The Dark Side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I am serving my third year on the Professional Standards Committee after two stints on the Faculty Advancement Committee. Why do you ask?
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Haltom's Ninth Law: Age quod agis.

Figure out what you are doing; do that; avoid hypocrisy by doing what you said you were doing or would do.



An IMDb entry for "Tombstone" memorializes a minute of dialog that had me guffawing when first I saw it:


###Wyatt Earp: [to Ringo] He's drunk.

###Doc Holliday: In vino veritas. ["In wine is truth" ... ]

###Johnny Ringo: Age quod agis. ["Do what you do" ... ]

Imagine my joy. In a leadup to the O K Corral, Johnny Ringo and Doc Holliday chirp schoolboy Latin at one another. During their exchanges, much longer than I have included, Ringo uses a Jesuit motto, Age quod agis, "Do what you are doing." Does popular cinema get better than Jesuitic Latin?


Alas! "Age quod agis" is more exhortative than predictive. Most humans fail to come clean with themselves or others about what they are doing, let alone to conform to what they say they are doing or said that they would do.

The Jesuits who beset me meant by Age quod agis that one should focus on one's ends and pursue them one by one. Such an admonition against multi-tasking was reasonable and so has long been ignored. This presents no problems, for exhortations acquire both urgency and apparent cogency the less likely they are to be followed.

I, Professor Sisyphus, repeat Age quod agis continually in my writing course for Politics and Government majors to get them to focus monomaniacally on a thesis that they have set themselves. Every paragraph must serve that thesis directly or indirectly. If not, the author is not doing what she or he said she or he was doing. I ask students to spare readers digressions, asides, pseudo-philosophical posturing, and other professorial predilections. "This is your term paper, not my lecture!"

When I am not hectoring students with Age quod agis, I often am pestering colleagues to admit what they are doing even if I should prefer that they stop doing what they have been doing or start doing what they should be doing.

I have discerned little or no impact from my haranguing. Members of multiple Faculty Advancement Committees and the Professional Standards Cult [2003-2004] have stoutly refused to acknowledge or to account for their decisions, inflating varied and often creative Confidentiality Cons to excuse their reticence. I have induced no members of the Wigger Patwol -- those colleagues so busy proclaiming their own rigor that they have little time in which to do anything rigorously except to proclaim rigor -- to see that they are promoting only themselves and not learning.

Still, like a Lee's nail, I press on. I do what I am doing.

What am I doing? I am signaling my small band of readers and listeners that candid speech and transparent processes befit academics and that mendacity and subtrefuges betray academia.

My philippics do not move colleagues who have mastered "arguing in the alternative," the protean art of "doing" what one was not doing a moment before. Professor Oohooh ["On the One Hand; On the Other Hand"] parries Age quod agis with Virtus in medio stat -- "Virtue stands in the middle," which I admit that more than one Jesuit also said to me. Via elaborate dramaturgy, Professor Oohooh regales all within ear- or eyeshot with the rigors of agony through which he/she must persevere to reach decisions defensible, if at all, by excruciations that precede decisions. What decisions lack in merit, Professor Oohooh more than makes up in the glory of her/his self-crucifixion. Professor Oohooh's daily performances lead up Golgatha to a moment of decision during some matinee. If decision-makers are evenly divided, Professor Oohooh courts favor with each and all before casting a deciding vote after torment exquisite for him/her and endless for everyone else. If decision-makers reach a decision quickly, Professor Oohooh cautions that a no-brainer decision actually has numerous nuances that -- Lord be thanked -- Professor Oohooh has espied just in time to avoid a rush to judgment. A decision becomes hasty, of course, if taken before Professor Oohooh has run through the best material that she/he has prepared. As the voiceover at the start of Casablanca might have ended but did not: "And the people come to the meeting and wait ... and wait ... and wait ... and wait."

Please notice, however, that Professor Oohooh fulfills Haltom's Ninth Law. Professor Oohooh does what he/she is doing. She/He is chewing the scenery and voguing. He/She is simulating balanced, dispassionate decision-making. Indeed, sometimes Professor Oohooh is so buried in decision-taking that she/he is perfectly willing to avoid decision forever to prolong the throes of passionate simulation. Professor Oohooh does what he/she is doing, albeit that what she/he is doing is avoiding doing.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Tenth Law: As good as it is to be trusted, it is even better not to have to be trusted.

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.

Evaluating Committees

Problems often lie less with administrators than with committee members.


Faculty ignorant of the written code and written bylaws but informed by folklore are often bamboozled by rogue committees or cunning members thereof. What John Mitchell said of the Nixon Administration applies as well to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC]: “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

As one watches what such Power Committees [PCs] do, one should keep in mind the lesson imparted by the late Erving Goffman. A social setting that appears to be exactly what one would expect may be what it seems; however, the next most likely possibility is that one beholds a perfect fake. Sloppy fakes or inadvertent mistakes would be unmasked quickly. For deviance to escape attention, fakery must be completed persuasively.

If, for example, the FAC denied a promotion on the basis of the very personal characteristics that faculty in 1994 eliminated from the Faculty Code, the Committee would doubtless hide its actual motives and procedures behind professed motives that concerned teaching or professional growth. As the cliché goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays virtue. Vulnerable faculty must pretend to believe the logic of justification in communications from the FAC, but they should privately expect more than a few committee judgments to hinge on the not-very-secret “Hail fellow well met” criterion.

If veterans of the FAC would dispute my claims above, they would have The Confidentiality Con to shield them: they can say anything they like in the cynical confi­dence that I dare not reveal what happened in the committee-room. That the FAC insisted on such a vow should suggest exactly how much credence such FAC vets should enjoy.

Is there no way to unmask FAC con men and con women through documents that are not secret? Suppose an evaluee made her or his letter from the FAC available to facul­ty. Faculty might then see how the FAC departed from authority at least in that instance. If the FAC or PSC interfered, such resistance to oversight and civil discussion would erode the credibility of confidentiality still further.

Please do not misunderstand my claims above. Most FAC outputs will conform to the Faculty Code because most evaluees will not run afoul of their departments. When the FAC departs from proper procedures or written authorities, astute members of the faculty must pay more attention to what the FAC has done than to what the FAC has said – or to what the code or bylaws say.

Still, if colleagues ask the PCs what they were up to, expect The Confidentiality Con and threats and reprisals. Some veterans of the PSC or of the FAC do not know enough about actual authority to fold their con. Some apparatchiks [members of campus elites beneath the President or Vice President] consider themselves and their committee authority higher than the code or the bylaws.

Pay attention and you may identify the enemy that is us.

Confidentiality Cons

What confidentiality does the code or the bylaws authorize?


To learn how often claims to confi­dentiality are folderol or folklore, tenured colleagues need simply inquire, “Where is that confidentiality defined or authorized?”

With regard to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], confidentiality is most­ly a product of agreement among members of the committee. True, the Faculty Code may apply with particular force to members of the FAC, who are not to reveal what closed files hide. Beyond that admonition, the FAC fabricates the con­fiden­tiality that members then claim to prevent them from discussing whether the FAC deviates from the code or the bylaws. That is the essence of The Confidentiality Con.

It is by no means clear, for example, that a colleague on the FAC is barred from alerting the President or the Faculty Senate or some other authority if the FAC insists on breaking the rules of evaluation. Whatever co-conspirators on the FAC may think of whistle-blowing, some faculty may even think that a member of the FAC is ethically bound not to suffer procedural or substantive injustices in silence. This may be particularly the case when someone appeals an FAC recommendation to a hearing board. Members of the FAC who know about misprision(s) may have an ethical obligation to notify the hearing board or the appellant.

Matters regarding the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] are only a bit more complicated. The Faculty Code in two places explicitly confers confidentiality. Participants in a grievance hearing are commanded not to “…make public statements, directly or indirectly about the matters in the hearings.” Second, if faculty refer matters to the PSC for advice, the code promises confidentiality. [Please see the interpretation on p. 37 of the July 2005 rendition of the code online.] Each locus of confidentiality is clearly less expansive than cunning or misinformed faculty have claimed.

Perhaps colleagues on the PSC do not realize that neither bylaws nor the code con­fers the confidentiality by which they claim to be bound. Like members of the FAC who seem not to realize that almost all of the confidentiality that they invoke follows from voluntary agreement among FAC insiders, perhaps members of the PSC are suckers for folklore or victims of groupthink or grouptalk. I think it less likely that members of the PSC are illiterate.

Should we be concerned that so many colleagues who proclaim themselves bound by rules appear so ill-informed about what the rules actually say? That depends on which Confidentiality Con a colleague is running. Many who invoke confidentiality have themselves been conned by folklore and folderol. These poor rubes actually believe that they are restating the code or the bylaws. We should be concerned about what other folderol or folklore they will substitute for the Faculty Code. Many others, alas, know very well that mutual agreement to cover insiders' asses and to deprive outsiders of corroborating information is the mainspring of confidentiality. This more insidious con job should allay concerns that FAC or PSC members do not know the rules. At least some members of each committee had to learn the rules to cover up deviations from the rules.

Beyond the Confidentiality Con

What if even one member of the FAC challenged the Confidentiality Con?


What if I had refused to agree to confidentiality on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]? What gallows or hellfire would an adminis­tra­tor have invoked to bring me back into line? Would the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] have ginned up an “inter­pretation” of the Faculty Code that aug­mented the modest confidentiality articulated there­in? Would the Faculty Senate have been asked to re­move me [and would a compliant chair have entertained the motion]? Or would the Center for Health and Well­ness have supplied a note that I was too well to attend FAC meetings? [cf. “Animal House” http://imdb.com/title/tt0077975/quotes]

My answer to such inquiries is that it little matters what reactions would have been had I thought of this gambit. Had I refused to join the cover up, a few faculty would have learned that FAC confidentiality is far more a matter of expedi­ence, insula­tion, and/or cowardice than of any authority to which faculty have consented. Be­yond such minimal awareness, some faculty might not have continued to be suckers for any claim to con­fi­den­tiality. I’d welcome an in­crease in the number of Puget Sound faculty who ask by what right this committee or that administrator pre­sumes to conceal what attentive, en­gaged citizens of the campus com­munity ought to know.

I hope that some colleague will refuse to agree to the Confidentiality Con, if only to see if others on the FAC will negotiate. Suppose that members of the FAC re­stricted con­fi­dentiality to substantive matters. Suppose further that members of the FAC reserved their liberty to raise procedural objections. First, a member of the FAC might object with­in the FAC to pro­cedural deviance. If unsatisfied by the response within the com­mit­tee, the objector then might refer the matter to a committee, an administrator, or an ombudsperson.

Would the FAC be less likely to abandon the rules if FAC misconduct were more likely to become known outside the committee? I do not know. I do know that FAC misconduct has gone unnoticed and unremarked outside the committee due in part to professed confidentiality.

FAC members who sincerely believe that something other than the Confidentiality Con circumscribes them should be pitied as dupes. FAC mem­bers who realize how limited the circumscriptions of the code and the bylaws truly are should be recognized as conspirators. FAC members who know that confidentiality is a con game and who exploit that con game to hide their misdeeds should be despised as grifters.

What if even one member of the FAC disdained to be a dupe, a conspirator, or a grifter?

An Apology for Conning Colleagues

Long ago, I should have informed colleagues that the Faculty Code and the Bylaws authorize far less confidentiality than is commonly believed and asserted.

I apologize for perpetuating the Confidentiality Con.

At the in­ception of the Ad Hoc Committee on Profes­sional Standards [AHCPS], two members of the 2005-2006 Professional Standards Committee [PSC] doubted the suc­cess of an ad hoc inquiry because, they claimed, the Facul­ty Code pro­hibits members of the PSC from discussing “cases.” [Please see the minutes of the Faculty Senate for 21 November 2005.] The two members were speaking casually and colloquially, and min­utes often paraphrase liberally. Still, I heard the PSC members reiterate the misinformation that the Faculty Code imposes on members of the PSC the strictest confidentiality.

As with most attempts by powerful committees to deny accountability and as with most communications from the Professional Standards Committee of 2003-2004, this "Confidentiality Con" is only partly true. The code actually states that no person involved in a grievance hearing “… shall make public statements, directly or indirectly about the matters in the hearings.” [Please see the Facul­ty Code Ch. 6, § 4, 3, 8.] Since the AHCPS arose out of discussions of a grievance for faculty plagiarism that never reached a hearing, it is hardly evident that the code pro­hibits members of the PSC from discussing that “case” or any other would-have-been grievance that never reached a hearing.

Perhaps the members overstated the prohibition because confidentiality has great­ly ex­panded over the years. Some mem­bers of the PSC or the Faculty Advancement Com­mittee [FAC] have naively accepted exaggerations of confidentiality. Others have inflated confidentiality to insulate them­selves from scrutiny. Either way, hypertrophic confidentiality has persuaded colleagues that they must keep secrets from colleagues and must frustrate faculty oversight. Those who wield the Confidentiality Con often fool themselves before they fool others.

Whenever protections of personal informa­tion are invoked to hide eva­sions of authorized procedures, confidentiality becomes a confi­dence game. Wittingly or unwittingly, credulously or cleverly, FAC and PSC members exploit the inability or unwil­ling­­ness to dis­tinguish be­tween substantive matters that truly are and ought to be shielded and proce­dures that properly are the concern of every campus citi­zen. Details that are private should be restricted to those authorized to consider such details. Practices and stan­dards that are public should not be obscured by those trusted to apply the rules.

From the beginning of my stints on the FAC, I knew that the FAC’s professed duty to keep secrets fol­lowed more from volun­tary agreement among those inside the FAC than from authoritative directives outside the FAC. Observance of duty has kept many personal and personnel matters as private as law or morality or the code demands. Overstating such duties has also kept members of the FAC from having to answer for de­via­tions from the Faculty Code, use of standards or cri­teria never authorized or no longer authorized, and assorted practices that hypertrophic confidentiality – the Confidentiality Con – prevents me from detailing or documenting.

I begin this blog, then, with my apology. I regret that I did not refuse to consent to FAC confidentiality beyond what the code demands. I should have assented to what the code demanded but no more.