Loopy Transparency or Transparent Loopiness?

Administrators claim to value transparency but practice it in a loopy manner.

¶ In a Rump Parliament post on 27 June 2011 ["Faculty Meetings, Administrators, & Deliberation"] I opined that expecting transparency from faculty meetings was contrary to my experience at the University of Puget Clowns. Last June a memorandum regarding faculty meetings had suggested that faculty would not feel "out of the loop" and would be "in the know" if faculty attended faculty meetings and read memoranda in which decision-makers made their decisions and decision-making transparent. I derided this communique as a transparent, loopy excuse for blindsiding faculty on tuition benefits for dependents. http://rumpparliament.blogspot.com/2011/06/faculty-meetings-administrators.html

¶ As the plenary meeting of the faculty on 20 September 2011 begins to unravel, faculty must ask themselves anew whether faculty meetings harm mental health. One who attends faculty meetings exposes herself or himself to transparent loops that entangle the mind by weaving webs of facts and folderol.

¶ On 20 September faculty were regaled regarding the School of Education. That report contained some numbers about an alleged shortfall in profits from the Ed School. The Faculty Governance Forum has since exposed the numbers as tendentious accounting at best. We'll see if administrators favor faculty with more suspect "data" at next week's faculty meeting. Probably the administrators will rely on faculty obliviousness and inattention to let the matter drop from awareness. We'll see.

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¶ What we see already is that the transparency about which faculty read in June will be iffy. Maybe administrators are eager to keep faculty "in the loop," as the 6-27 memorandum suggested, but maybe the faculty's feeling "out of the loop" had far less to do with non-attendance at faculty meeting than it had to do with the nature or quality of information provided faculty in faculty meetings and inmemoranda. Maybe administrators who have often been far from open have changed their ways, but maybe professions of transparency are the latest camouflage.

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¶ And maybe the numbers to which faculty were exposed on 9-20 will turn out to be misleading. The Faculty Governance Forum recently featured the information that the School of Education is debited for the square feet of their offices. What other creative cost-accounting does the Jones Hall practice? For how long has the university charged which departments at what rates for office-space?

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¶ This tactical accounting seems consistent with a tactic used when earlier administrators were trying to eliminate Occupational and Physical Therapy. The strategy then was to isolate OT/PT as an entity that lost money. When I asked the dean and the president why OT/PT was measured in such a manner yet various departments outside OT/PT were not, I was told that the trustees had decided to count in such a manner. A circular argument circles the wagons and keeps me "in the loop." That is how the university has often practiced transparency.

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¶ I did not expect transparency. I expected loop-the-loop. I expect more loopiness to follow. So perhaps the call for greater attendance at faculty meetings was more than the excuse for which I took it in June. Was it as well precondition for misleading the faculty? After all, what is the point of a magic show without an audience? Why, that would be like a confidence game without marks!

¶

The Dark Side

#########
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.
##########
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?
##############

Standing By

Behold the Ballast! Fear the Inert!

###########

I complied with a request from on high the other day and of course regret my cooperation. Asked to respond to a survey despite my having no dependents, I responded that I had no dependents. The web-apparatus thanked me for my participation and terminated. Perhaps I had little to contribute on that subject. Still, the survey might have solicited my views before dismissing me. That was survey etiquette when I attended graduate school.

Doubtless, my colleagues with dependents will be more solicitous of my views than the survey proved. If my views advance the interests of colleagues, I expect those colleagues to solicit my full cooperation. Many of those who seek my assistance or support will have been chronic bystanders: those who do little or nothing for others and seek to know little or nothing about others until they perceive that they have something at stake. Until they demand allies, that is, bystanders stand by.

The mass of bystanders have evinced little interest when I have served as mouthpiece for students, faculty, and staff abused by my university. Bystanders usually bear up under insults, injuries, or injustices not directed at bystanders but make appropriate sounds to extract themselves unscathed from an interaction. "I'm so sorry to hear that," they say, and they seem quite sorry to have heard anything about the university or "the community" that might get them sideways with administrators, apparatchiks, or colleagues.

"I am very sorry to hear that."

"Don't worry. In minutes it will be as if you had not heard and did not know. Next time, dive into a doorway to avoid me."

Bystanders distrust their perceptions and immobilize their cognitions unless they think that they stand to gain or to lose. Then bystanders belch platitudes, imagine insults, concoct injuries, and discover that they have always cared about justice and propriety. Then they chat up colleagues as if bystanders had not been above or beyond nearly every fray for years or decades.

Bystanders might seem to present yet another instance of economic collegiality and the hypocrisies that rationalize economic collegiality. At an individual level, bystanding may be simply self-regarding behavior. Considered as a class, however, bystanders form a mass that empowers and emboldens administrators and apparatchiks. As forces in campus policy-making, bystanders are perpetually potential and never actual. Bystanders standing by form the mass of predictable, inertial, and feckless faculty. They give administrators every benefit of every doubt by tirelessly suppressing doubt and evading information. They let apparatchiks assist the administrators by keeping themselves perpetually naive and, they think, innocent.

That the bystanders impassively stand by need not imply that they stand still. Among the most nimble bystanders are the hustlers of equality and equity. Because they are supposed to oppose injustices, they must simulate sympathy and feign surprise that sexism or racism or clientilism or favoritism have tainted personnel processes, although their ideology and rhetoric would dictate that such inequities are to be expected.

John Garfield:  "Somebody told a story.

Sure, a man at a dinner table told a story ...

and the nice people didn't laugh.

They even despised him, sure.

But they let it pass.  ..."



Dorothy McGuire:  "If you don't stop with that joke,

where do you stop?

Is that what you mean?  ...

Where do you call the halt? ...

I've been getting mad at Phil [Gregory Peck

in "Gentleman's Agreement," whence this dialogue comes]

because he expected me to fight this instead of

getting mad at those who help it along ..."



John Garfield:  "What about the rest of the dinner guests?

They're supposed to be on your side.

They didn't ..."



Dorothy McGuire:  "No, they didn't, and I didn't.

That's the trouble.

We never do."

I cannot summon much dudgeon against the gender- or race-mongers, however. Usually they are smothered by bystanders. The bystanders natter until they can excuse themselves on whatever excuse. After the nattering and amid their flight, I imagine that they congratulate themselves on fighting the good fight. Supposed to be on the side of equality and justice, they didn't. They never do. That's the trouble. Instead:



"Graffiti? How dreadful! You know, students really shouldn't be marking up school property in any manner, let alone in a sexist or nativist manner. ... "

"He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die, and he never sees the writing on the walls.” [Buffy St. Marie, "The Universal Soldier;" see "Who's to Blame?" 16 March 2007 in this blog.]


Less adroit bystanders must feign ignorance and practice impassivity. No matter what they believe that they have learned, they know nothing yet are eager, almost frantic, to learn no more. Until they have something at stake, one not only cannot fight city hall or Jones Hall but one should not. It roils campus and disrupts the community to dispute official accounts or to note Orwellian communiques.

Bystanders acquiesce. Bystanders go along that they might advance themselves as reliable, reputable, responsible colleagues in the eyes of patrons. [See "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" in this blog, 4 March 2007.] Bystanders dare to avoid conflict, awareness, and at times sapience. Confronted with a problem not defined by administrators or apparatchiks, bystanders suspend judgments and back away.

Neil Young: "How can you run when you know?" ["Ohio"]

The Bystander: "I do not know."

Bystanders know that the only problems are identified by proper authorities. Beyond such authorized, official problems, there are no problems -- except those faculty who see problems. Faculty who see problems that they have not been authorized to see are themselves problems. Bystanders do not want to augment such problems.

But we all are bystanders some of the time. When staff are sacked or furloughed or sanctioned, most faculty know little about who the staff were or are. Informed that so-and-so was dismissed for questionable reasons, we do not question. We do not even commit to a Panglossian "I suppose it is all for the best!" We cannot even "rise" to apologetics.

Instead, we preachers of civility and community stand by.

So shall I stand by when parents who were counting on benefits for their offspring rouse themselves from inertia and indifference? Shall I nod my understanding and ooze my sympathy for the parents' predicament? Shall I seem to attend to their complaints and concerns while I rehearse in my head the times when the grievant strived not to know or to know as little as possible?

Please stand by.

###########

Scoundrels and Frauds

Puget Sound observes its ideals on Graduation Day.

A colleague spoke from the heart about graduation:

#####I am happy to attend for the kids but usually dislike
#####the speeches. The speeches are high-minded. I get
#####inspired then look around and see so many
#####scoundrels and frauds sitting near me. I feel soiled,
#####but say nothing. The hypocrisy bothers me.

Doesn't seem to bother most faculty or administrators.

Maybe you should turn off your critical faculties and let the nonsense pour over you.

Slumber through the ceremonies and be at most semi-conscious amid faculty governance or other dissimulations.

"Men go to bed with Gilda, but they wake up with me," said Rita Hayworth. Graduate students are seduced into academia; if they awaken at Coyote Date University, they feel used. This is all the more reason not to wake up.

Sleep in.
Talk critical thinking, but never practice it.
Advocate skepticism about change.
Let reassurance wash over you.
Avoid faculty meetings in favor of alternative soporifics.
Go along and you'll get along.
Stage more conversations among the folks.

There are no problems. The only problems are colleagues who espy problems. They're the problems.

But forget about them.

Have a lotus with that beer?

Before you give me grief about spelling out "STALAGS" along the left margin supra, please note that "stalag" was coinage from "Stamm" main body and "Lager" camp. Scoundrels and frauds are not the numeric majority at the university, but those who avert their eyes from scoundrels and frauds or apologize for the condoning of frauds and other abuses are the leading cadre.

The FAC flips the Senate the bird then invites senators to pull their fingers

The Faculty Advancement Committee Evades the Bylaws Again!

Every spring of late, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] evades the Bylaws. The Bylaws mandate that each Faculty Senate Committee appoint a chair. The Faculty Senate has insisted for years that the FAC follow the Bylaws. Whether through recalcitrance or arrogance, the FAC has instead upheld the cherished Puget Sound tradition that the Professional Standards Committee and the FAC do as they please irrespective of rules. When challenged on their misbehaviors, the power committees ply the credulous with aged canards and newly hatched rationalizations.

Aged Canard 1: The FAC objects to electing a chair because the FAC has never had a chair.

This objection is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that, over the years, the Academic Vice President or Dean has been unacknowledged chair of the FAC. The FAC has been guided by a de facto decanal chair more often than it has resembled any roundtable of six decision-makers of equal standing or identical function. Ask veterans who have visited the FAC on multiple occasions over the years whether they were able to detect a de facto chair.

If the FAC has never had an official chair, so what? Other than Puget Sound administrators and apparatchiks, who argues that never having followed the rules justifies continuing to ignore the rules? If only Al Capone had known this "argument" was available to him: "But I have never paid income taxes!"

That the FAC has never appointed a chair establishes only that the FAC has never considered itself bound by rules that apply to all faculty senate committees.

Aged Canard 2: The FAC objects to electing a chair because electing a chair might have legal ramifications.

At least one member of the FAC has argued unspecified legal perils might follow from following the Bylaws. How intriguing! Ignoring or evading the Bylaws has no legal downside, but following them imperils the University? Who vetted this legal argument—John Yoo? Did the FAC ask any competent attorney about the advisability of following authority—often reckoned a legal virtue—as opposed to defying both the Bylaws and the Faculty Senate? Or would asking a competent attorney divest the FAC member(s) of this excuse?

The FAC has supplied no legal authority for this "legal opinion" because any legal peril—to the chair of the FAC or to individuals on the FAC—from following Bylaws is a chimera.

Indeed, that one or more members of the FAC would invoke such hokum shows little faith in other FAC canards.


Aged Canard 3: Electing a chair would spoil the egalitarianism of the FAC.

The 2008-2009 report of the FAC features this drollery: "... the Advancement Committee discussed at its first meeting of the year the matter of committee chair. Affirming that it continues to prefer that all voices at the table be equal participants, the Committee elected Priti Joshi, Sunil Kukreja, Andy Rex, Stuart Smithers, Kate Stirling, and Kris Bartanen as co-chairs."

The FAC knows that not all its members participate equally or identically:

• Concerning third-year assistant professors and distinction, five members of the FAC recommend to the sixth member, the Academic Vice President and Dean.
• Unless the FAC has changed recently, the Academic Vice President and Dean handles correspondence for the FAC, while members of the FAC draft letters regarding individual evaluees.
• Through 2005, the Academic Vice President and Dean was never the lead person for a file; the other five members of the FAC took turns taking the lead.
• "Streamlined" evaluations result in no inequalities of participation?

However, the FAC presumes that most senators and most faculty will not know how often the voices around the table will not be "equal." So the FAC bullshits the faculty.

Even if the suggested equality or equivalence were true, this argument would not be cogent. The Bylaws require every faculty senate committee to elect a chair at each committee's first meeting. The Bylaws further require that the chair be responsible for inducing the committee to meet and producing a report at year's end. The Bylaws require nothing else. How a chair's being responsible for the committee's meeting and reporting would roil or spoil the FAC, we are never told. We are never told for the same reason that we are never told why George W. Bush was one of our greatest presidents.

The FAC does not want to follow the Bylaws and so will not. The rest is blather summoned to explain why members of the FAC are above ordinary rules and authorities.

Newly Hatched Rationalization 1: The FAC this year elected six co-chairs.

The latest evasion by the FAC collides with Article V of the Bylaws [boldface added]:

...

Sec. 2. Organization. The Senate shall name a Convener for each committee during the first month of the fall semester for the purpose of electing a Committee Chairperson and orienting the committee based on the committee's prior year-end report, except when otherwise provided in the organization of the committee.

Sec. 3. Committee Meetings.
A. The Chairperson of each committee shall convene the committee during the first month of the fall semester to plan the work of the committee. Times for additional meetings will be at the discretion of the committee members. The Chairperson shall be responsible for presenting reports to the Senate.


Who would be so wanting in candor as to claim that appointing six co-chairs matched the Bylaws' requirement of "a chairperson" and of "the chairperson?" To ask the question is to answer it.

Perhaps most remarkable, the two newbies on the FAC conformed to the FAC's defiance in their very first meeting. What profiles in credulity! Did they hold out for even ten minutes before abasing themselves?

So here's to the FAC, ladies and gentlemen!

Six doctors who believe that 6 = 1.

What kind of colleagues caution vulnerable or credulous colleagues not to opt for openness?

When colleagues frighten vulnerable faculty into surrendering their right to an open file, do they confess or do they project onto others? Both?

I do not know how many administrators, apparatchiks, and others are advising our junior faculty to elect closed files, but I should be surprised if there were none. Such advice amounts to a confession that the Faculty Code is being or has been violated. Such advice portrays colleagues as poltroons.

Invulnerable faculty cannot too often remind colleagues that the Faculty Code says about selecting open or closed files:

#####The faculty member being evaluated shall have

#####the right to examine letters of evaluation. ...

#####The decision of the faculty member to waive

#####or not to waive confidentiality shall not be

#####a factor in evaluating the faculty member.

#####Faculty Code Ch. III, Sec. 4, a. (1) (d); p. 12, lines 33-36 of the current code

You read it yourself!

Any colleague who states that any decision-maker looks askance at open letters admits that decision-makers have violated the Faculty Code. The code unmistakably states that the decision to assert or to waive the faculty member's right shall not be a factor.

"Bitter-enders" who argued and voted to preserve closed files have never admitted that -- even under the previous rules -- penalizing colleagues for selecting an open file violated the part of the code inset above. One head officer has long been particularly incorrigible in this regard. She repeatedly warned assembled faculty that she and her colleagues distrusted open files and encouraged colleagues, especially the untenured and non-tenureline, to choose closed files always. When she was, almost as repeatedly, informed that she was confessing that her colleagues and she were doing what the code said that they must not, she waved off the point by stating that the preference for closed files and trust in colleagues was part of their culture.

Before changes that increased openness and choice and faculty rights, enemies of open files argued that colleagues would not be as candid in letters for an open file as they would be in letters for closed files. To whom did they attribute such craven evasion of candor?

Did they confess that they lacked the fortitude to state their own views in open files and, hence, that they assumed others are as weak and fearful as they knew themselves to be? No! Such a confession would require more candor and courage than fans of closed files can muster. Instead, they blamed "human nature." That invoking human nature implicitly included themselves among the cowardly appeared not to have occurred to these enemies of openness.

Did some opponents of openness assume their own candor and courage but attribute cowardice to unspecified lesser faculty? Sure! More than once faculty have had to endure braggadocio: "I myself have always written the truth as I saw it, but I have gotten little support in evaluating colleagues rigorously."

If reactionaries try to deny faculty the right to open files, please ask them whether they are confessing their own spinelessness or assigning weakness to colleagues. Follow up by asking how many senior colleagues have exercised the right that they would now deny junior colleagues. If you enjoy watching colleagues sputter and spew, ask reactionaries why they do not argue for only closed files so that junior faculty may be protected as much as senior faculty are.

But only ask such questions if you are invulnerable. If you are not yet tenured or not eligible for tenure, simply notice this presumption that colleagues are weenies. Then take seriously your seniors' characterizations of the faculty and of themselves.

Next: Douglas Ray Edwards 1950-2008

Haltom's Twenty-Second Law: The usually powerless govern most when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic.

Those habitually disempowered generate symbols and spectacles of self-governance when chronic potentates find apparent democracy as useful symbolically as it is useless pragmatically and/or when potentates are divided.

The usually powerless govern most -- "most" meaning both "to the greatest degree" and "frequently" -- when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic to the powerless because elites welcome popular governance that serves or does not compromise elites' interests. This supposition is well established among some political scientists.

When established "deciders" divide into factions, there may be more opportunities for "self-governance" than will usually be the case, but we should expect such opportunities to be transitory because some faction will want to capture or to coopt newly mobilized forces. Savvy hegemons -- elites who dominate but do not absolutely control -- who espy negligible stakes in conflicts will not waste resources on the conflicts but will exaggerate the rites and rights of "the people" and other myths. Participation and exuberance testify to democracy when and so long as the masses do not imperil the classes.

Still, the classes permit masses to frolic without supervision rarely lest activists or participants develop a taste for or expectations of self-rule. Various rites have evolved to promote the appearance and to stave off the reality of self-rule. Political conventions, for example, permit "spontaneous" demonstrations that have been choreographed and timed to serve nominees and other party hierarchs. Rank and file may commit candor, if at all, in private but not before cameras, microphones, or reporters. The assembled must coalesce around blather and absurdity. Delegates are largely free to choose buttons, headgear, and signs that do not contradict approved messages. [Indeed, the more disconcerting the costumes, the more that viewers welcome party elites as alternatives to mobs of hayseeds and morons.]

At the University of Puget Clowns, the classes -- administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists -- circumscribe masses of faculty and staff to preserve order and predictability. Staff are reined in because they can be disappeared overnight. Control of faculty, by contrast, must be somewhat subtler. To assure that faculty do not blurt out or even learn disconfirming information, administrators station decanal agents on "Faculty Senate" committees, assign observers to dinners for trustees hosted at faculty homes, and trade on their titular status as members of the faculty. To conceal disconfirming information, administrators rely on apparatchiks -- "reliable," "responsible," and therefore "reputable" faculty who consistently support administrators and thus get appointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or other key positions. These appointees tend to be, shall we say, open to administrative direction. [To be certain, the FAC from time to time and the PSC almost always will include a gadfly or two to "demonstrate" the openness of faculty governance as well as the futility of reminding Power Committees what the Faculty Code and Bylaws say in opposition to what administrators and apparatchiks claim these authorities state.] Faculty not yet favored with sensitive posts on the Power Committees may apprentice as apologists. Apologists attest to the soundness of administrative decisions and to the bona fides of apparatchiks. When apologists stumble upon injustices that they cannot deny, they scapegoat faculty governance for problems. Apologists fulsomely praise civility and community, by which they mean servility and deference to authorities. Apologists acknowledge that the truest guide for governance is whatever administrators and apparatchiks say and that codes, bylaws, and other documents to which employment contracts refer can only undermine propriety and tradition.

Administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists overlap. Apologists who demonstrate their reliability and resistance to independent thought make themselves attractive candidates for service as apparatchiks. To preserve their reputations and status, apparatchiks must explain away malfeasance or nonfeasance without holding Power Committees or administrators accountable. Thus do doors between apologists and apparatchiks revolve. Administrators raised from among the Puget Clowns faculty will tend to have been apparatchiks, apologists, or both, but not every administrator is abjectly "reliable" or "responsible." Administrators who buck top-down policies and directives soon disqualify themselves from the elite and "restore" themselves to status beneath even apologists via memoranda that mention a desire to get back to teaching or research [whether or not the discarded did any research in recorded history or taught competently in collective recollection].

Guided by administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, faculty ostentatiously govern themselves but seldom interfere with elites. The masses validate and valorize the classes.

When colleagues profess not to understand why the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings of the faculty are so inconsequential, they mistake myths and rites for campus realities. The Faculty Senate, it is true, charges committees with certain responsibilities, but committees, under the surveillance and control of administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, then do as they please. As the FAC has shown repeatedly, members of the FAC care not what the Faculty Senate says or what the bylaws mandate. The PSC has consistently refused to admit what it has done or otherwise to answer to the faculty. Members of Power Committees assert hypertrophic confidentiality and revel in their status as servants of Jones Hall.

In sum, committees and the Faculty Senate enervate critical faculty. That is what they were designed to do. When ad hoc committees crop up from time to time, expect administrators to get on the ad hoc committee (1990, 1996) or, if administrative shills do not control the committee, to rally apparatchiks and apologists to undermine the ad hoc committee (1996, 2006).

When elites appear to lose, therefore, the sensible citizen will wonder whether elites were indifferent on the issue on which they lost, were sympathetic with ordinary folk for some reason, or went so far wrong that even somnolent masses used their superior numbers to outmaneuver the classes. The last possibility -- that "the folks" awakened and stopped the deciders -- is the least likely.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twenty-Third Law: Only lousy music emanates loudly from a vehicle.

Haltom's Twenty-First Law: What is not worth doing is not worth doing well

Often the most exacting plans are designed for the most useless projects.


Amid my first year of graduate school, the late Dan Lev greeted a proposed seminar project with the statement, "You have designed your project fastidiously, but I do not see your goal." I experienced that critique as a jarring slap to my peer because I did not yet understand that many presentations would be far stronger on answers to "How best might we do this?" than on answers to "Why should we do this?" Decades of presentations at professional conferences have demonstrated that academics often pound their methodology most when their findings are least interesting.

Some of the most pride-filled journals in political science offer "NEW! IMPROVED!" ways to "test" propositions that no one doubts and, all too often, that no one values. The exactitude with which "Duh!" contentions are contested is stunning -- so much time wasted on proving the obvious. Those who have mastered a statistical technique that baffles most readers or created a dataset to which most referees have little or no access must pretend to need such statistics or such data to disprove some political-science equivalent of the Flat Earth Hypothesis. Justices of the United States Supreme Court tend to decide cases in keeping with their partisan and ideological leanings? Other than every Senate Judiciary Committee in the 20th Century, who knew?

Perhaps similar experiences led a professional colleague to proclaim that "What is not worth doing is not worth doing well." I unabashedly stole this maxim from my colleague and list it as Haltom's Twenty-First Law.

Haltom's 21st is more interesting for its variations than for its stark truth.

If we do not welcome the results of some fact-finding or decision-making, for example, we do not state our distaste for arguments and evidence. Rather, we concoct methodological objections. In the 1990s, for example, the Faculty Senate was persuaded that learning what faculty think might be helpful. An ad hoc committee crafted and conducted a survey. The survey showed that much that the then-President and her Academic Vice President were claiming was sheer balderdash. Suddenly, the administrators drew on methodological expertise that neither possessed to critique the survey's methods. The spectacle of two administrators, each given to self-serving blather, impugning the expertise and integrity of colleagues trained in survey research was quite amusing. [It would be gratuitous for me to note that both administrators were hardened humanists accustomed to supplanting facts with interpretations, so I skip that part.]

The upshot was that the two highest academic officers at the University thought that learning and verifying were among the labors "not worth doing" but did not dare to say so overtly. Instead, they pretended to welcome a survey done well but derided the findings of a survey that was not done well because the survey returned unwelcome information. This is a variation on Haltom's 21st.

In "Rump Parliament" I have already discussed a similar use of pseudo-methodological criticisms. The first ad hoc committee that the Faculty Senate deputed to research problems with processes by which faculty receive or fail of tenure at the University reported to the Senate in early 2006 and recommended reforms. One meeting after that ad hoc committee had reported, a senator who did not welcome the committee's findings and had an alibi for his absence from the ad hoc committee's report then raised, utterly out of parliamentary order, a pseudo-methodological objection over and over. He consumed 20-30 minutes. He slathered objections into the minutes with no opportunity for the ad hoc committee to respond directly and immediately. He badgered the only member of the ad hoc committee present. He wondered why the ad hoc committee did not interview other faculty, including those who had claimed that confidentiality would not let them speak to the ad hoc committee.

This colleague raised not a single cogent point, but I doubt that such was his object. Rather, he wanted to suggest that the nonfeasance and malfeasance that the committee discovered and documented did not count because nonfeasant and malfeasant decision-makers did not get to control the report after the longstanding conventions of faculty governance. Since decision-makers could not cover up their misdeeds, the first ad hoc committee report was a task not worth doing. Unprepared to say so openly, the senator instead proffered a risible critique to give the nonfeasant and malfeasant ostensibly plausible deniability. Worse, this senator was no humanist and therefore was trained not to avoid unwelcome evidence. [Even better, of course, his tactics appear to have induced the next ad hoc committee to avoid pseudo-methodological criticism by issuing no findings. This senator, it seems, achieved a twofer: he berated colleagues for findings that he did not want aired and thereby induced the next ad hoc committee to air no findings that the senator did not want to hear.]

If these variations on Haltom's 21st strike the reader as a bit removed from Haltom's 21st, the reader should reconsider Haltom's 21st in context. For at least the last 22 years, the Puget Clowns, especially denizens of Jones Hall, have had little taste or use for evidence that did not suit their agendas. Indifference to evidence makes the gathering of evidence not worth the bother. Ascertaining the actual is not worth doing. That makes ascertaining the actual not worth doing well.

Keep Haltom's 21st in mind the next time that someone invokes "the culture of evidence."

Coming Soon! Haltom's Twenty-Second Law: The usually powerless govern most when the usally powerful are indifferent or sympathetic.

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

It puzzles us more than it should that some departments have been sub-standard for decades yet no department is above-average for long. Judgments of departmental weakness usually are concrete and empirical; judgments of departmental strength usually are fanciful and dramaturgic.


Soon after one gets a job in the academy, one begins to form impressions of departments, schools, and other sub-units of the academic institution that hired one. A dust-up in a department induces old-timers to recall the department's chronic inability to handle conflict or to manage its own affairs. "That has always been a weak department" leads to multiple anecdotes or apocrypha about departmental dysfunction and personal dementia over a very long haul. When some largesse is conferred on another sub-unit, tongues wag to the effect that administrators or other benefactors have recently cossetted that sub-unit and esteemed it far beyond what objective assessments would justify. "They have been favored by the administration lately" leads to anecdotes and apocrypha to show how ill-deserved much of the uptick in favor actually is.

Jealousies and invidious distinctions aside, Haltom's 15th Law notes that identifiably weak departments seem to retain reputations for weakness while departments thought strong will not be thought strong for long. Why?

The short answer is that assessments of sub-units' weaknesses usually follow more from concrete observations and valid inferences than do assessments of sub-units' strengths. Assessments of sub-units' strengths often issue from rationalizations for distributions of favors and largesse. The rest of this entry elaborates on that short answer.

The credulous may believe that virtues lead to rewards and honors, but the savvy appreciate that rewards and honors more often lead to attributions of virtues than vice versa. Chronically fractious and feckless departments will continue to be divided and ineffective whatever subsidies or symbols patrons supply, so patrons invest collective resources and accolades in less risky departments. The distribution of collective spoils must be justified to an extent, so patrons conjure some collective strengths to rationalize the system of collective spoils. [To be sure, patrons also command individuated subsidies and sanctions with which to coopt members of weak sub-units, not so much in hope of improving sub-units as in pursuit of grateful, subservient allies. This entry is not primarily concerned with individual spoils, which will be a topic for one or more subsequent entries.]

When I arrived at the University of Puget Clowns, my mentors warned me of "the chosen ones," a department on which resources had recently been lavished out of proportion with visible accomplishments. As I came to understand how undeserved, even inexplicable, much of the praise of that department was, I came to recognize political-anthropologic patterns of command and cooptation [see F. G. Bailey, Stratagems and Spoils or Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils]. The greatness of "the chosen ones" lay less in published scholarship or practiced pedagogy than in fulsome bluster emanating from Jones Hall and a succession [pun intended] of decanal appointments and other sway and swag. That almost none of "the chosen" even approximated Jones Hall's plaudits was crucial to the cooptation because Jones Hall always had the option of admitting observable facts if administrators became dissatisfied with returns on their "investments." It was, therefore, predictable that most of "the chosen" a) provided reliable votes and spokespersons for administrative schemes, b) garnered designations such as "distinguished professor" when no objective observer would have discovered much distinction [at least in a positive direction], and c) harvested more than their share of individual and collective honors and booty. The strength of the department and the designs of the administration were symbiotically articulated.

It should go without saying that such symbioses were most likely in departments in the humanities, for humanities [variously understood] suited the University's arriviste dedication to "liberal arts" [variously understood]. The more that a sub-unit exemplified or at least dramatized the teaching of works celebrated for being famous, the more probable it became that excellences would be discovered in the sub-unit and spoils dispensed.

Likewise it should go without saying that the superiority of "the chosen ones" was more apparent than real [cf. Haltom's Eleventh Law: Seeming Beats Being] because the actual department was in some respects mediocre. Had Jones Hall and other outlets of propaganda and flackery been restricted to the observable, the concrete, and the verifiable, no case for the superiority of "the chosen ones" likely could have succeeded. Because Jones Hall could indulge in self-validating flim-flam with little risk that anyone would commit candor [candor is so unprofessional!], it could continue both to buy the allegiance and support of "the chosen ones" and to instruct other collectivities and individuals about the benefits of sub-unit tractability and conformity as well as the costs of critical thinking or independence by sub-units. [As noted already, similar manipulations of costs and benefits applied at the individual level, but this entry is about collectivities.]

None of the foregoing implies that a sub-unit cannot be superior to its institution in one or more regards. If qualities are distributed across sub-units, some sub-unit's strengths minus its weaknesses may sum to some figure greater than the institution's aggregate "net." Rather, the foregoing suggests that supposed excellences are, like the glory of the world, usually temporary fictions constructed for the purposes and convenience of the managers and the credulity of the managed.

Strengths are usually more reputed than demonstrable; weaknesses are often [but not always] both demonstrable and reputed. If a sub-unit is both weak and seen to be weak, individuals in that sub-unit face at least a dichotomy: Does one chance improving the sub-unit or does one concentrate on improving one's own reputation? This dichotomy might seem false, a candidate for Haltom's Fourteenth Law ["Never Do Either/Or When You may Do Both/And"]. However, improving one's own reputation is usually realistic when improving one's department's reputation is dauntingly improbable. Cooperating with Jones Hall and other campus potentates will secure one individual awards with far greater probability than undertaking to elevate a chronically pathetic department. After all, if improving the sub-unit were easy, the sub-unit would not have langushed for years or decades. Moreover, whatever absolute personal advancement one may effect, advancement relative to one's substandard department is usually far greater and far more probable.

Indeed, some colleagues have discovered a way around the dichotomy defined above: They strive to be the best of a bad lot, which impels them not only to pursue self-advancement but simultaneously to keep their sub-unit as unprepossessing as possible. In recruitment and hiring, they fend off rivals and thereby preserve their relative, local superiority.

#####How awful to be somebody,
#####How public like a frog,
#####To tell your name the livelong day
#####To an admiring bog.

Those who aspire to be the most visible frog in a risible bog thus acquire an interest in keeping their sub-unit down to keep themselves above the sub-unit. In hiring, "the best of a bad lot" may prefer candidates who will not challenge or overshadow the sub-unit's best. Promotion and tenure decisions may turn on willingness to go along with some of the foibles that make a sub-unit substandard. They certainly will turn on evaluees' fidelity to the local great and, far more important, the greatness of the local great. These tendencies and others predict that departmental stagnation or decline will be sustained and departmental improvement will be rare and transient.

When sub-units are actually [rather than putatively] superior to some campuswide median or mean, look for happy accidents or altruistic behaviors. Since lucky streaks soon break and altruistic behaviors soon give way to habitual selfishness, sub-units cannot long remain above the norm. Hence, Haltom's Fifteen Law obtains.


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

Haltom's Eleventh Law: Seeming beats being

Imagery and dramaturgy tend to displace veracity and verity.


Haltom's 11th salutes seeming, which usually outperforms being.

Haltom's 11th should not be interpreted to do more than state a routine inequality: appearances will avail most people most of the time far more than actualities will. The apparent need not displace the actual because appearances work best when they accommodate or accentuate actualities. Indeed, appearances often complete actualities on first dates or in weddings. The competent observer pays attention both to actualities and to appearances, both to what what is going on and to what is being said, sung, shot, or otherwise conveyed about what is going on.

The late David Mayhew stirred political science when he noted how seeming rounded out being in the U. S. Congress. Professor Mayhew did not argue that congresspeople were indifferent to vindication of principles, to improvements in policies, to acquisition of power, or to advancement of agendas personal, partisan, or pecuniary. However, he helped us to see that, to approach any goal or goals, the congressperson had to get herself or himself re-elected. This led lawmakers to seek publicity ["advertising"], to orate eloquently on problems and bills ["position-taking"], and to bribe their constituents with benefits ["credit-claiming"]. Of course, cynics -- my volk! -- tlansrated [sic] advertising as public-relations blather, position-taking as empty posturing, and credit-claiming as pork-barrel politicking. Either way, congresspeople performed well and secured re-election through dramaturgy. Because their survival as members of Congress demanded fraud, frauds they delivered. Congressional con artists made certain that their appearances accommodated and augmented actualities.

Appearances accommodate and complement actualities in other institutions as well. Academic institutions abound in advertising, position-taking, and credit-claiming because they abound in con artists. Institutional and individual web-pages advertise virtues and accomplishments that are more about seeming than being. Schools and scholars alike take positions athwart ignorance and inveigh against evils of an age, evils from when most immediately shrink rather than back their shibboleths or slogans with any actions that might cost them anything. How quickly Dr. Alligator Mouth becomes Professor Ostrich Head! And, of course, this university and that professor claim credit for any good that might be associated with higher education and evade responsibility for any harms that might be attributed to them personally or institutionally. No professor is so complete and utter a fraud as when he or she sits through a celebration of her or his retirement without rebutting the recited litany of ways in which the retiring single-handedly extended the frontiers of knowledge. [Remember! The frontiers of knowledge may be extended by shrinking what is known.]

Haltom's Eleventh Law applies to academic institutions differentially. The more respected and respectable the institution, the more that seeming must be backed by being eventually. The less respectable an institution and the less respected its faculty, the more that seeming will substitute for being over a longer period.

Accordingly, at a respected institution, a manuscript must appear between covers and be issued by a respectable press to continue to be touted as a "book." Books, articles, and reviews each have looming expiration dates after which the author must forfeit repute for his or her fecundity. At even mediocre schools, someone at some time will contrast the record [being] with the reputation [seeming] eventually. If the seeming outpaces the being too much for too long, an evaluator will flirt with such f-words as "fraud" or "failure." At sub-par schools, by contrast, "the culture of evidence" is so occasional and so selective that the author of some of the best rotogravure inserts a tourist bureau could underwrite may parlay such "refereed publications" into tenure and promotion. Indeed, some schools are so desperate to simulate greatness that their faculty will salute fulsomely some colleague for producing a book that has never appeared even as a manuscript in a dozen years. At some point, those who have praised "the book" over the years do not want to acknowledge that they have been lauding an accomplishment more apparent than actual. Belonging to an academic cargo cult would embarrass the laudatory. Better to praise a colleague's invisible manuscript and the latent glory with which it showers the institution and the institutionalized.

Whatever the level of academic institutions, those who cannot be must seem if they are to preserve their sinecures, secure prizes, and maintain an aura of potential. Most of us can simulate much more than we can realize, so seeming beats being for almost all of us almost all of the time, even at the better institutions. The worse the setting and the less accomplished the peers, moreover, the more that seeming may supplant being. Indeed, at truly weak venues, faculty are so busy covering up their lack of productivity that they have too little time in which to be productive. Seeming takes up all their time.

Haltom's Eleventh hints at high art when candidates for tenure must seem excellent without being even competent. As I have noted in previous blogs, at the University of Puget Clowns the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] will certify perhaps 85% of candidates for tenure as excellent teachers and excellent scholars. Some will not just seem but be excellent teachers. Some will be truly excellent scholars rather than performatively and ritually excellent scholars. Almost no one will excel at both teaching and scholarship unless the FAC and co-conspirators manipulate appearances to mask realities. If a candidate for tenure is beloved by her or his department, the department will furnish intra-disciplinary perspectives from which flawed or non-existent accomplishments are "actually" evidence of excellences. Of course, if a department or an FAC or an administrator wants rid of someone, evaluators will pronounce themselves disconsolate that she or he has failed of some standard of which everyone else in his or her tenure-class also failed.

Seeming is more than enough for those whom Puget Clowns wants to keep. Being is not enough for those whom Puget Clowns wants to go. Thus does seeming profit one more than being at the University of Puget Clowns.

After tenure, such seeming must be taken for being. This explains why so many colleagues will shake their heads at junior faculty who worry about verisimilitude. Colleagues addicted to discovering and communicating truth might expose this renowned intellectual as a mirage or that legendary teacher as an urban legend. Naïve faculty who say that "the book" is not invisible but non-existent imperil not only the author of the manuscript that never appears but also the system of evaluation and the institutional publicity that apotheozies him or her. The stubborn realist who opines that a renowned campus intellectual "... knows the first three sentences of every book ever written and nothing else" must be driven from our midst. Exile is too good for anyone who says that evaluation processes that promote fictions and folderol are corrupt; such a knave must be subjected to one or more degradation rituals, then exiled.

If seeming is to continue to outpace being, in sum, those who seemed excellent must be vigilant against demystifiers. Otherwise, a converse of the differential stated above becomes too obvious. Above I wrote, "The more respected and respectable the institution, the more that seeming must be backed by being eventually. The less respectable an institution and the less respected its faculty, the more that seeming will substitute for being over a longer period." One does not want to reverse that premise: "The longer and more that seeming substitutes for being, the less respectable the institution and the less respected its faculty."


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

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

Truly trustworthy people husband trust through transparency and accountability. Those who say "You'll just have to trust me/us" are not trustworthy.


Haltom's Tenth Law pertains to private relations and to public personas. When people want to impart some secret and say, "I trust you," note Haltom's 10th: prefer to be incapable of violating some confidence rather than to be confided in.

Those who vouchsafe me private information need not fear that I might blab, but I cannot spill beans I do not possess. I try to stick with the observable and the verifiable so that friends and colleagues may satisfy themselves that what I assert is true. Nice as it is to hear that I am trusted, I find life easier and more serene when I need not be trusted.

If you cite Haltom's 10th, expect multiple benefits. You will stifle hoped-for leaks by telling a leaker that the rumor is not going anywhere. The less one hears about wife-swapping or recreational drug use, the better. When exposure comes, no part of the consequences will follow from your knowing or doing anything.

You will nonetheless acquire previously latent information because people tend to share with one who would just as soon not know. Careful! You may thereby come to appreciate Bob Seeger's "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then" ["Against the Wind"] in a new way.

Perhaps the greatest payoff from Haltom's 10th is as a reminder that the more that anyone protests his or her trustworthiness, the less trustworthy she or he is likely to be.

Trustworthiness like other virtues is usually evident. If you must tell those who know you that you possess a virtue, you exemplify the virtue too little. The sexy do not have to cadge compliments; the strong do not advertise their strength; the honest seldom have to protest their integrity.

Moreover, those who cannot be virtuous redouble their efforts to seem virtuous. Masters of virtues are fewer than professors of virtues, just as those who profess ethics are more numerous than those who live ethics [Haltom's Third Law]. The underlying dynamics of being and seeming were covered long ago by Machiavelli and will be covered in the next entry in "Rump Parliament" by your present correspondent.

Hence, when a colleague or superordinate says, "Trust me," the prudent academic distrusts the performance and the performer. Why is reassurance being produced unless there might be good reason not to trust or to distrust? Has anyone but a crook ever assured you that he or she was not a crook? Why tell me you will respect me in the morning unless you suspect that I might believe that you will not?

One requests or demands trust when one knows one is not trusted, will not be trusted, or should not be trusted. The confidence man trades on confidence he entices from you. The politician asks you to put trust in her because she has no better argument.

"Trust me" often serves as a polite form of "Shut up." When an administrator claims that some committee has addressed some matter, that claim is tantamount to refusal to account for the committee. If the committee's decision-making would stand scrutiny, the administrator would be more forthcoming. When committees' processes or outcomes will not bear skepticism, administrators raise trust and civility to suggest that genteel colleagues will not reason why or make reply.

When, for example, an ad hoc committee wanted to assay differences in the tenuring and promotion of males and females at the University, those with access to such information produced it only in its least revealing form and after great delay. When faculty who work with data asked for more revealing data, they were stonewalled with the confidentiality of personnel processes. When these faculty protested that confidentiality could be preserved but good data provided -- for example, by moving averages or other statistics resistent to disaggregation but revealing of gendered disparities -- they were scolded for not trusting those who provided the information. [In one sense, the scolding was merited: if administrators will not find a way to provide reliable, valid information, one already knows what the administrators are striving to conceal.]

Administrators and colleagues might not stifle requests for accountability if they could be certain that faculty and staff would accept accounts. Almost all faculty are unaware of accounts. Made aware of accounts, almost all faculty are indifferent to them. Yet those hoarding latent information fear an outbreak of critical citizenship.

Such fears belie almost all experience in faculty meetings, committees, and the Faculty Senate, yet administrators preempt sensible inquiries with "confidentiality" and "trust" and other shibboleths. Of course, once an administrator proclaims herself or himself worthy of and insistent upon trust, any experienced member of the faculty knows that decisions, the makers of those decisions, and the process by which the decisions were taken cannot survive even the gentlest questioning. "Time to move along." "Nothing to see here."

The majority of the faculty on occasion accommodate insultingly incredible justifications. The routine state of affairs is that almost all faculty are ignorant of and indifferent to decisions, decision-making, and decision-makers. This is the most important rationale behind Haltom's Tenth Law. To be a trusted subject of the University of Puget Clowns, one must be judged to be docile, decorous, and daft [or an "at will" employee, such as staff or untenured faculty].

One who does not have to be trusted or who is not trusted, it follows, receives one of the highest accolades that administrators or power committees can bestow. If such plaudits were medals, the inscription might read "Neither a Dupe nor a Dope!"

Trust me!


Coming Soon -- Haltom's Eleventh Law: Seeming beats being.

Haltom's Third Law: No one who professes ethics has any

How much should we generalize about trained incapacities?

As far as I know, my third law originated with me: "No one who professes ethics has any." In graduate school I noticed that faculty trained in philosophical disputation tended to deploy ethical precepts and moral casuistry in academic forensics to an extent far greater than they practiced scruples in their lives. I speculated that facility and experience with ethical argumentation led these instructors to discover that they could justify almost any conduct, which in turn meant that they could rationalize sleeping with their students, cheating on their spouses as well as their taxes, and other behaviors that might strike the untutored as less than moral.

I have so far resisted temptations to generalize Haltom's Third Law to the scope of Berkowitz's Law: "Academics' specialties reflect academics' deficiencies." The late Steve Berkowitz was a sociologist at the University of Vermont. He exemplified his own law to at least the extent that he was maladroit at relating to fellow humans individually or in groups. However, more than personal projections were involved. Steve saw how many political scientists were impolitic and/or inept at organizing people or administering programs. He noted how many geographers are often lost. He reminded me both how many undergraduates I had known who seemed to have selected psychology as a major to deal with their own manifest problems and how many psychologists I was meeting who seemed utterly maladjusted. [I should add that clinical psychologists have struck me as much more likely to exhibit imbalances than, say, cognitive scientists.]

Now, many academics do exhibit "trained incapacities" [Veblen]. That is, in acquiring specialized expertise, many academics lose practical, everyday know-how. We have all run into:

• teachers of writing who cannot write a personal statement
• post-modern theorists who no longer think or talk coherently
• economists who cannot manage a household budget or make a decision
• rhetoricians who could not interest high-schoolers in sex
• professors of education who could not teach a cat to sit up
• literary analysts who cannot tell that "Dr. Strangelove" was satire
• humanists possessed of precious little humanity
• historians who cannot remember on what date the Fourth of July or Cinco de Mayo falls
• political scientists who preach but never practice accountability or due process
• "internationalists" who can barely speak English, let alone a language used in areas that they purport to study
• musicians who cannot live with or in harmony

But we have also met many academics who were equally inept at each of the mundane tasks above but had not been trained into such ineptitude. Thus, I suspect that Berkowitz's Law is the product of selective attention to ironies. Many academics cannot write well, as any veteran of the Faculty Advancement Committee can attest. The author of this blog never took an English course after high school, so it is less noteworthy that he never learn [sic] how to write. Nor is it cause for comment when one who publishes in academic outlets becomes less and less able to write succinctly or understandably. [Perhaps that is why so many colleagues avoid publishing.]

Thus, I have resisted generalizing Haltom's Third Law along the lines of Berkowitz's Law.

However, it may be that my third law suffers from the same etiology as Berkowitz's Law. That is, maybe academics tend to become less scrupulous and more cunning over their careers. Certainly tenure makes less circumspect some academics who are utterly ignorant of ethics. Accession to petty administrative posts [department or program chair, for example] has released some inner demons or made obsessive-compulisive disorders evident in ways that called for dazzling casuistry by those not trained in such macabre arts. So maybe my attention has been drawn to the irony of propounding ethics while behaving badly.

Still, I insist that all or almost all purveyors of ethics in academia have turned out to be themselves seriously unscrupulous. I have known more than one expert on ethics who adjudged every stimulus or situation by how it might benefit himself or herself, so I can cite that example without singling out anyone. Kant would have excluded the exemplar's reasoning from the realm of moral philosophy altogether, but the exemplar plays on her or his professional specialty in ethics to camouflage her or his selfishness.

Maybe Haltom's Third Law could be improved by noting that all intellectuals are trained to rationalize, to chisel, and to befuddle. One must defend one's dissertation after all! Maybe all or almost all academics have proclivities for hypocrisy, larceny, and mendacity. Nonetheless, "ethicists" stand out for their sheer chutzpah.

I am so happy that I did not bring up Bill Bennett in this entry before now. I bring up his name now to remind readers of Rump Parliament of this bon mot from Jacques Ellul: the accomplished propagandist accuses targets of the very misbehavior that the propagandist has committed in the recent past and/or anticipates executing in the near future. I need not retrace the ethical gambols of Dr. Bennett. I need only remind readers that self-professed ethicists, like other propagandists, tend to excoriate sinners over sins with which the propagandists are only too familiar.


Coming Soon: Haltom's Fourth Law! "If It Does Not Fit, Use a Larger Hammer."

Haltom's Second Law: It doesn’t mean nothing.

Most things are not meaningless but are not what they seem, advantageous as it might be to induce one to leap to obvious but misleading conclusions.


My second law, borrowed from a disabled Ballard Vietnam vet who mumbled, "Don't mean nuthin' " every day, exploits a double negative. That double negative permits the usual, idiomatic interpretation – the second negative is a colloquial intensification of the first – without necessarily foregoing the literal interpretation – most expressions or actions bear or convey meaning. To preserve that useful ambiguity, I adopted the veteran's mumble as a law second in importance only to "F**k it/you/me/them/this/it all."

Let's listen to a lyric from Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" as I propound.

… [M]an standin' o’er a dead dog by the highway in a ditch.
He's lookin' down kinda puzzled, pokin' that dog with a stick.
Got his car door flung open; standin' out on Highway 31.
Like if he stood there long enough that dog get up and run.
Struck me kinda funny, seemed kinda funny sir to me.
Still, at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe

Taken literally, “It doesn't mean nothing” reminds us of the tendency of homo sapiens to imbue myths [e.g., mission statements] and rituals [reaccreditation] with significance. Suspended in our own imaginings, we manufacture meaning whether we find meanings to be as obvious and intrinsic as a curse or as subtle and elusive as a Rorschach blot. Except zero and "the null set," no expression means nothing. But meanings assigned need have nothing to do with any referents or content. We make even nonsense meaningful. Take this blog, for example.

Now Mary Lou loved Johnny with a love mean and true.
She said, "Baby, work for you every day and bring my money home to you."
One day he up and left her and ever since that
She waits down at the end of that dirt road for young Johnny to come back.
Struck me kinda funny, seemed kind of funny sir to me.
How at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.

The idiomatic interpretation – "nothing" is an emphatic alternative to "anything" – is consistent with the literal interpretation to the extent that one denies this or that meaning but not all meaning. The idiom is slang for “This thing does not have the import or implications that you are assigning it.” Some evident meaning(s) attached to events or expressions must be questioned or vitiated before they settle into intractable truths. When a dean says that some concerned faculty member does not understand “the other side,” the faculty member must realize the high probability that the alleged other side is inconsequent. The other side need not mean nothing, but the dean may be exaggerating or distracting. Sometimes, faculty detect vacuous misdirection, as when faculty derided assurances that administrators and committees had "addressed" faculty plagiarism. Even those assurances, however, did not mean nothing. Rather, they betokened that cover-up artists had no better forensic options. Out of ammo, administrators directed attention elsewhere. For once, it did not avail them.

Take a baby to the river; Kyle William they call him.
Wash the baby in the water; take away little Kyle's sin.
In a whitewash shotgun shack, an old man passes away.
Take his body to the graveyard and over him they pray,
“ Lord, won't you tell us, tell us what does it mean.”
Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.

So what is the profit in Haltom’s Second Law? If a colleague marshals some symbol, verity, cliché, or canard and the colleague is not sincerely deluded, the obvious meaning is there to make respectable or to obscure the ulterior meaning(s). Seek the ulterior meanings. If a cigar sometimes is just a cigar, nothing is lost by presuming that it might be something else. When apologists invoke "multiple narratives," one may find oneself awash in the Rashomon effect. Before one howls like Benjy going around the town circle in an unaccustomed way at the end of The Sound and the Fury, one should politely inquire what the content of the alternative narrative might be. When apologists then raise confidentiality or some other dodge to excuse their unwillingness to present their excuses for scrutiny, then howl. Just don't howl "F**k this!" and leave the room. That would be uncivil expression although utter bullshit is not.

Congregation gathers down by the riverside.
Preacher stands with his Bible; groom stands waitin' for his bride.
Congregation gone, the sun sets behind a weepin' willow tree.
Groom stands alone and watches the river rush on so effortlessly,
Wonderin' where can his baby be.
Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.

My second law, as formulated in high school, was, "It's all bullshit anyway." However, that law was disproved repeatedly over the last decades. Some of "it" – say, the modal use in the Faculty Senate of "multiple narratives" – does not rise to the level of bullshit. Even bullshit or sub-bullshit may disclose truths, so many pronouncements are bullshit useful not only to the bluffer but to everyone present who knows a tell when she or he sees one. When the Ballard vet suggested a superior formulation, I adopted it. I certainly hope no committee addresses my plagiarism. How harrowing!


Coming Soon: Haltom's Third Law! "No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any."

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?

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.”