The Dark Side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I am serving my third year on the Professional Standards Committee after two stints on the Faculty Advancement Committee. Why do you ask?
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At Least One Senator Tried

Amid bad faith and cynical evasions, the incoming chair of the senate offers hope.

After Randall P. McMurphy tried but failed to lift a heavy machine, he offered a resounding phrase in the screenplay to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:"

"But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that." http://sfy.r/?script=one_flew

I rehearsed that phrase several times in my head in an attempt to calm down before a report to the Faculty Senate last Monday [10 May 2010]. The always wily, always deceptive Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had reported via one of its six chairs. See "The Persistence of Blather" [11 December 2009] and "O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here" [immediately previous entry in this blog, 24 April 2010].

The incoming Chair of the Faculty Senate, in his capacity as mere senator, had asked whether the FAC might move to change the Bylaws [one chair] to match FAC practice [six allegedly co-equal chairs]. He said that he preferred adjusting the Bylaws to circumventing the Bylaws. A novel notion that! Yes, we could follow the rules and, if we would not follow the rules, change the rules so that they resemble our practice.

The feckless, accommodating, thankfully outgoing chair of the Faculty Senate produced a communication from the FAC in which the FAC updated its deceptions and evasions. Does any member of the faculty remember when we had a Faculty Senate Chair who was not supine?

The member of the FAC presenting the report declined to pursue such a change. It would be unsual for a member of the FAC to take a straight path to any object or to acknowledge the authority of the faculty or the senate!

Then, in a usurpation that would have been merely hilarious were it not so pathetic and fatuous, the spokesperson attempted to "charge" the incoming chair to change the Bylaws himself. Ya gotta love FAC logic. A senator attempting to induce the FAC to follow the rules is asked to serve the FAC by changing rules that the FAC is content to flout.

Then senators were regaled with a flagrant misreading of a passage in the Bylaws that, if one were unfamiliar with standard English, might fool a dull sophomore. But let's keep it positive: how many FAC members have failed of our expectations for dull sophomores?

Rather than in anger, how might I respond to such vaudeville?

Shall I repeat "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown?"

Shall I rejoice that the spokesperson for the FAC wore flame-resistant pants amid her rendering of the Bylaws?

Shall I remind myself that many members of the FAC could not have found the meeting?

Shall I rebuke the faculty anew for electing to the FAC colleagues of so little credibility or ability?

Nope. Nope. Nope. And nope.

Shall I rejoice that the incoming chair of the Faculty Senate will not subvert the rules or suborn those who do?

Yep.

At least he tried.

God damn it! At least the new chair did that.

Amid the loons, one sane senator spoke truth to a Power Committee.

At the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], that is a miracle.

On the other hand, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], loons run the asylum.

Let's see if the new chair will be leader or loon.

Can he do much worse than his predecessors?

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.”

S Stands for Scams and Slackers

Self-serving, self-indulgent colleagues induce supervision, surveillance, and sanctions that task innocent faculty alongside scammers and slackers.


In the 1990s various colleagues intoned that it was too bad that many male faculty were reluctant to touch or console female undergraduates lest they risk suspicions or charges of sexual harassment. Some such laments signaled the astonishing credulousness of enablers, who took infamous predators seriously that efforts to police illicit, unethical relations between faculty and students were compromising avuncular relations be­tween professors and their charges. It did little good to remind predators or their enablers that whatever excesses efforts to control sexual harassment and hostile environs had fomented, the harassers bore far more of the blame than policymakers and decision-makers trying to protect students.

As with sexual harassment in the 1990s, efforts to police faculty scams and shirking often seem excessive -- especially to known slackers and scammers -- because such exertions must be energetic to keep up with wily veterans bent on fraud or misprision. The few faculty who find paperwork for travel to or participation in conferences to be onerous seldom as­so­ciate requirements with laws or false claims or profi­teering. When sur­veil­lance of faculty is excessive few academics acknowl­edge that surveillance often springs from financial liability and ethical responsibility. No one got into academe to be regimented like an assembly-line worker or, more accurately, like stereotypes or vague notions of what someone who held a real job must go through. Still, when faculty cannot be trusted, they will not be trusted. Untrustworthy, self-serving colleagues necessitate supervision, surveillance, and sanctions that annoy the conscienti­ous.

To be certain, administrators, apparatchiks, and accomplices go overboard. Administra­tors despair of winning arguments on the merits and instead impose their will on faculty because administrators know that apparatchiks and accomplices will go along and most faculty will acquiesce in almost any outrage. For example, when mul­ti­ple Academic Standards Committees showed little interest in the Rube Goldberg schedule that we currently use at Puget Sound and the Faculty Senate dismissed the idea as more trouble than it was worth, the Academic Vice President at the time proclaimed “administrative preroga­tive” and did as he [and perhaps the President] pleased. As usual, the coercion was ac­companied by liver-lipped professions of solicitude for cordial, collegial relations and faculty control of the curriculum. The faculty pissed and moaned like impotent jerks, then bent over and took it up the tailpipe [to mangle a Jim Carrey line from “Liar Liar”]. Because “the cul­ture of evidence” is a stratagem rather than a reality, faculty have never been able to ascer­tain what reasons impelled the current scheduling regime. Did administrators end up with too few classrooms after the bricks-and-mortar campaign of the last 10 years and so turned to pack­ing courses into Tuesdays and Thursdays? Who knows? The apparat­chiks and accomplices don’t want to know. The rank and file are too lazy and compla­cent to inquire. Cooptation and quiescence combine to allow administrators to do pretty much as they please, so excesses are to be expected.

Even amid cooptation and quiescence, faculty may speak out if they think the stakes worth the speaking. Those who speak out will be debilitated all too often by self-seeking scam artists and slackers. Faculty initiatives need not be self-serving for administrators and their thralls to portray reforms and reformers as self-serving.

Every slacker and every scam artist on the faculty provides administrators and accom­plices ready examples for opposing proposals. This colleague would like to free up more days per week in which to have time for research? Some opponent will allude to colleagues given to three- or four-day weekends. That colleague would like to offer classes in other than fifty-minute meetings? A detractor will mention instructors who opt for generous breaks in the midst of long meetings. A whole department wants to free up Fridays? Too many colleagues know about departments that are, shall we say, under­staffed every Friday as is.

For any change you might imagine, multiple colleagues have already been abusing leeways and loopholes in ways that call for more supervision, scrutiny, surveillance, and sanctions. We the faculty demand trust but seldom upbraid those who routinely abuse trust. Yet more silences, more quiescence, and more passivity render faculty incapable of governing themselves.

Q Stands for Quiescence

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ … I always knew what the right path was.

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

You know why?

It was too damn hard.”

Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman

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

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

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

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

Pay no attention to the apparatchik behind the curtain.

The winged monkeys are merely dispensing justice.

Sip some more Lotus Flavor Aid.

Ain't intellectual life grand!