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!

¶

Neglected Beauty of the Obvious

My favorite remark from the first two weeks of Fall 2011: “I have not done anything on my research for weeks. You know, this is a pretty easy gig if all you're doing is teaching.”

For many colleagues who have not soiled their hands or minds with research or ― Gasp! ― publishing, this report is belated but welcome. Still another colleague has figured out the scam worked by so many faculty at so many schools that pretend to value the pursuit of knowledge. Indeed, our colleague need take but one more step to enhance her or his retirement in place. She or he must complain daily about having too little time for research.

The clowns who most often bewail the time that teaching and service and other duties divert them from their windpath-breaking research almost always do no research, almost never produce research, and would not know peer-review if they ever were asked to do it.

You cannot aptly say that these clowns long ago retired in place, for retirement implies something from which to retire or some shift from more to less activity. Many clowns have not since their dissertations had a research program to halt.

Truly impressive are clowns who, bereft of research programs and accomplishments, use research to justify their piling into the three- or four-day-weekend clown-car. These clowns need an exclusively Tuesday-Thursday schedule or a Monday-Thursday schedule so that they can secure another day with which to pursue the work that they never get done or started. Now that is a cushy berth!

So, beloved colleague, aim high. Get a Lantz to pursue an imaginary project. Secure the designation “Distinguished Professor” despite your having published no peer-reviewed research in the last five or ten years. Become a low-level administrator and lament its stunting of your research.

The University of Puget Clowns affords faculty many opportunities for leisure and lassitude.

This is a very easy job when you're not doing much of it.

It is an even easier job when you aren't doing any of it. The colleagues whose service is grudging and desultory and whose teaching is at best a rumor truly have easy gigs. Who are these colleagues? Listen for those who trumpet most their service or teaching. Those who are advertising most are producing least.

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."

X Stands for X-Rays

Institutional occlusion is the next best thing to transparency.



They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.

Robinson Jeffers wrote the line above as Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Jeffers’ line reminded me that reaccreditation looms. Among other horrors “the culture of evidence,” a shibboleth crafted by rascals in the 1990s to generate propaganda for the reaccreditation report and to surveil faculty and staff, will echo. “The culture of evidence” or some other reheated then over-heated argot will summon the credulous and the taskless to heap information without provenance or consequence onto the Logger version of a Texas A&M bonfire. This agglomeration will collapse before it can light academe but not before it secures reaccreditation. No one will be killed as a result, for reaccreditation reports are designed to implode neatly to bury unsightly truths.


Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but … men favorably
Representative of massed humanity.


The reaccreditation heap will fill some room where outside authorities will inspect exhibits before conversing with campus notables. Artifices, fabrications, and rationalizations that make up the heap will reveal images that institutional potentates think efficacious, which in turn will give the visitors something to gab about in their report. Ritual requirements met, the accreditation team will file a report, our school will be certified anew, and various ministries of truth will claim that all is well because a collage was warmly received.


Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant.


As Jeffers counsels us, we should not fulminate or ridicule what we might perceive and understand. The reaccreditation report will be an official narrative. As such it will emphasize the institution’s struggles, accomplishments, and dreams as well as the institution’s complacency, failures, and fears. Every major claim in the report will as much deny perceived shortcomings as affirm perceived strengths, so the few faculty who take what is on the surface and ask what the surface occludes will behold an institutional X-ray. Most faculty will contribute little to the report and will read less of the report.


Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.


Thanks, Robinson! I now feel better about reaccreditation than about blitzkrieg.

I is for Inter-disciplinary

If a course or subject is said to be inter-disciplinary, it almost certainly is inner-disciplinary or interstitial.


At the University of Puget Sound, ironic labels rule. The “Susan Resneck Pierce Atrium” is a foyer, not an atrium. Ostensibly endowed chairs have no matching funds but all the pedigree and fecundity of a mule. A colleague is named the “Alfred Packer Professor of Culinary Studies” despite his inability to boil water or make S’mores. Racial and ethnic “diversity” are fabricated largely absent Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. And “inter-disciplinary” programs do not cross disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of truth so much as they elude disciplines in pursuit of marketing.

Take International Political Economy [IPE]. At most universities across the United States, IPE is a quarter or a third of International Relations, one of four or so official subfields of Political Science. What makes UPS think that a sub-sub-discipline crosses disciplinary lines? Ironic labels do.

If one calls a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs do most dogs have? Four – because calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make a dog’s tail a leg. If one calls a certain breed of dog a cross between a dog and bear, that does not make the critter inter-speciated unless reifying ironic expressions and substituting labels for actualities is an institutional habit.

This is yet another “Iron Law of Emulation.” Curricular con artists adorn some existing sub-sub-discipline with dilettante doo-dads and wannabe widgets to hoodwink the unwary [students, parents, the Curriculum Committee, and trustees] but, so they will not lose recruits to pre-existing majors, copy the name of the established area of study. Professors eager to “branch out” and departments that long to be rid of dabblers untrained in what they now would teach dignify their exodus with marketing slogans. “Political economy” sounds like it ought to cross disciplinary lines, despite the dozen or more offerings in Politics and Government that concern political economy among other things and several in Economics that do the same. “International Studies” will not work because that is what the offshoot actually is or resembles. Where is the ease of emulation, the security of redundancy, or the thrill of deception in that?

At UPS, programs soon enough will be taken for what the faculty wish they were. The labeling and the marketing work. IPE has become at once inner-disciplinary [that is, enlarging a part of a part of Political Science into a major] and interstitial far more than inter-disciplinary. Interstitiality is effected by excluding from the enterprise those disciplines whose boundaries are allegedly being crossed. The most demanding, most discipline-specific features of economics and of political science must be diluted or dispensed with altogether to create the mislabeled international studies program that UPS knows as IPE.

Dilettantism was the inevitable result once the mislabeling had been executed. Marketing expenditures and extra-campus publicity dictated that the enterprise not be allowed to fail. Courses had to be staffed, so IPE turned to colleagues with credentials, expertise, and experience at best peripheral to economics or to political science. Such instructors proclaimed to be crossing disciplinary boundaries careened across, around, and about the edges of disciplines about which they knew little or nothing. They might have made excellent dabblers for an international studies multi-disciplinary program, but they were scarcely fit for inner-disciplinary or interstitial work.

Those who guard the borders of longstanding disciplines do condemn work that “falls between the stools” of established lines of study, so truly inter-disciplinary incursions or excursions are needful. Truly inter-disciplinary work, however, does not consist in declaring that one missed the barstools because the barroom floor is a frontier of learning. Still less does work become inter-disciplinary through throes of anti-disciplinary humbug [see www2.ups.edu/ipe/whatisipe.htm] by which the floor is declared to be up and the barstools down.

G is for Guile

Rank-and-file faculty collude in fakery when they trust guileful communications.


The immediately previous entry in this blog argued that we faculty must assist fakery if various shams are to come off. The credulous among us are to an extent blameworthy, for if frauds concerned our own promotions or programs we each would be quick to de­con­struct ersatz communications. Concerning malfeasances and nonfeasances, we usually do not know because we do not want to know.

Even more blameworthy, however, are wily communicators, especially decision-makers who explain away or excuse their chicanery. It is a pity that colleagues become too caught up in their own careers, families, and affairs to be critical or even attentive. An expectation of lenient, lazy audiences for explanations and excuses has emboldened the guileful, who disrespect the analytic capacities of almost all faculty.

Consider a paragraph written by one or more members of the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of the 2003-2004 academic year. That group responded to an empty motion barely passed by the Faculty Senate on 5 February 2007 within two weeks, a remarkable feat for a committee that could not hear a grievance within the 15 days that the Faculty Code mandates. [It was of course encouraging to learn that these colleagues could react quickly when they cared to.]


Given the passage of this motion, one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC. Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation. Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006. 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.

Let us consider each sentence in turn to reveal the guile of these special pleaders.


[1] “… one might conclude the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation and found that mistakes had been made by the 2003-2004 PSC.”

Someone who read the minutes of 5 February 2007 – minutes not yet ap­proved and thus not yet available to senators, let alone to others – might presume that the Senate had undertaken a careful investigation, if that someone were ignorant of Senate meetings and minutes from 3 May 2004 to the present.

As respondents knew or should have known, the Senate had been stonewalled by those who endorsed the response. The Senate had appointed two ad hoc committees to investigate, among other matters, perfidies perpetrated by the PSC 2003-2004. One committee found – as any impartial, complete investigation would have to find – PSC violations of the Faculty Code. Members of the latter ad hoc committee witnessed the abuse of the first ad hoc committee by apologists and apparatchiks, which may account for why that committee’s report [October 2006] featured no findings.

The response thus reveals a tactic that the PSC has cunningly deployed for years: spin trivially true but utterly misleading. True, the Senate could be said never to have investigated PSC misprisions carefully. The Senate did not do so; two ad hoc committees appointed by the Senate did. True, the Senate had not found mistakes after a careful investigation; the Senate did so after two ad hoc committees had found mistakes [albeit that the second ad hoc committee did not issue explicit findings].

Maybe the respondents used “conclude” rather than “infer” or “assume” or other more apt terms because the respondents so routinely leapt to self-serving conclusions in 2003-2004 that they cannot imagine peers proceeding more systematically. [In fairness, the response may have been a rush job to which erstwhile members of the PSC gave too little thought. Usually, the PSC takes its time before reaching thoughtless interpretations and indefensible decisions.]


[2] “Such a conclusion would be mistaken: the Senate conducted no such investigation.”

The key subterfuge of this second sentence has been debunked supra: the Senate conducted no such investigation but assigned two ad hoc committees to do so. The second ad hoc committee sought interveiws with members of the 2003-2004 PSC despite explicit warnings from two members of that committee to senators that confidentiality would prevent any member of the PSC from cooperating. [Recall from early entries in this blog that such statements are at best erroneous and, if members of the PSC are as familiar with the Faculty Code as they habitually claim, mendacious.]


[3] “Nor did the Senate confirm the accuracy of the allegations against the PSC made in Senator Ostrom’s letter of November 29, 2006.”

This is a “nondenial denial,” the technique Ron Ziegler made famous in Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein lampooned in All the President’s Men. The respondents do not specify which allegations, if any, they believe to be the least bit inaccurate. They do not deny the allegations. Instead, they dispute the procedures by which a majority of senators came to hear and to believe the allegations. [One should not fault the response for its nondenial denials. Most if not all of Senator Ostrom’s allegations cannot plausibly be denied, as the failure of the response to specify even one example should reveal.]


[4] “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.”

One familiar with the PSC cannot but marvel at the chutzpah of the PSC in this fourth sentence. Members who unanimously flouted the Faculty Code and due process on multiple occasions in 2003-2004 now charge the Senate with failure(s) of due process. Members who have steadfastly stonewalled senators’ attempts to gather evidence or testimony complain that the Senate did not gather evidence from all parties. The very people most responsible for the Senate’s having to work around uncooperative, unaccountable colleagues blame the Senate for proceeding with what little they themselves left the Senate. The PSC kills its parents then pleads for mercy because it is now an orphan.

This risible paragraph ought to embarrass every colleague who assented to it, but it will not because the PSC members have no audience before which to be embarrassed. How many faculty will trouble themselves to read the Faculty Code to discover that the PSC’s extravagant claims about confidentiality are folderol? How many faculty read Senate minutes, especially a response from a long-ago committee to a nearly meaningless motion? Among those who read the minutes, how many will be able to deconstruct the four sentences in the second paragraph, let alone cunning phrasings throughout the response?

To ask those three questions is to answer them. To answer them is to understand how workaday faculty collude in the acts of rogue committees and tyrannical administrators. Until more faculty participate in governance, faculty committees will remain unaccountable and, from time to time, unconscionable.

Therefore, let us not thunder at the PSC, "How dare you?" The PSC's audacity follows from faculty lassitude.


Next -- "H is for Half-Assed" -- The Faculty Senate goes off half-cocked unless it might displease administrators.

Yo-Yo Motions

If you would discern what Power Committees are up to, watch for contradictory rulings in identical instances or for initiatives that contradict interpretations.


The immediately previous blog – “X Marks the Spot,” posted 24 March 2007 – argued that the very vehemence of proclaimed authority indicates a consciousness of culpability. But how does one detect deviance when Power Committees [PC] claim quietly that they were only following orders?

One method to detect misbehaviors behind pseudo-authority is to look for irreconcilable rulings on identical or nearly identical matters. Even the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] have difficulty claiming both that they assiduously followed authority and that they arrived at diametrical results in indistinguishable instances. [Be forewarned, however! PCs will quibble that the results are not really opposed diametrically – as if deciding identical issues in ways that are just, say, 160° removed from one another is a defense – or that instances may be distinguished due to factors that are confidential.]

For example, in the 2003-2004 academic year the PSC – Yes! That PSC again! – formally heard two grievances. Having resolved the first grievance, the PSC sent the grievant [a faculty member] and the respondent [the then Academic Vice President] copies of their report at the same time as they sent their report to the President. Less than six months later, the same members informed another grievant and another respondent [neither an administrator] that the Faculty Code authorized the PSC only to send its report to the President [that is true] and thus prohibited the PSC from doing what it had done months before [that is not true]. If the President wished, he might share the report with the parties to the grievance.

Since the PSC favored its member [the Academic Vice President serves on the PSC] with a simultaneous release and withheld its report from two faculty who were not members of the PSC, a double standard seemed afoot. Moreover, the respondent in the second grievance was not an administrator [a venial sin of omission] and had challenged multiple departures from the Faculty Code by that selfsame PSC and especially its chair [a mortal sin of commission]. What a coincidence that a respondent who had vigorously protested that rulings internally inconsistent with other PSC decisions or externally inconsistent with applicable authority had seriously disadvantaged him would be treated worse than the dean permanently on the committee!

The double standard notwithstanding, these protean procedures make patent what PCs normally keep latent. Usually, the vacillations or the favoritism of a PC may be hidden behind confidentiality or denial so that a PC’s inconsistencies cannot be demonstrated. When the 2003-2004 PSC was of two minds, however, its public acts went on display. This provided that rare opportunity: a departure from the Faculty Code that the PSC could not deny.

The most that the PSC could claim was that one or more of their members [at a weekend PC retreat?] read the Faculty Code between the first grievance and the second grievance. That is not a very flattering claim, but a flat-out contradiction is hard to explain away even for master dissimulators. The claim is more flattering than telling the parties that the PSC made a special concession for one of its members. [That was the first “explanation” that the PSC chair gave the respondent in the second grievance. Imagine that a PC lurched into candor – “We favored a member of our committee who is also a powerful administrator.” – before settling for a different tale: “In Fall Semester we did not know what the Faculty Code ‘required,’ but by Spring Semester we conveniently discovered another way to abuse a second-year colleague who had the audacity to grieve faculty plagiarism and the temerity to point out that the PSC does as it pleases when it is not a Star Chamber at the service of the dean.” Each quotation is an expository device—the PSC is never that candid!]

[Even worse, the Faculty Code neither authorizes the PSC to provide the parties the report nor forbids the PSC from doing so. The PSC’s “improved” reading is a misreading! Can anyone around here play this game?]

Our first lesson at detecting PC artifice and fabrication, then, is what Izzy Stone long ago told us: any modern government publishes so many decisions and rulings that sooner or later it will betray its misdeeds if one pays attention. Too bad we do not have an Izzy Stone to help out our easily misdirected, easily distracted, and easily acquiescent faculty.


Such flat-out contradictions rarely surface, so we need to be vigilant about other PC “tells.” A second device is to ask questions to reveal inconsistencies that have not surfaced on their own. For example, when the 2005-2006 PSC proposed that the 15 days within which the PSC must schedule a grievance hearing be amended to be 15 working days, all ten faculty in the know should have inquired [aloud, if they are tenured] why that had not already been done. After all, the authoritative interpreters of the code [the aforementioned PSC] declared it so for two grievances in December 2003. Does the PSC fear another yo-yo? What if a future PSC looks at the Faculty Code and" discovers" that “working” days was neither intended nor implied? How would the expedient delays of December 2003 then appear?


Confronted concerning such yo-yoing, the 2003-2004 PSC wrote to the Faculty Senate that their consciences were clear and that they made no apologies. As one senator responded, “That’s the problem!”

It was a problem. It is a problem. Cult-like decision-making will be a problem again and again. All that good citizens of the University of Puget Sound can do about PC cults is to catch them out when they are compelled to release materials. If a PC yo-yos and no one notices, con games and cant will frustrate faculty oversight and neuter faculty governance.


Next – Zone of Caprice – Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.

Taking the Fifth

Those who hide behind confidentiality that they have contrived do not get to play the victim when faculty call for genuine oversight.


Usually, the fearful may not assert 5th Amendment privileges selectively. Within limits, to waive protection against self-incrimination once is to waive that protection for all matters related to the intial waiver.

I do not know how many Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or Professional Standards Committee [PSC] veterans know this aspect of constitutional law, but several seem from time to time to appreciate the “once is for all” principle with res­pect to confidentiality. Once the FAC or PSC invent some confidentiality and assert it to shield themselves from inquiry [let alone oversight], the asserted confidentiality cannot be too selective lest the invention too obviously be seen as a contrivance. Once individuals on a Power Committee [PC] elect to stonewall faculty, they force their committee to collude on a confidentiality con or to devastate committee solidarity. Rather than to hang separately, individuals usually elect to hang together.

However ridiculous members of PCs make themselves when they protest that confidentiality prevents their answering critics, most faculty have no idea how contrived and cunning such confidentiality cons are. Even members of PCs understand that denying colleagues information need not make criticism unfair but less in­formed; however, PC poobahs also understand that most colleagues will mistake an absence of some evidence for evidence of absence. Because PCs collectively or individually will always be able to claim that some factlet, fabrication, or folderol remains unknown, PCs will always be able to scam gullible faculty by claiming that a) not all the facts are available; b) multiple narratives may recast facts in some way; c) civility requires faculty credulity; or some such nonresponsive responses that are trivially true but substantially specious.

I admit that the blowback is a bitch. When veterans of PCs confront even minimally critical colleagues, the veterans summon dudgeon as high as they are able to crawl. If this seems truculent, focus on the experiences of PC regulars.

Superannuated apparatchiks long ago got used to a rou­tine: members of the PCs do as they or their masters please; colleagues almost never notice or protest; upon a rare protest, PCs profess to be eager to answer but prevented from answering by contrived confidentiality or other scams; transiently sapient colleagues give up, shut up, and reprise their roles as saps.

Given that routine, it’s shocking when some bounder says, “If you deny me the information, I shall go as far as I can in the absence of information. I shall not pre­sume that elites are behaving well in the absence of the oversight that elites fend off.” What would become of faculty governance or animal husbandry if the governed routinely behaved critically, independently, or skeptically? Faculty governance presumes that only a few faculty will ask, "If everything is on the up and up, why can't committees account for their virtue?" [For blog readers who are puzzled, the answer to this seldom-asked, never-answered query is to reverse the order of the clauses: "Because committees cannot account for their virtue, they must assert that everything is on the up and up."]

Now, if you build a bunker and hide in the bunker, you know that colleagues get to assert that they dislike decisions that issue from the bunker. Still, bunker-dwelling elites know that hypocritical bellyaching about the disadvantages of hid­ing usually suffices to avoid owning up to vicious practices or unjust decisions. Dogs lick their balls because they can; Power Committees use subterfuges because they work.

No good con man blames the mark for seeing through the con. The good con man isolates the would-have-been mark, improvises new ways to use trust against the trusting, and moves on to the next mark.


Next – “Unpersons” – Once a colleague is denied tenure, most faculty begin to treat her or him as if she or he were already gone.

Standards are Performative and Adjustable

Most faculty cannot meet the literal standards for tenure and promotion, which makes subterfuges and “terms of art” indispensable.

Try this thought experiment. Posit a system in which faculty, to keep their jobs, must be superior teachers while achieving superior growth professionally. If 80% of faculty do keep their jobs, to what exactly must such faculty be “superior?”

The 80% must be superior to the 20% rejected! Beyond that trivium, however, we may say little. The 20% might have been rejected for being in the lowest quintile of teaching. Some of the 20% rejected may have manifest an insufficient quantity or quality of professional growth. Maybe a few rejects were grossly deficient in both teaching and professional growth.

Trivial as our inference may be, it matches results better than published standards. The code and the Faculty Advancement Com­mit­tee [FAC] inform us that tenure is conditioned on “excellence” in teaching and professional growth, yet at no educational institution on this planet are 80% of the faculty excellent both at teaching and at professional growth. [Don’t you just hate it when the obvious clashes with factoids, folklore, fabrications, and other fantasies?] Clearly, “excellence” in the Faculty Code has little to do with “excellence” in a dictionary of English.

Faculty who receive tenure at Puget Sound become excellent by definition. Tenured faculty are excellent performatively – that is, because official declarers have declared them excellent. No other inferences are warranted.

Beyond this performative wordplay, evaluators to some extent follow the criteria in the code – excellent teaching, excellent professional growth, a record of service, and departmental and university need – but not one criterion can be applied literally and affirmatively to most evaluees. If 80% of all faculty are adjudged “excellent” in teaching and in professional growth, then those doing the judging must not be using “excellent” literally or rigorously. Every evaluee has a record of service; the code does not state any minimal service that the evaluee’s record must exceed. Taking “need” in any strong sense of the word would doom almost every evaluee. [Many faculty admit that they have no idea what “de­part­mental need” means: The department will expire absent the evaluee’s courses, if not the evaluee? This evaluee is indispensable to the continued existence of the department? …]

In practice, standards are not literal but adjustable. The four official criteria figure prominently, but other factors condition how stringently or flaccidly the four will be employed. An evaluee insufficiently deferential to powers that be in a school, department, or program will have to survive heightened scrutiny if not flat-out reprisals. An administration favorite will, by contrast, be forgiven this or that shortfall, especially a shortfall of scholarly production, especially if members of the FAC have little recent, personal ex­peri­ence with publication. A paucity, even an absence, of published work can be pronounced excellent pro­fes­sional growth. [Over whom does the unpublished evaluee excel? Some graduate students? Most undergraduates? The man in the street?] Those who have served only themselves will be lauded for position rather than performance [“Even if he never attended committee meetings, could he have shirked had he not accepted appointment to the committee in the first place?”] provided evaluators consider the artful dodger useful or at least docile. As already noted, no department, school, program, or university literally needs anyone except donors, which makes judgments of “need” nearly infinitely elastic.

All of the foregoing should be evident to every faculty member, yet standards that are at once factoids [that is, taken for fact because they are published in the code], folk­lore [that is, shibboleths selected for solidarity more than for accuracy], and fabrications [that is, "responsible” and “reliable” faculty vouch that the FAC assiduously applies the official criteria] will hide deviance. The Confidentiality Con, the usual cover-ups, and other folderol will not hide all of the record from those few faculty who want to know and to acknowl­edge what is going on but will, I concede, continue to distract the busy faculty who are the large majority of our colleagues.

Among the few cognoscenti, base colleagues embrace the malleability of the standards. The chief virtue of sliding stan­dards, these candid connivers aver, is that departments and universities may rid them­selves of “the wrong sort” while flaunting the rigor of their standards. Having never been the excellent teachers or excellent scholars that they might have become but having often been excellent tools and sycophants, our tenured and promoted sharp operators mock credulous colleagues and exult in how much smarter and more successful their corrupt cynicism has made them. This is yet another way in which a member of the tenured and promoted 80% may be said to be superior.

Meanwhile this truly excellent teacher or that truly excellent scholar is dismissed for refusal to swell the ranks of genial frauds.


Next – “Taking the Fifth” – Those who hide behind confidentiality that they have contrived do not get to play the victim when faculty call for genuine oversight.

Nescience

Perhaps most faculty know little about what goes on at most universities; however, many colleagues at Puget Sound take measures to make certain that what goes on cannot be known.


Ignorance and indifference are problems for faculty self-governance and for evaluation of faculty. Nescience, however, is even a greater problem. Faculty succumb to folklore, folderol, factoids, and fabrications when they believe that they can never know [nescience] more so than when they do not know but believe that they might learn [ignorance] if they could overcome their overwork and distractions [indifference].

Particular abuses of confidentiality trade on ignorance but need not lead to sys­tematic nescience. The particularized Confidentiality Con goes, “You would be satisfied with what we insiders decided if only you were privy to matters that are confidential.” This “short con” expires as soon as faculty turn from some immediate injustice to the teaching, research, service, and other responsibilities that weigh more heavily. The faculty member still does not know the speci­fics of this matter but is assured that his betters knew and made their best judgment call.

A longer con, however, succeeds or fails by making systemic or chronic characteristics of evalu­ation or governance unknowable by the faculty. Braced by confidentiality actual or ap­parent, by narratives plausible or implausible, and by other devices valid or fraudulent, decision-makers inform the faculty that legal rights, administrative prerogative, university pol­i­cies, and/or collegial decency command that information be so closely guarded that sys­temic, longitudinal information that would attest to the veracity of decision-makers and the validity of decisions “cannot” be distributed. The trustees and administrators, who have some access to such data, are well satisfied, so critical faculty [e. g., those who are not indifferent to ignorance] implicitly insult their betters. This long con makes the administrators and trustees victims of distrust and criticism that – more’s the pity – laws and policies do not permit them to dissipate.

Faculty ignorance is facilitated by specific con jobs, and faculty indifference by repeated short cons. However, lengthy, generalized confidence games are needed to inculcate nescience and impassivity among the mass of veterans.

Long cons in turn demand potent individual, social, and cultural inducements to keep insiders from reverting to the critical, skeptical, scholarly ways that might demystify decisions and activities. As individuals, members of Power Committees must accept folderol, folklore, factoids, and other fictions if they are to keep collective accounts straight and, more important, believe them. As social beings, decision-makers find collective responsibility easier to assume than individual accountability, for mutually reinforcing accounts, groupthink, and shared recollections enable many hands to make light work of otherwise onerous justification. The culture of Power Committees generates an enduring mindset in which insiders commune, a mindset that reinforces individual and social beliefs even as it displaces ambiguities and uncertainties. Groupthink in time begets group mind as members of Power Committees reconstruct processes and procedures to mask from others as well as from themselves those errors, inconsistencies, and injustices that would unmask decision-making and decisions.

When members of the 2003-2004 Professional Standards Committee [PSC] bristle at the slightest suggestion that they might have erred [even though the PSC confessed error explicitly] or when they deny that a member of that committee threatened a member of a hearing board or mocked another member of that hearing board [even though a member of the hearing board insists that he was mocked and another member threatened], please do not imagine the bristling or the denial to be insincere. Instead, understand that umbrage and disavowals follow from the very nescience that Power Committees have long abetted. Insiders do not merely recreate and reinforce useful fictions; they accept the fictions as elements of ideologies that integrate insiders’ personal and communal attachments both to the PSC and to the campus community. Once the circuit has been closed in this manner, faculty who cycle off Power Committees [PCs] in three years become such thralls that they no longer are capable of perceiving or conceiving other than in the approved mindset.

After all, what would it profit PCs if insiders recanted or recovered once they left the PC and rejoined the general population? If nescience is to be sustained, nescience must be sustainable. Factlets, factoids, folklore, folderol, and fabrications fend off exposure in the short run and in the longer run make it seem impossible.


Next – “Oversight and Oversights” – Faculty oversight is more careless than vigilant.

Interpretations, Intentions, and Other Misnomers

Invocations of the intentions and interpretations of texts are common legerdemain practiced by committees.


The Professional Standards Committee [PSC] cites intentions without knowing who framed the words. The Faculty Advance­ment Committee [FAC] interprets away rules for which it does not care. An ad hoc committee interprets intentions behind text without a scintilla of valid evidence. Do not mock these foi­bles of committees. Rather note the inequities and improprieties that such bad habits undergird and hide.

For instance, the Faculty Senate has repeatedly reminded the FAC that the bylaws direct all Faculty Senate committees to elect a chair at the beginning of each academic year. At least one member of the FAC concocted an exception to the bylaws for the FAC that might euphemistically be called fanciful. When the Faculty Senate reiterated in Fall 2006 the radical proposition that the bylaws should be followed, the senators were regaled with fact­lets and folderol. The fanciful interpretations, the inconsequent factlets, and the other folderol exemplify the willingness of the FAC [or one or more of its members – how can one tell?] to ignore published authori­ty in favor of FAC practices and preferences, all the while vaunting the FAC’s fidelity to authority. Don’t you love vaudeville?

The Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards [AHCPS], for a second exam­ple, combined bogus interpretation with hokey intent in a single sentence of its report in Fall 2006! Noting that at three places Chapter Six of the Faculty Code directed the Aca­demic Vice President or the PSC to handle grievances within days rather than “working days,” the AHCPS stated that “working” had been inadvertently omitted in those three places. This combo of intent and interpretation was invented by the PSC to reduce its violation of the code when it got around to hearing a grievance weeks after the dead­line(s) in the Faculty Code. How replacing a fifteen-day deadline with a limit of fifteen working days was interpretation rather than substitution the PSC did not say. Neither the AHCPS nor the PSC favored the faculty with the source(s) whose intentions had been in­tuited. Clair­voyants who traduce unknown incorporeals are usually reckoned fakers, not fakirs.

Whatever one may think of the AHCPS’s non sequitur, at least the AHCPS did not engage in such wordplay at the expense of a grievant, a respondent, or an evaluee. The AHCPS proposed to edit the existing language; the PSC pretended that such was what the existing language said or meant because the PSC did not care for what the code demanded. The PSC and the AHCPS loose their interpretations and intuitions under circum­stances that expose their machinations; the FAC hides inferences and insinuations behind sly verbal subterfuges and, of course, the Confidentiality Con.

Every colleague should object to expedient, disingenuous interpretations of authority and to attribu­tions of intentions to anonymous persons but should not thereby be distracted from the greater iniquities worked and insulated when standing committees or ad hoc committees dodge unequivocal authority. Mere "technical violations" of the code or bylaws evince what confidentiality gambits and other cover-ups are least likely to be able to bury.

Vigilance, vigilants!



Next – “Justice, Fairness, and Other Argot” – Code and colleagues invoke procedural regularities that are usually followed; neither code nor colleagues even pretend to substantive justice.

Beyond the Confidentiality Con

What if even one member of the FAC challenged the Confidentiality Con?


What if I had refused to agree to confidentiality on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]? What gallows or hellfire would an adminis­tra­tor have invoked to bring me back into line? Would the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] have ginned up an “inter­pretation” of the Faculty Code that aug­mented the modest confidentiality articulated there­in? Would the Faculty Senate have been asked to re­move me [and would a compliant chair have entertained the motion]? Or would the Center for Health and Well­ness have supplied a note that I was too well to attend FAC meetings? [cf. “Animal House” http://imdb.com/title/tt0077975/quotes]

My answer to such inquiries is that it little matters what reactions would have been had I thought of this gambit. Had I refused to join the cover up, a few faculty would have learned that FAC confidentiality is far more a matter of expedi­ence, insula­tion, and/or cowardice than of any authority to which faculty have consented. Be­yond such minimal awareness, some faculty might not have continued to be suckers for any claim to con­fi­den­tiality. I’d welcome an in­crease in the number of Puget Sound faculty who ask by what right this committee or that administrator pre­sumes to conceal what attentive, en­gaged citizens of the campus com­munity ought to know.

I hope that some colleague will refuse to agree to the Confidentiality Con, if only to see if others on the FAC will negotiate. Suppose that members of the FAC re­stricted con­fi­dentiality to substantive matters. Suppose further that members of the FAC reserved their liberty to raise procedural objections. First, a member of the FAC might object with­in the FAC to pro­cedural deviance. If unsatisfied by the response within the com­mit­tee, the objector then might refer the matter to a committee, an administrator, or an ombudsperson.

Would the FAC be less likely to abandon the rules if FAC misconduct were more likely to become known outside the committee? I do not know. I do know that FAC misconduct has gone unnoticed and unremarked outside the committee due in part to professed confidentiality.

FAC members who sincerely believe that something other than the Confidentiality Con circumscribes them should be pitied as dupes. FAC mem­bers who realize how limited the circumscriptions of the code and the bylaws truly are should be recognized as conspirators. FAC members who know that confidentiality is a con game and who exploit that con game to hide their misdeeds should be despised as grifters.

What if even one member of the FAC disdained to be a dupe, a conspirator, or a grifter?

An Apology for Conning Colleagues

Long ago, I should have informed colleagues that the Faculty Code and the Bylaws authorize far less confidentiality than is commonly believed and asserted.

I apologize for perpetuating the Confidentiality Con.

At the in­ception of the Ad Hoc Committee on Profes­sional Standards [AHCPS], two members of the 2005-2006 Professional Standards Committee [PSC] doubted the suc­cess of an ad hoc inquiry because, they claimed, the Facul­ty Code pro­hibits members of the PSC from discussing “cases.” [Please see the minutes of the Faculty Senate for 21 November 2005.] The two members were speaking casually and colloquially, and min­utes often paraphrase liberally. Still, I heard the PSC members reiterate the misinformation that the Faculty Code imposes on members of the PSC the strictest confidentiality.

As with most attempts by powerful committees to deny accountability and as with most communications from the Professional Standards Committee of 2003-2004, this "Confidentiality Con" is only partly true. The code actually states that no person involved in a grievance hearing “… shall make public statements, directly or indirectly about the matters in the hearings.” [Please see the Facul­ty Code Ch. 6, § 4, 3, 8.] Since the AHCPS arose out of discussions of a grievance for faculty plagiarism that never reached a hearing, it is hardly evident that the code pro­hibits members of the PSC from discussing that “case” or any other would-have-been grievance that never reached a hearing.

Perhaps the members overstated the prohibition because confidentiality has great­ly ex­panded over the years. Some mem­bers of the PSC or the Faculty Advancement Com­mittee [FAC] have naively accepted exaggerations of confidentiality. Others have inflated confidentiality to insulate them­selves from scrutiny. Either way, hypertrophic confidentiality has persuaded colleagues that they must keep secrets from colleagues and must frustrate faculty oversight. Those who wield the Confidentiality Con often fool themselves before they fool others.

Whenever protections of personal informa­tion are invoked to hide eva­sions of authorized procedures, confidentiality becomes a confi­dence game. Wittingly or unwittingly, credulously or cleverly, FAC and PSC members exploit the inability or unwil­ling­­ness to dis­tinguish be­tween substantive matters that truly are and ought to be shielded and proce­dures that properly are the concern of every campus citi­zen. Details that are private should be restricted to those authorized to consider such details. Practices and stan­dards that are public should not be obscured by those trusted to apply the rules.

From the beginning of my stints on the FAC, I knew that the FAC’s professed duty to keep secrets fol­lowed more from volun­tary agreement among those inside the FAC than from authoritative directives outside the FAC. Observance of duty has kept many personal and personnel matters as private as law or morality or the code demands. Overstating such duties has also kept members of the FAC from having to answer for de­via­tions from the Faculty Code, use of standards or cri­teria never authorized or no longer authorized, and assorted practices that hypertrophic confidentiality – the Confidentiality Con – prevents me from detailing or documenting.

I begin this blog, then, with my apology. I regret that I did not refuse to consent to FAC confidentiality beyond what the code demands. I should have assented to what the code demanded but no more.