What If Governance Worked?

How different is faculty life when faculty governance works?

Very different from normal.

Hell, if faculty governance works, faculty committees might serve faculty.

?ty

***********

¶ Let 16 November 2010 go down as the date on which, for one fierce, shining moment, faculty governed themselves as they should. Gilbert Keith Chesterton's donkey once brayed about "one far fierce hour and sweet." For the tattered outlaw of the Earth who blogs here, Tuesday was all that -- the meeting took but an hour. A donkey of a different sort brayed about "one brief shining moment that was known / As Camelot. /" The faculty had such a moment without swordplay. For that fierce, shining hour, the faculty corrected an errant committee and disciplined some arrogant colleagues.

********

¶ The faculty scooped droppings from a rogue, irrational Academic Standards Committee [ASC] off the floor of a faculty meeting for what I hope is the last time but fear is merely the latest time. The ASC decided to prevent students from taking courses in their majors or minors pass-fail; perhaps six faculty supported the ASC's position in the plenary meeting. The ASC voted to restrict pass-fail coursework to juniors and seniors; maybe ten faculty endorsed that change in the plenary meeting. These results might have been as humbling and as enlightening as they were predictable if willful members of the ASC were open to "outside" views from, say, the vast majority of their colleagues. I have never seen the authoritarians who tend to populate the ASC learn. Maybe this time? Don't bet on it!

¶

¶ For years the ASC has been indifferent to information and evidence when not outright scornful of each. In recent years the ASC has routinely arrogated policy-making based on scant evidence and reckless presumption. Told of a problem, the ASC overreacts by lurching to a "solution" dizzyingly more extensive than the problem reported to [and usually by a member of] the ASC. Confronted about ASC effrontery, ASC members feign being affronted. Then ASC veterans adduce inconsequent numbers as if those statistics bore on any issue. [Of course, if any members of the ASC have facility with statistics or quantitative analysis or argument, such numbers might evince bad faith rather than questionable judgment.]

¶

¶ The immediate instance of changes in pass-fail originated when a member of the ASC said that her class relied on groupwork that was compromised by pass-fail shirkers. She wondered how she could restrict pass-fail enrollments in that course. The ASC pondered the matter and, much to the surprise of its own members, voted quickly and without much argument, thought, evidence, or information to eliminate the option of pass-fail at the University of Puget Sound. This revolutionary purge the faculty promptly overruled -- as any experienced member of the faculty would have told the cloistered authoritarians would happen had the ASC deciders cared what a majority of the faculty might think.

¶

¶ [If apologists would respond that the ASC passed the ban to provoke discussion among senators or the faculty, I should like to know why the ASC did not solicit views from faculty or from senators before precipitously and insouciantly banning pass-fail. I do not deny that some colleagues may elect to believe that the ASC was encouraging inquiry or raising the issue. I doubt that such was the ASC's primary motivation.]

¶

¶ The ASC's decision-making looked and looks insipid relative to the wisdom of the faculty once faculty were eventually informed of the problems. The plenary faculty meeting capped the number of pass-fail registrations at the discretion of the instructor. Instructors whose pedagogy could not bear pass-fail loafers could set the number of pass-fail registrations in their course or courses at zero. Other instructors could welcome every pass-fail registration for their courses. The problem articulated by a colleague who is no longer a member of the faculty nor of the ASC had been addressed with minimal violence to the options of students or faculty. Unless the ASC were acting out some vendetta against pass-fail itself, the faculty solved the problem brought to the ASC. What is more, the faculty tailored the solution to the problem. Try conveying that concept to recidivists on the Academic Standards Committee!

¶

¶ Demonstrating the tin ears for which the ASC has of late been renowned across campus and learning nothing from the faculty's dismissal of the ASC's original over-reach/over-reaction, the ASC proposed solutions for problems too microscopic to be worthy of the time of the Faculty Senate:

1. Perhaps one-tenth of 1% of all students' decisions resulted in students' opting to take pass-fail an elective in their major; the ASC was not going to suffer that affront with equanimity.
2. Perhaps a dozen students per year [accounting for less than six one-hundredths of 1% of all student-selections] came to regret their having taken a course pass-fail because they wanted to major in that course's department; the lone faculty-member from the ASC in the meeting yesterday assured faculty that either the department or the ASC easily remedied these rare problems, yet she defended the ASC's eliminating options for perhaps 100 times as many 1st- or 2nd-year students!

¶

¶ If the ASC were capable of opening their decision-making and their minds to the experiences and views of colleagues, they might not be upbraided so often in faculty meetings. And if my aunt Marilyn were a man, she'd be my uncle.

¶

¶ Many or most faculty thought problem 1 so trivial that they could not understand why the ASC bothered with the matter [again, unless animus toward pass-fail impelled the ASC to see in this or that sniffle an epidemic]. Amid Tuesday's meeting the faculty saw clearly that the ASC had put so little thought or craft into the first proposal that their rule would have prevented a French major from taking a course in another language pass-fail. [It was fortunate that the sole faculty member of the ASC who deigned to attend the meeting pointed out that the rule would under those circumstances not be enforced as written and that the ASC or some other decider would permit the student to use pass-fail in, say, Spanish 101 despite the student's having majored in French. Like so many faculty, I welcome assurances that whatever motions the faculty pass will be subordinate to what authorities decree from Jones Hall.]

¶

¶ You read the above correctly: The ASC misphrased its motion so abjectly that the sole member of the faculty from the ASC had to disavow the language of the motion to save the motion. Great work, apostles of rigor!

¶

¶ Problem 2 made the ASC look even more foolish. Presiding over the meeting, President Thomas asked whether instructors' grades were preserved after the computer assigned passing or failing grades. Instructors do not know which students are taking courses pass-fail and so assign ordinary letter grades. The registrar and the computer have those grades, as anyone who considered the matter for even a moment would expect. When the President then asked why a pass-fail grade could not be converted to the letter grade assigned by the instructor if a student decided to major after taking a class pass-fail, the inanity of the ASC's second proposal was clear to everyone not on a crusade to rid the campus of the sloth and laxity of pass-fail.

¶

¶ Given the silliness of the ASC changes in policy, who could be surprised that nearly all members of the ASC 2008-2010 dodged the faculty meeting? Their absence did not remedy the absence of reasons or reasoning and of evidence or inference for the ASC's excrescence of policies over the last two academic years. The Faculty Senate heard on Monday [11-15-10] that the ASC was demoralized because ASC decreees were so resoundingly and so routinely discarded in faculty meetings. Deciders who, to judge from ASC minutes, devoted very little time, thought, or discussion to problems or to solutions before lurching into major changes did not care to be second-guessed by colleagues who cheated by thinking proposals through then voting them down or by a President who eliminated a problem with a few seconds' reflection.

¶

¶ Petty overlords of rigor had been overruled. Woe is they or them!

¶

¶ Nor did the singularity of the membership of the ASC who dared to appear obscure the ASC bullies' getting their comeuppance from a student at the faculty meeting. The ASUPS President tolled the irrationality of the ASC by reproducing ASC minutes that showed that the committee's feces had no theses. ASC decision-makers so bold when it came to punishing students for deciding other than how the scions of rigor would have students decide left a staffperson and an associate dean to answer for the presumptuous, precipitate policies that would regiment 2500 students to eliminate the problems of a few students or even fewer faculty.

¶

¶ I doubt not that the ASC absentees have prepared excuses for their absences. I denounce their claims in advance without hearing or reading them. [In other words, I ASC them.] If any aspect of attacks on pass-fail had been passable, the absent ASC members would have made the meeting.

¶*** **ns.

¶

¶To sum up: A committee behaved recklessly and irrationally. The Faculty Senate did not directly discipline the committee but did set the reckless, irrational rogues up for rebuke by the faculty as a whole. The faculty scorned the deciders' decisions. The President of UPS and the President of ASUPS seemingly effortlessly exposed the ASC deciders as clowns who are not quite in on their own jokes.

¶

¶ When an object of a self-parody does not know that his or her parody is [self-]parodic, it's a UPS faculty meeting.

¶

¶ Will a future ASC learn from the rebuke? We shall see. Do not bet on it. One does not join the Wigger Patwol unless one is compensating for shortcomings actual or imagined.

¶

¶

Pressing the Wigger Patwol

Who would have guessed that pressure makes humans perform less well? Certainly not the Wigger Patwol



The Morning News Tribune (Tacoma WA) on 30 July 2009 ran an item from the Los Angeles Times: "Care less, do better, study says" (p. A7). A study published in the oxymoronically entitled Psychological Science showed that the promise of great rewards often led subjects to perform less well. It seems that the more that rode on performance, the likelier performers were to choke. [In sports-speak, "to choke" means to underperform due to stress or anxiety.]



Raise this item with a member of the Wigger Patwol and watch for hilarity.

Remember that the Wigger Patwol need not include every colleague who brags about how hard he is or how demanding she is. Colleagues who brag about their hardness are, of course, compensating from their shortness. [And some of them are not very tall, either.] Colleagues who tell us how demanding they are usually do not add how little assistance they provide students. To belong to the Wigger Patwol, teachers must 1) tout themselves for being hard and demanding; 2) exhort colleagues to teach as "the Few, the Proud, the Hard and Demanding" do; and 3) police colleagues who seem soft or reasonable. Only colleagues who surveil and criticize others, especially vulnerable others, achieve the distinctive vice of the Wigger Patwol -- to be so busy averring and testifying to rigor than one has no time left in which to practice rigor. To belong to the Wigger Patwol, one's rigor must be far more apparent than real.

In "Rump Parliament" I have often documented how members of the Wigger Patwol preach rigor more often than they practice rigor. If you want to find the worst hand-holders, for instance, start with those who denounce hand-holding most vociferously. Because compensation, projection, and hypocrisy range beyond the Wigger Patwol, I do not use any of those psychological features to define the Wigger Patwol. One who joins the Wigger Patwol likely will develop compensatory, projective, and/or hypocritical rationalizations to boldly go where no rational academic would go. Many who compensate, project, or pretend to virtues they do not practice, however, will not deteriorate into membership in the Wigger Patwol.

Having identified a candidate for the Wigger Patwol, send said candidate the study or the newspaper report. Be prepared with smelling salts. Then ask how faculty should incorporate this finding into the design of their courses.

Professor Javert of the Wigger Patwol will croak, "I rely on daunting, exhausting finals worth 50% of the course-grade to compel students to synthesize the materials of the course!" Watch Professor Javert's head implode when you point out that making the course cogent and coherent is probably the job of the instructor in the course and certainly the product of thought over weeks rather than torture over hours.

If Wigger Patwolmen and Patwolwomen elect due dates very late in the semester for tests and papers worth a majority of the course grade, you are expected to believe this is to foment rigor. It could never be that avatars of atavism are

• making things easier on themselves during the semester OR

• saving grading for when comments will do students no good and therefore may be dispensed with OR

• encouraging students to believe that they are sailing through a course before students evaluate the course, then lowering the course grade drastically with harsh grading of the semester project or a final.

Expect Dr. Gerard of the Wigger Patwol to argue that, as an undergraduate at Nairherdovit University, he aced five-hour examinations while being waterboarded. Once you are certain that Dr. Gerard is unarmed, ask how therapists have progressed over the last quarter-century in reversing the effects of those exams.

Attend informal confabs on pedagogy and, after the wine has been served, supply colleagues copies of the study. Probe for criticisms of methods, samples, measures, presumptions, and other barriers to new information. However well veterans of the Wigger Patwol allege they stood up to undergraduate or graduate torments, they will neither countenance nor condone any arguments or evidence contrary to the claim that "You cannot have too much rigor." They will break under the strain:

• Colleague Queeg will reel from whimpering to wailing about strawberries that are too mushy

• Colleague Ratched will ask whether the principal investigator had enough rigor in his courses and fiber in his diet to be taken seriously.

• Ivy-Leaguers Tor and Kay Motta will ask whether they draw salaries at a liberal-arts college or an encounter group.

A cacophony will then swell, decrying handholding, dumbing down, and other shibboleths that were hyphenated in less permissive times.

The one predictable outcome is that no members of the Wigger Patwol will revamp their courses to create more assignments worth less each to diffuse some pressures and to secure better work. After all, time the Wigger Patwol devote to creating more and better opportunities for learning cannot be devoted to assailing colleagues, mangling curricula, and telling all who will listen about the virtues of pedagogy that never materializes and publications that never appear.

Live Blogging the Senate

The Faculty Senate met 9 March 2009 at 4:00 p.m. 4:10 p.m. A gentle, genial conversation on a confidential matter wafted through the Faculty Senate today. What a welcome change from whiners asking the Faculty Senate to solve individual problems via institutional changes! And to discuss a matter confidentially when the confidentiality is not a con job -- what a thing to believe! 4:17 p.m. A senator mispronounced a fellow senator's first name for the 20th time this year. But we at the University of Puget Sound make up a "community of lifelong learners." Slow learners, we make up a great many things. 4:20 p.m. The Senate then took up approval of minutes and managed same in only four minutes. Roger Bannister ran a mile faster, but he had no Ph.D. 4:25 p.m. Outgoing ASUPS President Word was deservedly applauded and lauded; incoming ASUPS President Luu was introduced. 4:26 p.m. A senator once again began a "Special Orders" period by announcing that what she had to say was not truly a "Special Order," a habit that she has maintained in different forms and forums for years. Everyone enjoyed a nostalgic moment as we indulged our colleague's solipsism. She once responded to the president's call for announcements at a faculty meeting by saying, "This is not an announcement, but does anyone else have trouble parking these days?" I hope she will diversify her hijinks. Maybe during approval of minutes she could begin to rebut the Surgeon General's report on tobacco in 1964. When the senate gets to "Old Business," why not start things off with "Rectal itch can be annoying?" Order is often over-valued relative to self-indulgence. Immediate gratification is nice but erratic gratification entertains more and better. 4:31 p.m. A replacement senator, Dr. Wayne Rickoll, was appointed. Wayne is honest and straightforward, so I anticipate he'll get nothing but woe from his appointment. 4:34 p.m. Procedures for conducting faculty elections are being bandaid [sic] about. A patch was effected. Paper ballots versus electronic voting excited little interest, I believe -- dozed off. An elections officer was named after gratuitous dislocations. A staff member and a student outraced the faculty. Our staff and students have found us out! 4:52 p.m. Item VIII: The Professional Standards Committee [PSC] asked whether the Faculty Senate would mind it much if PSC posted on the campus web [inside the firewall] the guidelines for promotion, tenure, and evaluations for each department, school, or program. It sounds as if the Faculty Code assigns approval of departmental guidelines to the PSC. Could the PSC make substantive judgments about departments beyond whether they contradict the code? 5:00 p.m. Motion to appoint an ad hoc committee to study the internship program lay about. A discouraging word was heard: Rigor! Rigor began to overtake me owing to my missing an afternoon nap. Deep and restful sleep. He said, "Rigor" again. I found myself growing sleepier. Need strong drink. Must drink! 5:13 p.m. Senate Chair Kreskin forecast future Faculty Senate agendas. Need strong drink. Faculty Senate meetings should be accessible. Perhaps Knapp's? Harbor Lights? Tacoma Dome? 5:20 p.m. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Next -- Lifting the Manhole Cover

RIP Doug Edwards

Douglas Ray Edwards, 1950-2008


For the second time this year I pay respects to a colleague and friend born in 1950. [See "RIP Michael Denning" supra at March 18, 2008.] Like Michael, Doug Edwards succumbed to cancer. The genetic code that erected him brought him down when it became altered. Thus does biology play its own version of the parlor game "telephone."

We boomers are entering deadlier years. We so enjoy extended life-expectancy that we do not savor every day as a gift that our forebears not so long ago neither expected nor received. However, boomers who mourn should recall that another boomer sang, "Only the Good Die Young," itself an alteration of an ancient aphorism. If only the good die young, most boomers have many years to go.

I have the solace that I am not, never was, and never hope to be as good as Doug Edwards was. If my extended span of scholarly life be decades, I shall still fail of Doug's virtues.

Doug's greatest virtue was fidelity. Doug adhered to scholarly ideals and professed not to comprehend academics who betrayed those ideals. When Doug discussed with colleagues standards for professional attainment, he made the unaccomplished or less accomplished fearful. Colleagues had learned that at Puget Sound professional excellence was attributed far more than achieved. Doug gave every evidence of expecting achievement. Ghastly!

Some of the trembling colleagues did what one would expect. They lashed out at Professor Edwards's "extremism." Dr. Edwards was extreme. He was extremely faithful to professional ideals. He was extremely faithful to scholarship. He was extremely faithful to evidence and objectivity. He was extremely faithful to thinking and speaking the truth. Doug's fidelity did not make him popular with sycophants and shammers, narcissists and nincompoops. [You know who you are.]

Doug's fidelity to truth, objectivity, evidence, scholarly attainment, and idealism made him an unattractive, therefore unlikely candidate for the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Somehow Doug clambered onto the FAC in 2004. Almost instantly, he made a difference. The difference Doug worked was less in results -- the design of the FAC, its traditions and rituals, and its personnel militate against adhering to rules, upholding standards, or reading files straightforwardly -- than in reasoning. Only one as civil as Doug could ask where exactly the department had located "excellence" in a file before the FAC when it was obvious that no excellence was extant. Only one as courteous as Doug could then greet risible rationalizations and sophistical subterfuges with a gentle "Well, I do not quite understand your argument." I have esteemed perhaps five colleagues more after we served together on the FAC than before, none more than Doug. That increase in admiration is all the more remarkable because Doug started so high in my estimation that he had little room for improvement.

I raise the FAC amid a memoriam to make the point that Doug Edwards had so much character and integrity that service on the FAC became him. He saw that the system was corrupted in ways that I have mentioned in various previous entries. No student of religions ignores the blandishments of group-think, but Doug resisted them heroically.

Doug was designated "distinguished" by the FAC. In this instance, the FAC was not designating one of its own for special praise. Doug would have merited special praise if he had never served on the FAC. However, were Doug to epitomize distinction at the University of Puget Sound, the university could save itself a generous sum. Perhaps a half dozen colleagues could approach Doug's attainments. I know I could not. I know as well that almost everyone designated "distinguished" during my stints on the FAC would be distinguished from Doug in a downward direction. Here was a professor who was distinguished more than titularly.

Doug could afford idealism and honesty because he measured up to the standards he used. In teaching, Doug so exuded sincerity that he could be intellectually rigorous. Doug never joined the Wigger Patwol -- those who project rigor that they do not possess -- but lived rigorously. Indeed, Doug's teaching and scholarship frightened some self-aggrandizing colleagues into extolling their own fanciful virtues all the more fulsomely. In scholarship, Doug exhibited more devotion than any other scholar I have known. In service, he was generous and dedicated, not just putting in time.

Already others have lauded Doug as family man, community member, and bass singer. Of these virtues I know little, so I defer to those who do know. What I knew, I have written above.

I offer to my friend and colleague and to his admirers Robinson Jeffers' eulogy to a dead hawk:


#####What fell was relaxed,
#####Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
#####Soared: the fierce rush:
#######the night-herons by the flooded river
#######cried fear at its rising
#####Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.


And to colleagues who adhere to the maxim "Let no great men walk among us," I offer my own sentiments less poetic. Doug's death means not just serenity for Doug but for surviving colleagues. The bar has been lowered by Doug's passing. I find it unlikely that the bar will again be raised so high for so long by performance rather than by PR.

Sleep well, Doug. Like Randall P. McMurphy, you had the courage to try. May I live long enough to discover the Chief Bromdens whom you inspired.


Next: Why closed files guarantee innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt at least some evaluations.

Haltom's Sixteenth Law -- Whatever is not as it seems is the product of calculated, crafted fakery far more often than of error

If seeming beats being [Haltom's 11th], expect colleagues to work hard on seeming to be what they cannot be. They cannot perfect themselves, but they hope to perfect their imagery. If they succeed too well with the assistance of others, expect the perfected imagery to be (mis)taken for fact.


Would that I could attribute Haltom's Sixteenth Law! I believe that I learned this maxim from Erving Goffman, but it might have come from Kenneth Burke, Daniel Boorstin [The Image], or some other thinker central to my education. All I am certain about is that I learned it from another; I did not think of this myself, which certainly speaks well of this law.

Nonetheless, the gist of Haltom's 16th is as simple as Haltom.

α Most of what we perceive is largely what it appears to be. If colleagues in high dudgeon are deluded, they usually are sincerely deluded rather than feigning delusions [with a few exceptions for particularly cunning colleagues]. Who once were "rebels without a cause" decay into "reactionaries without a clue" not as a means by which to impress but in an earnest attempt to state misgivings and anxieties. [Indeed, most faculty reactionaries posture as Emile Zola but more closely resemble Emily Litella, befuddled commentator Gilda Radner played on "Weekend Update" on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, except that sincerely deluded colleagues never wise up and say, "Never mind." They just accuse more innocents of perfidy.]

β However, if our perceptions seem to mislead us or to obscure actualities, we must admit that whatever is not as it seems is the product of calculated fakery far more often than of error. To seem the least bit believable, a performance must persuade audiences or the performance will be taken for humor or parody or folly. Missteps immediately violate the dramaturgy or imagery and demand instant remediation and emendation of messages. Thus, when being belies seeming, seeming and being must be renegotiated between a protagonist and his or her audiences. [Strains of "Send in the Clowns" swell in the background.]

γ Artless fakery exposes itself and its creator too quickly and too easily to take in an audience. The colleague who looses a screed against students' evaluations/forms takes in no one because she or he lacks the methodological chops to make his or her points stick. Peers effortlessly tlansrate the screed into "I want better evaluations than I have been getting" or "If I do not fault students or forms, I may have to fault myself." If feckless teachers mistake the complaints of self-serving, self-exculpating ostriches for sensible, valid points, they imperil students, staff, administrators, and faculty. However, sensible colleagues dismiss such periodic mewling rather quickly. Much if not most such fakery exposes itself readily.

δ While anyone can make mistakes, errors usually do not align to fake out academics. When "mistakes" all or almost all suit some image that some colleague wants to be taken for reality, almost all PhDs immediately see fakery afoot. When "mistakes" are admitted, the performer may start to repair the imagery. However, many colleagues camouflage or rationalize mistakes behind elaborate, incredible defenses. Such dramaturgy fools no one who does not want to be fooled. For example, members of the Professional Standards Committees [PSCs] 2003-2005 still do not admit that those committees erred even though any fair-minded observer must concede they screwed up multiple times. That long line of evasions does not much imperil the University of Puget Clowns, however, because most faculty know nothing about it and because to hear from those PSCs is to disbelieve the members of those PSCs. In short, the PSCs' exculpations incriminate.

ε By contrast, persistent, persuasive verisimilitude follows from cunning, comprehensive, and copious dramaturgy far more than from good-faith errors or clumsy image-making. Worse, what is enduring and ersatz imperils the University of Puget Clowns. The colleague who faked a degree or an honor may have begun with a simple fraudulent line on his or her CV. The greater the honor or the more impressive the degree, the more tangled the web of "verification" the impostor wove. Accommodating colleagues or superiors then protected the counterfeit honor or degree because the impostor was too important to be forced out or too feisty to go down alone. Academic dramaturgy, alas, is group theater. It is an important part of the "contract of depravity" about which I have repeatedly, endlessly, tediously, exhaustively blogged.

ζ Therefore, the longer that the ersatz endures, the more invested in the fraud those who have accepted it become. Perhaps more important, the longer that the ersatz endures, the more that each responsible, respectable, reliable colleague [see this blog for 4 March 2007] must at least profess to believe the imagery and dramaturgy. Quia absurdum, credo! ["Because it is bullshit, I believe it!"] Hail fellows well kept must believe others' bullshit if others are to profess to believe the bullshit of fellows [female as well as male]. Thus does our "contract of depravity" entail collusion in mendacity and a culture of concealment of which the "Confidentiality Con" was the first example this blog explored.

η Cunning, crafted fakery, it follows, defines the University of Puget Clowns all too often. Take the Wigger Patwol -- please. The Wigger Patwol, readers of this blog will recall, consists of colleagues who are so busy professing to be demanding and stringent that they leave themselves less time to teach, to do research, to publish, or to serve the community than they might have if they were not so busy faking rigor. Most members of the Wigger Patwol are risible. How do they persist without dissolving amid derision? Because "civil" colleagues provide friendly audiences until their turn to perform comes around, at which time they may anticipate credulous colleagues who will pretend to believe the bullshit of "civil" colleagues. ["The Circle Game" now wafts into hearing.] The Wigger Patwol works the way the press corps worked in the 1980 Teddy Kennedy campaign: When Kennedy's advance people had failed to scare up a welcoming crowd at an airport, print reporters exited the planes first and whooped it up in range of cameras and microphones so that broadcast reporters would have tape to air. Many of our colleagues practice civility by scrambling to applaud colleagues for their rigor and by praising Rigor Itself.

θ In sum, at the University of Puget Clowns as at so many acacdemic institutions, seeming beats being because mutual admiration societies avert their eyes from what is and focus on what should be. Idealizations and mystifications perfect the virtual community and fend off embarrassing truths.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Seventeenth Law: Propagandists project crimes they are poised to commit.

Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Most alternatives, Kenneth Burke reminded us, need not exclude other alternatives. Many trade-offs can be transformed into syntheses or amalgams.

I derived Haltom's 14th Law from the literary analyst/theorist Kenneth Burke. Beyond the obvious advice to avoid false dichotomies, Burke counseled analysts to consider ways in which contrasting perspectives or passages might complement or mutually reinforce. Perhaps Certs is both a candy mint and a breath mint. To those with numb palates, Miller Lite may both taste great and be less filling. The nuns insisted that Jesus was both man and God.

Both/and!

Perhaps the most dispiriting either/or afflicts campus when one presumes that advance(s) by a peer come at one's expense. Your contract, publication, or opportunity makes the rest of us look bad, these envious dogs believe. Since there are always fewer people with some honor or accomplishment than without [even in a three-person department], such either/or, zero-sum attitudes guarantee more misery and jealousy than celebration and community. Those who want "no great woman or man to walk among us" guarantee mediocrity, sniping, and schadenfreude. That is how middling and weak departments stagnate.

Both/and!

Around campus, the either/or versus both/and problem arises whenever colleagues assert a sanitized, selfless motive as if such a motive precludes a corrupt, selfish motive. When I first raised concerns about permitting colleagues to take Fridays off by offering courses on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:00 p. m. until 4:20 p.m., proponents of four-day weekends quickly corrected me. "The point is not to take Fridays off but to clear Fridays for tasks other than teaching." These colleagues knew that this was a false either/or. As I showed in "U Stands for Unchained Malady" [the 10-27-07 entry in "Rump Parliament"], those pressing to be on campus fewer than a five days per week include slackers, shirkers, shuckers, and other cynics who hide behind few sincere colleagues who would put "free days" to good use. Long weekends reward both colleagues who put days away from campus to good use and far more numerous colleagues who sleep in, leave town, watch TV, luxuriate in tubs, swap spouses, or pursue other leisure activities. The slot on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1500 hours to 1620 hours may be devoted by some to legitimate pedagogy, but it is available for other purposes as well.


Both/and!

How many colleagues have presumed that one publishes only at the expense of one's teaching? Usually such a presumption excuses those who do not publish. While it is true that publishing more means that one must do less of something else, one may do less service, less hobnobbing, less dissipating, less kvetching, less traveling, or less bar-hopping. Publication feeds into teaching less directly and less often than some colleagues claim in personal statements, yet each has been known to improve the other. Thus, the zero-sum tradeoff between publishing and teaching is a false dichotomy. Publishing and teaching may have some positive-sum combinations, and publishing may come at the expense of activities other than teaching.

Both/and!

For decades decision-makers have presumed that the university needed ever-increasing SAT medians and other indicia of academic prowess to continue its transition from a local party-school to a national liberal-arts college. [Why it could not be both was never explained to me. Perhaps it is assumed that fun and learning are mutually exclusive.] Such concerns precluded diversification of our student body by classes, ethnicities, and other demographics we were told. This was more than an empty excuse for temporizing; it was another unnecessary choice dangled before credulous, craven faculty.

Both/and!

When some brave undergraduates in Spring 1993 held an event called "Sex, Lies, and Tenure," one or more members of the Faculty Advancement Committee spoke to students and assured them that recent firings of women had been based on considerations other than the women's facilitation of undergraduates' complaints against multiple members of the women's department. For some reason, the students were not taken in by the claim that this or that overt rationalization precluded certain covert motivations. [That is, the students were not drooling morons.] Indeed, students reasoned that overt rationlizations based on "personal and professional characteristics" might be a cover story that permitted decision-makers to punish whistle-blowers and those who sided with prey against tenured predators. Where did the students get such ideas? Well, many majored in Politics and Government.

Both/and!

Members of the Wigger Patwol insist that one cannot be both rigorous and supportive. This either/or concerns more than men with very small penises who argue about which of them assigned crummier grades to disoriented first-years. Faculty committed to being supportive take all or almost all students as those students enter courses. The supportive teachers strive to make students better. Supportive faculty do not believe that support makes them flaccid, any more than they believe that giving rotten grades makes them better teachers. The deluded in the Wigger Patwol, by contrast, insist that instructors may either be harsh and belittling or permissive and hand-holding. That is scarcely the only dimension along which Wigger-Patwol boneheads exhibit unusual thickness.

Both/and!

The Wigger Patwol, however, may exceed in IQ those who believe that any emphasis on careers, jobs, or practical education defeats attempts to run a liberal-arts curriculum. Need I explain how established liberal-arts colleges teem with alums who get jobs and pursue careers other than post-graduate education? We do not have to crank out professional students to prove that we are not "vocational."

Both/and!

Is there a faculty member who actually believes that paucity of majors demonstrates strength of the major? Cannot strong majors nonetheless be popular or attractive?

Both/and!

Thank God the current president believes the university can and should sport and support students who are engaged in Tacoma and other matters local while at the same time they think about big questions and enduring puzzles.

Both/and!

Now if we could only imagine a faculty both critical and loyal.

Coming Soon: Haltom's Fifteenth Law -- Academic sub-units can be inferior far longer than superior to their larger institutions.

Haltom's Twelfth Law: No matter how well you teach a class-session, students would have preferred you to cancel.

Most students have better things to do than to listen to professors. If they do not, they are losers.

Professor, be not proud. Generous evaluations, awards from student organizations, and plaudits from the Faculty Advancement Committee cannot gainsay a simple fact. On almost any day of the semester, almost every student in your section had a place she or he would rather have been. Haltom's 12th Law does not maintain that lectures are pointless or that taking pride in presentations is counterproductive. Instead, Haltom's 12th Law suggests that professors adopt more realistic attitudes about how entertaining and how informative they actually are on any given class-day.

Were you showing a boffo movie? Students would have preferred to have watched the film over refreshments at some reasonable hour. They likely would have gotten more out of the watching as well. Spin the DVD and do your best not to talk over the soundtrack like a demented disk jockey, but realize that you are saving yourself a lecture and entertaining the internees and that "mixing it up" is tacit admission that normal classroom activities are tedious.

Are you about to loose your most riveting presentation? Save it into PowerPoint and let students process the slides at their own pace in their own quarters -- if you dare to be bested by a pillow.

Do you protest that students love your classes and would not miss them? Then admit that you are an entertainer who has found ways to overcome students' alternative activities by pedagogical arts, crafts, devices, and dodges. That is, your refutation of Haltom's Twelfth Law reinforces the truth of Haltom's Twelfth Law.

No matter what protests brash blowhards belch, no matter what platitudes self-promoters chant, and no matter what self-aggrandizement full pustules ooze, some class-sessions represent substantial opportunity costs for every student with a life and a mind. Any student who could not have found multiple activities superior to those in a classroom deserves pity instead of a bump for class-participation.

Colleagues note and grade attendance because they must wield sanctions to fill their sections. Haltom's 12th Law helps peers admit what they are doing. In 1999, for an example, one of my advisees was graded down from the B- he had earned to a D because he had missed too many meetings of a course. I asked the professor about the matter. She or he replied that the penalty was listed in the syllabus. "When students miss class, they do not do well on examinations and do not learn!" He or she had no apt answer when I responded to this pious pronouncement with logic: "Then shouldn't a grade based on examinations and other course responsibilities represent any such gaps in learning?" I was not surprised that the instructor had no back-up bullshit. I was happy to help her or him see that he or she was affronted that some student could do average work without her or his assistance. He or she seemed less happy to receive my help.

In sum, deductions for missing classes often become more severe the more that instructors, in their few moments of reflection, realize that absences do not reflect in performance, learning, or grades. Such is not to say that students should not be encouraged to attend, that students who are blowing off class too often should not be rounded up, or that providing rewards and penalties for attendance or deportment is atavistic. Again, Haltom's Twelfth is about attitudes rather than actions.

Indeed, Haltom's Twelfth Law articulates with Haltom's Ninth Law. See what you are doing [XII], then do what you are doing [IX]. Get out of the habit of denying what you are doing, for that habit will induce you to lose sight of what is before your nose in your own classroom. Lose too much sight and you'll blindly join the "Wigger Patwol." Among the Wigger Patwol, thumbscrews and waterboarding demonstrate anew how eager your students are to be in class this morning.

I know that "the few, the proud, the professoriate" will never acknowledge that, at least for some students, weathering lectures, deciphering scrawl, and "engaging" in gabfests that raise students' evaluations more than students' acumen are often related more to pumping up the performer than to learning or to grades. They'd rather coerce captive audiences before whom they perform shtick that will secure evaluations that will get the performers raises and praises and the hapless audience an hour closer to their deaths [with or without learning].

Such colleagues are correct to suppose that coercion serves professors far better than voluntary consent ever would. One need not have done much peer evaluation to see why so many colleagues will not leave attendance up to students' assessments of relative rewards.

However, if you suspect that colleagues sanction attendance because they despair of defeating video games, slumber, and good books [as opposed to required readings] by any other means, you are a cynic, "[a] blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are ..." [Ambrose Bierce] rather than as your peers' rationalizations require.

When cynics are correct, they imperil mindless conformity even more than when they are wrong.

Coming next -- Haltom's Thirteen Law: Only lowlifes espouse Übermenschen.

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.

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.”