had grieved the plagiarist anew. I guess the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards thought such matters to be of no importance.
Quibbles, euphemisms, and cover-ups followed by calls for civility signal all of us that our system is malfunctioning normally. That, too, is reassuring to everyone who is not vulnerable.
Next – “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable” – When reputations and rewards issue from administrators and apparatchiks rather than from critical faculty, respectability corrupts faculty.
Some faculty get angry when our unaccountable elites claim that exposés are errant in some unspecified way. Quibbling does not anger me. It assures me that the expression of concerns is largely correct. If powerful people had more important objections, they would issue them.
Some faculty were chagrined when an administrator wrote that an article about faculty plagiarism in The Trail contained unspecified errors. I took this familiar quibble in stride because no one demanded or requested a retraction. Indeed, I chuckled at the cheek of the editors when they reproduced the trivial criticisms that The Trail had weathered: the article started from a mixed metaphor [A trenchant if mistaken critique!]; “serial plagiarism” was a lurid label [Should The Trail avoid terms used by The Chronicle of Higher Education?]; and so on. A repeat offender imperiled the reputations of a generous colleague and a credulous student [each a co-author of a plagiarized manuscript], yet our campus features folks ready to confront anything except serious violations of professional canons and ethics.
Of course, shams and spin deceive no one who does not want to miss the point or to overlook problems. When the Senate discussed faculty plagiarism, the minutes bowdlerized “plagiarism” to “academic honesty,” but such lipstick did not become the pig. I am told that “multiple narratives” explain why a colleague who reported the serial plagiarisms became so disgusted with the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] over retaliations against him that he withdrew his grievance. May we anticipate a singular story about why no administrator or other person in the know took up the matter? We have been told that the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] “addressed” the matter, but we know not which matter the FAC addressed or even knew about. Amid uproar over faculty plagiarisms, the Faculty Senate appointed an ad hoc committee to look into grievances [including the aborted grievance over the second set of plagiarisms]. By the time that ad hoc committee issued no findings about the plagiarism grievance or much of anything else, the tumult over faculty plagiarisms had become faint and quaint. Indeed, the ad hoc committee did not even inform the faculty that the plagiarism grievant stated in an email to the PSC that he wanted to withdraw his grievance because 1) he no longer trusted the PSC to behave in a procedurally or substantively fair manner and 2) he hoped that withdrawing his grievance would stop the harassment he had undergone since he had grieved the plagiarist anew. I guess the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards thought such matters to be of no importance.
Quibbles, euphemisms, and cover-ups followed by calls for civility signal all of us that our system is malfunctioning normally. That, too, is reassuring to everyone who is not vulnerable.
Next – “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable” – When reputations and rewards issue from administrators and apparatchiks rather than from critical faculty, respectability corrupts faculty.
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