Have You Seen This Fellow?

Isn't he a bit like you and me?

In Ferdinand von Schirach's Crime – Stories (Knopf 2011) I found the following sentences of interest: "He was sly rather than intelligent, and because he was weak himself, he recognized the weaknesses in other people. He exploited these even when it gained him no advantage."

Of whom did I immediately think?

Possessed of some talent in book-learning or blather-slathering, perpetual students eventually land a job and enter a system that selects for

• "professionalism," which in context means cowardice and aversions to conflict and to candor;
• "civility," which in context means smarminess and unctuousness; and
• "smarts,"which in context means cunning and cravenness.

So of whom at the University of Puget Clowns did I immediately think?

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.

###########

RIP Doug Edwards

Douglas Ray Edwards, 1950-2008


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

Haltom's 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 Sixth Law: Those who are committed should be.

We are all committed at and to various contracts of depravity.

Haltom's Sixth Law is a double double entendre. It plays on multiple meanings of "committed." Many of those who are committed have very good reasons for their commitment(s). Many of those committed should be put away from polite society. These two interpretations of "Those Who Are Committed Should Be" are neither exclusive nor exhaustive. Indeed, many persons incarcerated in psycho wards should be incarcerated in psycho wards. Others imprisoned in psychiatric institutions are ghost writers of integrity codes and of mission statements.

           
In ordinary social settings, commitment that is overzealous or fanatical marks individuals who should be hidden from children and from elders. These "committed" persons are disappointed when Kool-Aid gives them a sugar rush or sugar coma rather than the cyanide buzz and ticket to mortality of Jonestown's Flavor Aid. [Every time Bill O'Reilly calls someone a Kool-Aid drinker, he reveals his ignorance about Jonestown. On the other hand, that Bill O'Reilly has not yet revealed all of his ignorance is impressive. What a trove of unabashed unawareness the man comprises!]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid  This sort of commitment imperils security and sanity itself.
              

At the University of Puget Clowns, by contrast, commitment that is not feigned and cunning will often get one exiled. Those who appear to be committed to orthodox expressions or values but moderate their practice of or adherence to such commitments once the klieg lights fade often thereby secure honors and named chairs. A reputation for probity is much more valuable than the practice of honesty or any habits of integrity. Those who commit candor or observe virtues will be denounced, usually for whatever virtue they have most in abundance, and shunned, usually for whatever practices make "distinguished" faculty look bad. In this as in so many respects, the University of Puget Clowns abhors actual virtues and embraces ersatz virtues as if the former were Near Beer and the latter malt liquor.
    

Many colleagues sincerely committed to honesty, integrity, candor, and openness are no longer among the faculty, while most trimmers, trucklers, and temporizers [Murat Halstead] survive like post-apocalyptic cockroaches. One reason why homo economicus [the academic Latin for "weasel"] we shall always have with us is that the shrewd and the sly guard their reputations against those who, by telling the truth, might expose the sly and the shrewd, which would be dreadful because that would mean the sly were not sly enough and the shrewd had miscalculated. They who landed their jobs or forged their credentials through fraud or misprision must be vigilant lest truth-tellers gain tenure. Famous publishers who have not quite gotten around to publishing what they have assured us was "forthcoming" must fend off the kinds of evaluators given to insisting on reading manuscripts before certifying monographs on which the famous publishers who haven't published have alleged themselves to have been working for years and for grants. Those who threaten or bully fellow faculty must protect their reputations through reliance on colleagues who will vouch for the bullies. After all, without lies or dissembling, thugs might seem less than committed to integrity and other academic values. Can't have that.
            

When actually virtuous colleagues hold their departments or administrators to mission statements, ideals, or values, they demand that colleagues fulfill pretensions. How unfair that is! If we could live our pretenses we should not pretend. We pretend to be when we know that we cannot be. We pretend to be what we know we shall never be. Is it collegial to mock socially approved, communally shared travesties when shams are all some colleagues have?

 
Instead, let us commit anew to our "contract of depravity" [The Hustler 1961] by banishing those who, having inadvertently detected dishonesty or corruption, do not immediately find ways to hide malfeasance, nonfeasance, treachery, or mendacity. Colleagues unwilling to avert their eyes from unfairness, bigotry, discrimination, or meanness are simply not as committed as, by Haltom's Sixth Law, they should be.

    
Coming Soon: Haltom's Seventh Law -- What he/she/they will do to him/her/them, he/she/they will do to you.

Drug-Free Workplaces -- A Cautionary Tale

Campus elites have exploited faculty credulity before.


Confidentiality Cons force on faculty a decision common to citizenship: to question authority or to live under questionable authority. Gover­nance brakes fickle or facile changes in the Faculty Code or the Bylaws, so genuine authority seldom imperils the rights or security of the faculty. Fictional authority, by contrast, expands or contracts to suit the exigencies of committees or colleagues. Such Procrustean stretching and lopping is not new to Puget Sound, as the following will demonstrate.

In the early 1990s, Congress passed the Drug-Free Workplace Act. Among other symbols and gestures, this act required educational institutions that got federal funds – which is to say solvent educational institutions – to create severe sanctions for use of drugs on campuses.

Certain apparatchiks [that is, members of elite apparati beneath the level of the President or Vice President] presented the faculty in a plenary meeting with a proposal that, unbeknownst to the faculty, far exceeded the Congress’s requirements. When facul­ty mocked the proposal, the Dean of Students gravely intoned that the proposal had been im­posed on students and staff already. This led a certain campus wag to ask, “Is your point that, since staff and students have been stripped of dignity, faculty should be so stripped for fellowship’s sake?” [Adapted from Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons” http://imdb.com/title/tt0060665/quotes] The case for the proposal depended on belief that federal aid would be denied Puget Sound stu­dents unless faculty voted gentle for a good night to liberties.

That campus wag then went to Human Relations to get a copy of the legislation. Having persuaded a staffer that, actually, someone who specialized in teaching law to undergraduates could read a congressional enactment, I then made the far less capacious demands of Congress beknownst to the faculty, and the Professional Standards Commit­tee [PSC] created a far less Draconian measure. The FBI, freed from searching for a bottle of Scotch in my filing cabinet, then apprehended the Unabomber.

The moral of this story seems to me clear. It is not uncivil or confrontational to ask by what authority administrators or other decision-makers act. It is needful and rational. Campus elites have exploited “civility” ― usually a euphemism for credulity and servility ― before.