The Few, The Proud, The Clowns

This week on Dancing with the Stars: the Puget Clowns do the Charlie Foxtrot.

¶

The plenary meeting of the faculty 19 April 2011 considered new forms for students to evaluate their courses and professors. Among the assembled faculty were

• colleagues who had worked on committees or subcommittees concerned with this issue,
• faculty senators who had consulted with colleagues and committees,
• surveys of the views of students and faculty, and
• others who had acquired thorough familiarity with existing forms and alternatives.

¶

But strains of "Entry of the Gladiators" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0CyOAO8y0&feature=related lofted through Trimble Forum. The Puget Clowns barred grounded inquiry and systematic thinking soon enough. Familiarity with issues and outlooks, attention to detail, and comprehension of the range of interests and contexts disappeared as the Puget Clowns began to speculate and to parse, to grouse and to pontificate, and to posture and to preen.

¶

The faults, Dr. Brutus, lie less in our forms than in our faculty.

¶

The dean warned the assembled that the university invests in reams of forms, so tampering and tweaking are as costly as casual. This slowed down no Clown. I reminded the assembled and the dissemblers that nothing worthwhile was ever drafted on the fly at a plenary meeting of the faculty. Maybe the Clowns kept that in mind[less] as they proposed and disposed at bearkneck [sic] speed.

¶

Deliberation? We don't need no stinking deliberation!

¶

The Clowns plunged recklessly into ad hockery. The Clowns woorded [sic], reworded, and deworded with such brio that the Secretary of the Faculty had to ask one colleague -- a veteran of the Starr Chamber who flabbergasted the Faculty Senate in 2004 when she reported that the Professional Standards Committee interpreted the Faculty Code so often and so quickly that they had no time in which to write down PSC interpretations -- to slow down so that the changes could be recorded. I began to wonder whether my colleagues wrote their syllabi and constructed their courses with similar insouciance. I was thankful that, for most of those present, I need not worry whether they went about their research with similar patience and craft.

¶

Professional Growth? We don't need no stinking professional growth!

¶

As I emerged from the meeting -- "Recalled to Life" [Dickens] -- multiple colleagues who had voted in the affirmative asked me what had been decided. They knew not on what they had voted. Perhaps they had responded to the Chair of the Faculty Senate, who stated his hope that some cloture on this issue would be effected by the assembled. After that, the Chair informed us, we could always repair the evaluation forms over time. This remark, of course, echoed one of the most infamously fatuous remarks by a member of the Starr Chamber: Let's change the Faculty Code today so we can get it done; we always can fix mistakes later.

¶

What rot had the Clowns wrought?

¶

I assured them that nothing had been decided or done. The Clowns were the Clowns prior to the meeting; they remained Clowns in the meeting; the traveshamockery [Woody Allen] of faculty governance continued apace. The faculty made the faculty and the idea of faculty self-governance look bad again [and again and again]. Like drunks in a midnight choir [Leonard Cohen], colleagues testified to what they did not know and could not understand about their students' classes or concerns. And, of course, much of what the assembled endured spoke much more about the speakers than about their subjects [in either sense of "subject"].

¶

Other than to faculty self-governance the outcome made little difference. For here is the central fact that few in the meeting seemed to comprehend: The evaluation of faculty at the University of Puget Clowns suffers far more from shady, shaky interpretations by evaluators than from murky messages from undergraduates or from confusing wording on students' evaluative questionnaires.

¶

As we lose colleagues to departmental snipers and departmental sniping, the Puget Clowns debate the caliber of the slugs that inflict the best head shots and gut shots.

¶

Charlie Foxtrot!

¶

As members of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] fabricate latent -- truly latent, as in "I wish I had not read the evaluations so that I might believe that what you are claiming was actually anywhere therein" -- designs in the students' evaluations to justify decisions on which they have settled for other reasons, the Puget Clowns debate nuances in wording items.

¶

Charlie Foxtrot!

¶

The presiding officer at faculty meetings accepts as a friendly amendment an emendation that is then debated for minutes and passed by voice vote.

¶

Charlie Foxtrot!

¶

Once again a plenary meeting of the faculty devolved into masterful misdirection.

http://ia700103.us.archive.org/13/items/BarnumAndBaileys/Barnum_and_Bailey.mp3

Greatest Moments in Faculty Meetings

What is your favorite moment from a plenary meeting of the faculty?

¶ When the University of Puget Clowns assembles its faculty, travesty results. About 90 minutes per show, vaudeville lives again:

• Rigor is burlesqued but never practiced.
• Gravitas is parodied but lighter than air.
• Flatulence is celebrated but more substantial than gravitas or rigor.
• Fatuousness is erudition in service of faithlessness and disloyalty to liberal education.
• Obsequiousness is courage among the conflict averse.
• Ignorance is strength especially ignorance aligned with decanal orthodoxies.
• Civility is candor unafraid to voice the thoughts of the powerful.
• Sincerity is unknown absent delusion.

¶ But what were the greatest shams and shames in a plenary meeting of the Clowns?

Please look over the candidates below and propose alternatives.

¶ Professor Lance Rosywiz spoke of extensive, controversial changes in The Faculty Code: "I am the kind of person who likes to get things done. Why don't we pass these changes and fix any problems in subsequent meetings?" Was this call to alter the employment contract of each member of the faculty in a fast and facile manner the worst fraud attempted by a chair of a Power Committee? Was this former member of the Professional Standards Cult channeling Professor Irwin Corey <http://www.irwincorey.org/>?

Whether the remark was careless, reckless, half-clever, or half-cunning, was it the greatest spit-take in the history of faculty meetings? Read on.

¶ In the hallway after another inept attempt by an administrator to deceive the clowns, Professor Soviet Tankard opined, "I don't mind if you serve me a platter of turds, but don't call them sausages!"

Is this the funniest remark immediately after a plenary meeting of the faculty? Does hallway badinage count as faculty meeting vaudeville?

¶ The presiding administrator granted Professor Eve Slimehatch 10 minutes in which to defend a curricular proposal the administrator favored. The proposer took 30 minutes to present 5 minutes worth of material, so smarming the assembled colleagues that this presentation is itself a candidate for most fatuous self-abuse at a plenary meeting of the faculty.

Truly to realize how off-putting the presentation was, one had to have been there. I estimated amid that meeting that Ol' Slimehatch had lost 10 votes for the proposal by the manner of presentation.

¶ The speech by Professor Slimehatch prompted one of the great time-wasting members of the faculty, Professor Terry Snarl, to wave a wristwatch at Slimehatch to stop Slimehatch's blathering. One of the greatest moments of irony in faculty history, this incident was the equivalent of the Unibomber's questioning the ethical propriety of a letter to a representative.

I was getting very sleepy, very sleepy. Then Snarl started to wave his wristwatch.

¶ Before he waved his wristwatch side to side as if trying to hypnotize the administrative favorite, Professor Snarl triumphed by beginning a speech explicitly affirming one side of a debate and ending that same speech minutes later announcing that the opposite side in the debate had the stronger case. The seamless segues distinguished this speech as perhaps the greatest self-parody in a meeting renowned for intentional and unintentional self-parodies.

"Madam President, I rise in opposition to this proposal. It is such an affront that I am taken aback. Its passage would be such a blot on the eschatology of this institution that I am compelled to vote in its favor. I thank you."

¶ Professor Snarl also worked behind the scenes to induce the vilest speech ever delivered at a clowns' meeting I attended. A Puget Clown who went to graduate school with a whistleblower used phony hypotheticals to defame the whistleblower and to defend the most notorious philanderer on the faculty. Professor Ed Needspiers followed Professor Snarl's direction to a zone of twilight infamy.

Hypotheticals that are not hypothetical but are flat-out falsehoods. What will these wackos think up next?

¶ After a colleague had observed that politics makes strange bedfellows, the next speaker began,"As someone who has had more strange bedfellows than anyone here, ..."

But seriously, folks!

¶ One member of a youth movement, Dr. Van I. Smugdad, ended a salute to "Science in Context" -- also known as "Science in Contempt" -- by noting that Smugdad had secured a grant via the program. Colleagues who missed the meeting cursed themselves because they were not there to hear a dazzling defense of the only category of the previous core curriculum of which the student body asked the faculty to rid the university: "I got a grant to pursue it!"

What a candid canard! But was it the greatest revelation of the "me" in "team?" Read on!

¶ At the start of a meeting, the President asked for announcements from the faculty. Professor Hazel-Don Annuls said, "I don't know if this is an announcement, but did anyone else have trouble parking?"

You want self-absorption bordering on solipsism? Faculty meetings got it!

¶ As the faculty debated whether to permit candidates for tenure to select open files, two wonderful moments glistened. First, a notorious assassin argued to keep tenure files closed, saying, "I trust colleagues to be fair." Across the meeting hall, a colleague who had inside knowledge of the assassin's notions of fairness mouthed "Unbelievable" multiple times. Another colleague stared at the speaker in what seemed shock and disbelief.

Did O. J. worry much about Nicole's slicing his throat?

¶ Second, a senior member of the faculty broke out the finger puppets to reveal the perversity of closed files at tenure. "When you, an untenured member of the faculty, come up for tenure, I may write whatever I please about you, and you may not read what I have written. That is, I may savage you in a manner that denies you your job and defames you forever, and the most you will get to see is a tepid summary that attributes the remark to a colleague. However, when I next come up for a five-year review, I may elect to read every word in your letter. You cannot much harm me, but I get to read your letter and hold it against you if I choose."

If jobs and careers did not hang in the balance, the spectacle of a tenured, full professor having to connect dots for a recent Ph. D. might amuse me more.

¶ Professor Ed Fern Carollens repeatedly denounced false rumors that, if anything, were euphemistic with "respect" to a renowned philanderer. Professor Carollens then acted shocked when the philanderer fessed up, but that performance occurred outside a faculty meeting and thus may not count.

The satellite, rarely overhead, was aligned with the Mother Ship to the endless infamy of Dr. Carollens, who for decades was a strong candidate for the most addled member of the faculty.

¶ Amid discussion of electives that seniors tended to select, a professor observed with disgust that many advisees chose ceramics to complete their degrees. "Ceramics!" the colleague snarled as if seniors were choosing a practicum in child abuse. Many colleagues marveled for weeks that the University of Puget Clowns was so fortunate to have such minor foibles pass for problems at a faculty confab. What they may have missed was the virtuosity of the professor's preening. To identify a happy feature of the undergraduate experience at Puget Clowns as a blot on the rigorousness of the curriculum was genius!

Where else but the circus could one luxuriate in such pretentious nonsense?

¶ Munching potato chips, a colleague wandered into a meeting of the faculty just as a dean completed a curricular rant. The dean insisted that the most reckless thing that the faculty could do was to pass the measure on the floor without much further deliberation and debate. A colleague suggested that the eater of potato chips should call the previous question. This he did without realizing what the dean had just said. The dean glared at Professor Potato Chip as the faculty voted in favor of the measure and against the dean.

Stop it! You're killing me!

¶ A legendary psychotic appeared late in a meeting, moved to adjourn, then left. Could anyone do better than that?

Always good to hear from Professor Rebel Screwtrout!

¶ And what of likening a perfectly respectful presentation to denial of the Holocaust? You cannot make this crap up -- unless you're David Lodge or Richard Russo or Jane Smiley.

Who pulled her finger?

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."

Z Stands for Zanzibar

As Juli McGruder retires, "Rump Parliament" salutes a fighter and her fight.

The Faculty Senate resolved in December 2007 that Juli McGruder had been a boon to the university. I could not agree more. I add my own resolution below to complement the necessarily bland pronouncement of the senate.

First and most important, Dr. Juli McGruder for almost thirty years strove to deny students, faculty, and staff at the University of Puget Clowns what she demurely called “the luxury of ignorance.” By this she meant that discriminations against women, racial and ethinic minorities, and those who have less income and wealth proliferate in part because people claim not to realize what they want very much not to realize. Juli shook colleagues and pupils. She made them admit that they should have known what they claimed not to know. More, she made them admit that they now knew what they claimed not to have known. Like Neil Young in “Ohio,” Juli Mack asked, “How can you run when you know?”

Second and almost as important, Professor McGruder was credentialed in Occupational Therapy, Anthropology, and cognate disciplines or specialties, making her that rarest of UPS faculty: she possessed rather than merely professed interdisciplinary learning and expertise. Juli did not fake interdisciplinary. She earned interdisciplinary. On a campus where many faculty extol interdisciplinary research and teaching but exemplify dilettantism, Professor McGruder tantalized colleagues with what might not merely seem but be.

Third and not as important, Juli McGruder tried to make faculty governance more accountable and less corrupt. Her Sisyphean labors included service on the Faculty Senate and on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Many senators quietly contradicted decanal subtrefuges and presidential mendacity; Senator McGruder called bullshit in senate meetings and in plenary meetings of the faculty. Many toadies and tools were ensconced on the FAC despite garnering fewer votes from peers; Professor McGruder took being passed over as the compliment that it was and won election until finally a dean let her serve. Members of the senate and FAC alike often serve as if campaigning for promotion or other favors or as if they lusted after respectability. [And those are the relatively heroic. Lesser senators and FACers cannot recall authenticity or independence!] McGruder did not want to be a “reliable, responsible” member of the faculty or anything else that required major surgery on spine or gonads. Instead, McGruder committed candor, a habit disgusting to administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists alike.

As Dr. McGruder exits the University of Puget Clowns, she acknowledges honestly that students and faculty still walk and talk without acknowledging the privileges and patronage that they receive, without admitting that “interdiscplinary” is more shibboleth than modifier, and without concerning themselves about which “contract of depravity” [The Hustler, 1961] shapes them. Juli sees that the luxury of ignorance, the dilettantism, and the docility remain as she leaves. Nonetheless, Juli McGruder tried. She tried the patience of presidents and deans. She tried to induce faculty to stand and speak their truths. She tried to live up to intellectual ideals.

So here is my toast to Professor Juli McGruder: Like Randall P. McMurphy [Are the initials “R.P.M.” coincidental? I think not.], you tried to set other inmates free. Unlike Randall P. McMurphy, you leave the asylum with your frontal lobes connected. If you see Nurse Ratched on your way off campus, slap her for us, would you?

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!

W Stands for Women against Women

If you would understand why women so often play important roles in firing women, cherchez les hommes.


When first I began to fathom promotion and tenure at Puget Clowns, I was sur­prised by the role of women in the firing of other women. In 1992 I observed that male sexists had difficulty attacking women because faculty females shredded women before the old boys could lumber over to the corpses. Were lionesses reducing pigs to scavenging through carrion? My seniors patiently explained how ingeniously the old boys had ar­ranged sanc­tions – negative as well as positive sanctions – to promote the appearance and the reality that women devoured women and that men merely came upon the carnage. The obvious killers, the “Women Against Women” [WAW], had adapted to the oldest old-boy imperative: a candidate for advancement must be “one of us.” Those who had pros­pered by making themselves unobjectionable to the men who then controlled the uni­ver­sity perpetuated the importance of such “personal and professional characteristics” as promised to stifle dissent and insure continuation of myths and rituals that routinized and legitimized control of the university. This control remained largely in the hands of the old boys.

My subsequent studies of WAW have confirmed the wisdom of the old hands who set me straight. A grown woman savaged sisters for the approval of an old boy to whom she had some twisted relationship resembling a school-girl crush. As females in his department tore apart evaluees centerstage, this old boy and his pals “reluctantly” put junior faculty females out of their [and his] misery behind the scenery. Another member of WAW seemed quite responsive to the will of males until females gained positions of power, at which time she was as ob­se­quious to fe­males as she had been to males. In instances of this second sort, at­trac­tion mattered less than self-advancement, although being flattered by old boys made the compliant fe­male feel more like lamb than the mutton she each day resembled more. A third but related class of women ravaging other women led in the 1990s to the “Crone Hypothesis,” whereby attractive females, especially blondes, were trashed in their depart­ments by sisters who had not attracted admiration from one or another sex for some time, if ever. Of course, Puget Clowns hosted a number of women who cherished their exclu­sive status enough to preserve it by leaving junior females to old boys who whispered what Justice McReynolds stated when he heard that a second Jew had been appointed to the Supreme Court: “Not another one.”

When the ravaged females escaped their departments, first-generation females [pro­fessors who had few or no female mentors or models when they were under 30] ap­pointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] were often more old-boyish than the old boys on the FAC, and thus camouflaged secondary victimization of self-admitted females. Once the university recruited and retained females who had had female models or mentors, self-described feminists assailed junior faculty women who were actual feminists. These second-generation females, too, legitimized the demise of women in the eyes of the credulous or the masculine or both. In my 22 years at Puget Clowns, pretenders to femininity and to feminism alike have masked sexism individual as well as institutional.

That first- or second-generation females trash their sisters was to be expected from the enduring misogyny of the institution and dependency of females on old boys for pa­tronage and permanence. Female instructors serving under a traditional chair often be­haved as “at will” employees or found themselves unemployed. Females who depended on potentates less for their jobs than for cherished classes, monetary advances, or collegial respect likewise tended to conform to the views of their betters, especially if those betters so lacked chivalry that they threatened overtly those whom they could not cow covertly.

Even women who were safely tenured or promoted to full professor behaved as if they were under some man’s gun. To be sure, some such cravenness followed from a decade or more of socialization at Puget Clowns. What once was calculation after a dozen years became rote, especially as security made it ever more imperative to deny how tenure had been achieved. Who once craved tenure and promotion came to crave respect, luxurious schedules, and time off. What once was done out of friendship or attraction or desire to hold onto one’s job soon enough became dirty deeds to ensure esteem from the FAC or the Professional Standards Cult [PSC] or some other source of sway. Indeed, to attain tenure and fullness, senior females sacrificed the moral to the mercenary so long ago that many could not re­call when they sold out. Soon enough, they no longer distinguished sell-outs from ship-outs lest they raise questions about how they themselves had managed to survive and to prosper. “Which trustee was your patron?”

Females who earned respect and spoils under the elder regime had to show that they could play like the boys, but they became more useful to the old boys than boys were because they were presumptively free from sexism. That meant that a woman had to be cruder and more thuggish than a man even to be suspected of being a self-loathing woman. If a colleague advanced herself by reminding concerned students and faculty that collegiate females could prey upon innocent male faculty, woe betide the colleague who observed that one might as well fixate on the perils that stam­peding lambs might trample sleeping lions. If a member of a power committee never managed to disagree with the dean, she nonetheless could coo agreeably when the special rigors of being a female in academia were inventoried because such lists made her survi­val all the more Homeric. It would have been uncivil or defamatory, of course, to ob­serve that some starlets and harlots resisted much more powerful men for far longer. Male fellows well met instead made a show of taking advancement of females for evi­dence of special merit, which amounted to a tacit admission of discrimination lost on most colleagues.

None of the above denies such usual dynamics as “the Queen Bee” who despises [female] rivals or jealousy over other attention to other women or “pulling up the ladder” after the first female clambers aboard the yacht. Indeed, the modal manner of success for females is the mode for males as well: lie low and do not be associated with losers. Nothing above lets women off the hook by attributing sole or overwhelming agency to men. Women who assail women are responsible for their Msdeeds whether they do so out of their own insecurity or from job insecurity wielded by men.

Still, promotion and tenure are to a large degree matters of whether an evaluee is “one of us,” and males continue to control the definition of “us.” As women assume more of the high offices on campus, the definition of “us” may benefit from women’s touches. It is more likely, however, that women at Puget Clowns will resemble Orwell’s pigs at the end of Animal Farm: would-be revolutionaries not easily distinguished except rhetorically from those against whom they revolted.

V Stands for Venial Venalities

Small ethical missteps accumulate quantitatively and qualitatively into corrupted character and corroded collegiality.



We begin from the last lines of “Judgment at Nuremberg:”

Judge Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster): “Judge Haywood... the reason I asked you to come … Those people, those millions of people ... I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it!

Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy): “Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.


Long I have snorted at that Liberal arithmetic. “Numbers two through six million might think that 5,999,999 repetitions made things worse.” Still, Judge Haywood had a point. Minor misconduct and petty corruption may erode character to make additional miscarriage of justice easier, hence greater qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

An important cause of the “Able was I ere I saw Elba” Syndrome [by which colleagues devolve the longer that they are at the University of Puget Clowns] is venality that starts minor but ramps up rapidly. One stifles one’s opinions to gain the affirmation of col­leagues until, so soon, one tailors one’s opinions to others and deprives them of critical consideration and sober second looks. In return, one is promoted or tenured or honored. One awakens like Richard Rich in “A Man for All Seasons:”


Richard Rich (John Hurt): “I've lost my innocence.”

Thomas Cromwell (Leo McKern): “Some time ago. Have you only just noticed?”


Then on the Faculty Advancement Committee one circumvents the Faculty Code or pretends that this welcome colleague has met criteria or that unwelcome colleague has not. Such is perhaps a venial sin, but “From small things, mama, big things one day come” (Bruce Springsteen).

Or one chairs the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] and bends the rules until one twists and breaks the rules, all the while protesting that one is behaving exactly as PSC chairs have long or always behaved.

Oh, chip chip,
You tell a little lie,
Chip chip,
You make your baby cry,
Chip chip,
You cheat a little bit,
Chip chip,
You quarrel over it.
One day you`re gonna discover,
One little wrong leads to another.
Chip chip,
Chipping away,
Chipping at your mansion of love.

Or one trims and truckles to get or to keep one of the minor appointments or titles or designations available. One looks the other way when women are being fired. One dodges faculty meetings. One otherwise becomes "institutionalized." In the case of the University of Puget Clowns, one becomes miniaturized:

Thomas More (Paul Scofield): “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?”

T Stands for Tlansrations

Argot is found wherever people to be manipulated are found, but argot at the University of Puget Clowns bamboozles on many levels.


In my senior year of high school, I wrote an occasional column called “Tlansrations” wherein I commented on absurd communications. I had learned to expose absurdity from MAD Magazine’s “What They Say / What They Mean” features. Down a left column MAD would list banalities that seemed straightforward. To the right MAD would list ironic meanings often masked by the banalities. I adapted MAD methodology to Blanchet High. Classmates were amused. Teachers were less amused: “What we have here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t teach.” One reaction was pretty much the same as the other to a teenager who was usually playing "I'm Looking Through You" in his head.

In looking over some previous entries in my blog, it appears to me that I have retraced “Tlansrations” by discussing the latent usages of “responsible,” “civil,” “professional,” and “inter-disciplinary,” among other terms of art deployed about the campus. Although the movie Cool Hand Luke and the newspaper feature “Tlansrations” explain much about “The University of Puget Clowns,” administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices at our school use ironic expres­sions in a manner far more nuanced that my teachers at Blanchet or Luke's bosses. [Of course, the foregoing juxtaposition between my high school and a road prison was strictly unintentional. The prison did not teach theology, for example.]

“The Senate has raised a technical objection.” tlansrates to “To invoke explicit rules is in poor taste and perhaps malicious.”

When apologists for campus rule-breakers thus dismiss violations of the Faculty Code or Bylaws, they go beyond Harry Callahan’s beliefs that rights and rules are for prisses. They explicitly or implicitly claim that rule-breakers have pursued higher justice by any means necessary. [Stop laughing! They are serious!] What is more, this “mere technicality” trope subtly incorporates the Confiden­tiality Con: if confidentiality permitted decision-makers to explain their actions, faculty of good will would understand and applaud but, alas, such accountability is not per­mitted by custom. By a remarkable, pithy sentence, then, practices warranted by no explicit authority overpower mandated rules. What the Faculty Code states in so many words becomes the merest trifle; decanal self-aggrandizement and/or committees' evasions and delusions that contradict the explicit rules become controlling authority.

“This is getting personal.” tlansrates to “This may expose too much truth.”

In ordinary usage “personal” denotes what is private or individuated, but campus usage incorporates the connotation “inappropriately candid, open, or transparent.” When a person or side with whom a colleague identifies is being confronted by truths that hurt, the colleague may say that “this has gotten personal,” especially when the truths relate to governance and are vigorously being denied. “Personal issues” include matters elimi­nated from public discussion by decree or by confidentiality, no matter how crucial the matter to governance, understanding, or integrity. The variability of subtext that invoca­tions of “personal” permit boggles the mind, which is of course the political purpose be­hind the professed solicitude for feelings. “This is getting personal” tlansrates sometimes to “I do not care to answer,” sometimes to “I do not know what to say,” sometimes to “You are very rude to raise what I cannot plausibly deny,” sometimes to "I have a very small penis," and on occasion to “How un­kind of you to respond in kind to my attacks on you.” In governance, “pursuing per­sonal agenda” or “for personal reasons” connotes that actions or arguments are not consis­tent with the personal agendas or motives of the speaker who deploys “personal.”

Although “personal” might be used in a sincere attempt to elevate discussion or de­bate, I know of no instance in which that usage has been employed on campus.

“Are we being rigorous enough?” tlansrates to “Are you as exacting and severe as I claim to be?”

It is well known across campus that a moment before his death, Goethe uttered, “More rigor!” “Rigor” combines common, straightforward understandings of scholarly virtue or virtues with presumptions about the scholarly superiority of whoever wields the Sword Rigor. This or that peer may from time to time exemplify rigor, especially if the peer bought the first round or a recent autobiographic anecdote, but the campus Wigger Pat­wol – those so busy es­pous­ing rigor that they leave themselves little energy for practicing rigor – epitomize rigor in their febrile fantasies. Such self-glorification is a common symp­tom of inferiority complex, so academe teems with variants on this demand that col­leagues’ prowess measure up to one’s own. That persons of actual prowess so seldom make such demands underscores the insidiousness of Wiggerspeak: no one can measure up to rigor that cannot be detected.


The examples above do not exhaust my trove of tlansrations. I shall note more in future postings and highlight those that I have incorporated in past postings. Watch this blog for such campus favorites as “mandated confidentiality” [what a decision-maker would just as soon not explain], “personal and professional characteristics” [respectable camouflage for why we really don’t like you], and, of course, “interdisciplinary” [matters covered by an existing discipline in which one has no competence or credentials].


However, we must remember that some tlansrations are so common in academia that campus usage and users merely follow longstanding fashion:

“We have decided to be prospective, not retrospective.” on many campuses tlansrates to “We have decided to minimize accountability and maximize chances of recurrence.”

“Let’s be proactive on this matter.” on many campuses tlansrates to “Let’s make sure that this does not happen to me or mine, but otherwise let’s avert our eyes.”

“Civility” on many campuses tlansrates to “Use ineffective argumentation that reinforces existing elites or authorities.” All too often, civility is a proper synonym for servility.

“Collegial” or “collegiality” on many campuses tlansrates to “Serving [my/our] greater good.”

“Culture of evidence” on many campuses tlansrates to “A cult worshipping spin.”

“That matter has been addressed by the appropriate body.” on many campuses tlansrates to “We have covered that matter up and would appreciate its staying buried.”

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" --

F is for Fakery

When things are not quite what they seem, faculty enable deceptions and delusions.

At the University of Puget Clowns [so called by President Pierce at graduation], administrators and apparatchiks rely on audience participation. As sad-sack deans, slapstick chairs, and supporting jesters engage in deliberate irony and inadvertent parody, rank and file faculty must suspend disbelief, credit performances, and accept verisimilitude as verity.

Most of the time, ordinary faculty suspend disbelief easily because most performances approximate reality. Many professors that the Faculty Advancement Committee (FAC) dubs distinguished, for example, have outperformed colleagues. Many recipients of teaching awards are good teachers. Many promotions are merited. These decisions at least roughly meet standards, criteria, and expectations and need little or no help or credence from faculty enablers.

From time to time, the FAC will deviate from rules or expectations and will have to counterfeit honors, designations, or decisions. When this happens, faculty enablers are indispensable. Colleagues must under such circumstances believe the unbelievable, credit the incredible, and deny the undeniable. More, colleagues must shore up accounts where they are obviously faulty lest innocents who are not enablers catch on to the fakery.

As we saw in “Evaluating Committee Performance,” an earlier entry in this blog, whatever social production appears to be exactly what one would expect probably is what it seems; if a performance is not what it seems, most likely it is a perfect fake (as Erving Goffman taught us).

Veteran faculty routinely perfect fakery to nudge the FAC within range of practice and precedents. A few colleagues stretch the facts or bury inconvenient truths to enable the FAC to award a mediocrity a teaching award; far more colleagues at the Fall Faculty Dinner clap politely and avoid obvious mismatches between the evidence and the outcome. When a colleague who is distinguished from other full professors mostly or only in a negative direction is designated “Distinguished,” colleagues avert their eyes at the Fall Faculty Dinner then acted surprised that such designees claim to be “Distinguished” on business cards or on correspondence as if such designation were equivalent to “Distinguished Professor of This or That” at a genuine university. Colleagues must assist in the fakery.

So when next one marvels at ersatz evaluation, give some thought to the bozos piling out of the little car. They perform their parts so that featured actors can fake out the unwary.