The Dark Side

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Each member of the faculty is in some measure a perpetrator, a bystander, and a victim. However, when faculty become dean-like, perpetration increases, bystanding becomes more active, and victimization decreases.
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In Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945, Professor Raul Hilberg differentiated those who created or expedited the Holocaust [perpetrators] from those who did little to stop the Holocaust [bystanders] and from those who died in or suffered through the Holocaust [victims]. Academic politics and government, to be sure, are far less important and far less murderous than the Holocaust was, so I intend no comparison between the misdeeds I cover below and the crimes and outrages of the Nazis and others. Rather I aim to use the concepts "perpetrator," "bystander," and "victim" to explain how administrators go over to the dark side.

In this entry I shall not differentiate the doers, the done-to, and the done-too-little for the University of Puget Clowns [® Susan Resneck PieRce]. Rather, I aggregate those roles or descriptors. Every academic, I presume, is to some extent a perpetrator of and a victim of and a bystander amid the lesser outrages and delicts of academe. I further presume that the modal academic is mostly a bystander, occasionally a victim, and only rarely a perpetrator. Hence, the mix of roles or dispositions interests me in this post.

I expect that any increase in administrative responsibilities or expectations will increase perpetration even if it does not reduce victimization. What may be less obvious is that the more administrative one's duties, the more that one is expected to be a bystander. Although administrators may often be bystanders, administrative roles require less passive and more active standing by than professorial roles require.

Recall from my entry "Standing By" for 26 June 2010 in "Rump Parliament" that passive bystanders stand by apparently idly and inertly. Passive bystanders know little and want to know less unless a matter or issue lines their pockets or threatens their positions or interests. Compelled or induced into some academic fray, passive bystanders avoid controversy, agree with and reaffirm the basic goodness of as many colleagues as possible, decide nothing, and establish no truths or facts. Passive bystanders want all of us to get along. Indeed, the passive are so averse to conflict that they avert their eyes and close their minds to injustices and improprieties. Even if passive bystanders do not become apologists, they strive not to know, try not to hear, euphemize in every way, and thereby resist being drawn into frays or phrase.

Faculty have far more opportunities for passivity and apathy than dean-like or dean-light figures do. Untenured faculty had better be active apologists, accomplices, or enablers at least some of the time lest they run into "Double Secret Personal and Professional Characteristics," but professing to know almost nothing and to be unconcerned about whatever senior faculty tell junior faculty to be unconcerned about secures tenure and promotuion most of the time. Unternured and tenured alike will usually strive to be credulous and conforming. Knowing and caring get in the way of conformity and credulity. To be sure, passive bystanders must declare their basic decency: "Oh, our colleague got shafted? I had not heard that. How dreadful for her! I am so saddened by this news -- which I had not heard anything about -- that I am not certain I shall recover by my nap."

By contrast, dean-like or dean-light colleagues must be more active and less passive than even sinecures. Associate deans, assistant deans, or petty decanal figures [e.g., chairs or directors or members of Power Committees] may be expected to be cover up administrative decisions or non-decisions rather than to ignore them, to rationalize or apologize for policies or ukases rather than to describe them and conform to them, or actively to support or to cheer on actions or inactions, especially when actions or inactions are indefensible. Hence, a shift to an administrative role may not change the degree to which one is a bystander but will change bystanding from more passive to more active standing by. Administrators are expected to stand by what their superiors have dictated.

Members of Power Committees tend to stand by administrators and other superiors, so their bystanding will be more active while they occupy committees and more passive when they do not so serve. After service on a Power Committee, faculty may revert to passive bystanding, but they may be more active bystanders if the acts they perpetrated on the Power Committee especially rankled departments, programs, or a few conscious colleagues. On rare occasions when Power Committees or the Confidentiality Con is challenged, veterans of Power Committees will stand by the actions of "their" committees with aggressive and defensive rhetoric and, of course, the usual stonewalling.

Some chairs of programs, schools, or departments quite predictably become aggressive bystanders when they are not flat-out perpetrators. Indeed, some departmental chairs were so obviously perpetrators-in-waiting that I am reluctant to pronounce them bystanders at all, except in the sense that a Rottweiler on a short chain is "standing by." A colleague salivating at the thought of having her or his way with a school or program may actively stand by her or his administrative betters to get into positions from which to tyrannize. Such colleagues range between bystanding and perpetrating.

When we reassure ourselves and others that a professor will not be changed by becoming decanal, we probably have in mind that the professor is no perpetrator. But we are not thinking matters through. Even if a decanal figure evades stark perpetration for some months or years, administrative office will move him or her toward more active bystanding. [It should go without my adding that members of Power Committees, chairs, directors, and deans sooner or later become perpetrators. It comes with each job, even if one is temporarily chairing the smallest program. Indeed, for some chairs, perpetrating tyrannies is their reason for accepting responsibilities.]

Multiple members of the faculty have not merely claimed that becoming an assistant dean or associate dean or a chair would not change them but boldly proclaimed such immunity. Understanding more active bystanding explains why such predictions have proved misleading.

Many of the predictions, of course, were designed to mislead. After one professor served in a decanal position, any colleague with three digits of IQ knew what a tyrant he would be if he ever became an assistant dean or an associate dean or, God help us, a "full" dean. To my knowledge, he was tyrannical only in two dean-like or dean-light capacities. So when he explicitly reassured long-serving colleagues that he did not want his "accession" to change relations with colleagues, he was at best being clever. In theory he did not want relations to change; in practice they would. They must.

More than one member of the faculty has counseled a colleague to get out of a position that requires deception or distortions. More than one member of the faculty has asked what happened to a colleague who became more administrative and began to parrot nonsense or support malfeasance. At such times, faculty exclaim, "He's gone native!" or "She's gone over to the dark side." I have shown above why that should be expected.

So when a veteran warns that someone has "gone over to the dark side," the veteran is not necessarily committing to the prediction that decanal darkness will involve flat-out misconduct or corruption. Some combination of dishonesty, misprision, malfeasance, and nonfeasance is highly probable but not inevitable.

On the other hand, the probability that a decanal figure will be victimized is far less than the likelihood that she or he will victimize. Thus, I define "going over to the dark side" as increasing one's propensity to victimize, decreasing one's propensity to be victimized, and increasing one's active bystanding. Those trends are inevitable. That is "going over to the dark side." That is why colleagues caution against taking decanal positions.

If you would be a chair, a director, an assistant dean, an associate dean, or worse, remember your Dante: Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'entrate. Abandon hope for your own soul. Abandon hope for your colleague's soul. Those who enter Jones Hall or chair a department or serve on a Power Committee plummet into active or aggressive standing by, into covert or overt sins of commission or omission, and into a spiral of rationalizing and covering up.

Yes, I am serving my third year on the Professional Standards Committee after two stints on the Faculty Advancement Committee. Why do you ask?
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Standing By

Behold the Ballast! Fear the Inert!

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I complied with a request from on high the other day and of course regret my cooperation. Asked to respond to a survey despite my having no dependents, I responded that I had no dependents. The web-apparatus thanked me for my participation and terminated. Perhaps I had little to contribute on that subject. Still, the survey might have solicited my views before dismissing me. That was survey etiquette when I attended graduate school.

Doubtless, my colleagues with dependents will be more solicitous of my views than the survey proved. If my views advance the interests of colleagues, I expect those colleagues to solicit my full cooperation. Many of those who seek my assistance or support will have been chronic bystanders: those who do little or nothing for others and seek to know little or nothing about others until they perceive that they have something at stake. Until they demand allies, that is, bystanders stand by.

The mass of bystanders have evinced little interest when I have served as mouthpiece for students, faculty, and staff abused by my university. Bystanders usually bear up under insults, injuries, or injustices not directed at bystanders but make appropriate sounds to extract themselves unscathed from an interaction. "I'm so sorry to hear that," they say, and they seem quite sorry to have heard anything about the university or "the community" that might get them sideways with administrators, apparatchiks, or colleagues.

"I am very sorry to hear that."

"Don't worry. In minutes it will be as if you had not heard and did not know. Next time, dive into a doorway to avoid me."

Bystanders distrust their perceptions and immobilize their cognitions unless they think that they stand to gain or to lose. Then bystanders belch platitudes, imagine insults, concoct injuries, and discover that they have always cared about justice and propriety. Then they chat up colleagues as if bystanders had not been above or beyond nearly every fray for years or decades.

Bystanders might seem to present yet another instance of economic collegiality and the hypocrisies that rationalize economic collegiality. At an individual level, bystanding may be simply self-regarding behavior. Considered as a class, however, bystanders form a mass that empowers and emboldens administrators and apparatchiks. As forces in campus policy-making, bystanders are perpetually potential and never actual. Bystanders standing by form the mass of predictable, inertial, and feckless faculty. They give administrators every benefit of every doubt by tirelessly suppressing doubt and evading information. They let apparatchiks assist the administrators by keeping themselves perpetually naive and, they think, innocent.

That the bystanders impassively stand by need not imply that they stand still. Among the most nimble bystanders are the hustlers of equality and equity. Because they are supposed to oppose injustices, they must simulate sympathy and feign surprise that sexism or racism or clientilism or favoritism have tainted personnel processes, although their ideology and rhetoric would dictate that such inequities are to be expected.

John Garfield:  "Somebody told a story.

Sure, a man at a dinner table told a story ...

and the nice people didn't laugh.

They even despised him, sure.

But they let it pass.  ..."



Dorothy McGuire:  "If you don't stop with that joke,

where do you stop?

Is that what you mean?  ...

Where do you call the halt? ...

I've been getting mad at Phil [Gregory Peck

in "Gentleman's Agreement," whence this dialogue comes]

because he expected me to fight this instead of

getting mad at those who help it along ..."



John Garfield:  "What about the rest of the dinner guests?

They're supposed to be on your side.

They didn't ..."



Dorothy McGuire:  "No, they didn't, and I didn't.

That's the trouble.

We never do."

I cannot summon much dudgeon against the gender- or race-mongers, however. Usually they are smothered by bystanders. The bystanders natter until they can excuse themselves on whatever excuse. After the nattering and amid their flight, I imagine that they congratulate themselves on fighting the good fight. Supposed to be on the side of equality and justice, they didn't. They never do. That's the trouble. Instead:



"Graffiti? How dreadful! You know, students really shouldn't be marking up school property in any manner, let alone in a sexist or nativist manner. ... "

"He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die, and he never sees the writing on the walls.” [Buffy St. Marie, "The Universal Soldier;" see "Who's to Blame?" 16 March 2007 in this blog.]


Less adroit bystanders must feign ignorance and practice impassivity. No matter what they believe that they have learned, they know nothing yet are eager, almost frantic, to learn no more. Until they have something at stake, one not only cannot fight city hall or Jones Hall but one should not. It roils campus and disrupts the community to dispute official accounts or to note Orwellian communiques.

Bystanders acquiesce. Bystanders go along that they might advance themselves as reliable, reputable, responsible colleagues in the eyes of patrons. [See "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" in this blog, 4 March 2007.] Bystanders dare to avoid conflict, awareness, and at times sapience. Confronted with a problem not defined by administrators or apparatchiks, bystanders suspend judgments and back away.

Neil Young: "How can you run when you know?" ["Ohio"]

The Bystander: "I do not know."

Bystanders know that the only problems are identified by proper authorities. Beyond such authorized, official problems, there are no problems -- except those faculty who see problems. Faculty who see problems that they have not been authorized to see are themselves problems. Bystanders do not want to augment such problems.

But we all are bystanders some of the time. When staff are sacked or furloughed or sanctioned, most faculty know little about who the staff were or are. Informed that so-and-so was dismissed for questionable reasons, we do not question. We do not even commit to a Panglossian "I suppose it is all for the best!" We cannot even "rise" to apologetics.

Instead, we preachers of civility and community stand by.

So shall I stand by when parents who were counting on benefits for their offspring rouse themselves from inertia and indifference? Shall I nod my understanding and ooze my sympathy for the parents' predicament? Shall I seem to attend to their complaints and concerns while I rehearse in my head the times when the grievant strived not to know or to know as little as possible?

Please stand by.

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Haltom's Twenty-Second Law: The usually powerless govern most when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic.

Those habitually disempowered generate symbols and spectacles of self-governance when chronic potentates find apparent democracy as useful symbolically as it is useless pragmatically and/or when potentates are divided.

The usually powerless govern most -- "most" meaning both "to the greatest degree" and "frequently" -- when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic to the powerless because elites welcome popular governance that serves or does not compromise elites' interests. This supposition is well established among some political scientists.

When established "deciders" divide into factions, there may be more opportunities for "self-governance" than will usually be the case, but we should expect such opportunities to be transitory because some faction will want to capture or to coopt newly mobilized forces. Savvy hegemons -- elites who dominate but do not absolutely control -- who espy negligible stakes in conflicts will not waste resources on the conflicts but will exaggerate the rites and rights of "the people" and other myths. Participation and exuberance testify to democracy when and so long as the masses do not imperil the classes.

Still, the classes permit masses to frolic without supervision rarely lest activists or participants develop a taste for or expectations of self-rule. Various rites have evolved to promote the appearance and to stave off the reality of self-rule. Political conventions, for example, permit "spontaneous" demonstrations that have been choreographed and timed to serve nominees and other party hierarchs. Rank and file may commit candor, if at all, in private but not before cameras, microphones, or reporters. The assembled must coalesce around blather and absurdity. Delegates are largely free to choose buttons, headgear, and signs that do not contradict approved messages. [Indeed, the more disconcerting the costumes, the more that viewers welcome party elites as alternatives to mobs of hayseeds and morons.]

At the University of Puget Clowns, the classes -- administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists -- circumscribe masses of faculty and staff to preserve order and predictability. Staff are reined in because they can be disappeared overnight. Control of faculty, by contrast, must be somewhat subtler. To assure that faculty do not blurt out or even learn disconfirming information, administrators station decanal agents on "Faculty Senate" committees, assign observers to dinners for trustees hosted at faculty homes, and trade on their titular status as members of the faculty. To conceal disconfirming information, administrators rely on apparatchiks -- "reliable," "responsible," and therefore "reputable" faculty who consistently support administrators and thus get appointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or other key positions. These appointees tend to be, shall we say, open to administrative direction. [To be certain, the FAC from time to time and the PSC almost always will include a gadfly or two to "demonstrate" the openness of faculty governance as well as the futility of reminding Power Committees what the Faculty Code and Bylaws say in opposition to what administrators and apparatchiks claim these authorities state.] Faculty not yet favored with sensitive posts on the Power Committees may apprentice as apologists. Apologists attest to the soundness of administrative decisions and to the bona fides of apparatchiks. When apologists stumble upon injustices that they cannot deny, they scapegoat faculty governance for problems. Apologists fulsomely praise civility and community, by which they mean servility and deference to authorities. Apologists acknowledge that the truest guide for governance is whatever administrators and apparatchiks say and that codes, bylaws, and other documents to which employment contracts refer can only undermine propriety and tradition.

Administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists overlap. Apologists who demonstrate their reliability and resistance to independent thought make themselves attractive candidates for service as apparatchiks. To preserve their reputations and status, apparatchiks must explain away malfeasance or nonfeasance without holding Power Committees or administrators accountable. Thus do doors between apologists and apparatchiks revolve. Administrators raised from among the Puget Clowns faculty will tend to have been apparatchiks, apologists, or both, but not every administrator is abjectly "reliable" or "responsible." Administrators who buck top-down policies and directives soon disqualify themselves from the elite and "restore" themselves to status beneath even apologists via memoranda that mention a desire to get back to teaching or research [whether or not the discarded did any research in recorded history or taught competently in collective recollection].

Guided by administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, faculty ostentatiously govern themselves but seldom interfere with elites. The masses validate and valorize the classes.

When colleagues profess not to understand why the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings of the faculty are so inconsequential, they mistake myths and rites for campus realities. The Faculty Senate, it is true, charges committees with certain responsibilities, but committees, under the surveillance and control of administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, then do as they please. As the FAC has shown repeatedly, members of the FAC care not what the Faculty Senate says or what the bylaws mandate. The PSC has consistently refused to admit what it has done or otherwise to answer to the faculty. Members of Power Committees assert hypertrophic confidentiality and revel in their status as servants of Jones Hall.

In sum, committees and the Faculty Senate enervate critical faculty. That is what they were designed to do. When ad hoc committees crop up from time to time, expect administrators to get on the ad hoc committee (1990, 1996) or, if administrative shills do not control the committee, to rally apparatchiks and apologists to undermine the ad hoc committee (1996, 2006).

When elites appear to lose, therefore, the sensible citizen will wonder whether elites were indifferent on the issue on which they lost, were sympathetic with ordinary folk for some reason, or went so far wrong that even somnolent masses used their superior numbers to outmaneuver the classes. The last possibility -- that "the folks" awakened and stopped the deciders -- is the least likely.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twenty-Third Law: Only lousy music emanates loudly from a vehicle.

Haltom's Twenty-First Law: What is not worth doing is not worth doing well

Often the most exacting plans are designed for the most useless projects.


Amid my first year of graduate school, the late Dan Lev greeted a proposed seminar project with the statement, "You have designed your project fastidiously, but I do not see your goal." I experienced that critique as a jarring slap to my peer because I did not yet understand that many presentations would be far stronger on answers to "How best might we do this?" than on answers to "Why should we do this?" Decades of presentations at professional conferences have demonstrated that academics often pound their methodology most when their findings are least interesting.

Some of the most pride-filled journals in political science offer "NEW! IMPROVED!" ways to "test" propositions that no one doubts and, all too often, that no one values. The exactitude with which "Duh!" contentions are contested is stunning -- so much time wasted on proving the obvious. Those who have mastered a statistical technique that baffles most readers or created a dataset to which most referees have little or no access must pretend to need such statistics or such data to disprove some political-science equivalent of the Flat Earth Hypothesis. Justices of the United States Supreme Court tend to decide cases in keeping with their partisan and ideological leanings? Other than every Senate Judiciary Committee in the 20th Century, who knew?

Perhaps similar experiences led a professional colleague to proclaim that "What is not worth doing is not worth doing well." I unabashedly stole this maxim from my colleague and list it as Haltom's Twenty-First Law.

Haltom's 21st is more interesting for its variations than for its stark truth.

If we do not welcome the results of some fact-finding or decision-making, for example, we do not state our distaste for arguments and evidence. Rather, we concoct methodological objections. In the 1990s, for example, the Faculty Senate was persuaded that learning what faculty think might be helpful. An ad hoc committee crafted and conducted a survey. The survey showed that much that the then-President and her Academic Vice President were claiming was sheer balderdash. Suddenly, the administrators drew on methodological expertise that neither possessed to critique the survey's methods. The spectacle of two administrators, each given to self-serving blather, impugning the expertise and integrity of colleagues trained in survey research was quite amusing. [It would be gratuitous for me to note that both administrators were hardened humanists accustomed to supplanting facts with interpretations, so I skip that part.]

The upshot was that the two highest academic officers at the University thought that learning and verifying were among the labors "not worth doing" but did not dare to say so overtly. Instead, they pretended to welcome a survey done well but derided the findings of a survey that was not done well because the survey returned unwelcome information. This is a variation on Haltom's 21st.

In "Rump Parliament" I have already discussed a similar use of pseudo-methodological criticisms. The first ad hoc committee that the Faculty Senate deputed to research problems with processes by which faculty receive or fail of tenure at the University reported to the Senate in early 2006 and recommended reforms. One meeting after that ad hoc committee had reported, a senator who did not welcome the committee's findings and had an alibi for his absence from the ad hoc committee's report then raised, utterly out of parliamentary order, a pseudo-methodological objection over and over. He consumed 20-30 minutes. He slathered objections into the minutes with no opportunity for the ad hoc committee to respond directly and immediately. He badgered the only member of the ad hoc committee present. He wondered why the ad hoc committee did not interview other faculty, including those who had claimed that confidentiality would not let them speak to the ad hoc committee.

This colleague raised not a single cogent point, but I doubt that such was his object. Rather, he wanted to suggest that the nonfeasance and malfeasance that the committee discovered and documented did not count because nonfeasant and malfeasant decision-makers did not get to control the report after the longstanding conventions of faculty governance. Since decision-makers could not cover up their misdeeds, the first ad hoc committee report was a task not worth doing. Unprepared to say so openly, the senator instead proffered a risible critique to give the nonfeasant and malfeasant ostensibly plausible deniability. Worse, this senator was no humanist and therefore was trained not to avoid unwelcome evidence. [Even better, of course, his tactics appear to have induced the next ad hoc committee to avoid pseudo-methodological criticism by issuing no findings. This senator, it seems, achieved a twofer: he berated colleagues for findings that he did not want aired and thereby induced the next ad hoc committee to air no findings that the senator did not want to hear.]

If these variations on Haltom's 21st strike the reader as a bit removed from Haltom's 21st, the reader should reconsider Haltom's 21st in context. For at least the last 22 years, the Puget Clowns, especially denizens of Jones Hall, have had little taste or use for evidence that did not suit their agendas. Indifference to evidence makes the gathering of evidence not worth the bother. Ascertaining the actual is not worth doing. That makes ascertaining the actual not worth doing well.

Keep Haltom's 21st in mind the next time that someone invokes "the culture of evidence."

Coming Soon! Haltom's Twenty-Second Law: The usually powerless govern most when the usally powerful are indifferent or sympathetic.

J Stands for Jokers and Jokes

Evaluators all too often consist of jokers rather than colleagues whose judgments should be taken seriously.


The University of Puget Clowns – a label that President Pierce repeatedly justified before and after she uttered it at graduation – must consistently replenish its bag of tricks and its complement of tricksters. While the sources of jokes – the folderol, fictions, flim-flam, factoids, figments, and fabrications that I have discussed above and will cover anew in future entries – vary, jokers recruited by departments and evaluated by departments, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], and one or more administrators tend to resemble one another. Viewed as mordant self-parody, the output of such jokers would be infotainment if the jokers were better informed or dispensed more information.

Because the process by which we staff the FAC is farcical, all too often the jokers who climb thereon augur jokes that will issue therefrom. I have remarked in this blog about features or factors that select for false-positives, faculty who should never have been hired or tenured or promoted. To eke out tenure or promotion increases one’s odds of nomination and appointment to the FAC. Of course, faculty nominate false-positives more often relative to their proportion in the faculty than false-negatives because most false-negatives are being shown the exit. Perhaps faculty nominate false-positives more often than true-positives relative to their proportion in the faculty because colleagues hope that someone who has been subjected to savagery, fickleness, and unfairness might be especially sensitive to miscarriages of procedural or substantive justice. Perhaps this sensitivity to injustices inheres immediately after monkeys escape false-positives’ asses.

Of course, false-positives are usually more available for service on the FAC than faculty who are more talented and accomplished. Other service demands talent, efficiency, and effectiveness to a far greater extent than the FAC. The FAC functions more smoothly with faculty who will follow the choreography and mark stage directions. Critical, analytic, or intellectual faculties get in the way of scripts and foil hoaxes and pranks. You cannot have buffoons actually running into one another as they race around. Someone other than evaluees might get hurt. The buffoons must cooperate in operatic obtuseness and dramatized obliviousness. The FAC's routines can withstand only so much independence, intelligence, and integrity.

However recruited, jokers are socialized by the FAC in much the way that departmental jokers are indoctrinated by programs or schools. As this blog has shown, the FAC overlooks, circumvents, or flouts rules when it pleases to, so the Faculty Bylaws and the Faculty Code shape boilerplate more and more foten than they shape decision-making. In challenging cases, the FAC augments extant authority with figments and folderol. This provides members ample wiggle room, for they may invoke the letter or spirit of rules when the rules get them where they want to go but deviate when they feel a whim coming on or when they may court favor with administrators or colleagues. The process described in rules and procedures provides the set-up; absurd decisions deliver the punch line. Zaniness ensues.

FAC gags are inevitable because explicit flaws in procedures yield risible results irrespective of substantive merits. In any review during the third year of an assistant professor, for instance, the Faculty Code directs that the FAC recommend reappointment [or not] to the Academic Vice President [AVP]. The AVP then makes a decision that is not subject to any explicit criteria or standards.

One great flaw in this process is that the AVP sits with the FAC while the FAC is deciding what to recommend. The FAC considers the file and recommends to the AVP, who has been sitting in the room all along! Members of the FAC easily learn of the AVP’s concerns and orientation. The AVP automatically learns the issues and concerns lurking behind the official letter. The FAC releases to the evaluee and her or his department a rationalization of the committee’s recommendation(s), but a host of considerations, suspicions, and pretexts never make the FAC letter although they made the FAC’s decision.

The potential for groupthink to prevail and for other forms of cross-fertilization or cross-contamination to afflict decisions should be obvious to everyone except a practiced FAC apologist. The code nearly guarantees collusion in hackneyed [yet inadvertent] humor.

In third-year assistant reviews as in other momentous evaluations, FAC letters are redolent of stale shtick and practiced pratfalls from the moment that the diminutive FAC fire truck pulls into the center ring under the big top that is the University of Puget Clowns.

"Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am / ..."


Next -- "K stands for Kyrie eleison" --