Waiting out a colleague's fate, I remember my own tenure-decision.
As I await for a colleague "the lame feet of salvation" (Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks") from a committee that too often plays "death the redeemer" (Ibid.), I recall waiting for word from the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] when I was considered for tenure.
I had a unanimous endorsement from my department and letters from colleagues at Harvard and other creditable institutions. Still, I had not kept my mouth shut and "the asshole clause" -- possession of appropriate personal and professional characteristics -- had yet to be excised from the Faculty Code. In the semester I stood/stooped for tenure, I had noted in the Faculty Senate that the general education core had yet to pass according to rules that the faculty had agreed to. Throughout the renegotiation of general education in 1990-1991, I had questioned such prescriptions as "Science in Context," calling them pork-barrel projects and an "International POlitical Economy" syllabus that was risible. Before that, I had questioned the delay of fraternity and sorority rush on the ground that the faculty had no business saying when clubs could recruit.
Moreover, a member of the FAC had warned me not to disagree with the dean again after a dean so calm that he was nearly comatose had struck me over a governance dispute. At first I thought the member of the FAC was joking, but he made it clear he was serious. "You're saying that this university is so chickenshit that my disagreeing with the dean and my getting struck by the dean might doom me?" I asked rhetorically. One sixth of the FAC there and then assured me that this university did not need troublemakers. [This was before I learned to say, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Please see the entry in this blog for 14 January 2010.]
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had at least two advantages. First, I was a male. It would be some years before I learned just how advantageous that Y-chromosome was. Second, a contemporary bereft of a Y-chromosome was given to obeying federal law on sexual harassment despite sentiments in her department such as the immortal, "If she followed the law, then that law is wrong!" The FAC lavished ammunition on the whistleblower. Maybe they ran out of ammunition (Admiral Stockdale, 1992) before me. [The university ran out of ammunition when she sued and got a huge settlement. She threw a great party, but I still miss her.]
By the time the FAC sent me its letter, I was in Vermont. I opened the letter and smiled that the FAC had recommended me for tenure. Then I read the letter aloud to my friend. She was a voracious reader and learned, so she gasped along with me as solecisms and errors in the letter accumulated. I do not think that she was much impressed with the institution at which I had just received tenure. "This letter was written by a professor?" she asked. "Nope," I answered. "It was written by six professors."
In the final paragraph of the letter, the FAC explicitly hoped that I would conform more and squawk less than I had in my probationary period. I found the FAC's presumption droll. [Think Victor Laszlo in "Casablanca:" "If I didn't give {names of the underground leaders} to you in a concentration camp where you had more persuasive methods at your disposal, I certainly won't give them to you now."]
When I returned to Tacoma, the main author of that letter took me to dinner to explain away its final paragraph. He apparently did not want me to think that the letter, especially in that final paragraph, meant what it said. I cut him off. "My letter will always say what the words literally meant. Anything you say now is gloss beside the point." My interlocutor seemed flummoxed and frustrated by my unwillingness to go along with his re-mystifying. How lacking in civility of me after all he had done for me!
Thus did I come to understand why my pre-tenure period was called probationary. When I completed my probation, I received a lifetime sentence.
Showing posts with label Academic Vice President. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Academic Vice President. Show all posts
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The Good Ol' Days
The University of Puget Sound in the early 1990s: The Myth of the Cave playing to rave reviews from prisoners inured to shackles.
A Puget Sound retiree reminded me today of this university in the early 1990s. I may have conveyed some of this narrative, but I want to contribute to the oral history of those times.
When the president of Puget Sound announced that he intended to retire in one year, administrators and one or more executives of the Faculty Senate conferred on the process for selection of the next CEO of UPS. In those days, Faculty Senate chairs tended to shill for the administrators to a far greater degree than in the later 1990s and early 21st century. The administrators and their apparatchiks announced, among other things, that faculty would select three faculty for the presidential selection committee via the process used for seating faculty on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. That is, faculty would submit names and, pending approval of the trustees, the three named faculty would be on the committee.
No other faculty would know the names of candidates or interviewees. No one interviewing on or near campus would meet faculty. The Dean of the University, through the chair of the Faculty Senate, distributed photocopies of arguments for such secrecy. Indeed, the chair of the Faculty Senate reminded senators than PLU had recently been poised to hire a new president but had been prevented owing to an upsurge from faculty who disliked the choice. When an as-yet-untenured senator asked why it was better for faculty to suffer whomever the committee selected rather than to voice objections prospectively, I was rebuffed.
Then I asked why the indirect election was needful. The Dean intoned, as he sometimes did in defense of administrative brakes on direct election of members of the FAC, that otherwise the faculty might directly elect faculty from the same department or representative of some clique. This pretended solicitude for representation of the faculty made me wince, for even in my early years I had seen through the pretense.
I was somewhat surprised, nonetheless, when three faculty approved by the trustees [or administrators -- other than what administrators or their flunkies told trustees, trustees knew little about faculty then or later] included two faculty with PhDs in chemistry and not a single humanist. As a political scientist, I was not surprised that the selected faculty were more representative of administration dogma than of the teaching faculty. The Dean's concern for representation of the faculty failed elementary skepticism: "What would one expect an administrator to say?" That administrators and trustees were audacious enough to undermine their only announced rationale for indirect election surprised me. Usually deceptions are better protected from detection. [This eerily foreshadowed the presidency of the successful candidate: she probably fibbed about as often as her predecessor, but she did so in ways that made it unmistakeable to everyone except the most reputable and reliable faculty that she was fibbing; indeed, she seemed to me to revel in having power to mislead with impunity.]
When the Chair of the Board of Trustees later spoke to a faculty meeting, I asked him why the trustees were keeping faculty away from would-be presidents. His face reddened. He sputtered that he knew nothing about that and that trustees did not care who represented the faculty or how many faculty met with candidates. The chair of the board thus exposed as deceitful those who had claimed that the trustees wanted the process to proceed in the way it did.
Once the deceit of the Chair of the Faculty Senate and the Dean of the University had been exposed, the process went forward. I could not find a dozen faculty who knew and cared that all but three of the faculty had been closeted lest candidates or trustees meet the zany loons who do the teaching. When I raised the matter with a 15-year veteran, he croaked, "You'd argue with dean if he said it was raining." I must concede his point. If the dean complained about the rain on a dry day, I should argue. I thought the more pertinent hypothetical was that if that if the dean told that veteran that black was white, that veteran would act as if he believed the dean if rewards sufficed.
The rewards must have flowed because, to my knowledge, that 15-year veteran confronted mendacious, manipulative administrators exactly twice before he retired. Mostly, he mumbled protests and deconstructed absurdities that issued from Jones Hall. Still, that put him far ahead of most of the faculty who had been hired in the 1970s and had prospered in the 1980s. Those faculty not only held their peace but also reveled in their obsequiousness. Veterans traduced newbies who doubted the dubious or observed the obvious. Every day in every way, the university was improving. Pavlovian faculty "freely" associated improvements with going along with each administrative gag. Those who gagged at administrative euphemisms or misdirection lacked the appropriate "personal and professional characteristics" for Puget Sound. Faculty evaluation procedures and other discipline would deal with thralls less than grateful for their subjection.
And why shouldn't the uninquisitive and the credulous rejoice in their shackles? Cheerful credulity and instrumental ignorance profit the shackled in honors, programs, and a reputation for being respectable and responsible. In addition, docile and reticent apologists and apparatchiks have more time for pursuits they value, like pretending to do research.
A Puget Sound retiree reminded me today of this university in the early 1990s. I may have conveyed some of this narrative, but I want to contribute to the oral history of those times.
When the president of Puget Sound announced that he intended to retire in one year, administrators and one or more executives of the Faculty Senate conferred on the process for selection of the next CEO of UPS. In those days, Faculty Senate chairs tended to shill for the administrators to a far greater degree than in the later 1990s and early 21st century. The administrators and their apparatchiks announced, among other things, that faculty would select three faculty for the presidential selection committee via the process used for seating faculty on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. That is, faculty would submit names and, pending approval of the trustees, the three named faculty would be on the committee.
No other faculty would know the names of candidates or interviewees. No one interviewing on or near campus would meet faculty. The Dean of the University, through the chair of the Faculty Senate, distributed photocopies of arguments for such secrecy. Indeed, the chair of the Faculty Senate reminded senators than PLU had recently been poised to hire a new president but had been prevented owing to an upsurge from faculty who disliked the choice. When an as-yet-untenured senator asked why it was better for faculty to suffer whomever the committee selected rather than to voice objections prospectively, I was rebuffed.
Then I asked why the indirect election was needful. The Dean intoned, as he sometimes did in defense of administrative brakes on direct election of members of the FAC, that otherwise the faculty might directly elect faculty from the same department or representative of some clique. This pretended solicitude for representation of the faculty made me wince, for even in my early years I had seen through the pretense.
I was somewhat surprised, nonetheless, when three faculty approved by the trustees [or administrators -- other than what administrators or their flunkies told trustees, trustees knew little about faculty then or later] included two faculty with PhDs in chemistry and not a single humanist. As a political scientist, I was not surprised that the selected faculty were more representative of administration dogma than of the teaching faculty. The Dean's concern for representation of the faculty failed elementary skepticism: "What would one expect an administrator to say?" That administrators and trustees were audacious enough to undermine their only announced rationale for indirect election surprised me. Usually deceptions are better protected from detection. [This eerily foreshadowed the presidency of the successful candidate: she probably fibbed about as often as her predecessor, but she did so in ways that made it unmistakeable to everyone except the most reputable and reliable faculty that she was fibbing; indeed, she seemed to me to revel in having power to mislead with impunity.]
When the Chair of the Board of Trustees later spoke to a faculty meeting, I asked him why the trustees were keeping faculty away from would-be presidents. His face reddened. He sputtered that he knew nothing about that and that trustees did not care who represented the faculty or how many faculty met with candidates. The chair of the board thus exposed as deceitful those who had claimed that the trustees wanted the process to proceed in the way it did.
Once the deceit of the Chair of the Faculty Senate and the Dean of the University had been exposed, the process went forward. I could not find a dozen faculty who knew and cared that all but three of the faculty had been closeted lest candidates or trustees meet the zany loons who do the teaching. When I raised the matter with a 15-year veteran, he croaked, "You'd argue with dean if he said it was raining." I must concede his point. If the dean complained about the rain on a dry day, I should argue. I thought the more pertinent hypothetical was that if that if the dean told that veteran that black was white, that veteran would act as if he believed the dean if rewards sufficed.
The rewards must have flowed because, to my knowledge, that 15-year veteran confronted mendacious, manipulative administrators exactly twice before he retired. Mostly, he mumbled protests and deconstructed absurdities that issued from Jones Hall. Still, that put him far ahead of most of the faculty who had been hired in the 1970s and had prospered in the 1980s. Those faculty not only held their peace but also reveled in their obsequiousness. Veterans traduced newbies who doubted the dubious or observed the obvious. Every day in every way, the university was improving. Pavlovian faculty "freely" associated improvements with going along with each administrative gag. Those who gagged at administrative euphemisms or misdirection lacked the appropriate "personal and professional characteristics" for Puget Sound. Faculty evaluation procedures and other discipline would deal with thralls less than grateful for their subjection.
And why shouldn't the uninquisitive and the credulous rejoice in their shackles? Cheerful credulity and instrumental ignorance profit the shackled in honors, programs, and a reputation for being respectable and responsible. In addition, docile and reticent apologists and apparatchiks have more time for pursuits they value, like pretending to do research.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The FAC flips the Senate the bird then invites senators to pull their fingers
The Faculty Advancement Committee Evades the Bylaws Again!
Every spring of late, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] evades the Bylaws. The Bylaws mandate that each Faculty Senate Committee appoint a chair. The Faculty Senate has insisted for years that the FAC follow the Bylaws. Whether through recalcitrance or arrogance, the FAC has instead upheld the cherished Puget Sound tradition that the Professional Standards Committee and the FAC do as they please irrespective of rules. When challenged on their misbehaviors, the power committees ply the credulous with aged canards and newly hatched rationalizations.
Aged Canard 1: The FAC objects to electing a chair because the FAC has never had a chair.
This objection is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that, over the years, the Academic Vice President or Dean has been unacknowledged chair of the FAC. The FAC has been guided by a de facto decanal chair more often than it has resembled any roundtable of six decision-makers of equal standing or identical function. Ask veterans who have visited the FAC on multiple occasions over the years whether they were able to detect a de facto chair.
If the FAC has never had an official chair, so what? Other than Puget Sound administrators and apparatchiks, who argues that never having followed the rules justifies continuing to ignore the rules? If only Al Capone had known this "argument" was available to him: "But I have never paid income taxes!"
That the FAC has never appointed a chair establishes only that the FAC has never considered itself bound by rules that apply to all faculty senate committees.
The FAC has supplied no legal authority for this "legal opinion" because any legal peril—to the chair of the FAC or to individuals on the FAC—from following Bylaws is a chimera.
Indeed, that one or more members of the FAC would invoke such hokum shows little faith in other FAC canards.
Aged Canard 3: Electing a chair would spoil the egalitarianism of the FAC.
The 2008-2009 report of the FAC features this drollery: "... the Advancement Committee discussed at its first meeting of the year the matter of committee chair. Affirming that it continues to prefer that all voices at the table be equal participants, the Committee elected Priti Joshi, Sunil Kukreja, Andy Rex, Stuart Smithers, Kate Stirling, and Kris Bartanen as co-chairs."
Every spring of late, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] evades the Bylaws. The Bylaws mandate that each Faculty Senate Committee appoint a chair. The Faculty Senate has insisted for years that the FAC follow the Bylaws. Whether through recalcitrance or arrogance, the FAC has instead upheld the cherished Puget Sound tradition that the Professional Standards Committee and the FAC do as they please irrespective of rules. When challenged on their misbehaviors, the power committees ply the credulous with aged canards and newly hatched rationalizations.
Aged Canard 1: The FAC objects to electing a chair because the FAC has never had a chair.
This objection is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that, over the years, the Academic Vice President or Dean has been unacknowledged chair of the FAC. The FAC has been guided by a de facto decanal chair more often than it has resembled any roundtable of six decision-makers of equal standing or identical function. Ask veterans who have visited the FAC on multiple occasions over the years whether they were able to detect a de facto chair.
If the FAC has never had an official chair, so what? Other than Puget Sound administrators and apparatchiks, who argues that never having followed the rules justifies continuing to ignore the rules? If only Al Capone had known this "argument" was available to him: "But I have never paid income taxes!"
That the FAC has never appointed a chair establishes only that the FAC has never considered itself bound by rules that apply to all faculty senate committees.
Aged Canard 2: The FAC objects to electing a chair because electing a chair might have legal ramifications.
At least one member of the FAC has argued unspecified legal perils might follow from following the Bylaws. How intriguing! Ignoring or evading the Bylaws has no legal downside, but following them imperils the University? Who vetted this legal argument—John Yoo? Did the FAC ask any competent attorney about the advisability of following authority—often reckoned a legal virtue—as opposed to defying both the Bylaws and the Faculty Senate? Or would asking a competent attorney divest the FAC member(s) of this excuse?The FAC has supplied no legal authority for this "legal opinion" because any legal peril—to the chair of the FAC or to individuals on the FAC—from following Bylaws is a chimera.
Indeed, that one or more members of the FAC would invoke such hokum shows little faith in other FAC canards.
Aged Canard 3: Electing a chair would spoil the egalitarianism of the FAC.
The 2008-2009 report of the FAC features this drollery: "... the Advancement Committee discussed at its first meeting of the year the matter of committee chair. Affirming that it continues to prefer that all voices at the table be equal participants, the Committee elected Priti Joshi, Sunil Kukreja, Andy Rex, Stuart Smithers, Kate Stirling, and Kris Bartanen as co-chairs."
The FAC knows that not all its members participate equally or identically:
- Concerning third-year assistant professors and distinction, five members of the FAC recommend to the sixth member, the Academic Vice President and Dean.
- Unless the FAC has changed recently, the Academic Vice President and Dean handles correspondence for the FAC, while members of the FAC draft letters regarding individual evaluees.
- Through 2005, the Academic Vice President and Dean was never the lead person for a file; the other five members of the FAC took turns taking the lead.
- "Streamlined" evaluations result in no inequalities of participation?
However, the FAC presumes that most senators and most faculty will not know how often the voices around the table will not be "equal." So the FAC bullshits the faculty.
Even if the suggested equality or equivalence were true, this argument would not be cogent. The Bylaws require every faculty senate committee to elect a chair at each committee's first meeting. The Bylaws further require that the chair be responsible for inducing the committee to meet and producing a report at year's end. The Bylaws require nothing else. How a chair's being responsible for the committee's meeting and reporting would roil or spoil the FAC, we are never told. We are never told for the same reason that we are never told why George W. Bush was one of our greatest presidents.
The FAC does not want to follow the Bylaws and so will not. The rest is blather summoned to explain why members of the FAC are above ordinary rules and authorities.
Newly Hatched Rationalization 1: The FAC this year elected six co-chairs.
The latest evasion by the FAC collides with Article V of the Bylaws [boldface added]:
...
Sec. 2. Organization. The Senate shall name a Convener for each committee during the first month of the fall semester for the purpose of electing a Committee Chairperson and orienting the committee based on the committee's prior year-end report, except when otherwise provided in the organization of the committee.
Sec. 3. Committee Meetings.
A. The Chairperson of each committee shall convene the committee during the first month of the fall semester to plan the work of the committee. Times for additional meetings will be at the discretion of the committee members. The Chairperson shall be responsible for presenting reports to the Senate.
Who would be so wanting in candor as to claim that appointing six co-chairs matched the Bylaws' requirement of "a chairperson" and of "the chairperson?" To ask the question is to answer it.
Perhaps most remarkable, the two newbies on the FAC conformed to the FAC's defiance in their very first meeting. What profiles in credulity! Did they hold out for even ten minutes before abasing themselves?
So here's to the FAC, ladies and gentlemen!
Six doctors who believe that 6 = 1.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Year-End Review -- 2007
2007 brought the faculty and the university some welcome developments.
In 2007 the University of Puget Clowns gave some signs of improving on the master intellectual of our age, Yogi Berra. As we slouch toward 2008, let us remember some advances of the last year.
“You can observe a lot by watching,” Yogi is reputed to have said. At the University of Puget Clowns, “You can learn a bit by reading.” On 17 April 2007, a lawyer for the university read the Faculty Code to assembled PhDs. She uncovered the startling truth that “personal and professional characteristics” [hereafter, P&PC] became an illicit criterion for tenure after the faculty and trustees banned P&PC from the criteria for tenure. [Please review “E is for Etiquette,” posted 20 April 2007 in this blog, for some details of the faculty meeting.] Many faculty who struggled to prevent removal of P&PC from the Faculty Code proceeded in the ensuing dozen years as if P&PC were still available. Now that faculty have been informed that they open the university to liability if they invoke P&PC obviously, we may expect them to hide their use of P&PC behind official criteria. Like Yogi, these recalcitrants remain convinced that the faculty didn’t really say everything they said.
Moroever, this year our own Professional Standards Committee [PSC] concluded that the text of the Faculty Code might be an excellent starting point for interpretation of the Faculty Code. This means that the current PSC, too, came to believe that one could learn a lot by reading, a proposition that would not seem very newsworthy at a liberal arts college. I take this for evidence that, as Yogi put it, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” A PSC read the code literally, and, having concluded that the literal words of the code disposed of an issue, told the Dean that she could not circumvent the code. No other reading of the code would have been plausible, but that did not stop the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004. [Please review “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007, and “Yo-Yo Motions,” posted 25 March 2007, to see how the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004 ginned up alternatives to following directives in the code.]
If 2007 brought us a PSC that would behave legitimately, might a licit Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] be not so far in our future? Yogi would counsel us that “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” The Faculty Senate, especially Senator Emerita Juli McGruder, have for years pestered the FAC to obey the bylaws, which require the appointment of a chair as the first order of business of every faculty senate committee. Deans loathe reminders that the FAC is formally a committee of the Faculty Senate and of the faculty. It’s so much more expedient to preserve the tradition that the FAC operates as it – and often as the Dean – pleases. Pessimists may insist that “It's deja vu all over again” in that the FAC has yet to appoint a chair as the bylaws demand. Let’s have some New Year cheer: some senators give every evidence of insisting that the FAC cannot flout the rules and expect faculty to believe that the FAC follows rules when it does not care to. The Faculty Senate, long a “big clog” in the UPS machine [as Yogi said of Ted Williams and the Red Sox], has spoken simple, literal truth to the FAC. That’s progress!
In another sign of progress, last February the Faculty Senate by one vote acknowledged recent malfeasance and nonfeasance by university decision-makers. Yogi explained the Yankees’ loss to Pittsburgh in the 1960 World Series: “We made too many wrong mistakes;” the Senate by the thinnest of margins acknowledged errors. Senator Ostrom framed a resolution so minimized as to be laughable whereby the senate would take responsibility for mistakes made by a recumbent senate and a rogue committee in 2003-2004. No one expected even that too little to pass. Once a secret ballot was called for, however, seven senators conceded what every informed, honest member of the faculty knew: “Mistakes were made.” Acknowledging the undeniable seems negligible to those unfamiliar with more than three years of denials, rationalizations, and untruths by which decisions and processes were defended. Those in the know, however, are aware of just how hard it has been to get decision-makers and their apologists to concede the indisputable. Maybe future committees and senates will make fewer wrong mistakes. That could lead to accountability to the faculty.
Decades of deficient accountability have made 2007 seem like a continuation of faculty woes, but there is at least one more bit of good news. The faculty’s silent, unorganized, persistent boycott of plenary meetings may also signify that more and more faculty see through farce and judge themselves too busy to attend. Yogi famously opined, “If the people don't want to come out to the ballpark, nobody's going to stop them.” So too with faculty. If faculty do not want to come to faculty meetings, you can’t stop them. Now if we can just get faculty to stay away from Fall Faculty “Conversations,” we may free minds by the dozens!
In 2007 the University of Puget Clowns gave some signs of improving on the master intellectual of our age, Yogi Berra. As we slouch toward 2008, let us remember some advances of the last year.
“You can observe a lot by watching,” Yogi is reputed to have said. At the University of Puget Clowns, “You can learn a bit by reading.” On 17 April 2007, a lawyer for the university read the Faculty Code to assembled PhDs. She uncovered the startling truth that “personal and professional characteristics” [hereafter, P&PC] became an illicit criterion for tenure after the faculty and trustees banned P&PC from the criteria for tenure. [Please review “E is for Etiquette,” posted 20 April 2007 in this blog, for some details of the faculty meeting.] Many faculty who struggled to prevent removal of P&PC from the Faculty Code proceeded in the ensuing dozen years as if P&PC were still available. Now that faculty have been informed that they open the university to liability if they invoke P&PC obviously, we may expect them to hide their use of P&PC behind official criteria. Like Yogi, these recalcitrants remain convinced that the faculty didn’t really say everything they said.
Moroever, this year our own Professional Standards Committee [PSC] concluded that the text of the Faculty Code might be an excellent starting point for interpretation of the Faculty Code. This means that the current PSC, too, came to believe that one could learn a lot by reading, a proposition that would not seem very newsworthy at a liberal arts college. I take this for evidence that, as Yogi put it, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” A PSC read the code literally, and, having concluded that the literal words of the code disposed of an issue, told the Dean that she could not circumvent the code. No other reading of the code would have been plausible, but that did not stop the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004. [Please review “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007, and “Yo-Yo Motions,” posted 25 March 2007, to see how the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004 ginned up alternatives to following directives in the code.]
If 2007 brought us a PSC that would behave legitimately, might a licit Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] be not so far in our future? Yogi would counsel us that “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” The Faculty Senate, especially Senator Emerita Juli McGruder, have for years pestered the FAC to obey the bylaws, which require the appointment of a chair as the first order of business of every faculty senate committee. Deans loathe reminders that the FAC is formally a committee of the Faculty Senate and of the faculty. It’s so much more expedient to preserve the tradition that the FAC operates as it – and often as the Dean – pleases. Pessimists may insist that “It's deja vu all over again” in that the FAC has yet to appoint a chair as the bylaws demand. Let’s have some New Year cheer: some senators give every evidence of insisting that the FAC cannot flout the rules and expect faculty to believe that the FAC follows rules when it does not care to. The Faculty Senate, long a “big clog” in the UPS machine [as Yogi said of Ted Williams and the Red Sox], has spoken simple, literal truth to the FAC. That’s progress!
In another sign of progress, last February the Faculty Senate by one vote acknowledged recent malfeasance and nonfeasance by university decision-makers. Yogi explained the Yankees’ loss to Pittsburgh in the 1960 World Series: “We made too many wrong mistakes;” the Senate by the thinnest of margins acknowledged errors. Senator Ostrom framed a resolution so minimized as to be laughable whereby the senate would take responsibility for mistakes made by a recumbent senate and a rogue committee in 2003-2004. No one expected even that too little to pass. Once a secret ballot was called for, however, seven senators conceded what every informed, honest member of the faculty knew: “Mistakes were made.” Acknowledging the undeniable seems negligible to those unfamiliar with more than three years of denials, rationalizations, and untruths by which decisions and processes were defended. Those in the know, however, are aware of just how hard it has been to get decision-makers and their apologists to concede the indisputable. Maybe future committees and senates will make fewer wrong mistakes. That could lead to accountability to the faculty.
Decades of deficient accountability have made 2007 seem like a continuation of faculty woes, but there is at least one more bit of good news. The faculty’s silent, unorganized, persistent boycott of plenary meetings may also signify that more and more faculty see through farce and judge themselves too busy to attend. Yogi famously opined, “If the people don't want to come out to the ballpark, nobody's going to stop them.” So too with faculty. If faculty do not want to come to faculty meetings, you can’t stop them. Now if we can just get faculty to stay away from Fall Faculty “Conversations,” we may free minds by the dozens!
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
S Stands for Scams and Slackers
Self-serving, self-indulgent colleagues induce supervision, surveillance, and sanctions that task innocent faculty alongside scammers and slackers.
In the 1990s various colleagues intoned that it was too bad that many male faculty were reluctant to touch or console female undergraduates lest they risk suspicions or charges of sexual harassment. Some such laments signaled the astonishing credulousness of enablers, who took infamous predators seriously that efforts to police illicit, unethical relations between faculty and students were compromising avuncular relations between professors and their charges. It did little good to remind predators or their enablers that whatever excesses efforts to control sexual harassment and hostile environs had fomented, the harassers bore far more of the blame than policymakers and decision-makers trying to protect students.
As with sexual harassment in the 1990s, efforts to police faculty scams and shirking often seem excessive -- especially to known slackers and scammers -- because such exertions must be energetic to keep up with wily veterans bent on fraud or misprision. The few faculty who find paperwork for travel to or participation in conferences to be onerous seldom associate requirements with laws or false claims or profiteering. When surveillance of faculty is excessive few academics acknowledge that surveillance often springs from financial liability and ethical responsibility. No one got into academe to be regimented like an assembly-line worker or, more accurately, like stereotypes or vague notions of what someone who held a real job must go through. Still, when faculty cannot be trusted, they will not be trusted. Untrustworthy, self-serving colleagues necessitate supervision, surveillance, and sanctions that annoy the conscientious.
To be certain, administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices go overboard. Administrators despair of winning arguments on the merits and instead impose their will on faculty because administrators know that apparatchiks and accomplices will go along and most faculty will acquiesce in almost any outrage. For example, when multiple Academic Standards Committees showed little interest in the Rube Goldberg schedule that we currently use at Puget Sound and the Faculty Senate dismissed the idea as more trouble than it was worth, the Academic Vice President at the time proclaimed “administrative prerogative” and did as he [and perhaps the President] pleased. As usual, the coercion was accompanied by liver-lipped professions of solicitude for cordial, collegial relations and faculty control of the curriculum. The faculty pissed and moaned like impotent jerks, then bent over and took it up the tailpipe [to mangle a Jim Carrey line from “Liar Liar”]. Because “the culture of evidence” is a stratagem rather than a reality, faculty have never been able to ascertain what reasons impelled the current scheduling regime. Did administrators end up with too few classrooms after the bricks-and-mortar campaign of the last 10 years and so turned to packing courses into Tuesdays and Thursdays? Who knows? The apparatchiks and accomplices don’t want to know. The rank and file are too lazy and complacent to inquire. Cooptation and quiescence combine to allow administrators to do pretty much as they please, so excesses are to be expected.
Even amid cooptation and quiescence, faculty may speak out if they think the stakes worth the speaking. Those who speak out will be debilitated all too often by self-seeking scam artists and slackers. Faculty initiatives need not be self-serving for administrators and their thralls to portray reforms and reformers as self-serving.
Every slacker and every scam artist on the faculty provides administrators and accomplices ready examples for opposing proposals. This colleague would like to free up more days per week in which to have time for research? Some opponent will allude to colleagues given to three- or four-day weekends. That colleague would like to offer classes in other than fifty-minute meetings? A detractor will mention instructors who opt for generous breaks in the midst of long meetings. A whole department wants to free up Fridays? Too many colleagues know about departments that are, shall we say, understaffed every Friday as is.
For any change you might imagine, multiple colleagues have already been abusing leeways and loopholes in ways that call for more supervision, scrutiny, surveillance, and sanctions. We the faculty demand trust but seldom upbraid those who routinely abuse trust. Yet more silences, more quiescence, and more passivity render faculty incapable of governing themselves.
In the 1990s various colleagues intoned that it was too bad that many male faculty were reluctant to touch or console female undergraduates lest they risk suspicions or charges of sexual harassment. Some such laments signaled the astonishing credulousness of enablers, who took infamous predators seriously that efforts to police illicit, unethical relations between faculty and students were compromising avuncular relations between professors and their charges. It did little good to remind predators or their enablers that whatever excesses efforts to control sexual harassment and hostile environs had fomented, the harassers bore far more of the blame than policymakers and decision-makers trying to protect students.
As with sexual harassment in the 1990s, efforts to police faculty scams and shirking often seem excessive -- especially to known slackers and scammers -- because such exertions must be energetic to keep up with wily veterans bent on fraud or misprision. The few faculty who find paperwork for travel to or participation in conferences to be onerous seldom associate requirements with laws or false claims or profiteering. When surveillance of faculty is excessive few academics acknowledge that surveillance often springs from financial liability and ethical responsibility. No one got into academe to be regimented like an assembly-line worker or, more accurately, like stereotypes or vague notions of what someone who held a real job must go through. Still, when faculty cannot be trusted, they will not be trusted. Untrustworthy, self-serving colleagues necessitate supervision, surveillance, and sanctions that annoy the conscientious.
To be certain, administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices go overboard. Administrators despair of winning arguments on the merits and instead impose their will on faculty because administrators know that apparatchiks and accomplices will go along and most faculty will acquiesce in almost any outrage. For example, when multiple Academic Standards Committees showed little interest in the Rube Goldberg schedule that we currently use at Puget Sound and the Faculty Senate dismissed the idea as more trouble than it was worth, the Academic Vice President at the time proclaimed “administrative prerogative” and did as he [and perhaps the President] pleased. As usual, the coercion was accompanied by liver-lipped professions of solicitude for cordial, collegial relations and faculty control of the curriculum. The faculty pissed and moaned like impotent jerks, then bent over and took it up the tailpipe [to mangle a Jim Carrey line from “Liar Liar”]. Because “the culture of evidence” is a stratagem rather than a reality, faculty have never been able to ascertain what reasons impelled the current scheduling regime. Did administrators end up with too few classrooms after the bricks-and-mortar campaign of the last 10 years and so turned to packing courses into Tuesdays and Thursdays? Who knows? The apparatchiks and accomplices don’t want to know. The rank and file are too lazy and complacent to inquire. Cooptation and quiescence combine to allow administrators to do pretty much as they please, so excesses are to be expected.
Even amid cooptation and quiescence, faculty may speak out if they think the stakes worth the speaking. Those who speak out will be debilitated all too often by self-seeking scam artists and slackers. Faculty initiatives need not be self-serving for administrators and their thralls to portray reforms and reformers as self-serving.
Every slacker and every scam artist on the faculty provides administrators and accomplices ready examples for opposing proposals. This colleague would like to free up more days per week in which to have time for research? Some opponent will allude to colleagues given to three- or four-day weekends. That colleague would like to offer classes in other than fifty-minute meetings? A detractor will mention instructors who opt for generous breaks in the midst of long meetings. A whole department wants to free up Fridays? Too many colleagues know about departments that are, shall we say, understaffed every Friday as is.
For any change you might imagine, multiple colleagues have already been abusing leeways and loopholes in ways that call for more supervision, scrutiny, surveillance, and sanctions. We the faculty demand trust but seldom upbraid those who routinely abuse trust. Yet more silences, more quiescence, and more passivity render faculty incapable of governing themselves.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
H is for Half-Assed
Between administrators and apparatchiks above and rank-and-file faculty below lie the tools and fools of the Faculty Senate.
Previous entries in this blog have covered the deceptions and delusions of rulers [e. g., administrators and apparatchiks] and the attention-deficit disorders of the ruled [except when more than $1.27 of their benefits or some empty praise focuses their appetites]. Between rulers and ruled the Faculty Senate occasionally surfaces: a dozen or so faculty perpetually in search of courage and purpose who perpetually content themselves with half-measures in service of their betters. Half-afraid and half-annoyed, the half-wits of the Senate form a halfway house of enablers always half a step from licking ass and faking aims.
The Senate meeting on 7 May 2007 revealed anew the canine pleasantries [see the entry on responsible, reputable, reliable faculty dogs] of senators. The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had flouted the Faculty Bylaws [hereafter, Bylaws] despite repeated notice from the Senate and elsewhere that the Bylaws mandate that each committee have a Chairperson. The FAC has no chair. It is fortunate for the FAC scofflaws, therefore, that the Faculty Senate has neither integrity nor intestinal fortitude.
The Chair of the Faculty Senate half-pusillanimously pandered that one passage of the Bylaws might be read to permit the FAC to report to the Senate despite its chairlessness. Good point, sir! If only O. J. Simpson had thought to point out how many Commandments do not proscribe murder!
Numerous senators reiterated their fidelity to the bylaws, then turned away from confrontation and retreated behind “Let’s make just this one exception for now.” Imagine that marines resembled faculty senators. “Semper fi!” would be replaced by “Semper flee!” “Gung ho!” would give way to “Gangway!” On the other hand, were the Faculty Senate the Marines, the United States would be out of Iraq: senators would have invaded Iceland in the first place and would have determined that occupying geysers was an important first step toward capturing the populace. "Today the spa; tomorrow space, the final frontier!"
The Academic Vice President [AVP] mumbled half-truths easily debunked by two veterans of the FAC, neither of whom cared or dared to point out that the interchangeability and equality of FAC members were truer by assumption than in actuality. One senator did note that such arguments, even if true, would be irrelevant. The Bylaws make no exceptions for committee Kum Ba Yah. The absence of an exception did not impress the AVP, who dismissed the rules as some "technicality." Yet another member of the Professional Standards Committee yet again transcends mere rules. As Peter Townshend might have put it, “Meet the new boss / The same as the old boss.”
All but two of the senators acknowledged what the Bylaws commanded, praised principle, and emulated Byron’s Julia: “And whispering 'I will ne'er consent' – consented.” Profiles in Porridge!
To summarize: the FAC continues ostensibly semi-cephalus; the Faculty Senate persists blissfully quasi-gonadal; the faculty suffer blindly pseudo-governing.
Next -- "I is for Inter-disciplinary" -- If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary.
Previous entries in this blog have covered the deceptions and delusions of rulers [e. g., administrators and apparatchiks] and the attention-deficit disorders of the ruled [except when more than $1.27 of their benefits or some empty praise focuses their appetites]. Between rulers and ruled the Faculty Senate occasionally surfaces: a dozen or so faculty perpetually in search of courage and purpose who perpetually content themselves with half-measures in service of their betters. Half-afraid and half-annoyed, the half-wits of the Senate form a halfway house of enablers always half a step from licking ass and faking aims.
The Senate meeting on 7 May 2007 revealed anew the canine pleasantries [see the entry on responsible, reputable, reliable faculty dogs] of senators. The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had flouted the Faculty Bylaws [hereafter, Bylaws] despite repeated notice from the Senate and elsewhere that the Bylaws mandate that each committee have a Chairperson. The FAC has no chair. It is fortunate for the FAC scofflaws, therefore, that the Faculty Senate has neither integrity nor intestinal fortitude.
The Chair of the Faculty Senate half-pusillanimously pandered that one passage of the Bylaws might be read to permit the FAC to report to the Senate despite its chairlessness. Good point, sir! If only O. J. Simpson had thought to point out how many Commandments do not proscribe murder!
Numerous senators reiterated their fidelity to the bylaws, then turned away from confrontation and retreated behind “Let’s make just this one exception for now.” Imagine that marines resembled faculty senators. “Semper fi!” would be replaced by “Semper flee!” “Gung ho!” would give way to “Gangway!” On the other hand, were the Faculty Senate the Marines, the United States would be out of Iraq: senators would have invaded Iceland in the first place and would have determined that occupying geysers was an important first step toward capturing the populace. "Today the spa; tomorrow space, the final frontier!"
The Academic Vice President [AVP] mumbled half-truths easily debunked by two veterans of the FAC, neither of whom cared or dared to point out that the interchangeability and equality of FAC members were truer by assumption than in actuality. One senator did note that such arguments, even if true, would be irrelevant. The Bylaws make no exceptions for committee Kum Ba Yah. The absence of an exception did not impress the AVP, who dismissed the rules as some "technicality." Yet another member of the Professional Standards Committee yet again transcends mere rules. As Peter Townshend might have put it, “Meet the new boss / The same as the old boss.”
All but two of the senators acknowledged what the Bylaws commanded, praised principle, and emulated Byron’s Julia: “And whispering 'I will ne'er consent' – consented.” Profiles in Porridge!
To summarize: the FAC continues ostensibly semi-cephalus; the Faculty Senate persists blissfully quasi-gonadal; the faculty suffer blindly pseudo-governing.
Next -- "I is for Inter-disciplinary" -- If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary.
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.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
C is for Cooneying
The Bush Administration’s bowdlerizing of scientific reports provides colleagues a useful verb.
Deans have over the years loaded Power Committees [PC] with sycophants and shills, especially when feckless senate executives have been more interested in the good will or patronage of deans. In like manner, failed “oilman” George W. Bush selected an energy lobbyist to lead his Council on Environmental Quality. The erstwhile lobbyist, Philip A. Cooney, proceeded to redact scientific reports on global warming to create or to nurture mysteries or uncertainties about the existence or extent of global warming and to undermine inconvenient truths. In Mr. Cooney’s hands, intelligence about greenhouse gases and climate changes was “fixed” around policy much as intelligence about Iraq was said by the “Downing Street Memorandum” to have been. Needless to add, Cooney had no more scientific expertise than the modal member of the Professional Standards Committee has aptitude for reading the Faculty Code. Cooney gave every appearance of being yet another loyal hack, another “Bushie” doing a heckuva job. When Cooney finally left the council, he got a job for Exxon Mobil. Perhaps in a future entry in this blog, I may explore such “revolving doors” at Puget Sound. Given similarities between governance on campus and in D. C., let us use “to Cooney” as a verb for various subterfuges by administrators or apparatchiks.
One may “Cooney” a colleague by calling a meeting to entertain the views of constituents and colleagues only to quarrel with every premise or critical observation any underling dares to offer. One opens the floor to “input,” then disputes unwelcome ideas and welcomes disputable notions. Fool and tools may, of course, point out how the current administration [in Washington as at Puget Sound] every day in every way gets better and better without fear of condemnation and with reasonable odds of commendation. The lowly are free to assent to their own debasement present or future without concern that they will be Cooneyed, but let some rambunctious neophyte wonder why certain questionable practices prevail and administrative hysteria breaks out.
A classic “Cooney” is to refute decisively an argument that no one ever has or ever would make. Al Gore and his allies are beset for positions that they have never endorsed, for beliefs that they have never entertained, and for policies that they would never embrace. They are subjected to caricature assassination as surely as “reliable faculty” mischaracterize proposals and critiques on campus.
One may also “Cooney” colleagues by refusing to release or even hiding reports or other key documents. Unsolicited, unwelcome information must be quarantined lest the impressionable be impressed. Better to ration information on a “need to know basis.”
Of course, in the Era of Dubya no true leader permits democratic or republican self-governance. Rather, the true leader expands administrative or executive prerogative as far as he or she can. The crafty leader sees instantly that every lacuna is permissive for betters but prohibitive to the masses. Whatever measures the common folk enact should be circumvented secretly and soon so that, through precedents and precedence, they may be subverted blatantly later.
There are many more ways in which the powerless have been or will be “Cooneyed.” Let the audacious seek ever more ways in which to stifle dissent and to enervate discourse. Only by comprising as many corruptions as possible may we truly honor the Great Cooney as he deserves.
Next: "D is for Deals" -- Buying the school’s way out of malfeasance limits litigation and other exposure.
Deans have over the years loaded Power Committees [PC] with sycophants and shills, especially when feckless senate executives have been more interested in the good will or patronage of deans. In like manner, failed “oilman” George W. Bush selected an energy lobbyist to lead his Council on Environmental Quality. The erstwhile lobbyist, Philip A. Cooney, proceeded to redact scientific reports on global warming to create or to nurture mysteries or uncertainties about the existence or extent of global warming and to undermine inconvenient truths. In Mr. Cooney’s hands, intelligence about greenhouse gases and climate changes was “fixed” around policy much as intelligence about Iraq was said by the “Downing Street Memorandum” to have been. Needless to add, Cooney had no more scientific expertise than the modal member of the Professional Standards Committee has aptitude for reading the Faculty Code. Cooney gave every appearance of being yet another loyal hack, another “Bushie” doing a heckuva job. When Cooney finally left the council, he got a job for Exxon Mobil. Perhaps in a future entry in this blog, I may explore such “revolving doors” at Puget Sound. Given similarities between governance on campus and in D. C., let us use “to Cooney” as a verb for various subterfuges by administrators or apparatchiks.
One may “Cooney” a colleague by calling a meeting to entertain the views of constituents and colleagues only to quarrel with every premise or critical observation any underling dares to offer. One opens the floor to “input,” then disputes unwelcome ideas and welcomes disputable notions. Fool and tools may, of course, point out how the current administration [in Washington as at Puget Sound] every day in every way gets better and better without fear of condemnation and with reasonable odds of commendation. The lowly are free to assent to their own debasement present or future without concern that they will be Cooneyed, but let some rambunctious neophyte wonder why certain questionable practices prevail and administrative hysteria breaks out.
A classic “Cooney” is to refute decisively an argument that no one ever has or ever would make. Al Gore and his allies are beset for positions that they have never endorsed, for beliefs that they have never entertained, and for policies that they would never embrace. They are subjected to caricature assassination as surely as “reliable faculty” mischaracterize proposals and critiques on campus.
One may also “Cooney” colleagues by refusing to release or even hiding reports or other key documents. Unsolicited, unwelcome information must be quarantined lest the impressionable be impressed. Better to ration information on a “need to know basis.”
Of course, in the Era of Dubya no true leader permits democratic or republican self-governance. Rather, the true leader expands administrative or executive prerogative as far as he or she can. The crafty leader sees instantly that every lacuna is permissive for betters but prohibitive to the masses. Whatever measures the common folk enact should be circumvented secretly and soon so that, through precedents and precedence, they may be subverted blatantly later.
There are many more ways in which the powerless have been or will be “Cooneyed.” Let the audacious seek ever more ways in which to stifle dissent and to enervate discourse. Only by comprising as many corruptions as possible may we truly honor the Great Cooney as he deserves.
Next: "D is for Deals" -- Buying the school’s way out of malfeasance limits litigation and other exposure.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Yo-Yo Motions
If you would discern what Power Committees are up to, watch for contradictory rulings in identical instances or for initiatives that contradict interpretations.
The immediately previous blog – “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007 – argued that the very vehemence of proclaimed authority indicates a consciousness of culpability. But how does one detect deviance when Power Committees [PC] claim quietly that they were only following orders?
One method to detect misbehaviors behind pseudo-authority is to look for irreconcilable rulings on identical or nearly identical matters. Even the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] have difficulty claiming both that they assiduously followed authority and that they arrived at diametrical results in indistinguishable instances. [Be forewarned, however! PCs will quibble that the results are not really opposed diametrically – as if deciding identical issues in ways that are just, say, 160° removed from one another is a defense – or that instances may be distinguished due to factors that are confidential.]
For example, in the 2003-2004 academic year the PSC – Yes! That PSC again! – formally heard two grievances. Having resolved the first grievance, the PSC sent the grievant [a faculty member] and the respondent [the then Academic Vice President] copies of their report at the same time as they sent their report to the President. Less than six months later, the same members informed another grievant and another respondent [neither an administrator] that the Faculty Code authorized the PSC only to send its report to the President [that is true] and thus prohibited the PSC from doing what it had done months before [that is not true]. If the President wished, he might share the report with the parties to the grievance.
Since the PSC favored its member [the Academic Vice President serves on the PSC] with a simultaneous release and withheld its report from two faculty who were not members of the PSC, a double standard seemed afoot. Moreover, the respondent in the second grievance was not an administrator [a venial sin of omission] and had challenged multiple departures from the Faculty Code by that selfsame PSC and especially its chair [a mortal sin of commission]. What a coincidence that a respondent who had vigorously protested that rulings internally inconsistent with other PSC decisions or externally inconsistent with applicable authority had seriously disadvantaged him would be treated worse than the dean permanently on the committee!
The double standard notwithstanding, these protean procedures make patent what PCs normally keep latent. Usually, the vacillations or the favoritism of a PC may be hidden behind confidentiality or denial so that a PC’s inconsistencies cannot be demonstrated. When the 2003-2004 PSC was of two minds, however, its public acts went on display. This provided that rare opportunity: a departure from the Faculty Code that the PSC could not deny.
The most that the PSC could claim was that one or more of their members [at a weekend PC retreat?] read the Faculty Code between the first grievance and the second grievance. That is not a very flattering claim, but a flat-out contradiction is hard to explain away even for master dissimulators. The claim is more flattering than telling the parties that the PSC made a special concession for one of its members. [That was the first “explanation” that the PSC chair gave the respondent in the second grievance. Imagine that a PC lurched into candor – “We favored a member of our committee who is also a powerful administrator.” – before settling for a different tale: “In Fall Semester we did not know what the Faculty Code ‘required,’ but by Spring Semester we conveniently discovered another way to abuse a second-year colleague who had the audacity to grieve faculty plagiarism and the temerity to point out that the PSC does as it pleases when it is not a Star Chamber at the service of the dean.” Each quotation is an expository device—the PSC is never that candid!]
[Even worse, the Faculty Code neither authorizes the PSC to provide the parties the report nor forbids the PSC from doing so. The PSC’s “improved” reading is a misreading! Can anyone around here play this game?]
Our first lesson at detecting PC artifice and fabrication, then, is what Izzy Stone long ago told us: any modern government publishes so many decisions and rulings that sooner or later it will betray its misdeeds if one pays attention. Too bad we do not have an Izzy Stone to help out our easily misdirected, easily distracted, and easily acquiescent faculty.
Such flat-out contradictions rarely surface, so we need to be vigilant about other PC “tells.” A second device is to ask questions to reveal inconsistencies that have not surfaced on their own. For example, when the 2005-2006 PSC proposed that the 15 days within which the PSC must schedule a grievance hearing be amended to be 15 working days, all ten faculty in the know should have inquired [aloud, if they are tenured] why that had not already been done. After all, the authoritative interpreters of the code [the aforementioned PSC] declared it so for two grievances in December 2003. Does the PSC fear another yo-yo? What if a future PSC looks at the Faculty Code and" discovers" that “working” days was neither intended nor implied? How would the expedient delays of December 2003 then appear?
Confronted concerning such yo-yoing, the 2003-2004 PSC wrote to the Faculty Senate that their consciences were clear and that they made no apologies. As one senator responded, “That’s the problem!”
It was a problem. It is a problem. Cult-like decision-making will be a problem again and again. All that good citizens of the University of Puget Sound can do about PC cults is to catch them out when they are compelled to release materials. If a PC yo-yos and no one notices, con games and cant will frustrate faculty oversight and neuter faculty governance.
Next – Zone of Caprice – Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.
The immediately previous blog – “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007 – argued that the very vehemence of proclaimed authority indicates a consciousness of culpability. But how does one detect deviance when Power Committees [PC] claim quietly that they were only following orders?
One method to detect misbehaviors behind pseudo-authority is to look for irreconcilable rulings on identical or nearly identical matters. Even the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] have difficulty claiming both that they assiduously followed authority and that they arrived at diametrical results in indistinguishable instances. [Be forewarned, however! PCs will quibble that the results are not really opposed diametrically – as if deciding identical issues in ways that are just, say, 160° removed from one another is a defense – or that instances may be distinguished due to factors that are confidential.]
For example, in the 2003-2004 academic year the PSC – Yes! That PSC again! – formally heard two grievances. Having resolved the first grievance, the PSC sent the grievant [a faculty member] and the respondent [the then Academic Vice President] copies of their report at the same time as they sent their report to the President. Less than six months later, the same members informed another grievant and another respondent [neither an administrator] that the Faculty Code authorized the PSC only to send its report to the President [that is true] and thus prohibited the PSC from doing what it had done months before [that is not true]. If the President wished, he might share the report with the parties to the grievance.
Since the PSC favored its member [the Academic Vice President serves on the PSC] with a simultaneous release and withheld its report from two faculty who were not members of the PSC, a double standard seemed afoot. Moreover, the respondent in the second grievance was not an administrator [a venial sin of omission] and had challenged multiple departures from the Faculty Code by that selfsame PSC and especially its chair [a mortal sin of commission]. What a coincidence that a respondent who had vigorously protested that rulings internally inconsistent with other PSC decisions or externally inconsistent with applicable authority had seriously disadvantaged him would be treated worse than the dean permanently on the committee!
The double standard notwithstanding, these protean procedures make patent what PCs normally keep latent. Usually, the vacillations or the favoritism of a PC may be hidden behind confidentiality or denial so that a PC’s inconsistencies cannot be demonstrated. When the 2003-2004 PSC was of two minds, however, its public acts went on display. This provided that rare opportunity: a departure from the Faculty Code that the PSC could not deny.
The most that the PSC could claim was that one or more of their members [at a weekend PC retreat?] read the Faculty Code between the first grievance and the second grievance. That is not a very flattering claim, but a flat-out contradiction is hard to explain away even for master dissimulators. The claim is more flattering than telling the parties that the PSC made a special concession for one of its members. [That was the first “explanation” that the PSC chair gave the respondent in the second grievance. Imagine that a PC lurched into candor – “We favored a member of our committee who is also a powerful administrator.” – before settling for a different tale: “In Fall Semester we did not know what the Faculty Code ‘required,’ but by Spring Semester we conveniently discovered another way to abuse a second-year colleague who had the audacity to grieve faculty plagiarism and the temerity to point out that the PSC does as it pleases when it is not a Star Chamber at the service of the dean.” Each quotation is an expository device—the PSC is never that candid!]
[Even worse, the Faculty Code neither authorizes the PSC to provide the parties the report nor forbids the PSC from doing so. The PSC’s “improved” reading is a misreading! Can anyone around here play this game?]
Our first lesson at detecting PC artifice and fabrication, then, is what Izzy Stone long ago told us: any modern government publishes so many decisions and rulings that sooner or later it will betray its misdeeds if one pays attention. Too bad we do not have an Izzy Stone to help out our easily misdirected, easily distracted, and easily acquiescent faculty.
Such flat-out contradictions rarely surface, so we need to be vigilant about other PC “tells.” A second device is to ask questions to reveal inconsistencies that have not surfaced on their own. For example, when the 2005-2006 PSC proposed that the 15 days within which the PSC must schedule a grievance hearing be amended to be 15 working days, all ten faculty in the know should have inquired [aloud, if they are tenured] why that had not already been done. After all, the authoritative interpreters of the code [the aforementioned PSC] declared it so for two grievances in December 2003. Does the PSC fear another yo-yo? What if a future PSC looks at the Faculty Code and" discovers" that “working” days was neither intended nor implied? How would the expedient delays of December 2003 then appear?
Confronted concerning such yo-yoing, the 2003-2004 PSC wrote to the Faculty Senate that their consciences were clear and that they made no apologies. As one senator responded, “That’s the problem!”
It was a problem. It is a problem. Cult-like decision-making will be a problem again and again. All that good citizens of the University of Puget Sound can do about PC cults is to catch them out when they are compelled to release materials. If a PC yo-yos and no one notices, con games and cant will frustrate faculty oversight and neuter faculty governance.
Next – Zone of Caprice – Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
X Marks the Spot
Every cover-up or con game depends on a verbal stratagem that stresses most forcefully crucial misinformation.
Bunko artists entice marks via tales (cf. “The Sting” or “The Flim-Flam Man”). Cover-ups use cover stories to transform the unconscionable into new evidence of good faith and good work. Tales and cover stories focus attention on laudable actors, actions, and motives. They also distract marks and gulls from features that might undermine credibility.
Every oral or written account withholds information. The more crucial the information withheld, however, the more vulnerable the account to disconfirmation. The account’s greatest vulnerability will lie beneath the authority that the account-giver stresses most forcefully. Because most faculty accede uncritically to almost any authority, and because almost all faculty take the Faculty Code, Bylaws, and policies to say whatever an administrator or apparatchik or apologist claims, an account’s vulnerability will go undetected by all but the few faculty who have learned where to look.
Sometimes account-givers cite authority very quietly to give the impression that nothing is amiss and authority is ample. Consider the outcome of the faculty’s last nominations to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. The Academic Vice President [AVP] announced her appointments to the FAC and accounted for skipping over someone who had gotten more votes than one or more appointees by noting that the code says that, normally, no more than one member of a department serves on the FAC at a time.
Let us work from the general to the particular. Any member of the faculty ought to appreciate that the “Normally” that begins the passage generally gives the AVP wide discretion, for every selection for the FAC is to some extent abnormal. This means that when the AVP pleases, she may “double up.” In this instance, one candidate who garnered votes was not really a candidate because she was up for promotion and could not serve on the FAC. Indeed, an existing member of the FAC whose departmental affiliation bumped two nominees from the faculty’s list should have stood for promotion in 2006-2007 but postponed for one year so that the FAC would not lose more than three experienced members. For that reason, the candidate who was passed over despite securing a greater number of votes would overlap with his departmental colleague for but one year due to a decidedly abnormal but not necessarily rare situation.
Once these considerations are taken into account, it becomes evident that the language cited by the AVP neither prescribed nor proscribed. The AVP made her choices. Then she quietly invoked inconsequent authority. Who caught her out? Only those who wanted to catch her out.
Quiet, subtle flim-flam is often hard to distinguish from confident, valid authority, so I cannot offer a sure-fire means for detecting pseudo-authority.
In contrast, when account-givers pound the table while citing authority, one may be certain that a trove of flim-flam lies not far beneath. An example of trumpeting of nonexistent authority should show what I mean.
Once the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] had commandeered a remedy prescribed by a hearing board – see “Kaleidoscope of Questions,” posted on this blog 20 February 2007 – it was nearly foreordained that the PSC would claim to be only following orders. In a communiqué to the Hearing Board, the PSC showed how it had adhered to the directives of the Hearing Board. The PSC knew from the chair of that hearing board that the board had protested that its remedy was not being applied, so language denying the devition was imperative.
Indeed, one need not have known any specifics of the matter to know that, if the PSC were merely fulfilling the recommendation of the Hearing Board, the PSC would not memorandize the Hearing Board that it was complying. The Hearing Board would recognize compliance. Because, instead, the PSC was not complying with the Hearing Board and knew that the Hearing Board knew that the PSC was not complying, the PSC had to camouflage its noncompliance.
This cover story did not confuse the Hearing Board, all five members of which promptly protested the PSC's subtrefuges. Fooling the Hearing Board did not concern the PSC. The cover story existed to fool the PSC itself and to fool anyone who might inquire into the matter thereafter.
Between nuanced chicanery [like the account of the selection of the members of the FAC in 2006] and bombastic deceptions [like the claim that the PSC followed the Hearing Board in 2003] lies trickery that ordinary faculty should be able to detect when they want to. Consider this sentence in a recent communication from the PSC to the Faculty Senate about PSC malfeasance and nonfeasance in 2003-2004:
"Throughout it all, we drew upon our familiarity with the Code and our sense of fairness to provide, as best we could, impartial and reasonable processes for all parties."
The trick in decontructing this sentence, of course, is to recognize what the PSC did not state. The PSC did not even claim to have followed or obeyed the Faculty Code, the contract between faculty and the university. Rather, the 2003-2004 PSC felt compelled to dilute their account to "drawing on" their "familiarity" with the code. Moreover, the PSC did not state that the PSC substituted its will for the command of the code or the recommendation of a hearing board. Instead, we read that the PSC parlayed its familiarity with the code and its "sense of fairness" to provide "impartial and reasonable processes for all parties." Please note the peculiar word order in that last-quoted phrase. The PSC claimed that the processes were impartial and reasonable – they were not but the whole point of deceptive rhetoric is to hide inconvenient truth – but could not even bring itself to say that the processes were fair to all parties.
I suppose it would be gratuitous for me to note that, if the processes in 2003-2004 actually were as fair, impartial, and reasonable as the members of the PSC could manage, senators who have excoriated the PSC's decision-making may rest their case, for the members of that PSC have admitted their incompetence.
Next – Yo-Yo Motions – If you would discern what Power Committees are up to, watch for contradictory rulings in identical instances or for initiatives that contradict interpretations.
Bunko artists entice marks via tales (cf. “The Sting” or “The Flim-Flam Man”). Cover-ups use cover stories to transform the unconscionable into new evidence of good faith and good work. Tales and cover stories focus attention on laudable actors, actions, and motives. They also distract marks and gulls from features that might undermine credibility.
Every oral or written account withholds information. The more crucial the information withheld, however, the more vulnerable the account to disconfirmation. The account’s greatest vulnerability will lie beneath the authority that the account-giver stresses most forcefully. Because most faculty accede uncritically to almost any authority, and because almost all faculty take the Faculty Code, Bylaws, and policies to say whatever an administrator or apparatchik or apologist claims, an account’s vulnerability will go undetected by all but the few faculty who have learned where to look.
Sometimes account-givers cite authority very quietly to give the impression that nothing is amiss and authority is ample. Consider the outcome of the faculty’s last nominations to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. The Academic Vice President [AVP] announced her appointments to the FAC and accounted for skipping over someone who had gotten more votes than one or more appointees by noting that the code says that, normally, no more than one member of a department serves on the FAC at a time.
Let us work from the general to the particular. Any member of the faculty ought to appreciate that the “Normally” that begins the passage generally gives the AVP wide discretion, for every selection for the FAC is to some extent abnormal. This means that when the AVP pleases, she may “double up.” In this instance, one candidate who garnered votes was not really a candidate because she was up for promotion and could not serve on the FAC. Indeed, an existing member of the FAC whose departmental affiliation bumped two nominees from the faculty’s list should have stood for promotion in 2006-2007 but postponed for one year so that the FAC would not lose more than three experienced members. For that reason, the candidate who was passed over despite securing a greater number of votes would overlap with his departmental colleague for but one year due to a decidedly abnormal but not necessarily rare situation.
Once these considerations are taken into account, it becomes evident that the language cited by the AVP neither prescribed nor proscribed. The AVP made her choices. Then she quietly invoked inconsequent authority. Who caught her out? Only those who wanted to catch her out.
Quiet, subtle flim-flam is often hard to distinguish from confident, valid authority, so I cannot offer a sure-fire means for detecting pseudo-authority.
In contrast, when account-givers pound the table while citing authority, one may be certain that a trove of flim-flam lies not far beneath. An example of trumpeting of nonexistent authority should show what I mean.
Once the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] had commandeered a remedy prescribed by a hearing board – see “Kaleidoscope of Questions,” posted on this blog 20 February 2007 – it was nearly foreordained that the PSC would claim to be only following orders. In a communiqué to the Hearing Board, the PSC showed how it had adhered to the directives of the Hearing Board. The PSC knew from the chair of that hearing board that the board had protested that its remedy was not being applied, so language denying the devition was imperative.
Indeed, one need not have known any specifics of the matter to know that, if the PSC were merely fulfilling the recommendation of the Hearing Board, the PSC would not memorandize the Hearing Board that it was complying. The Hearing Board would recognize compliance. Because, instead, the PSC was not complying with the Hearing Board and knew that the Hearing Board knew that the PSC was not complying, the PSC had to camouflage its noncompliance.
This cover story did not confuse the Hearing Board, all five members of which promptly protested the PSC's subtrefuges. Fooling the Hearing Board did not concern the PSC. The cover story existed to fool the PSC itself and to fool anyone who might inquire into the matter thereafter.
Between nuanced chicanery [like the account of the selection of the members of the FAC in 2006] and bombastic deceptions [like the claim that the PSC followed the Hearing Board in 2003] lies trickery that ordinary faculty should be able to detect when they want to. Consider this sentence in a recent communication from the PSC to the Faculty Senate about PSC malfeasance and nonfeasance in 2003-2004:
"Throughout it all, we drew upon our familiarity with the Code and our sense of fairness to provide, as best we could, impartial and reasonable processes for all parties."
The trick in decontructing this sentence, of course, is to recognize what the PSC did not state. The PSC did not even claim to have followed or obeyed the Faculty Code, the contract between faculty and the university. Rather, the 2003-2004 PSC felt compelled to dilute their account to "drawing on" their "familiarity" with the code. Moreover, the PSC did not state that the PSC substituted its will for the command of the code or the recommendation of a hearing board. Instead, we read that the PSC parlayed its familiarity with the code and its "sense of fairness" to provide "impartial and reasonable processes for all parties." Please note the peculiar word order in that last-quoted phrase. The PSC claimed that the processes were impartial and reasonable – they were not but the whole point of deceptive rhetoric is to hide inconvenient truth – but could not even bring itself to say that the processes were fair to all parties.
I suppose it would be gratuitous for me to note that, if the processes in 2003-2004 actually were as fair, impartial, and reasonable as the members of the PSC could manage, senators who have excoriated the PSC's decision-making may rest their case, for the members of that PSC have admitted their incompetence.
Next – Yo-Yo Motions – If you would discern what Power Committees are up to, watch for contradictory rulings in identical instances or for initiatives that contradict interpretations.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Plagiarisms
Does anyone remember what led to the formation of the AHCPS?
The Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] arose out of concerns expressed in the Faculty Senate that plagiarisms by a faculty member had been “addressed” in a manner that no senator was permitted to learn. Senators and other faculty allowed that it was so difficult to oversee this “addressing” that it was tempting for senators to overlook the whole matter. Despite claims that the University took faculty plagiarism seriously, senators wanted to know what “addressing” and “taking seriously” meant. To the best of my knowledge, no senator yet knows what apparatchiks and apologists meant.
The AHCPS did not address these questions, so let me do so here. One department, two Power Committees, one Academic Vice President, and one President “addressed” severe serial plagiarisms so assiduously and took faculty plagiarism so seriously that almost no one knew what, if anything, had been done. What more need we know or hear?
Thus, questions asked at senate on 14 November 2005 should answer themselves. The claim that instances of faculty plagiarism were “addressed” supplies no information beyond the invitation to stop asking embarrassing questions. To declare that the University takes faculty plagiarism seriously amounts to an account that itself obstructs accountability. Empty assurances supplant information. “Trust us” substitutes for justification. Thus is oversight defeated.
Before oversight could be evaded, some senators offered excuses for overlooking the whole matter in the senate. Perhaps the plagiarisms were few or minor, some naifs said. The plagiarisms were many and major, as multiple members of the senate might have attested if anyone present had cared enough to inquire sincerely. Even if the sets of plagiarisms had been a few technical mistakes or missteps, wouldn’t we hold our students responsible for such mistakes or missteps? Mightn’t a PhD be held to a higher standard than someone thirteen weeks removed from high school? Yet the first impulse of a few senators was to advance a cover story, any cover story. Perhaps they thought that the civil thing to do. Their evolution from apologists to apparatchiks will be interesting to observe.
About two years after the sets of plagiarisms had been discovered, the discoverer of the plagiarisms and his primary defender had been driven from the University of Puget Sound, yet the plagiarist was still on the faculty. Those facts should be enough to show the assurances to be meaningless and the communications to be counterfeit.
Did the AHCPS encounter multiple narratives about the sets of plagiarisms? When the besieged grievant told the AHCPS that he withdrew his grievance concerning the second set of plagiarisms –plagiarisms on a paper written with a student – after expressing reservations about the conduct of the Professional Standards Committee in other matters and pleading for someone to police acts of intimidation and reprisals to which he had been subjected, did the AHCPS discover some way to multiply narratives beyond the grievant’s own account?
The AHCPS has excused its failure to reach findings regarding the (mis)conduct of the Professional Standards Committee and assorted other faculty and administrators. The AHCPS has yet to explain away the absence of findings regarding what one member of the AHCPS has admitted to senators was the reason for the ad hoc committee’s creation. What an oversight!
Next – “Quibbles” – Nit-picking signals that nothing is substantially amiss.
The Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] arose out of concerns expressed in the Faculty Senate that plagiarisms by a faculty member had been “addressed” in a manner that no senator was permitted to learn. Senators and other faculty allowed that it was so difficult to oversee this “addressing” that it was tempting for senators to overlook the whole matter. Despite claims that the University took faculty plagiarism seriously, senators wanted to know what “addressing” and “taking seriously” meant. To the best of my knowledge, no senator yet knows what apparatchiks and apologists meant.
The AHCPS did not address these questions, so let me do so here. One department, two Power Committees, one Academic Vice President, and one President “addressed” severe serial plagiarisms so assiduously and took faculty plagiarism so seriously that almost no one knew what, if anything, had been done. What more need we know or hear?
Thus, questions asked at senate on 14 November 2005 should answer themselves. The claim that instances of faculty plagiarism were “addressed” supplies no information beyond the invitation to stop asking embarrassing questions. To declare that the University takes faculty plagiarism seriously amounts to an account that itself obstructs accountability. Empty assurances supplant information. “Trust us” substitutes for justification. Thus is oversight defeated.
Before oversight could be evaded, some senators offered excuses for overlooking the whole matter in the senate. Perhaps the plagiarisms were few or minor, some naifs said. The plagiarisms were many and major, as multiple members of the senate might have attested if anyone present had cared enough to inquire sincerely. Even if the sets of plagiarisms had been a few technical mistakes or missteps, wouldn’t we hold our students responsible for such mistakes or missteps? Mightn’t a PhD be held to a higher standard than someone thirteen weeks removed from high school? Yet the first impulse of a few senators was to advance a cover story, any cover story. Perhaps they thought that the civil thing to do. Their evolution from apologists to apparatchiks will be interesting to observe.
About two years after the sets of plagiarisms had been discovered, the discoverer of the plagiarisms and his primary defender had been driven from the University of Puget Sound, yet the plagiarist was still on the faculty. Those facts should be enough to show the assurances to be meaningless and the communications to be counterfeit.
Did the AHCPS encounter multiple narratives about the sets of plagiarisms? When the besieged grievant told the AHCPS that he withdrew his grievance concerning the second set of plagiarisms –plagiarisms on a paper written with a student – after expressing reservations about the conduct of the Professional Standards Committee in other matters and pleading for someone to police acts of intimidation and reprisals to which he had been subjected, did the AHCPS discover some way to multiply narratives beyond the grievant’s own account?
The AHCPS has excused its failure to reach findings regarding the (mis)conduct of the Professional Standards Committee and assorted other faculty and administrators. The AHCPS has yet to explain away the absence of findings regarding what one member of the AHCPS has admitted to senators was the reason for the ad hoc committee’s creation. What an oversight!
Next – “Quibbles” – Nit-picking signals that nothing is substantially amiss.
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