My Annual Salute to the 2003-2004 PSC -- The Starr Chamber

As malfeasant as the Academic Standards Committee was 2008-2010, the 2003-2004 Professional Standards Committee was worse.

Reading over my seven posts between 3 and 7 December 2010, you might believe that the Academic Standards Committee between Fall 2008 and Fall 2010 was the worst Faculty Senate committee in my 24.5 years at the University of Puget Clowns. To the best of my reckoning, the nadir for committees still belongs to a committee so malfeasant that it merited designation as “The Starr Chamber” after Kenneth Starr and the English court [“The Star Chamber” – one “r”] renowned for abusing its powers.

As is my annual custom, I salute the Starr Chamber -- the "Professional" "Standards" Committee between September 2003 and May 2004 -- as the worst Faculty Senate Committee of my time at the University.

I begin from an elementary distinction to console the Academic Standards Committee [hereinafter abbreviated ASC] that its performance 2008-2010 did not descend to the depth to which the Professional Standards Committee [hereinafter abbreviated PSC] sank:

The ASC 2008-2010 performed as abominably as it could, but supervision by faculty got in the ASC's way; the PSC 2003-2004 plummeted far deeper because faculty could not even learn what the PSC was doing, let alone stop the PSC's doings.

While the ASC ran amuck in academic years 2008-2009 and 2009-2010, the faculty voted down the impostures of the ASC. By contrast, the Starr Chamber was policed neither by the Faculty Senate nor the faculty as a whole and was directed [in fact if not in theory] by an administrator far more powerful, far more cunning, and far more compromised than any fixture on the ASC.

The ineptitude, inequity, and iniquities of the Starr Chamber were Homeric, so there is no shame in the ASC's falling short. I am certain that individual members of the ASC have sunk and will again sink to the inanity and insanity that individual members of the Starr Chamber sustained in 2003 or 2004. Still, a collective effort demands just the right combination of arrogation and anarchy to produce truly malign results.

I need not in this entry rehearse the missteps and mendacity of the Starr Chamber. My entries in this blog for 11 February 2009 and 9 February 2010 preserve acts and statements of buffoonery and buncombe to which most faculty cannot aspire or conspire. Even in those entries taken together, I did not detail all of the failings and double/multiple dealings of the Starr Chamber.

Even the limited record in this blog establishes, however, the degree to which the Starr Chamber parlayed nonfeasance with malfeasance, audacity with mendacity, and recklessness with fecklessness.

Of course, holdovers from the 2003-2004 PSC, having earned their dubious distinction, then characterized a hearing board as "rogue." Don't you admire colleagues who leave the Caps Lock on when they type hypocrisy?

Five veterans of the Starr Chamber still walk among us on campus, so watch out for them.

Moreover, as I noted in my entry for 5 December 2010 [Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses III] in 2008-2009 the ASC featured three Starr Chamber veterans.

For those three veterans, for all five holdovers, for the two emeriti, and for the single most malign force on this campus over my 24.5 years here, I pray:

Áve Manía, deduco pléna, Dóminium técum.

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses VII

To

a) the groupthink of fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee [See this blog, 3 December 2010];

b) hackneyed formulas that purport to justify the changes that the fixtures prefer & proffer [This blog, 4 December 2010];

c) veterans of THE rogue committee of all time [This blog, 5 December 2010];

d) inert and indifferent time-servers on the committee;

e) uncritical students [This blog, 6 December 2010];

and

f) a dozing Faculty Senate [This blog 7 December 2010]

let us now add the leadership of a rogue committee:

The Academic Standards train went off its tracks largely owing to the proclivities of its conductors and engineers.

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Explanation 7 -- Authoritarian Personalities

.....

..Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde:

misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb,

zu strafen, mächtig ist!

But thus do I counsel you, my friends:

distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

.......

The ASC 2008-2010 proved Nietzsche [Thus Spake Zarathustra] prescient. More than one authoritarian on the ASC longed to punish students who disappointed members of the committee. Students who chose other than the authoritarians would prefer disappointed the authoritarians. Students who elected options that authoritarians wished the students did not have disappointed the authoritarians. That is the way authoritarians think and behave. That is why I label them authoritarians.

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In the 4 October 2010 entry in this blog I noted with F. G. Bailey the preponderance of deceivers, especially self-deceivers, among those who dedicate themselves to the work of committees. I presume much delusion and many deceptions on any committee, so that is not what I am getting at with this seventh explanation.

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Rather I intend to note that a will to power distorts the deceptions of delusional colleagues into tyranny. As it was with the Professional Standards Committee 2003-2004, so it was with the Academic Standards Committee 2008-2010:

• members with powerful impulses to sanction, to coerce, and to punish drove committees to precipitate decisions that could not be defended before colleagues; as a result,
• chairs of each committee mismanaged communications between their committees and overseeing or superordinate entities; and
• chairs misled, misstated facts, or lied.:::::::::::::::::::::::::

.....

These tyrannical drivers of renegade committees are not fascists. They are fantasists. Deceived and deluded by their own dogma and doggerel, these tyrants must live up to images that they concocted to hide from colleagues shortcomings that their tyrannies make evident. As a result, these tyrants must redouble their efforts to seem to be what they cannot be. Denial and duplicity are overdetermined and overwhelming whenever an academic makes being himself or herself impossible.

..........................

I fault malfeasant and nonfeasant fantasists in the rank and file of the ASC, to be sure. They are supposed to be responsible and accountable. Yet, about the irresponsible, incompetent, unaccountable, and inexplicable fantasists what can we do? The fixtures are group-thinking apparatchiks who serve masters and missions over which faculty have little sway. Mantras that have bedeviled the "Academic" "Standards" Committee are immune to argument, instruction, reason, or suasion, so faculty can no more cure shibboleths and sloganeering than herpes. If we rid the ASC of these defective fantasists, those defective fantasists likely take their places.

---------

Membership on the ASC is largely self-selected. All too often, authoritarians bent by and bent on rigor elect to "serve" on the "Academic" "Standards" Committee. Fantasists with irresistible impulses to punish those who do not conform then re-imagine their own undergraduate triumphs and concoct spurious explanations for their own excellences. With each passing year the noncommissioned officers of the "Rigor Patrol" become retrospectively magnificent. Imbued with enthusiasm to transform undergrads into the intellectual figures that the rigorous refashion their autobiographies to conjure, these apostles of "hard love" then belch

• "I never used pass-fail when I was an undergraduate."*
• "I worked hard to get my degree; I expect our students to do the same."**
• "I don't see why a senior at a national liberal-arts college should have to take a first-year-level course pass-fail."***
• "Our students have to learn that grades do not matter."****

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Such statements, derived from members of the "Academic" "Standards" Committee 2008-2010, should dash any hopes of remedying the powerful draw of that committee for colleagues who misremember their past and prosecute that fanciful past on the undergrads of the present.

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It may be, however, that faculty may do something about leadership of and in the ASC. Let the Faculty Senate attend to processes by which the willful ascend to authority and descend to tyranny.

• Each time a committee elects as chair the member who arrives latest at the first meeting of the committee, that committee disdains competence for convenience.
• Each time that shirkers elect a junior colleague chair, they risk that someone with something to prove will assume a position for which she or he will prove ill-suited.
• Each time a member of the faculty yearns to chair a committee [or a department, program, or school], she or he marks herself or himself as a potential malefactor.

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The Faculty Code leaves committee chairpersons to the accident and expedient of first-meeting elections. Thus the Code devalues design and deliberation from the start.

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Given ASC leadership in 2008-2010, a rogue ASC should shock us about as much as we are shocked when a young Cuervo-drinker talking on a cell-phone is piloting a muscle car 50 mph the wrong way down a one-way street. You can pronounce the results an accident, but most adults would find the result predictable.

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It is now past time for the Faculty Senate and the trustees to amend The Faculty Code so that committee chairs are annually elected by faculty or appointed by the Faculty Senate.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Enough accidental amateurs! No more tyrannical tyros!

* And? So? Some of our colleagues do not use dental floss now, let alone when they were sophomores. Your assertion would be inconsequent if true, moron!

** If you worked hard to get an undergraduate degree in the 1970s or 1980s, you must be even dumber than your remark.

*** But you understand why careful drivers might carry insurance, Bozo?

**** Did you get into graduate school based on your looks or your personality, Doctor?
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

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Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses II

Hypothesis One, the immediately preceding post in "Rump Parliament," proposed that chronic fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] have over the years indulged in groupthink. These ASC insiders accept orthodoxies and verities that students and faculty across campuses and eras have not shared. The immediately preceding post [3 December 2010] also noted, however, that these disjunctions between longtime ASC insiders and the broader campus community change slowly if at all. "Inside groupthink," then, is nearly constant. How can a constant predilection explain the ASC stampede 2008-2010?

.........................

Explanation 2 -- Stagnant Mantras Fend Off Information.

.

Once a long-(dis)serving member of the ASC substitutes shibboleths for reasons, he or she is unlikely to stop or to learn. Instead, she or he will recite formulas that spread a contagion to credulous colleagues who cycle onto the ASC. Even if mantras evolve slowly, sooner or later such mantras will find faculty or students more credulous than most.

Please permit me to illustrate how shibboleths can long gestate before breaking out when the makeup of the ASC permits.

.......

Long ago an associate dean who was technically a member of the faculty but who never to my knowledge taught a class at UPS or earned tenure in a department declared that many students were using pass-fail in ways not explicitly authorized by the faculty. Ensconced on the ASC, this dean so treasured his thought that he would voice it over and over. Over the years, he repeated his saying so often that he came to believe its truth more and more. Even as this Ass. Dean was persuading himself of the gravity and probity of his mantra over the years, he was winning converts among the fixtures on the committee [see Hypothesis One, 3 December 2010]

...............

This Ass. Dean emulated a caricature of a filiopietistic martinet in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall:"

.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

.

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Perhaps the key clause quoted above, for present purposes, is "... as it seems to me ... ." Frost, as it seems to me, presumed that his readers would agree with Frost that rebuilding stone fences between pine woods and apple orchards was largely wasted effort. So it was with this Ass. Dean when I served with him on the ASC. He would intone his inconsequent drivel that students used pass-fail for purposes other than taking risks. Most faculty with whom I served stifled the obvious response: "No shit!" Most members of the ASC presumed that most motions that elicit faculty agreement have one or more official rationales and multiple ulterior motivations. I suspect that most members of the ASC presumed that the Ass. Dean knew that faculty meetings consist of good reasons and real reasons and that good reasons are voiced more often and more loudly than some real reasons are. The Ass. Dean was being disingenuous because he had no stronger arguments to advance and because he did not want to admit his own ulterior motivations and real reasoning: pass-fail is bad because grades promote rigor and because pass-fail coursework may promote inflation of GPAs.

------------------------------

More than once I invited this Ass. Dean to move against Puget Sound core curricula, which faculty explicitly designed to do what the core curricula never did. He never did. Nor to my knowledge did he protest when a reaccreditation report claimed that the core at that time ensured undergraduates a "unifying experience." This reaccreditation document -- to keep matters short and clear -- lied about the core curriculum. That was no problem for Jones Hall or for the Ass. Dean. But when students use pass-fail for any purpose not explicitly authorized by faculty but tacitly acknowledged by every colleague who recalls his or her undergraduate years, the Ass. Dean and a few fixtures espy a problem.

None of the foregoing is very mysterious. Many long-serving members of the campus community have never reconciled themselves to pass-fail. They repeat mantras to mask their long-standing opposition to decisions of the faculty. Repetition makes slogans and shibboleths seem less fatuous and less reactionary than they are. Uncritical faculty accept repeated nonsense. If intra-committee sloganeering is insulated from colleagues' questions and disputation, the mantra persists.

.

For the very reasons noted in the 3 December 2010 post, however, we must see that shibboleths and slogans cannot alone explain how policies that garner almost no support in plenary meetings of the faculty could issue from the ASC. Such mantras must be adopted by students and faculty on the ASC. What spread the long suppurating discharges through the ASC and into the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings?

.......

Stay tuned to "Rump Parliament for the answers to that query.

...

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses I

...............................

Too many hypotheses chase too few data when we try to understand why the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] went astray or ran amok over the last two years. Undeterred, I inventory explanations that might be offered.

.....
Explanation 1 -- Stable Misrepresentation Foments Groupthink.

The ASC habitually features a representative of the Academic Vice President who is usually the only faculty member of the ASC who serves more than three consecutive years. In addition, the Registrar, the head of advising, and a representative of the Dean of Students repeat on the ASC year after year while faculty and student members come and go.

........

Faculty or staff who fester on the ASC for more than three years tend to acquire and to generate beliefs or presuppositions that most faculty need not share. This can lead to groupthink: "... a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink> ASC fixtures will tend to share enduring dogmas, doctrines, anecdotes, and shibboleths as well as perspectives and orientations that may diverge starkly from the beliefs, frames, concerns, or priorities of students and faculty "outside" the ASC sub-culture.

..................

When the fixtures as a group UNDER-represent students and faculty and/or OVER-represent the distinctive problems, concerns, and goals of a department or office, the fixtures lose touch with what most of the community sees, believes, thinks, or wants. The fixtures become fixed upon in-group perspectives.

• Is the current policy regarding incomplete courses troubling this repeater on the ASC? Then the ASC should finally do what the repeater has long recommended. From the view of insiders/fixtures, the ASC has repeatedly failed to act on the insiders' preferences for policy.
• Another fixture on the ASC has for years argued that permitting students choices is permissiveness? Then clearly [to insiders and fixtures] the ASC newbies and especially the ASC students should accede to the expertise of and the "history" brandished by that fixture.
• A long-serving administrator on the ASC abhors what he calls grade inflation? The moment he chants "grade inflation" or uses "grade inflation" to explain anything, the fixtures will "observe" that "grade inflation" has troubled the ASC acutely and repeatedly. Insiders' lamentations and liturgy will conjure what no serious attention to evidence and inferences can disclose -- grade inflation..........

Thus do repeat performers recycle their causes and their prejudices over the years, especially if faculty who were around for the last epidemic of groupthink have cycled off the ASC so that the ASC's "history" may be not simply brandished but brandied.

Explanation 1, then, invites us to look to the beliefs, values, prejudices, shibboleths, and blarney of those who persist on the ASC for more than three years. Perhaps unwitting victims of groupthink themselves, these repeating members encourage groupthink [and lack of wit] among transient students and faculty on the ASC. This is especially the case with faculty who are merely serving their time on the committee, a special matter to be considered in a subsequent part of our inventory.

........

But the fixtures together constitute largely a constant. Constants seldom explain variables.

What If Governance Worked?

How different is faculty life when faculty governance works?

Very different from normal.

Hell, if faculty governance works, faculty committees might serve faculty.

?ty

***********

¶ Let 16 November 2010 go down as the date on which, for one fierce, shining moment, faculty governed themselves as they should. Gilbert Keith Chesterton's donkey once brayed about "one far fierce hour and sweet." For the tattered outlaw of the Earth who blogs here, Tuesday was all that -- the meeting took but an hour. A donkey of a different sort brayed about "one brief shining moment that was known / As Camelot. /" The faculty had such a moment without swordplay. For that fierce, shining hour, the faculty corrected an errant committee and disciplined some arrogant colleagues.

********

¶ The faculty scooped droppings from a rogue, irrational Academic Standards Committee [ASC] off the floor of a faculty meeting for what I hope is the last time but fear is merely the latest time. The ASC decided to prevent students from taking courses in their majors or minors pass-fail; perhaps six faculty supported the ASC's position in the plenary meeting. The ASC voted to restrict pass-fail coursework to juniors and seniors; maybe ten faculty endorsed that change in the plenary meeting. These results might have been as humbling and as enlightening as they were predictable if willful members of the ASC were open to "outside" views from, say, the vast majority of their colleagues. I have never seen the authoritarians who tend to populate the ASC learn. Maybe this time? Don't bet on it!

¶

¶ For years the ASC has been indifferent to information and evidence when not outright scornful of each. In recent years the ASC has routinely arrogated policy-making based on scant evidence and reckless presumption. Told of a problem, the ASC overreacts by lurching to a "solution" dizzyingly more extensive than the problem reported to [and usually by a member of] the ASC. Confronted about ASC effrontery, ASC members feign being affronted. Then ASC veterans adduce inconsequent numbers as if those statistics bore on any issue. [Of course, if any members of the ASC have facility with statistics or quantitative analysis or argument, such numbers might evince bad faith rather than questionable judgment.]

¶

¶ The immediate instance of changes in pass-fail originated when a member of the ASC said that her class relied on groupwork that was compromised by pass-fail shirkers. She wondered how she could restrict pass-fail enrollments in that course. The ASC pondered the matter and, much to the surprise of its own members, voted quickly and without much argument, thought, evidence, or information to eliminate the option of pass-fail at the University of Puget Sound. This revolutionary purge the faculty promptly overruled -- as any experienced member of the faculty would have told the cloistered authoritarians would happen had the ASC deciders cared what a majority of the faculty might think.

¶

¶ [If apologists would respond that the ASC passed the ban to provoke discussion among senators or the faculty, I should like to know why the ASC did not solicit views from faculty or from senators before precipitously and insouciantly banning pass-fail. I do not deny that some colleagues may elect to believe that the ASC was encouraging inquiry or raising the issue. I doubt that such was the ASC's primary motivation.]

¶

¶ The ASC's decision-making looked and looks insipid relative to the wisdom of the faculty once faculty were eventually informed of the problems. The plenary faculty meeting capped the number of pass-fail registrations at the discretion of the instructor. Instructors whose pedagogy could not bear pass-fail loafers could set the number of pass-fail registrations in their course or courses at zero. Other instructors could welcome every pass-fail registration for their courses. The problem articulated by a colleague who is no longer a member of the faculty nor of the ASC had been addressed with minimal violence to the options of students or faculty. Unless the ASC were acting out some vendetta against pass-fail itself, the faculty solved the problem brought to the ASC. What is more, the faculty tailored the solution to the problem. Try conveying that concept to recidivists on the Academic Standards Committee!

¶

¶ Demonstrating the tin ears for which the ASC has of late been renowned across campus and learning nothing from the faculty's dismissal of the ASC's original over-reach/over-reaction, the ASC proposed solutions for problems too microscopic to be worthy of the time of the Faculty Senate:

1. Perhaps one-tenth of 1% of all students' decisions resulted in students' opting to take pass-fail an elective in their major; the ASC was not going to suffer that affront with equanimity.
2. Perhaps a dozen students per year [accounting for less than six one-hundredths of 1% of all student-selections] came to regret their having taken a course pass-fail because they wanted to major in that course's department; the lone faculty-member from the ASC in the meeting yesterday assured faculty that either the department or the ASC easily remedied these rare problems, yet she defended the ASC's eliminating options for perhaps 100 times as many 1st- or 2nd-year students!

¶

¶ If the ASC were capable of opening their decision-making and their minds to the experiences and views of colleagues, they might not be upbraided so often in faculty meetings. And if my aunt Marilyn were a man, she'd be my uncle.

¶

¶ Many or most faculty thought problem 1 so trivial that they could not understand why the ASC bothered with the matter [again, unless animus toward pass-fail impelled the ASC to see in this or that sniffle an epidemic]. Amid Tuesday's meeting the faculty saw clearly that the ASC had put so little thought or craft into the first proposal that their rule would have prevented a French major from taking a course in another language pass-fail. [It was fortunate that the sole faculty member of the ASC who deigned to attend the meeting pointed out that the rule would under those circumstances not be enforced as written and that the ASC or some other decider would permit the student to use pass-fail in, say, Spanish 101 despite the student's having majored in French. Like so many faculty, I welcome assurances that whatever motions the faculty pass will be subordinate to what authorities decree from Jones Hall.]

¶

¶ You read the above correctly: The ASC misphrased its motion so abjectly that the sole member of the faculty from the ASC had to disavow the language of the motion to save the motion. Great work, apostles of rigor!

¶

¶ Problem 2 made the ASC look even more foolish. Presiding over the meeting, President Thomas asked whether instructors' grades were preserved after the computer assigned passing or failing grades. Instructors do not know which students are taking courses pass-fail and so assign ordinary letter grades. The registrar and the computer have those grades, as anyone who considered the matter for even a moment would expect. When the President then asked why a pass-fail grade could not be converted to the letter grade assigned by the instructor if a student decided to major after taking a class pass-fail, the inanity of the ASC's second proposal was clear to everyone not on a crusade to rid the campus of the sloth and laxity of pass-fail.

¶

¶ Given the silliness of the ASC changes in policy, who could be surprised that nearly all members of the ASC 2008-2010 dodged the faculty meeting? Their absence did not remedy the absence of reasons or reasoning and of evidence or inference for the ASC's excrescence of policies over the last two academic years. The Faculty Senate heard on Monday [11-15-10] that the ASC was demoralized because ASC decreees were so resoundingly and so routinely discarded in faculty meetings. Deciders who, to judge from ASC minutes, devoted very little time, thought, or discussion to problems or to solutions before lurching into major changes did not care to be second-guessed by colleagues who cheated by thinking proposals through then voting them down or by a President who eliminated a problem with a few seconds' reflection.

¶

¶ Petty overlords of rigor had been overruled. Woe is they or them!

¶

¶ Nor did the singularity of the membership of the ASC who dared to appear obscure the ASC bullies' getting their comeuppance from a student at the faculty meeting. The ASUPS President tolled the irrationality of the ASC by reproducing ASC minutes that showed that the committee's feces had no theses. ASC decision-makers so bold when it came to punishing students for deciding other than how the scions of rigor would have students decide left a staffperson and an associate dean to answer for the presumptuous, precipitate policies that would regiment 2500 students to eliminate the problems of a few students or even fewer faculty.

¶

¶ I doubt not that the ASC absentees have prepared excuses for their absences. I denounce their claims in advance without hearing or reading them. [In other words, I ASC them.] If any aspect of attacks on pass-fail had been passable, the absent ASC members would have made the meeting.

¶*** **ns.

¶

¶To sum up: A committee behaved recklessly and irrationally. The Faculty Senate did not directly discipline the committee but did set the reckless, irrational rogues up for rebuke by the faculty as a whole. The faculty scorned the deciders' decisions. The President of UPS and the President of ASUPS seemingly effortlessly exposed the ASC deciders as clowns who are not quite in on their own jokes.

¶

¶ When an object of a self-parody does not know that his or her parody is [self-]parodic, it's a UPS faculty meeting.

¶

¶ Will a future ASC learn from the rebuke? We shall see. Do not bet on it. One does not join the Wigger Patwol unless one is compensating for shortcomings actual or imagined.

¶

¶