Quo Warranto?

By what authority did the Starr Chamber proceed?

My immediately previous entry in "Rump Parliament" -- for senior faculty, that is the blog you are presently reading -- recalled that the Professional Standards Committee of 2003-2004 [always designated "The Starr Chamber" in this blog but only sometimes "the Professional Standards Cult"] was the worst Faculty Senate committee in my nearly 25 years at this university.

Below I list some reasons why I single out The Starr Chamber for dishonor. I do not list all of the missteps and misprisions of the Starr Chamber below.

In each instance below, I ask whence The Starr Chamber derived its authority. I tried to ask members of the Starr Chamber directly and indirectly, but they spurned me repeatedly. The Senate tried to bring these renegades to account, but the renegades did not care to explain themselves and an ad hoc committee colluded with the renegades to cover up the Starr Chamber's record. On another ad hoc committee four senators courageously noted some of the Starr Chamber's shortcomings; the only answer on behalf of the Starr Chamber came from one senator who relentlessly defended the Starr Chamber as acting other authority higher than The Faculty Code. [This dogged, mulish defender did not specify what higher authority he was invoking. I guess that higher authority is confidential.]

My abbreviated list:

The Starr Chamber took over the evaluation of a member of the faculty and directed a departmental evaluation. Whence did The Starr Chamber get the authority to involve itself in any department’s evaluation?

The Starr Chamber set aside recommendations of a formal hearing board. What discernible authority in The Faculty Code or the by-laws permitted the Professional Standards Cult [PSC] such sway?

When the chair of the hearing board protested The Starr Chamber’s takeover of the evaluation, a member of the hearing board not only mocked his stammering but threatened any member of the hearing board who discussed the remedy directed by the hearing board with anyone except the Professional Standards Cult. Is "contempt of PSC" authorized somewhere aside from the febrile mind of this or that tyrant?

The Starr Chamber, informed that it was overruling a hearing board by inverting the remedies that the hearing board had directed, declared that the hearing board had expired the moment the hearing board issued its directives. Where does the code say that? Was this a formal interpretation? If so, why wasn't the Faculty Senate informed and why weren't the trustees asked to approve? Was this an informal interpretation?

The Starr Chamber declared the hearing board to have completed its work despite the fact that the hearing board had held no hearing. The Faculty Code prescribes that hearing boards conduct hearings before making determinations and directing remedies. The Starr Chamber overruled The Faculty Code based on what higher authority?

Starr Chamber heard a formal grievance almost 60 days after that grievance reached the committee. The Faculty Code allows the PSC 15 days. The Starr Chamber overruled The Faculty Code based on what authority?

The Starr Chamber “interpreted” The Faculty Code to demand that the PSC hear a formal grievance within 15 “working” days rather than the 15 days explicit in the code itself. The Starr Chamber reported this “interpretation” to no one – not the grievant, not the respondent, not The Faculty Senate. Square that with the bylaws or the code, if you will.

Having reinterpreted the code to excuse the tardiness of The Starr Chamber, the committee then convened the grievance hearing more than 15 working days after the committee had received the formal grievance. Yep! The Starr Chamber concocted "15 working days" to excuse the PSC's tardiness, then dallied past its re-imagined code. It seems that for some of its decisions, even the Starr Chamber could not imagine authority.

The Starr Chamber then entertained a grievance that the grievance itself showed to have exceeded the 30 working days allotted by the code. Quo warranto, tyranni et tyrannae?

Having decided against the grievant, The Starr Chamber then issued a report to the President that criticized and characterized the respondent harshly. The Faculty Code authorizes the PSC to condemn anyone whom it chooses?

The President shared the report of The Starr Chamber with grievant and respondent because The Starr Chamber decided that The Faculty Code did not permit or allow The Starr Chamber to share its report with either party to the grievance. The Starr Chamber had shared its report immediately with grievant and respondent in a grievance earlier in that very academic year [2003-2004]. One or the other interpretation might be consistent with the code. It is hard to see how both could be. I am certain the fact that a member of the PSC was the respondent -- the person grieved -- in the first grievance had nothing to do with the differential treatment.

Has this list suggested one reason why the Professional Standards Cult had, over the years and the deans, invoked various sorts of confidentiality not to be found in The Faculty Code or elsewhere?

Do you now see why the staunchest senatorial defender of the Starr Chamber cited only double-secret authority higher than the code?

Did I just pose rhetorical questions?

Quo warranto? By what authority?

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses VII

To

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

let us now add the leadership of a rogue committee:

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

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Explanation 7 -- Authoritarian Personalities

.....

..Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde:

misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb,

zu strafen, mächtig ist!

But thus do I counsel you, my friends:

distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

.......

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

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

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?
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

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

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?

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.

Haltom's Fourth Law: If it does not fit, use a larger hammer

Expect Procrustean thinking wherever you turn.


The same Ballard Vietnam vet who tended to repeat "Don't mean nothing" was prone to "If it don't fit, use a bigger hammer." Son of a Swedish carpenter and adept at home repair, Mike disparaged those so given to impatience and brute force that their repairs tended to make matters worse. On the other hand, Mike might have pondered why German carpenters call deep impressions made when hammers missed nails "Swedish dimples."

Not restricted to shoddy repairers or volcanic vets, Haltom's Fourth Law mocks all partisans of "I want it to be so; therefore, it is so" methodologies. Haltom's Fourth Law parodies the Procrustean.

At a glance one surmises why Haltom's Fourth Law should hold true. We each know dozens of folks capable of Procrustean thinking. Some are flat-out practiced at bricolage to "verify" what they fervently wish were true. Each of us knows few who are capable of Promethean thinking, so it cannot suprise us that Procrustean thinkers greatly outnumber Promethean thinkers. We each have friends or colleagues who will stake a claim and defend it long past the point at which anyone could believe the nonsense, so we realize that the Procrustean greatly outnumber the candidly perplexed and vastly outnumber the Promethean. The plurality of Procrustean "thinkers" is what Haltom's Fourth Law memorializes.

We see it around the University of Puget Clowns all too often. A colleague who has never uttered an intellectual thought and could never publish anything the least bit intellectual laments that since a certain administrator left, "the intellectual climate has declined." The lamenter knows that not one colleague in one hundred could suggest suitable measures by which such a decline might be measured or tested. Indeed, that is why the lament is risk-free. No matter what information one might marshal, the lamenter will parry the information as somehow suspect and will reiterate that the intellectual climate is poorer. Most colleagues will not press the lamenter over such empty blather, for they realize that the blather dresses up the true source of displeasure: the lamenter enjoyed some largesse from the prior administrator that has not been forthcoming from current administrators. The lamenter should be taken as seriously as we took Ronald Reagan when he attributed declining math scores to the absence of school prayer.

Expect Procrustean excess in peer evaluation, especially when such lamenters serve on the FAC [as, being false-positives, almost all of them will]. Every anecdote or observation may exemplify one's prejudices if only one is agile, shameless, and relentless.

At the departmental level, suppose you observed a colleague who did not do in a situation what you are confident that you would have done. If the colleague is vulnerable and you are invulnerable, pummel the sucker! After all, you know yourself to be the perfect judge of all classroom situations. What you would have done is the best thing to have done. The vulnerable evaluee frittered away a golden opportunity to follow your lead. What lousy teaching!

Or suppose you are on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and learn that one or more administrators opposed hiring an evaluee and that people in power don't like the evaluee. Time to concoct some vague, abstract failing that is ineluctable because ineffable. Subsume every negative on students' evaluations under some rubric that you cannot quite articulate. Claim that you know it when you see it. You must not define the great, generalized flaw, of course, for then it would be too obvious that most students crammed into the "Category that has no Name" did not mean what you are mistaking their comments to indicate. Just refer to assorted parts as if they constituted a discrete, valid failing. Most members of the FAC cannot spell or detect synecdoche or metonymy, so no one will call you on wholly Procrustean amalgams. And you'll please administrators behind the cover of confidentiality.

In faculty meetings, our Procrustean colleagues husband anecdota and apocrypha the way Ballard youth brandished "Ford persuaders" and whacked engines until the engines resumed [barely] running. One Puget Clowns colleague suggested that faculty tend to follow the advice of Red Green: "Any tool can be the right tool," but I have stuck with the metaphor of the hammer to preserve the subtlety with which colleagues at faculty meetings pound large square pegs into tiny round holes. Many is the faculty meeting during which someone has tried to force a four-by-four through the holes in peg board. When the peg board gives way, many colleagues exclaim, "We have a perfect fit!"

This is not to claim that all administrators have used sledge hammers to run faculty meetings. President Phibbs and Dean Davis fixed faculty tools around some top-down orthodoxy and orthopraxy, then let the credulous [merely 90-95% of the faculty] attribute policies and practices to governance. The Phibbs-Davis team brought down Thor's hammer when they had to, but they seldom had to because they were so adept at selecting, using, and [usually] rewarding the right faculty tools for the right jobs and because they were so adept with needles, nails, screws, and surgical instruments.

By contrast, President Pierce was so maladroit at "leading" faculty that she frequently and publicly had to resort to sledge hammers and jack hammers. The faculty were fortunate that, for some reason, she usually missed her targets. Maybe it was a vision thing.

Pierce violated the Faculty Code to sell the law school, then stonewalled the Faculty Senate and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] when they raised her violations. She then spun laughable yarns about what had happened. Frustrated at the ability of Senate Chair Walter Lowrie and the PSC to read the Code [Yikes! Once the PSC was replete with literates!], Pierce and her new dean tried to recruit incoming faculty at "Rookie Camp" in 1994. They plied newbies with the claim that Pierce and her team wanted to upgrade the university but were obstructed by an old guard. One need not be a seer to foretell the fates of rookies who believed Pierce and her dean. The reputations of some of the first-years barely outlasted the lunch at "Rookie Camp" when UPS veterans were grilled about why they were thwarting Pierce's brave, new world. Some of the first-years were gone before the new dean was sacked! In sum, Pierce wielded big hammers to get her way but tended to brain her allies rather than to clobber her opponents. [Of course, hitting one of her few supporters was a much tougher feat than nailing her many detractors, so I should show some respect for her markspersonship.]

President Pierce and her deans eventually flourished a hammer suited to their arrogance: administrative prerogative. During the Pierce presidency, administrators all too often escalated to that sledge hammer when they did not get their way with consultation, conversation, or cajoling. The class schedule that Puget Clowns uses at present was run by the Academic Standards Committee and the Faculty Senate multiple times, but it found few if any takers. The administrators could neither persuade nor entice faculty to agree to the new scheme, so the then-dean declared that scheduling, long thought to be part of faculty prerogative with respect to curriculum, was in fact subject to administrative ukase. Tlansration: We tried to woo the faculty, but the faculty spurned us, so now we have moved to the famed "My way or the highway" syllogism.

Exhuberant over getting their way, Pierce's administrators decided that furnishings and arrangements in Wyatt Hall were not matters for consultation with faculty who would occupy the offices but were matters meet for the administrative prerogative hammer. When students, staff, and faculty questioned the headstones and electronic signs that popped up around campus, a subaltern did not deign to discuss such matter. Administrative prerogative made administrators deciders of such things, we all were told.

At faculty meetings, in committee meetings, and in departmental meetings, then, expect Procrustes to run the inn. Prometheus -- whose name means foresight -- is usually absent, chained to his desk or to a barstool and beset by various vultures masquerading as eagles around Jones Hall. Administrators follow Prometheus's brother Epimetheus -- hindsight -- in hammering students, staff, and faculty even when administrators might prevail through discourse or dialogue.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Fifth Law: "No one who whistles in public can."

Haltom's Laws

Haltom's First Law helps to sort things and persons out.

"Rump Parliament" turns now to rationalization of Haltom's laws. I have formulated various norms over the last 35 years. Some of my norms posit behavioral regularities based on my perverse interpretations of observations and experiences. Other norms prescribe how I aspire to live or ought to live. I have adapted many of these "laws" from the adages or apothegms of others. As far as I recall, some originate with me. I propose to enumerate my behavioral or normative laws so that I can keep track of what I "know."

My first law expresses misanthropy and/or futility -- "F**k them/it/me/this."

This first law is misanthropic in that I mean it to misstate slightly Kipling’s famed advice -- all men count with me but none too much. When I say "F**k them" or "F**k 'em," I mean to dismiss some person(s) as unworthy of concern or solicitude. More polite formulations of this usage might include "Life is too short to worry about this fellow" or "Why concern yourself with such a person?" Perhaps Rick Nelson came the closest to a denotation of Haltom's First Law in his song “Garden Party:” “You can’t please everyone so you got to please yourself.”

I derived my first law from the cliché "F**k him if he can’t take a joke." I complemented that old saw. If he or she can take a joke now, he or she will not be able to take a joke later, so why not f**k him or her now and get it over with? The sooner one turns one's attention and energies from someone who will fritter them away, the sooner one will have attention and energy for those who might profit from one's regard.

Hence, when confronted with whining, misplaced entitlement, or other resentments, I draw on my Ballard upbringing: I exclaim "Uff da!" and move on. I think but usually do not say, "F**k 'em." A variation on this melody recalls my buddy from Far Rockaway who could say "F**k you" as if each word had multiple syllables. And, of course, one might emulate Vice President Cheney's suggestion that Senator Leahy have sexual congress with himself.

When I say "F**k it" rather than "F**k them," I mean that some matter [rather than some person] lies beneath my regard. "To hell with it" would work as well, I suppose, but would not be as pithy. "F**k it" dismisses matters from my mind. It assigns some thing to that 98% of all incidents or issues best forgotten.

"F**k me" I got from Clint Eastwood's film "The Gauntlet." Clint's character lifts a shade and sees dozens of guns and gunmen outside the shack he is in. He exclaims, "F**k me!" That is a little more graphic than "I am a dead man" or "Holy Mother of God!" Still, like "F**k it," "F**k me" expresses the all too common futility of life or situations.

A colleague in 2007 exemplified the use of "f**k this" to express futility. He became exasperated with maneuvers to prevent senators from acknowledging the simplest truths about the Professional Standards Cult [PSC]. Recalcitrant or cowardly senators were engaged in implausible denials, in disinformation that demeaned the Senate as well as the cult [and demeaning the PS Cult is no mean feat!], and in excuses that would shame Bill Clinton. Amid the disingenuous, the deceptive, and the daffy, one senator exclaimed, "F**k this!" and picked up his stuff and left. Some senators pronounced themselves offended [see Haltom's Eighth Law]. Perhaps the most Pecksniffian senator decried the remark as lacking civility. He had a good point: The civil thing to do would have been to condone evasions and occlusions and to avoid admitting that a rogue committee had misbehaved repeatedly. Still, whatever this invocation of Haltom's First Law lacked in civility it made up in honesty. The senator meant, I believe, that the proceedings were a waste of his and the senate's time. That senator complied with Haltom's first law without being aware of it, I think.

So, when colleagues are conniving in some manner that demeans all present, quietly repeat to yourself variations of Haltom's First Law. When colleagues dissemble in committee-work, write on a pad that no one else can see, "F**k them." When faculty meetings again devolve into self-serving badinage, pick up your papers and walk out of the room, stopping to whisper, "F**k this!" to a colleague who can be trusted. When yet another email invites you to throw good time after bad, feel free to say behind a closed door, "F**k it." The alternative is to awaken amid the "Fall Faculty Non-Conversation" screaming, "F**k me!" That might be uncivil.


Coming Soon: Haltom's Second Law! "It Doesn't Mean Nothing."

Year-End Review -- 2007

2007 brought the faculty and the university some welcome developments.



In 2007 the University of Puget Clowns gave some signs of improving on the master intellectual of our age, Yogi Berra. As we slouch toward 2008, let us remember some advances of the last year.

“You can observe a lot by watching,” Yogi is reputed to have said. At the University of Puget Clowns, “You can learn a bit by reading.” On 17 April 2007, a lawyer for the uni­ver­sity read the Faculty Code to assembled PhDs. She uncovered the startling truth that “personal and professional characteristics” [hereafter, P&PC] became an illicit criterion for tenure after the faculty and trustees banned P&PC from the criteria for tenure. [Please review “E is for Etiquette,” posted 20 April 2007 in this blog, for some details of the facul­ty meeting.] Many faculty who struggled to prevent removal of P&PC from the Faculty Code proceeded in the ensuing dozen years as if P&PC were still available. Now that faculty have been informed that they open the university to liability if they invoke P&PC obviously, we may expect them to hide their use of P&PC behind official criteria. Like Yogi, these recalcitrants remain convinced that the faculty didn’t really say every­thing they said.

Moroever, this year our own Professional Standards Committee [PSC] concluded that the text of the Faculty Code might be an excellent starting point for interpretation of the Faculty Code. This means that the current PSC, too, came to believe that one could learn a lot by reading, a proposition that would not seem very newsworthy at a liberal arts college. I take this for evidence that, as Yogi put it, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” A PSC read the code literally, and, having concluded that the literal words of the code disposed of an issue, told the Dean that she could not circumvent the code. No other reading of the code would have been plausible, but that did not stop the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004. [Please review “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007, and “Yo-Yo Motions,” posted 25 March 2007, to see how the Professional Standards Cult of 2003-2004 ginned up alternatives to following directives in the code.]


If 2007 brought us a PSC that would behave legitimately, might a licit Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] be not so far in our future? Yogi would counsel us that “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” The Faculty Senate, especially Senator Emerita Juli McGruder, have for years pestered the FAC to obey the bylaws, which require the appointment of a chair as the first order of business of every faculty senate committee. Deans loathe reminders that the FAC is formally a committee of the Faculty Senate and of the faculty. It’s so much more expedient to preserve the tradition that the FAC operates as it – and often as the Dean – pleases. Pessimists may insist that “It's deja vu all over again” in that the FAC has yet to appoint a chair as the bylaws demand. Let’s have some New Year cheer: some senators give every evidence of insisting that the FAC cannot flout the rules and ex­pect faculty to believe that the FAC follows rules when it does not care to. The Faculty Senate, long a “big clog” in the UPS machine [as Yogi said of Ted Williams and the Red Sox], has spoken simple, literal truth to the FAC. That’s progress!

In another sign of progress, last February the Faculty Senate by one vote acknowledged recent mal­feasance and nonfeasance by university decision-makers. Yogi explained the Yankees’ loss to Pittsburgh in the 1960 World Series: “We made too many wrong mistakes;” the Senate by the thinnest of margins acknowledged errors. Senator Ostrom framed a resolu­tion so minimized as to be laughable whereby the senate would take responsibility for mistakes made by a recumbent senate and a rogue committee in 2003-2004. No one expected even that too little to pass. Once a secret ballot was called for, however, seven senators con­ceded what every informed, honest member of the faculty knew: “Mistakes were made.” Acknowledging the undeniable seems negligible to those unfamiliar with more than three years of denials, rationalizations, and untruths by which decisions and processes were defended. Those in the know, however, are aware of just how hard it has been to get decision-makers and their apologists to concede the indisputable. Maybe future committees and senates will make fewer wrong mistakes. That could lead to accountability to the faculty.

Decades of deficient accountability have made 2007 seem like a continuation of faculty woes, but there is at least one more bit of good news. The faculty’s silent, unorganized, persistent boycott of plenary meetings may also signify that more and more faculty see through farce and judge themselves too busy to attend. Yogi famously opined, “If the people don't want to come out to the ballpark, nobody's going to stop them.” So too with faculty. If faculty do not want to come to faculty meetings, you can’t stop them. Now if we can just get faculty to stay away from Fall Faculty “Conversations,” we may free minds by the dozens!

Q Stands for Quiescence

Convenient as it is to blame the docility and conformity of faculty on their having been "born, bought, or beaten," faculty go along with injustice and unfairness because it is just too much trouble to insist on truth and propriety.



So far this blog has ascribed the quietude of the faculty amid corruptions and injus­tices to competing responsibilities to family, research, or life. That may seem too polite an explanation. Indeed, the last three entries may incline reader and blogger alike to reconsider that polite verdict. How many times has each of us heard that faculty go along with in­jus­tices and chicanery because they are “born, bought, or beaten” into silence and sub­mission? Maybe it's not our fault!

It is our own fault. Let's see why "born, bought, or beaten" excuses accomplices' languor.

One problem with “born, bought, or beaten” is that it phrases as alternatives what in practice are sequential complements. Passive, quiescent colleagues tend to be born [that is, created through recruitment and socialization] then to be bought [that is, tenured, promoted, honored, and well paid] but only to be beaten [that is, penalized, disciplined, or spurned] if the breeding and buying of inertia and resignation succeed too little or too seldom. Administrators and apparatchiks cannot do all the work! They require accomplices to form an approving audience.

Faculty are born and bred to regard meekly going along with half-truths as the essence of professionalism [see the immediately previous entry in this blog]. Once a rambunctious graduate student in hot pursuit of truth has been “raised” to assume the position of sober professional craving a good reputation among peers but especially among superiors, the seeker of truth commits suicide [perhaps via Flavor Aid – Rev. Jim Jones did not dispense Kool-Aid] and becomes born again in the wonders and beliefs of the Puget Sound congregation. The baptism of hiring leads to confirmation through tenure as colleagues decide that someone has the personal and professional characteristics to fit in – which is to say, lacks the personal and professional wherewithal to be reasonably skeptical, critical, or sentient – rather than to impede injustice, to expose deceit, or to indulge in other impieties.

A congregant, believer, and accomplice having been born and bred, positive and negative sanctions reinforce ortho­doxy and orthopraxy. The roles of administrators and apparatchiks are obvious. The FAC enables raises, bestows awards, recommends tenure, and promotes accomplices, although quiet agnostics may survive when noisy infidels would perish. No less important, administrators and apparatchiks may withhold favors, moneys, and reappointments.

Peers and departments sometimes play crucial roles in assisting or obstructing decision-makers “above” the departmental level. Peers and departments look for, among other positives, a reputation for responsible criticism [that is, discovering not yet articulated arguments for what departmental elites have advocated] and demonstrated reliability [that is, predictable responses that serve departmental elites] as well as collegiality [that is, a willingness to commit or condone injustice in return for rewards]. More dysfunctional departments operate in a more defensive manner, ever watchful lest truth-tellers or whistle-blowers be rewarded or anointed. Truly dismal departments are quite bristly: negative sanctions descend on those who “unprofessionally” deconstruct departmental misbehavior.

“Born, bought, AND beaten” may seem to explain quiescence, but that formula misses the sheer expense involved in sanctions and socialization if faculty are the least bit aware or incredulous. Sooner or later all faculty learn of some injustice done in their name, or a faction that helped fire “those” women are “shocked! shocked!” when “their” women are similarly mistreated. The suddenly attentive and alert colleagues are neither reborn nor re-bought nor re-beaten, for such practices take time and work best behind the scenes. Instead, once and future accomplices are re-educated.

As we have seen often in entries of this blog, proce­dures for appeals exist to reassure all who are utterly ignorant of the facts that fairness has prevailed and that decisions are justified. Administrators and apparatchiks assure the temporarily discombobulated that only confidentiality keeps the insiders from demonstrating just how right their decisions were. Veteran accomplices join this chorus of nonsense, resounding hymns such as “When We Have Fired Folks, They Invariably Go On to Do Nothing” or "A Mighty Fortress is Our FAC."

Colleagues accept soothing twaddle because to do otherwise would require great efforts that would ultimately be unavailing. Worse, to admit that the Faculty Advancement Committee or the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or an administrator is misleading the faculty would be unpleasant and would mark one as lacking in civility. Why did an ad hoc committee learn about multiple acts of malfeasance by the PSC but avoid public documentation of such missteps so something might be done about them in the future? Perhaps they stifled themselves because accountability and candor might alienate colleagues and endanger reputations for reliability and responsibility. The safer course was to praise “forward looking” policies [almost none of which, quite predictably, have been discussed in the Faculty Senate or passed by the faculty] and to divert colleagues from corruption, deception, and dereliction in their governance.

“ … I always knew what the right path was.

Without exception, I knew, but I never took it.

You know why?

It was too damn hard.”

Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman

It’s also not pleasant, not cordial, not collegial, and not proper to speak truth to power, so lazy and depraved or scared and depressed faculty choose silence and impotence and thereby make themselves accomplices after the fact. Awareness of and familiarity with the actual conditions of one’s employment imperils tenured professionals as much as union apprentices if either is inclined to articulate what he or she sees or hears. To make the most obvious observations or deductions is in extremely poor taste and indicates a rotten attitude and perhaps a self-destructive tendency. To utter such observations in a forum supposedly designed for faculty self-governance reveals some deeply personal shortcoming and is therefore utterly unprofessional.

To get along, go along. The Emperor is not naked. He is wearing loafers.

Relax! If you knew what your betters knew, you'd see that they're right, so really there is no reason for you to look into the matter. The confidants cannot tell you what they did to whom or why, but if they could you would swell with admiration for their wisdom, so why not just swell with admiration now and skip the intermediate fact-finding?

Everything is alright. Pretend you are at another Fall Faculty Conversation. Blather and shibboleth waft to the rafters. You are mesmerized by the majesty of intellectual discourse when you eschew disruptive reason and discordant reflection. There are no problems except faculty who identify problems.

Pay no attention to the apparatchik behind the curtain.

The winged monkeys are merely dispensing justice.

Sip some more Lotus Flavor Aid.

Ain't intellectual life grand!

H is for Half-Assed

Between administrators and apparatchiks above and rank-and-file faculty below lie the tools and fools of the Faculty Senate.


Previous entries in this blog have covered the deceptions and delusions of rulers [e. g., administrators and apparatchiks] and the attention-deficit disorders of the ruled [except when more than $1.27 of their benefits or some empty praise focuses their appetites]. Between rulers and ruled the Faculty Senate occasionally surfaces: a dozen or so faculty perpetually in search of courage and purpose who perpetually content themselves with half-measures in service of their betters. Half-afraid and half-annoyed, the half-wits of the Senate form a halfway house of enablers always half a step from licking ass and faking aims.

The Senate meeting on 7 May 2007 revealed anew the canine pleasantries [see the entry on responsible, reputable, reliable faculty dogs] of senators. The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had flouted the Faculty Bylaws [hereafter, Bylaws] despite repeated notice from the Senate and elsewhere that the Bylaws mandate that each committee have a Chairperson. The FAC has no chair. It is fortunate for the FAC scofflaws, therefore, that the Faculty Senate has neither integrity nor intestinal fortitude.

The Chair of the Faculty Senate half-pusillanimously pandered that one passage of the Bylaws might be read to permit the FAC to report to the Senate despite its chairlessness. Good point, sir! If only O. J. Simpson had thought to point out how many Commandments do not proscribe murder!

Numerous senators reiterated their fidelity to the bylaws, then turned away from confrontation and retreated behind “Let’s make just this one exception for now.” Imagine that marines resembled faculty senators. “Semper fi!” would be replaced by “Semper flee!” “Gung ho!” would give way to “Gangway!” On the other hand, were the Faculty Senate the Marines, the United States would be out of Iraq: senators would have invaded Iceland in the first place and would have determined that occupying geysers was an important first step toward capturing the populace. "Today the spa; tomorrow space, the final frontier!"

The Academic Vice President [AVP] mumbled half-truths easily debunked by two veterans of the FAC, neither of whom cared or dared to point out that the interchangeability and equality of FAC members were truer by assumption than in actuality. One senator did note that such arguments, even if true, would be irrelevant. The Bylaws make no exceptions for committee Kum Ba Yah. The absence of an exception did not impress the AVP, who dismissed the rules as some "technicality." Yet another member of the Professional Standards Committee yet again transcends mere rules. As Peter Townshend might have put it, “Meet the new boss / The same as the old boss.”

All but two of the senators acknowledged what the Bylaws commanded, praised principle, and emulated Byron’s Julia: “And whispering 'I will ne'er consent' – consented.” Profiles in Porridge!

To summarize: the FAC continues ostensibly semi-cephalus; the Faculty Senate persists blissfully quasi-gonadal; the faculty suffer blindly pseudo-governing.


Next -- "I is for Inter-disciplinary" -- If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary.

G is for Guile

Rank-and-file faculty collude in fakery when they trust guileful communications.


The immediately previous entry in this blog argued that we faculty must assist fakery if various shams are to come off. The credulous among us are to an extent blameworthy, for if frauds concerned our own promotions or programs we each would be quick to de­con­struct ersatz communications. Concerning malfeasances and nonfeasances, we usually do not know because we do not want to know.

Even more blameworthy, however, are wily communicators, especially decision-makers who explain away or excuse their chicanery. It is a pity that colleagues become too caught up in their own careers, families, and affairs to be critical or even attentive. An expectation of lenient, lazy audiences for explanations and excuses has emboldened the guileful, who disrespect the analytic capacities of almost all faculty.

Consider a paragraph written by one or more members of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of the 2003-2004 academic year. That group responded to an empty motion barely passed by the Faculty Senate on 5 February 2007 within two weeks, a remarkable feat for a committee that could not hear a grievance within the 15 days that the Faculty Code mandates. [It was of course encouraging to learn that these colleagues could react quickly when they cared to.]


Given the passage of this motion, one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC. Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation. Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006. In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.

Let us consider each sentence in turn to reveal the guile of these special pleaders.


[1] “… one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC.”

Someone who read the minutes of 5 February 2007 – minutes not yet ap­proved and thus not yet available to senators, let alone to others – might presume that the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation, if that someone were ignorant of Senate meetings and minutes from 3 May 2004 to the present.

As respondents knew or should have known, the Senate had been stonewalled by those who endorsed the response. The Senate had appointed two ad hoc committees to investigate, among other matters, perfidies perpetrated by the PSC 2003-2004. One committee found – as any impartial, complete investigation would have to find – PSC violations of the Faculty Code. Members of the latter ad hoc committee witnessed the abuse of the first ad hoc committee by apologists and apparatchiks, which may account for why that committee’s report [October 2006] featured no findings.

The response thus reveals a tactic that the PSC has cunningly deployed for years: spin trivially true but utterly misleading. True, the Senate could be said never to have investigated PSC misprisions carefully. The Senate did not do so; two ad hoc committees appointed by the Senate did. True, the Senate had not found mistakes after a careful investigation; the Senate did so after two ad hoc committees had found mistakes [albeit that the second ad hoc committee did not issue explicit findings].

Maybe the respondents used “conclude” rather than “infer” or “assume” or other more apt terms because the respondents so routinely leapt to self-serving conclusions in 2003-2004 that they cannot imagine peers proceeding more systematically. [In fairness, the response may have been a rush job to which erstwhile members of the PSC gave too little thought. Usually, the PSC takes its time before reaching thoughtless interpretations and indefensible decisions.]


[2] “Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation.”

The key subterfuge of this second sentence has been debunked supra: the Senate conducted no such investigation but assigned two ad hoc committees to do so. The second ad hoc committee sought interveiws with members of the 2003-2004 PSC despite explicit warnings from two members of that committee to senators that confidentiality would prevent any member of the PSC from cooperating. [Recall from early entries in this blog that such statements are at best erroneous and, if members of the PSC are as familiar with the Faculty Code as they habitually claim, mendacious.]


[3] “Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006.”

This is a “nondenial denial,” the technique Ron Ziegler made famous in Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein lampooned in All the President’s Men. The respondents do not specify which allegations, if any, they believe to be the least bit inaccurate. They do not deny the allegations. Instead, they dispute the procedures by which a majority of senators came to hear and to believe the allegations. [One should not fault the response for its nondenial denials. Most if not all of Senator Ostrom’s allegations cannot plausibly be denied, as the failure of the response to specify even one example should reveal.]


[4] “In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events.”

One familiar with the PSC cannot but marvel at the chutzpah of the PSC in this fourth sentence. Members who unanimously flouted the Faculty Code and due process on multiple occasions in 2003-2004 now charge the Senate with failure(s) of due process. Members who have steadfastly stonewalled senators’ attempts to gather evidence or testimony complain that the Senate did not gather evidence from all parties. The very people most responsible for the Senate’s having to work around uncooperative, unaccountable colleagues blame the Senate for proceeding with what little they themselves left the Senate. The PSC kills its parents then pleads for mercy because it is now an orphan.

This risible paragraph ought to embarrass every colleague who assented to it, but it will not because the PSC members have no audience before which to be embarrassed. How many faculty will trouble themselves to read the Faculty Code to discover that the PSC’s extravagant claims about confidentiality are folderol? How many faculty read Senate minutes, especially a response from a long-ago committee to a nearly meaningless motion? Among those who read the minutes, how many will be able to deconstruct the four sentences in the second paragraph, let alone cunning phrasings throughout the response?

To ask those three questions is to answer them. To answer them is to understand how workaday faculty collude in the acts of rogue committees and tyrannical administrators. Until more faculty participate in governance, faculty committees will remain unaccountable and, from time to time, unconscionable.

Therefore, let us not thunder at the PSC, "How dare you?" The PSC's audacity follows from faculty lassitude.


Next -- "H is for Half-Assed" -- The Faculty Senate goes off half-cocked unless it might displease administrators.

D is for Deals

Buying the school’s way out of malfeasance limits exposure and accountability more than litigation or loss.

Some veterans, when confronted about the University’s buying its way out of its failings rather than correcting the failings, pose as sages: “Well, sometimes the payoff is the best thing.”

Not to make too much out of yet another thought-free remark from old parrots – I intend to make just enough out of it – faculty should realize two "A's" that buyouts betoken:

• Aversion to litigation and, even more, to exposure

• Affinity for unaccountability and irresponsibility.

Aversion to Litigation and especially Exposure

The Ad Hoc Committee on Tenure [AHCT] – the four fools who took accountability seriously, crafted findings bravely, and endured brickbats stoically – worried about the University’s procuring protection from litigation and from adverse publicity at too great a price. The AHCT asked whether the University was spending freely rather than using such less expensive means of warding off litigation as doing the right thing in the first place or policing processes and professors when they go awry. The AHCT hazarded a conjecture that following the Faculty Code might be cheaper than flouting the Faculty Code and paying off a few victims who secure legal representation, evi­dence from Ford’s Pinto litigation notwithstanding. However, once that ad hoc committee released findings at odds with pronouncements from Jones Hall, their concerns about payoffs large­ly disappeared beneath ostensibly methodological, actually mythological critique.

Colleagues who were not gulled by the caterwauling of those who can abide anything but candor were nonetheless taken in by the myth of litigious America. They assured themselves and others that Puget Sound would win the litigation but only after enormous legal bills, so that the better part of jural valor might be to throw money at colleagues who objected to being ill-used. [If you do not object to being ill-used, wait for the named chair in your future!] Why not let the school off cheap, they ask, before some benighted jury fails to understand that violations of the rules are actually evidence of fidelity to higher ideals. [It is distressing how few jurors have read 1984 as a guide to institutional self-help!]

Yet many buyouts come before victims have engaged counsel or contemplated litigation. The school is expending thousands of dollars to fend off lawsuits that might never be? I suppose the pre-emptive surgeries work, but removing tonsils and adenoids at birth seems precipitous.

Maybe the school actually wants to buy the silence of victims. The aggrieved must be shut up lest faculty, staff, students, or trustees be wised up. More than litigation or negotiation, the University fears exposure.

What if colleagues found out that a whistleblower was induced to take a buyout before the whistleblower’s file reached the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]? [Naturally, the serial plagiarist on whom the naïve junior faculty blew the whistle not only continued on the faculty but also participated in dismissing the whistleblower – exactly the sort of process with which unsophisticated jurors might have some difficulty!] Why need the University fear that a third-year review might be read by five faculty [on the FAC or a hearing board] sworn to secrecy? If the University worried that the negative letters might expose the University to litiga­tion, wouldn’t it have been more straightforward and just to wait for a hearing board or the FAC to screen the file for unfairness, inadequacy, or incompleteness? Did the University fear that some faculty might conclude that more than 20 pages written against the whistle­blower by the spouse of the serial plagiarist might fall short of the objectivity that the Faculty Code commands? [Another detail that pesky jurors might not understand!] Or was the worry that five or more professors might learn what the AHCT called “departmental meltdown?”


Affinity for Unaccountability and Irresponsibility

Buyouts, especially preemptory buyouts, do more than gag those in the know and protect practices and processes from exposure and judgment. They instruct the few faculty in the know that malefactors will not be held responsible or accountable.

Consider the erstwhile faculty plagiarist. How did a third-year assistant professor get through her departmental review unscathed after two of her plagiarized works were ex­posed by the whistleblower before deliberations? Most faculty probably will never know. Two witnesses to the depart­mental deliberation have been sent away. The remaining participants are unlikely to take responsibility for any ineffectual or indifferent responses to the revelations. The chair of the depart­ment had been informed about each plagiarism be­fore the deliberations. What steps, if any, did he take? Did one or more departmental col­leagues excuse or minimize the plagiarisms [one set imperiling a faculty co-author and one set endangering a then-undergraduate co-author]?

We have been told that the FAC “addressed” this matter. Exactly what does that mean? We cannot know, which is precisely why we are told only that the FAC spoke or wrote some words that had something to do with the file. More than that we are not permitted to learn.

The FAC recommends a disposition of the file to the Academic Vice President [AVP], who decides whether to reappoint a third-year assistant professor. Whatever addressing or recommending the FAC did, the AVP was ultimately charged to dispose of the matter. If a serial plagiarist was reappointed by the AVP – and since she was working in Fall Semester 2005 one might infer that she had been reappointed – how can colleagues believe that the AVP took the sets of plagiarisms seriously? Did that AVP inform himself about the particulars, or did he reach his decision without additional information? If we intone that the AVP took faculty plagiarism seriously, what does that say about colloquial usage of “taking seriously?”

And what of the whistleblower’s effort to acquaint the President with the sets of plagiarisms before the whistleblower left town? Did the President “take seriously” faculty plagiarism to such an extent that he refused to look at the evidence? The faculty do not know, courtesy of the buyout.

Some faculty had hoped that, when the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS] was created to deal with, among other matters, campuswide disquiet over facul­ty plagiarism and its apparent mishandling [when it was handled at all], the AHCPS might answer some ques­tions. Instead, the AHCPS issued no findings about faculty plagiarism. The AHCPS issued no explanation for why the formal grievance against the plagiarist was withdrawn. The AHCPS covered up anew, thereby completing the lack of accountability and the ir­res­ponsibility worked by buyouts. What a coincidence that senators who had attacked the earlier ad hoc committee welcomed the vacuities of the later committee's report!

When buyouts and payoffs obstruct accountability, responsibility, cognizance, and governance, Jones Hall's “Deal or No Deal” keeps faculty in the dark.


Next: "E is for Etiquette" -- When colleagues call for "civil" discourse, what they mean is mannered discourse that serves over-dogs better than under-dogs.