Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses VII

To

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

let us now add the leadership of a rogue committee:

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

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

Explanation 7 -- Authoritarian Personalities

.....

..Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde:

misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb,

zu strafen, mächtig ist!

But thus do I counsel you, my friends:

distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

.......

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

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

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

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

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

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

.....

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

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

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

---------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough accidental amateurs! No more tyrannical tyros!

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

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

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

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

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

The Dark Side

#########
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.
##########
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?
##############

Standing By

Behold the Ballast! Fear the Inert!

###########

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.

###########

Apparat-Chicks and Maid Men

Given how few women have been employed here, this university has had more than its share of female apparatchiks.

Reflecting on "Women Against Women's Advancing" [WAWA] the other day, I reviewed the tormenters, abettors, and bystanders who have made this campus unfriendly to females over my years here.

And what got me thinking about women afflicting other women these days?

Coining "Women Against Women" in 1991-1996 to point out a disadvantage that sexist pigs and patriarchs faced at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], I pretended to lament that male colleagues who wanted to fire or otherwise torment women usually found the victim beset by too many female colleagues to participate fully. Relatively and absolutely few women were in decision-making positions in the 1980s and 1990s, yet the women who were in such spots often beat many men to the punching. Moreover, such women took the lead in defending decisions because firing women just looks better if it appears done by women.

Elder boars could not make their way through old sows to get at, so to speak, women standing or stooping or crawling for tenure. Those old sows founded WAW, which I now have restyled "WAWA." Please compare "W Stands for Women Against Women," 24 November 2007.

Know why the Old Girls were displacing the Old Boys?

I dispensed anew with one hypothesis common in the 1990s. "The Crone Hypothesis" posited that attractive, young professors annoyed colleagues of a certain age who were losing their looks, in some cases declining little from a less than lofty start. In 1991, 1992, 1994, and 1995, fans of The Crone Hypothesis argued, women denied tenure were far too fetching for their own good.

Recall that attractive young women who spurned advances from senior colleagues would be vulnerable, but such is a different hypothesis.

Crone-hypothesizers must know, however, that tenure-rejections were less about fetching females than about Stepin Fetchit. Attractive but accommodating women got tenure and promotions. Not particularly attractive but particularly accommodating women got tenure and promotions. The Crone Hypothesis, thus, mistook a spurious subset for the general relation. The Crone Hypothesis was always more about disappointed and disappointing males disparaging females for their looks than about explaining thuggery.

He who quite occasionally despises thuggery attacks the looks of female thugs. How convenient.

No, a more persuasive if incomplete explanation follows from what one victim of thuggery called "The Asshole Clause." "The Asshole Clause" abased all of its deployers, females more than males. Let us see how.

Excellence in teaching and professional growth aside, in the 1980s and 1990s candidates for tenure had to manifest "personal and professional characteristics" lest they be rebuffed. The Faculty Code explicitly demanded that evaluees "possess" qualities that promised to make them personable and professional for decades to come. In practice, this standard for decorum and congeniality was deployed when decision-makers wanted to deny tenure [or other rewards] to candidates who too evidently had met academically and intellectually appropriate criteria.

Really? How could awarding tenure according to congeniality lead to women who obstruct or injure other women?

In the view of most academics, "personal and professional characteristics" must be anathema. To self-respecting scholars, any evaluator who would deny tenure to an otherwise qualified evaluee owing to "personal and professional characteristics" would degrade himself or herself and the process of evaluation. Indeed, "The Asshole Clause" was what most sets of standards and criteria were designed to deny. What other schools tried to fend off as a calumny, this school enunciated as a calling card.

Simply explain The Asshole Clause to colleagues from elsewhere. They only half-believe that such a standard could have been explicit. They concede that such considerations taint tenure decisions everywhere. They cannot believe that any school announced it. "That seems like an invitation to litigation."

Lo it was that, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], evaluators were expected to embrace and to enforce what most institutions denied: that personality, docility, obedience, and deference were expected of junior faculty who wanted to retain their positions.

Our musical interlude -- "I've Become Accustomed to Disgrace" from "My Fair Lady"

Worse, personality, docility, obedience, and deference were qualities gendered in application if not in conception. Male faculty might be colorful, skeptical, rambunctious, and independent without threatening or upsetting the old boars who ran the school. Females lacking in orthodoxy or orthopraxy were improper, unladylike, bitchy, or prickly. Traditional, quiet, submissive females might be dismissed and derided, but females who challenged men would be targeted. Women who made themselves useful to men would be favored. Women who showed men up would be fired.

Rogues who objected to sexual misconduct were especially dangerous and instantly targets.

Intelligent maidens who became academic "maid men" under this gendered system did not much care to acknowledge how they had become responsible, respectable, reliable colleagues, so they had to erase acknowledgement of their own humiliation and subjugation by valorizing the system of faculty evaluation and by humiliating, subjugating, and firing junior faculty who would not submit to degradation rituals.

Encounter anew, please, my entry from 4 March 2007 in this blog. Males or females who craved a reputation for respectability, reliability, and responsibility had to degrade themselves all the while praising the degradation. They still do, readers. This Stockholm Syndrome is not peculiar to Puget Clowns but is endemic and ongoing.

When the faculty in 1994-1995 moved to delete "The Asshole Clause" from the code, many of those who had imposed that clause defended it assiduously. Even among the women, this was understandable. Women who had fired women for being uppity and women who had attained their decision-making positions by being obsequious could not have been expected to acknowledge their subservience, their opportunism, and their supple spines. Instead, like Winston Smith at the close of 1984, they loved Big Brother -- or proclaimed that they did for so long that it became true.

Is a colleague -- male or female -- regaling the faculty with professions of commitment to equality or justice? Ask "How much of whose blood is this professor trying to wash away?"

Now, some women destined for the WAWA leadership went further. Some so identified with their trainers and their trainers' values that they had long since incorporated patriarchy into their psyches. Their patina of feminist sensibilities disguised their willingness or longing to please the Old Boys as some women became more Old Boy than the old boys were. By the time I arrived on campus, then, many self-proclaimed [yet male-derided] "feminists" extolled and executed orthodoxy and orthopraxy all while denying that the process was gendered at all. Long since having submitted, they saw submission not as surrender but transcendence. They were apparatchiks, defined in this blog [4 March 2007] as those beneath the level of Vice President who collaborate with administrators and justify decisions.

Not long ago, a male colleague wanted to deny what a female denied tenure had said about advancement at this school. "You cannot map gender onto everything," he told me. That phrase is clown-talk. On campus it means "You cannot notice any use of gender that I'd prefer not to acknowledge," which soon enough amounts to "You cannot map gender onto anything." [Please see other tlansrations in the entry at 19 October 2007 in this blog.]

Even so, not all socialization into the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] was gendered. Some was general, which made submission and surrender seem less gendered. To advance, tyros female or male had to voice their agreement with policies; had to honor traditions, myths, and rituals; and had to master local newspeak and doubletalk. Male and female at first acted as if they believed so that they would not be disreputable and vulnerable. Soon enough, they did believe. Worse, they forgot what it was not to believe. Tenured and promoted, these women and men were no longer at Puget Clowns. They had become Puget Clowns.

Recall a twice-told tale: The single leader of WAWA perhaps most instrumental to the demise or detriment of women on this campus was walking away from a faculty meeting with a female colleague when she waved toward me and said that I'd never get tenure at this campus because I mouthed off at faculty meetings. She was on the FAC that recommended me for tenure but not the woman she was talking to. Interesting coincidence?

Norman Bates had to deny his matricide; so too those who had to disgrace themselves to get tenure had to deny the disgrace by which they secured permanent employment. Who could deny the disgrace if assertive, candid, loud-mouthed, threatening, disruptive females were parading about campus? Better that such women not torment the maid men by their presence.

Observe and mark well women who are touted for service to this university, for employment at the University of Puget Clowns once demanded especially from women service qua SubsERVIenCE.

Who will join "Women Against Women's Advancing" next?

?

?

?

At Least One Senator Tried

Amid bad faith and cynical evasions, the incoming chair of the senate offers hope.

After Randall P. McMurphy tried but failed to lift a heavy machine, he offered a resounding phrase in the screenplay to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:"

"But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that." http://sfy.r/?script=one_flew

I rehearsed that phrase several times in my head in an attempt to calm down before a report to the Faculty Senate last Monday [10 May 2010]. The always wily, always deceptive Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had reported via one of its six chairs. See "The Persistence of Blather" [11 December 2009] and "O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here" [immediately previous entry in this blog, 24 April 2010].

The incoming Chair of the Faculty Senate, in his capacity as mere senator, had asked whether the FAC might move to change the Bylaws [one chair] to match FAC practice [six allegedly co-equal chairs]. He said that he preferred adjusting the Bylaws to circumventing the Bylaws. A novel notion that! Yes, we could follow the rules and, if we would not follow the rules, change the rules so that they resemble our practice.

The feckless, accommodating, thankfully outgoing chair of the Faculty Senate produced a communication from the FAC in which the FAC updated its deceptions and evasions. Does any member of the faculty remember when we had a Faculty Senate Chair who was not supine?

The member of the FAC presenting the report declined to pursue such a change. It would be unsual for a member of the FAC to take a straight path to any object or to acknowledge the authority of the faculty or the senate!

Then, in a usurpation that would have been merely hilarious were it not so pathetic and fatuous, the spokesperson attempted to "charge" the incoming chair to change the Bylaws himself. Ya gotta love FAC logic. A senator attempting to induce the FAC to follow the rules is asked to serve the FAC by changing rules that the FAC is content to flout.

Then senators were regaled with a flagrant misreading of a passage in the Bylaws that, if one were unfamiliar with standard English, might fool a dull sophomore. But let's keep it positive: how many FAC members have failed of our expectations for dull sophomores?

Rather than in anger, how might I respond to such vaudeville?

Shall I repeat "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown?"

Shall I rejoice that the spokesperson for the FAC wore flame-resistant pants amid her rendering of the Bylaws?

Shall I remind myself that many members of the FAC could not have found the meeting?

Shall I rebuke the faculty anew for electing to the FAC colleagues of so little credibility or ability?

Nope. Nope. Nope. And nope.

Shall I rejoice that the incoming chair of the Faculty Senate will not subvert the rules or suborn those who do?

Yep.

At least he tried.

God damn it! At least the new chair did that.

Amid the loons, one sane senator spoke truth to a Power Committee.

At the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], that is a miracle.

On the other hand, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], loons run the asylum.

Let's see if the new chair will be leader or loon.

Can he do much worse than his predecessors?

O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here

Why do we let "souls undone undoing others" on the Faculty Advancement Committee preach at naifs?

A member of the faculty for almost two years went to a meeting with erstwhile members of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] to hear their advice for faculty who will undergo their third-year assistant professor review, the first full-scale assessment of their teaching, service, professional growth, and likableness. She learned so much that she returned to her department asking if one really cannot have an open file for tenure.

Well played, FAC authorities! The faculty have in this century made ONE change regarding tenure files, and you clowns managed to fuzz it up so that a PhD walks away from "mentoring" confused about a matter that she understood correctly when she entered the room. And you teach for a living?

That some former members of the FAC push closed files cannot surprise us. Members of the FAC have complained that since 2005 -- when candidates for tenure were permitted to select an open file -- letter-writers have been guarded in their assessments. [Can't have guarded letters. Calumnies provide the FAC "complete" information.] Now FAC emeriti instruct virgins that closed files are truly advisable. Maybe the "sophomore" who spoke to me misunderstood, but how coincidental that she misunderstood in a manner that suited the view of some FAC conspirators of recent years. And what a coincidence that, according to one or more attendees, each FAC veteran present indicated a strong preference for closed files.

To get, through deception of the uninformed and unwary, what they cannot get through meetings of the faculty, will closed-minded FAC bunko artists stop at nothing?

I do not blame the selected FAC alums alone. I also blame the decision-maker(s) who selected these closed-minded FAC alums for this forum. More important, I blame faculty who larded the FAC with fatheads. Those who have made careers from duping naifs in classrooms can scarcely be expected to develop new skills and proclivities once appointed to the FAC. When we faculty nominate shuckers and jivers to the FAC, we enable blatherers to bamboozle the gullible.

Not content to muddle through evaluation of personnel for three years or less, the few, the proud, the cloying suffuse campus with their baleful blarney even after their terms have ended.

Once deceivers and believers make the FAC, misdirection and bad faith become part of the way of working if not the way of life. The bylaws require the FAC to appoint one chair; the members of the FAC knowingly ignored the bylaws for years, then engaged in the subterfuge of naming every member of the FAC chair. This flouting too may be blamed in part on the faculty, for the Faculty Senate knows that the FAC is rejecting a mandate for which they do not care. Chairs of the Faculty Senate and senators do nothing about it.

But of course colleagues pretend to believe the FAC when the FAC says it assiduously adheres to authority.

On the FAC colleagues exemplify Orwell's proposition that the great enemy of clarity is insincerity. Like essays from desultory students, FAC letters celebrate murk and sloppiness as if they were virtues. Euphemistic encomia laud for their excellent professional growth evaluees with no professional growth but friends on the FAC or patrons in high places. Disfavored evaluees find their students' evaluations categorized in ways obviously at variance with the most straightforward readings to conjure an "excellence gap" in teaching. [Why should the FAC limit its bad faith to readings of the code or the bylaws?] The FAC then stonewalls the president on the rare occasions when he troubles himself to inquire into their "reasoning" and why it makes little sense.

Thus do "made men" unmake themselves.

None of the above should surprise anyone who has been at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] for even a few years.

As a prior entry in "Rump Parliament" [1-14-10] counseled, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

What may surprise even jaded veterans, however, is just how doltish FAC parolees can be. Did a recent member of the FAC truly say that he advises colleagues to select closed files for the same reason that he advises his students to waive access to letters of recommendation? He claimed that he tells faculty and student alike that readers take confidential letters more seriously, did he?

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Please permit me to advise Dr. Dumkopf about colleagues and about students/advisees in turn.

Favoring or disfavoring colleagues because they selected open or closed files flouts the Faculty Code. If one makes a habit of violating the code, I suppose that admitting violations forthrightly is more virtuous than concealing one's misdemeanors.

As for advisees or students, counsel your recommendees to waive their right to see the letter, then give them copies. That way, you protect your students and advisees both against the prejudices of the closed-minded and against any temptations to write what you would just as soon the subject of the letter not know you wrote. If you would not have your advisee or student read it, do not write it; if you must write what you would not have your student or advisee read, do not agree to write "for" the student or advisee.

Why do the simplest professional and ethical puzzles stymie the simple-minded?

I admit readily that the FAC might advise naifs to go with a closed file for their first FAC evaluation. That is one way to smoke out the assassins in the ranks of a program, department, or school. If mentors communicated that stratagem clearly and repeatedly, they might assist tyros.

However, if we advise newcomers to choose closed files to elicit negatives while probationary faculty may remedy defects real or concocted, wouldn't probationary faculty immediately infer that come tenure time they must select open files to be able to counter negatives that dissemblers will pour into the process?

Beyond that, junior colleagues should seek colleagues with reputations for candor and awareness and should neither seek nor accept mentoring from the apologists or apparatchiks. How are inexperienced faculty to sort apologists or apparatchiks from candid and aware veterans? They should inquire of those who proffer advice the capacities in which they have served the university. Apologists and apparatchiks do not work for free. They work for patrons who sanction negatively or positively. Colleagues frequently appointed over the years to positions of responsibility owing to their reputations for reliability have, in effect, been outed by their appointers. [Re-read "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" in this blog, 4 March 2007.] Many who have done time on the FAC are seldom or never paraded before junior faculty because of the likelihood that they will commit candor or acknowledge truths inconvenient for the powerful.

Joanne Herring: "Why is Congress saying one thing and doing nothing?"
Charlie Wilson: "Well, tradition mostly."

Naifs: "Why do so many members of the FAC advise faculty so poorly?"
Wild Bill: "Well, tradition mostly."

Third-year assistant professors should never listen to FAC members who are ignorant of "local" presuppositions, habits, or traditions. The FAC members will argue for stripped-down files because that makes the work of the FAC easier. They are prosecuting their own lassitude and preserving their own latitude. Having counseled evaluees to "keep it simple," members of the FAC will then sniff that the code explicitly burdens evaluees with making the case for advancement and will resolve silences or gaps against those who have listened to FAC advice.

"And you'll be amazed at the gaze / On their faces as they sentence you"

Rather, preparation of the newbie's file should be informed by the newbie's "local" culture, peers in department, program, or school. The third-year assistant should ask those who will supply specialized, expert assessments what those evaluators would prefer to be available.

Don't tell anybody, but the members of the FAC read only a small subset of submitted materials anyway.

Oh? The FAC members did not make that tidbit clear while urging skinny files?

I am shocked and amazed!

Sunshine Thugs

Are you a Sunshine Thug?

Our colleague is a Sunshine Thug. He may even be The Sunshine Thug.

The Sunshine Thug beams to see me as he asks me how my life is going. The Sunshine Thug's face shines on everyone most of the time. The Sunshine Thug radiates diffidence about his own competence as a means of suggesting that whomever he speaks with is a far better member of the faculty than he.

Do not be taken in! The pleasantries are mannered rather than truly civil or cordial. His sunshine is shtick.

If his betters close a door and grant Dr. Sunshine confidentiality, his dark side will come out. If it nets him a course release, he'll support a decision to push you down a well. Give him a title, no matter how trivial, then watch him dispatch his good friends, his cherished colleagues, his longtime department, or anyone else if it might please those who can grant him favors or save him bother. Smiling all the while and professing to be uncertain what has happened or why, this Mack the Knife flashes his shark teeth as he fingers the blade out of sight.

Having alluded to Bertolt Brecht, I am uncertain whether I now should steal from Edmond Rostand. Rostand has his hero Cyrano denounce some Sunshine Thugs. These folks "seek for the patronage of some great man, and like a creeping vine on a tall tree, crawl upward, where [they] cannot stand alone ..." Clinging to the lofty, Sunshine Thugs "... play the buffoon in the vile hope of teasing out a smile on some cold face ..." and make their "knees callous, and cultivate a supple spine ... ." Shaded by their patrons and protectors, the Sunshine Thugs "[t]ickle the horns of Mammon with [their] left hand, while their right, too proud to know his partner's business, takes in the fee ..." Betraying whatever smidgeon of talent they may have and usually do not need, Sunshine Thugs "[u]se the fire God gave [them] to burn incense all day long under the nose of wood and stone ..." even as they burn vulnerable colleagues out of the sight of most colleagues. In sum, Rostand/de Bergerac might say that Sunshine Thugs "[c]alculate, scheme, [live in fear], love more to make a visit than a poem, seek introductions, favors, influences..." all while acting the part of the affable, slightly daffy academic too distracted to have any part in dastardly deeds in which they play a prominent but latent part.

Shall I invoke Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, MN, instead?

You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning

You got a lotta nerve
To say you gota helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that's winning

...

You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, "How are you?" "Good luck"
But you don't mean it

When you know as well as me
You'd rather see me paralyzed
Why don't you just come out once
And scream it

...

If in public you praise excrement as excellence while in private you serve anyone who can do you any good or any harm, you may be a Sunshine Thug. If you loudly, proudly endorse independence even as you punish independents in any circumstance that hides your other face, you may be a Sunshine Thug. If you are craven in the shadows but gay in the daylight, you may be a Sunshine Thug.

Please do not be a Sunshine Thug.

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.

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.

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.