Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses I

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

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Explanation 1 -- Stable Misrepresentation Foments Groupthink.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J Stands for Jokers and Jokes

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Haughty Culture

When Power Committees deign to speak beyond official communications, they condescend while counseling colleagues to remain civil.


In May 2004 a member of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] wrote to the Chair of the Faculty Senate that the PSC did not answer to the senate. This PSC col­league seemed mistaken as well as condescending, for the bylaws assign the senate a duty to oversee faculty committees. The senate charges faculty committees at the be­gin­ning of each academic year and receives reports from committees at the end of each academic year, so the senate’s oversight role could scarcely be clearer.

Still, no Puget Sound veteran would deny that the PSC and the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] often act as if they transcend faculty oversight, control, or even input. As if the arrogations and arrogance of the Power Committees [PCs] were not problem enough, members of the PCs often compound their haughty ways with admonitions to common faculty to keep a civil tongue should misbehaviors be detected. Power Commit­tees do not answer to faculty any more than they answer to the Faculty Senate.

The power and the majesty of the PCs usually remain latent if not dormant, especially in public documents. When PCs’ autonomy or authority is questioned, however, mem­bers of either power committee may brandish their presumptions and presumptuousness. When, for a peculiar example, I suggested in the Faculty Senate that the PSC ought to make even minor inter­pretations of the Faculty Code available for senators to review, the then Dean objected that the senate does not get to review or reverse PSC interpretations. The Bylaws state that the senators do, but faculty should not embrace such mere techni­cal­i­ties as a code that is included in faculty contracts or bylaws that define faculty gover­nance. Now if the PSC claimed to abide by the code or the bylaws, that might be a dif­ferent matter.

Except on rare occasions, the FAC and the PSC operate independently of the faculty. The code states that the FAC is to judge its cases independently. The FAC almost always does. Most PSC reflections on departmental procedures or the meaning of problematic passages in the code are not hidden but fly beneath the radar of busy colleagues. Because almost all of the work of these two PCs is meticulous and tedious, committee workers get used to isolation from outside advice or assistance. These isolated labors encourage comaraderie among committee members who have ac­cess to inside information and inside insights. Independence, isola­tion, and insula­tion sooner or later breed groupthink, especially if the independent committees are not blessed or burdened with independent members.

Nonetheless, critical commentary will arise from time to time, especially among col­leagues who believe that a PC has wronged them. PCs and especially the administrators on them characteristically react to in­credulity with a mélange of all-embrac­ing confidentiality, unyielding obscurantism, obdurate groupthink, bad-faith interpreta­tions of authority, and con­des­cension. But for condescension, the other elements of the mélange might be ameliorated. Once a Power Committee takes umbrage at oversight or attention, self-aggrandizing brio exacerbates the other elements into breathtaking super­ciliousness. It does not do to arouse the wrath of the Great and Powerful Oz!

We have seen that the first resort of those who hold themselves above criticism, the Confidentiality Con, is mostly groundless. A committee that greatly esteems itself yet knows that its decisions and reasoning cannot withstand scrutiny will soon expand secrecy into a magnificent fabrication in support of the proclaimed importance of the oh-so-independent committee [and, of course, of the elite status of the less independent thinkers on the committee]. The more dubious the decision-making and the authority, the more persuaded of their own great­ness and infallibility we should expect members to act and the more barriers to discovery and deconstruction we should expect PCs to erect. After all, critical colleagues affront the dignity of the PC.

What the Confidentiality Con does not cover up, other maneuvers must mask. Ad­minis­trators may cut deals that include gag clauses. Committees may profess their own unanimity or solidarity or resolve. PCs will cover the Golden Oldie “If We Were Not Barred by Confidentiality from Disclosing Details, Everyone Would See that Questions Are Baseless” [to be followed by a new release of “Resistance Is Futile” by Dick Cheney and the Borg]. The PSC, especially authorized to interpret the code, will be especially tempted to legislate under the guise of interpretation.

As each defensive stratagem entrenches a Power Committee in this or that defense, the committee reiterates its august independence and subservience to authori­ty, its humble service and unstinting noblesse oblige, its serene in­dif­ference to position or personality and its special relationship to administrators, its many bur­dens and its stoic shoul­der­ing of unauthorized discretion for the good of the order, and other signs, symbols, mysteries, and para­doxes of its transcendence of mundane facul­ty. Too im­por­tant [especially in the view of committee insiders] to be allowed to admit error, PCs com­pound their errors with flim-flam, disingenuousness, self-serving ig­norance, dis­tor­tions of evidence, anarchy, stone-walling, and – if exigencies necessitate – willful half-truths. Charming as it is to see liberal educators en­counter Machiavelli and Orwell, one might prefer that PCs adopt other classics. Maybe something by Thomas More? [On second thought, they would probably go with “A Defence of the Seven Sacraments” or some other papist bull.]

The crowning achievement of PCs, however, is to feign surprise that faculty might so lack civility as to ask PCs to abide by authorized procedures and criteria. The further out­side the rules that the PC strays, the more that its members act hurt that anyone could think that the PC might flout rules. Even as they craft letters to hide their willful devi­ance from the Faculty Code, members of the FAC proclaim their fidelity to the code’s cri­teria and standards and protest the infidelity of colleagues to campus dogmatics. Defenders of the PSC warn that if colleagues are going to be critical or attentive, good faculty will not consent to serve on the PSC. “Civility,” always a term of art, comes to comprise credulity, incuriosity, docility, and servility.

Our colleague was correct, even prescient: the PSC does not answer to the Faculty Senate. Privileged faculty committees are almost always unaccountable to faculty.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Hauteur and calls for civility form the wall that pretended virtue raises around detected vices. Do not look for Mr. Gorbachev or the Faculty Senate to tear down that wall.

Gripped by Groupthink

The Confidentiality Con exacerbates the tendency of small groups to echo internal communications and to resist external communications.


The Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] are each Petri dishes for groupthink. When small, cohesive, and insulated groups attribute to their decisions empirical validity and norma­tive superiority that outsiders cannot see, groupthink defeats skepticism and sober second thoughts that might allow groups to correct themselves. Gripped by groupthink, the FAC or the PSC rations or rationalizes away information that might contradict announced or antici­pated decisions, preferring communications that reinforce the committee’s rectitude to those that raise alternative decisions or perspectives. Whatever “multiple narratives” apologists for such committees may eventually concoct, insiders strive for a singular narrative around which they all may rally.

All groups press toward consensus, cohesion, and cooperation, but outsiders’ views may save a committee from conformity, obstinacy, or collusion. Conformity and loyalty afflict the FAC and the PSC because Confidentiality Cons [and other dodges] deny insiders alternative perspectives that might change their minds. Private doubts may be expressed within the committee while communications still flow freely, but once the committee has taken its decision, private doubts are less welcome and, for some who have served on the committees, may not even be acknowledged within the committee or, even more frightening, in private reflection. Even members of a committee who have submitted their scholarly work to referees and have thereby been saved from errors or less than their best work have preferred loyalty to a committee and conformity to a majority to admitting outside perspectives. Power committees do not believe in "multiple narratives." They craft a singular story and stick to it.

When enlargements of confidentiality beyond authorized rules have transmogri­fied restrictions on the free flow of personnel information [that is, confidentiality nar­rowly and properly understood] into protection of committees from alternative perspec­tives and from accountability [that is, confidentiality improperly extended], the FAC and the PSC have been able to close colleagues out of insiders’ circles. This is how Confidentiality Cons [and subsequent cover-ups, buyouts, and other defenses against faculty’s or trustees’ learning what happens on campus] virtually guarantee groupthink.

Groupthink in turn virtually guarantees that power committees will be given in even slightly challenging cases to defensiveness rather than openness, to communications more tactical than sincere, and to superciliousness.