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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haltom's 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 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."

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.”

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.

Zone of Caprice

Over time, false negatives and false positives accumulate into divergences that attest to arbitrary decision-making.

The “Zone of Caprice” may be defined as the distance between the qualifications of the finest person denied tenure [called a “false negative” below] and the qualifications of the worst person granted tenure [that is, a “false positive” infra]. The polar false positive is less meritorious than the polar false negative, creating a gap. At least one false negative was a better teacher and a better scholar than the worst false positive was or is, which means that other factors account for the dismissal of the better and the retention of the worse.

Firings of false negatives probably occasion more outcry, but the tenure of the false positives did the University more damage. The opportunity costs of dismissing great teachers and terrific scholars are difficult to cal­culate. The net costs of keeping incompetents on staff for decades seem more readily ap­parent over time.

Those costs, however, are particularized and minuscule relative to the institutional price exacted when processes belie procedures and when standards in theory are super­seded by standards as practiced. I am not, of course, referring to fathomable dif­ferences of opinion. I write of flouting of rules abetted by the cynical confidence that most colleagues won’t notice and that the few who do notice won’t protest loudly or long.

If some louts do protest, the Confidentiality Con, some doubletalk and double­think, Rovian denials, and high dudgeon worthy of Bill O’Reilly will be aimed at the hooligans. Bereft of allies in the Faculty Senate or elsewhere, the hooligans howl in vain amid indifference and obliviousness as the departed slip away from almost all faculty.

The false positives have nowhere else to go. They stick around to remind us of the gulf between those wrongly rewarded and most of the faculty. That part of the zone of caprice every faculty member may see if she or he wants to see. [Most do not want to see and do not acknowledge the false positives except if a false positive offends.] The other part of the zone of caprice – the myriad resemblances between the rejected and the mass of the tenured and all too often the manifest superiority of the rejected to the mass of those accepted – is usually hidden by lapsing memory and fatigue, by apologetics and secrecy, and by perfidy and stupidity.

Even worse, colleagues whose tenure or promotion or promotions are inexplicable are disproportionately likely to end up on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Because many faculty expect that colleagues who barely scraped by or were saved from just deserts will be flaccid, forgiving decision-makers, folks who never truly met standards for tenure or promotion(s) will stand better odds of making the FAC than those who truly merited tenure or promotion(s). Need I add that expectations of laxity are often dashed when the unworthy retaliate for their being undeserving by punishing the worthy for outstripping the unworthy; or when some feeb saved by an administrator pays his or her debt to the administrator by becoming a very reliable vote [which often is what saved the feeb in the first place]; or when the very vices that made the improvidently rewarded fall short of standards also impair performance on the FAC; or when the patronized would like to impress their patrons to secure other patronage?

The zone and the caprice are systemic features of our community. Arbitrariness and patronage not only accumulate but proliferate. If false negatives occasionally fail upwards, the false positives consistently make our university less than it might have been.


Next – “Advanced Accounting” – How the FAC actually works.

Who’s to Blame?

We’re the universal soldiers, and we really are to blame.


In her “Universal Soldier,” Buffy Sainte-Marie < http://www.creative-native.com/lyrics/univelyr.htm> helps us to fix blame for the concert of depravity that faculty governance has become and long been.

Sainte-Marie explains why members of Power Committees [PCs] mutually pledge confidentiality to defeat oversight, to promote unawareness, and to encourage apathy: “… he knows he shouldn't kill, and he knows he always will, kill you for me my friend and me for you.” PC insiders would just as soon not have to account for the indefensible. The Confidentiality Con means that they never have to.

Sainte-Marie accounts as well for how and why faculty allow themselves to shirk self-governance in favor of ignorance and equanimity amid injustices: “ … he says it's for the peace of all. 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.”

Apparatchiks, apologists, and administrators protest that they do not relish their decisions or duties and that they are only following orders, but “… without him, … Caesar would have stood alone. He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war, and without him all this killing can’t go on.”

All who believe in faculty governance rather than administrative prerogative should remember Ms. Sainte-Marie’s conclusion:

He's the universal soldier and he really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.

Whoever would exploit faculty expects faculty to be credulous, complacent, cooperative, and – above all! – civil. Whenever we trust administrators, apparatchiks, apologists, or their associates, we become accessories after the fact. Whenever our civility, credulity, complacency, and cooperation assure decision-makers that we will go along with almost any injustice or outrage, we become accessories before the fact for the next disappeared colleague.

If you do not care to be part of the problem, try a little civil disobedience. When you are told that a situation has been “addressed” by a power committee or “handled” by an administrator, regard that communiqué as itself lacking in civility.

Treat releases from the Office of Communications as if they were appeals for you to donate your child to the latest schemes of some neocon death cult.

And the next time some mouthpiece claims that the University of Puget Sound takes “academic honesty” seriously, screw up your courage and ask “And is the school for or against?”


Next – “X Marks the Spot” – Every communication stresses its misinformation most forcefully.

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.

Evaluating Committees

Problems often lie less with administrators than with committee members.


Faculty ignorant of the written code and written bylaws but informed by folklore are often bamboozled by rogue committees or cunning members thereof. What John Mitchell said of the Nixon Administration applies as well to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC]: “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

As one watches what such Power Committees [PCs] do, one should keep in mind the lesson imparted by the late Erving Goffman. A social setting that appears to be exactly what one would expect may be what it seems; however, the next most likely possibility is that one beholds a perfect fake. Sloppy fakes or inadvertent mistakes would be unmasked quickly. For deviance to escape attention, fakery must be completed persuasively.

If, for example, the FAC denied a promotion on the basis of the very personal characteristics that faculty in 1994 eliminated from the Faculty Code, the Committee would doubtless hide its actual motives and procedures behind professed motives that concerned teaching or professional growth. As the cliché goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays virtue. Vulnerable faculty must pretend to believe the logic of justification in communications from the FAC, but they should privately expect more than a few committee judgments to hinge on the not-very-secret “Hail fellow well met” criterion.

If veterans of the FAC would dispute my claims above, they would have The Confidentiality Con to shield them: they can say anything they like in the cynical confi­dence that I dare not reveal what happened in the committee-room. That the FAC insisted on such a vow should suggest exactly how much credence such FAC vets should enjoy.

Is there no way to unmask FAC con men and con women through documents that are not secret? Suppose an evaluee made her or his letter from the FAC available to facul­ty. Faculty might then see how the FAC departed from authority at least in that instance. If the FAC or PSC interfered, such resistance to oversight and civil discussion would erode the credibility of confidentiality still further.

Please do not misunderstand my claims above. Most FAC outputs will conform to the Faculty Code because most evaluees will not run afoul of their departments. When the FAC departs from proper procedures or written authorities, astute members of the faculty must pay more attention to what the FAC has done than to what the FAC has said – or to what the code or bylaws say.

Still, if colleagues ask the PCs what they were up to, expect The Confidentiality Con and threats and reprisals. Some veterans of the PSC or of the FAC do not know enough about actual authority to fold their con. Some apparatchiks [members of campus elites beneath the President or Vice President] consider themselves and their committee authority higher than the code or the bylaws.

Pay attention and you may identify the enemy that is us.