O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here

Why do we let "souls undone undoing others" on the Faculty Advancement Committee preach at naifs?

A member of the faculty for almost two years went to a meeting with erstwhile members of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] to hear their advice for faculty who will undergo their third-year assistant professor review, the first full-scale assessment of their teaching, service, professional growth, and likableness. She learned so much that she returned to her department asking if one really cannot have an open file for tenure.

Well played, FAC authorities! The faculty have in this century made ONE change regarding tenure files, and you clowns managed to fuzz it up so that a PhD walks away from "mentoring" confused about a matter that she understood correctly when she entered the room. And you teach for a living?

That some former members of the FAC push closed files cannot surprise us. Members of the FAC have complained that since 2005 -- when candidates for tenure were permitted to select an open file -- letter-writers have been guarded in their assessments. [Can't have guarded letters. Calumnies provide the FAC "complete" information.] Now FAC emeriti instruct virgins that closed files are truly advisable. Maybe the "sophomore" who spoke to me misunderstood, but how coincidental that she misunderstood in a manner that suited the view of some FAC conspirators of recent years. And what a coincidence that, according to one or more attendees, each FAC veteran present indicated a strong preference for closed files.

To get, through deception of the uninformed and unwary, what they cannot get through meetings of the faculty, will closed-minded FAC bunko artists stop at nothing?

I do not blame the selected FAC alums alone. I also blame the decision-maker(s) who selected these closed-minded FAC alums for this forum. More important, I blame faculty who larded the FAC with fatheads. Those who have made careers from duping naifs in classrooms can scarcely be expected to develop new skills and proclivities once appointed to the FAC. When we faculty nominate shuckers and jivers to the FAC, we enable blatherers to bamboozle the gullible.

Not content to muddle through evaluation of personnel for three years or less, the few, the proud, the cloying suffuse campus with their baleful blarney even after their terms have ended.

Once deceivers and believers make the FAC, misdirection and bad faith become part of the way of working if not the way of life. The bylaws require the FAC to appoint one chair; the members of the FAC knowingly ignored the bylaws for years, then engaged in the subterfuge of naming every member of the FAC chair. This flouting too may be blamed in part on the faculty, for the Faculty Senate knows that the FAC is rejecting a mandate for which they do not care. Chairs of the Faculty Senate and senators do nothing about it.

But of course colleagues pretend to believe the FAC when the FAC says it assiduously adheres to authority.

On the FAC colleagues exemplify Orwell's proposition that the great enemy of clarity is insincerity. Like essays from desultory students, FAC letters celebrate murk and sloppiness as if they were virtues. Euphemistic encomia laud for their excellent professional growth evaluees with no professional growth but friends on the FAC or patrons in high places. Disfavored evaluees find their students' evaluations categorized in ways obviously at variance with the most straightforward readings to conjure an "excellence gap" in teaching. [Why should the FAC limit its bad faith to readings of the code or the bylaws?] The FAC then stonewalls the president on the rare occasions when he troubles himself to inquire into their "reasoning" and why it makes little sense.

Thus do "made men" unmake themselves.

None of the above should surprise anyone who has been at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] for even a few years.

As a prior entry in "Rump Parliament" [1-14-10] counseled, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

What may surprise even jaded veterans, however, is just how doltish FAC parolees can be. Did a recent member of the FAC truly say that he advises colleagues to select closed files for the same reason that he advises his students to waive access to letters of recommendation? He claimed that he tells faculty and student alike that readers take confidential letters more seriously, did he?

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Please permit me to advise Dr. Dumkopf about colleagues and about students/advisees in turn.

Favoring or disfavoring colleagues because they selected open or closed files flouts the Faculty Code. If one makes a habit of violating the code, I suppose that admitting violations forthrightly is more virtuous than concealing one's misdemeanors.

As for advisees or students, counsel your recommendees to waive their right to see the letter, then give them copies. That way, you protect your students and advisees both against the prejudices of the closed-minded and against any temptations to write what you would just as soon the subject of the letter not know you wrote. If you would not have your advisee or student read it, do not write it; if you must write what you would not have your student or advisee read, do not agree to write "for" the student or advisee.

Why do the simplest professional and ethical puzzles stymie the simple-minded?

I admit readily that the FAC might advise naifs to go with a closed file for their first FAC evaluation. That is one way to smoke out the assassins in the ranks of a program, department, or school. If mentors communicated that stratagem clearly and repeatedly, they might assist tyros.

However, if we advise newcomers to choose closed files to elicit negatives while probationary faculty may remedy defects real or concocted, wouldn't probationary faculty immediately infer that come tenure time they must select open files to be able to counter negatives that dissemblers will pour into the process?

Beyond that, junior colleagues should seek colleagues with reputations for candor and awareness and should neither seek nor accept mentoring from the apologists or apparatchiks. How are inexperienced faculty to sort apologists or apparatchiks from candid and aware veterans? They should inquire of those who proffer advice the capacities in which they have served the university. Apologists and apparatchiks do not work for free. They work for patrons who sanction negatively or positively. Colleagues frequently appointed over the years to positions of responsibility owing to their reputations for reliability have, in effect, been outed by their appointers. [Re-read "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" in this blog, 4 March 2007.] Many who have done time on the FAC are seldom or never paraded before junior faculty because of the likelihood that they will commit candor or acknowledge truths inconvenient for the powerful.

Joanne Herring: "Why is Congress saying one thing and doing nothing?"
Charlie Wilson: "Well, tradition mostly."

Naifs: "Why do so many members of the FAC advise faculty so poorly?"
Wild Bill: "Well, tradition mostly."

Third-year assistant professors should never listen to FAC members who are ignorant of "local" presuppositions, habits, or traditions. The FAC members will argue for stripped-down files because that makes the work of the FAC easier. They are prosecuting their own lassitude and preserving their own latitude. Having counseled evaluees to "keep it simple," members of the FAC will then sniff that the code explicitly burdens evaluees with making the case for advancement and will resolve silences or gaps against those who have listened to FAC advice.

"And you'll be amazed at the gaze / On their faces as they sentence you"

Rather, preparation of the newbie's file should be informed by the newbie's "local" culture, peers in department, program, or school. The third-year assistant should ask those who will supply specialized, expert assessments what those evaluators would prefer to be available.

Don't tell anybody, but the members of the FAC read only a small subset of submitted materials anyway.

Oh? The FAC members did not make that tidbit clear while urging skinny files?

I am shocked and amazed!

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, 2007

On 14 February 2007, a mostly bygone Professional Standards Committee soiled itself over the slightest imaginable supervision by the Faculty Senate.



Lest we forget, two years ago the Professional Standards Committee from academic year 2003-2004 [hereinafter, the Professional Standards Committee will be abbreviated "PSC" and the PSC for the year 2003-2004 designated "the Starr Chamber" to commemorate the secrecy of their proceedings and decision-making and the inequity of their methods and reasoning] sent the Faculty Senate a mewling memorandum.

The Faculty Senate, by the barest of margins, had passed a resolution in which the Senate took responsibility for mistakes made by the Starr Chamber in its annus horribilis 2003-2004. The Senate, deciding to exercise oversight just to see what it might be like, had appointed an ad hoc committee to investigate recent PSC [mis]behavior and to make recommendations to prevent violations of the Faculty Code and due process in the future. That ad hoc committee produced no findings. I do not know whether to attribute the ad hoc committee's misprision to cowardice, collegiality, collusion, cunning, cleverness, or some other word beginning with "c." What I do know is that the ad hoc committee insulated the 2003-2004 PSC and insulted the Faculty Senate. When seven senators responded to the absence of findings by acknowledging the errors and misjudgments of the Starr Chamber, that was entirely too much for the Starr Chamber [and for its chronic, conniving apologists on the Faculty Senate].

The communiqué from the Starr Chamber was a marvel of haughtiness and misdirection. Having committed undeniable errors, the Starr Chamber, like mafiosi, pointed out that the Senate had not proved the errors. Even that subterfuge was not quite true. For one thing, senators had noted that the Starr Chamber had proceeded in very different ways to deal with two grievances, one in Fall 2003 and one in Spring 2004. When the Academic Dean, a member of the Starr Chamber, was the respondent regarding a grievance, he and the grievant received the report of the Starr Chamber at about the same time that the President received it. The Starr Chamber after the second grievance sent its report to the President but denied the report to the second grievant and to the second respondent. Logic dictated that at least one release had to be contrary to the Faculty Code, which had not changed in the interim. Senators therefore concluded that the Starr Chamber had committed at least one mistake.

Pesky, punctilious senators! Why can't they mind their own business? Why do they oversee the Starr Chamber when they could be banning Pass/Fail or addressing plagiarism? Don't they know with who [sic] they're messing?


The Senate had had noted other errors or irregularities that even the Starr Chamber could not have denied had members of the Starr Chamber deigned to speak with senators. It cannot be disputed that the Starr Chamber conducted the second grievance hearing more than fifteen days after it received the grievance from the Dean of the University. It is beyond dispute, therefore, that the Starr Chamber tarried past the Faculty Code's deadline. That was a first violation of the Faculty Code, a violation that one hopes was mistaken but may have been deliberate. To cover its mistake or misstep, the Starr Chamber "interpreted" the Faculty Code to set the deadline at fifteen working days, an interpretation that negated the mandate in the Faculty Code. That is a second incontrovertible error or evasion. It is not only beyond dispute but beyond belief that the Starr Chamber then blew by the "reinterpreted" fifteen working days -- a third incontestable violation of its duty. When the second grievance was eventually heard, one of the two claims advanced by the grievant was more than thirty working days in the past according to the grievant's own complaint. Despite the code's "statute of limitations," the Starr Chamber entertained that grievance. This fourth violation senators did not have to investigate or to prove; a calendar proved that nonfeasance or malfeasance.

Senators may be able to count, but they do not count. The Starr Chamber is far too important to be bothered with calendars or duties or instrumentalities of lesser beings, especially when the Starr Chamber dispenses justice and rights wrongs and picks favorites and follows decanal directions. Besides, for all outsiders know, the Starr Chamber interpreted thirty working days as thirty-three working days because thirty-three made a prettier number and allowed the grievance to be entertained.


The Valentine's Day greeting from the Starr Chamber to the Senate featured other deceptions. The most inept PSC in recent memory objected that the Senate had not carefully investigated mistakes. As noted above, the Senate's ad hoc committee had investigated mistakes and malfeasance, so the mistakes of the Starr Chamber were carefully investigated. Because that ad hoc committee issued no findings, neither senators nor members of the Starr Chamber could know what the ad hoc committee might have found. Senators knew that each member of the ad hoc committee admitted before the senators that he or she had discovered mistakes, however. The Starr Chamber phrasing was thus cunning but misleading. The Senate as a whole had not investigated, but the Senate's ad hoc committee had discovered that "mistakes were made."

"Mistakes were made!" That passive construction does not hide agents effectively enough. The Starr Chamber deserves greater camouflage. Maybe senate proceedings should be confidential.

The recklessness of the Starr Chamber in conducting its proceedings in 2003-2004 made the Starr Chamber's call for careful work ironic and amusing, not to say hypocritical. The hypocrisy followed: "In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events." Shall we peel this onion and weep at the double standards employed by Starr Chamber apologists?

• The Starr Chamber violated due process repeatedly in 2003-2004 beyond what I have listed above. For one thing, the Starr Chamber so constructed a list of charges that an accused colleague had to prove her innocence rather than the accusers having to prove her guilt. The Starr Chamber's product passes for due process but the Senate's motion does not?

• The Starr Chamber repeatedly insisted that a confidentiality found neither in the Faculty Code nor in the bylaws prevented them from speaking with the Senate about their activities despite the Senate's oversight capacity and duty. Hence, those who protested that evidence had not been gathered were themselves parties who refused to provide the evidence that they then said had not been accumulated. [Please consult the very first posting in "Rump Parliament" to see that two members of the Starr Chamber had explicitly informed the Faculty Senate that no member of the Starr Chamber would break confidentiality to speak to the senate or to its ad hoc committee.] Having obstructed the investigation, the Starr Chamber then protested that the investigation was incomplete. The effrontery of the Starr Chamber recalls the classic definition of chutzpah: A son kills his parents then demands mercy because he is an orphan.

• A final hypocrisy: the little information the Starr Chamber had released was partial and incomplete, not to mention every bit as misleading as the Starr Chamber's Valentine's Day memorandum.
  
  Let senators have their truth. The Starr Chamber will settle for arrogance and presumptuousness. All hail the Starr Chamber! The Few, the Proud, the Unelected Elect. By appointment to the Dean, Chief Privy Attendants!
  
  Had anyone with even the slightest common sense counseled veterans of the Starr Chamber, he or she would have noted that defensive over-reaction to the merest hint of oversight and accountability did not become the Starr Chamber. It did, however, show what the Starr Chamber had become.
  
  Senators are just jealous. Senators must work in open meetings and must account to faculty for their decisions and activities. The Starr Chamber, like President Dubya, answers to a Higher Power. It does not account for itself or its actions to ad hoc committees, to the Faculty Senate, or to hoi polloi. The Starr Chamber transcends mere faculty governance and accountability. The Starr Chamber rules! The Faculty Senate drools!
  
  
  Still, the 2006-2007 Senate weathered the whining duplicity and hypocrisy of the Starr Chamber. Thus, the Senate was steeled when the 2006-2007 PSC was found to have issued a major interpretation that it had sent forward neither to the Senate nor to the trustees. The Faculty Code requires the assent of the trustees to a major interpretation. It also requires that the Faculty Senate be notified of the interpretation. The PSC once again had ignored or forgotten elementary demands of the Faculty Code, just like the Starr Chamber.
  
  Faculty Code? Bylaws? Authority? Due Process? What were those to the Starr Chamber? What are those to any elect on a mission from God or the Dean, to cite a distinction of which the Starr Chamber proved incapable?
  

Coming Next: "Live Blogging the Senate"

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.”

N Stands for 1984

George Orwell wrote about a confluence of consequences of everyday pusillanimity and mendacity.


I guess it makes sense to read Orwell’s 1984 as dystopic fantasy, but Orwell was writing about tendencies everpresent in every stratum of every society albeit hypertrophied in some. The University of Puget Sound illustrates those tendencies even if it never approaches Orwellian extremes. Let’s look at everyday Orwellian rhetorics and practices.

As each of us fails of expectations and hides our shortcomings behind accounts [Do not try to explain connections between such accounts and accountability to colleagues who cling to the Confidentiality Con -- the pretense that administrators and apparatchiks would be accountable if only confidential proceedings permitted -- lest they sputter and bluster!], we play our parts in a social system of deceptions. When governors [administrators, apparatchiks, and other decision-makers] dare not be honest, they spin and prevaricate so extensively that soon they can no longer tell deceptions from ascertainable realities. Such is the ending of Orwell’s Animal Farm: humans and pigs become indistinguishable as pigs consolidate their control of other animals. Our governed animals, colleagues who are equal to governing animals only less so, are fed a steady diet of propaganda and lies until they crave deceptions and depend on illusions to make everyday campus life understandable, predictable, and pleasant. Fantasies, fictions, folderol, factlets, and factoids each and all manifest underlying social systems of mutual deception.

So it was in 1984. Big Brother deceived the masses with their active complicity. Passivity no more sufficed in Oceania than it would at an Pentacostal tent-meeting. To be seduced by Big Brother or Jim Jones, members of the audience must actively seduce themselves. [Please re-read my earlier posting (“Who’s to Blame?”) on these points.]

When faculty play the passive victims of administrators and apparatchiks to excuse their impotence and debasement, their pretense is convenient but dishonest. If one cannot fight Jones Hall, then one need not fight Jones Hall. But one can fight Jones Hall. Even feckless faculty may resist, evade, decry, expose, and otherwise harry Jones Hall. Fighting Jones Hall and oppression or other faulty governance takes time and energy away from teaching, research, family, and other valued pursuits, but each faculty member can strike a blow for better governance or greater justice IF HE OR SHE IS WILLING TO EXPEND TIME AND ENERGY AND WILLING TO RISK HIS OR HER RESPECTABILITY. [Cf. “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable,” 4 March 2007 in this blog]

Most colleagues most of the time take an easy way out [Not the easy way out! Part of the problem is that so many paths offer escape that keeps the escapee in good with administrators and apparatchiks.] Absurdities to which faculty first silently accede sooner or later reputable, respectable faculty must loudly aver if they are to stay within the spotlight of favor and favors. Thus do otherwise rational intellectuals persuade themselves that standards that are impossible to fulfill have for the most part been fulfilled by the tenured and the promoted.

As noted, to accept misinformation meekly, is insufficient. Reliable, reputable, respectable faculty spread disinformation boldly and in front of monitors and patrons. Every passive self-betrayal becomes yet another reason to traduce others to betray their own better selves. Like Winston Smith, they betray what they once claimed they loved and embrace with stronger faith what they once loathed. Orwell closes his novel with the observation that Winston Smith now loves Big Brother. All too many faculty cling to campus leaders because all too many academics are followers who have bought the official story so long and so often that the story owns them even if administrators do not.

Craven, craving credulity is not the only symbiosis between administrators and faculty. Other faculty bury themselves in their work and ignore apparatchiks’ and administrators’ misleading. Like buying in, opting out permits Big Brother to rule and ruin with impunity and without much notice,

Winston Smith was the particular. Social entities and processes are more general instances of Orwellian processes and rhetorics. The Puget Sound community is not immune to Orwell’s horrors because Puget Sound faculty soon or late practice what Orwell preached against.

L Stands for Lilliput

How much malfeasance at Puget Sound shall we attribute to its being a small school?

Does size matter? Many Puget Sound faculty explain malfeasance by noting that UPS is much smaller than the graduate institutions whence most faculty secured their degrees. Larger schools, they presume, have more experienced administrators selected from outside the institution via more rigorous vetting than that at UPS. Larger schools have more extensive staff to save faculty and administrators from missteps. Seattle’s large, state school has a suite of offices for the State Attorney General’s deputies, for example.

Confounding factors undermine confidence in “Size Matters” hypotheses. First, state schools are held to much higher standards for due process under U. S. and state constitutions, and as a consequence administrators and staff at state institutions have been professionalized and sensitized beyond the flaccid habits of non-state schools. Since many large institutions are state schools, size alone need not account for much.

Second, smaller institutions tend to be less visible, and anonymity of personnel and unawareness of institutional history may explain as much as smallness itself. A dust-up at some school somewhere creates too many unknowns for most academics to resolve, master, or monitor.

Third, some small places are more prestigious than others. The more that an academic institution depends on national or international recognition of faculty or on significant, refereed publications, the more that such merit will shape hiring and firing. More, the absence of professional reputation or of publications is far less likely to be remediable at the better small schools than it is at UPS. This implies that many “close calls” at UPS would at more intellectually imposing but small institutions be “no-brainers” in multiple senses. Size alone need not account for flaccid or malleable standards.

Size does matter. At places as small as UPS, for instance, faculty from this scientific discipline know much more about the average humanist than would be usual at a larger school and hence may be more tempted to hazard judgments. Socializing with colleagues in other departments breeds sympathy for one’s friends in those departments, and more inter-departmental socializing is likelier at smaller schools. When “administrative prerogative” rears its tyrannical head, far fewer faculty at smaller schools have the smarts, stamina, and courage to oppose depredations. At an “intimate” institution, smarmy veterans habituated to silence and servility will intone that administrators are colleagues due every consideration that one professor extends to another; at larger institutions, greater distance between colleagues encourages greater attention to disparate interests between administrators and teachers and to the myriad ways in which power and authority are masked behind civility and collegiality.