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

If seeming beats being [Haltom's 11th], expect colleagues to work hard on seeming to be what they cannot be. They cannot perfect themselves, but they hope to perfect their imagery. If they succeed too well with the assistance of others, expect the perfected imagery to be (mis)taken for fact.


Would that I could attribute Haltom's Sixteenth Law! I believe that I learned this maxim from Erving Goffman, but it might have come from Kenneth Burke, Daniel Boorstin [The Image], or some other thinker central to my education. All I am certain about is that I learned it from another; I did not think of this myself, which certainly speaks well of this law.

Nonetheless, the gist of Haltom's 16th is as simple as Haltom.

α Most of what we perceive is largely what it appears to be. If colleagues in high dudgeon are deluded, they usually are sincerely deluded rather than feigning delusions [with a few exceptions for particularly cunning colleagues]. Who once were "rebels without a cause" decay into "reactionaries without a clue" not as a means by which to impress but in an earnest attempt to state misgivings and anxieties. [Indeed, most faculty reactionaries posture as Emile Zola but more closely resemble Emily Litella, befuddled commentator Gilda Radner played on "Weekend Update" on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, except that sincerely deluded colleagues never wise up and say, "Never mind." They just accuse more innocents of perfidy.]

β However, if our perceptions seem to mislead us or to obscure actualities, we must admit that whatever is not as it seems is the product of calculated fakery far more often than of error. To seem the least bit believable, a performance must persuade audiences or the performance will be taken for humor or parody or folly. Missteps immediately violate the dramaturgy or imagery and demand instant remediation and emendation of messages. Thus, when being belies seeming, seeming and being must be renegotiated between a protagonist and his or her audiences. [Strains of "Send in the Clowns" swell in the background.]

γ Artless fakery exposes itself and its creator too quickly and too easily to take in an audience. The colleague who looses a screed against students' evaluations/forms takes in no one because she or he lacks the methodological chops to make his or her points stick. Peers effortlessly tlansrate the screed into "I want better evaluations than I have been getting" or "If I do not fault students or forms, I may have to fault myself." If feckless teachers mistake the complaints of self-serving, self-exculpating ostriches for sensible, valid points, they imperil students, staff, administrators, and faculty. However, sensible colleagues dismiss such periodic mewling rather quickly. Much if not most such fakery exposes itself readily.

δ While anyone can make mistakes, errors usually do not align to fake out academics. When "mistakes" all or almost all suit some image that some colleague wants to be taken for reality, almost all PhDs immediately see fakery afoot. When "mistakes" are admitted, the performer may start to repair the imagery. However, many colleagues camouflage or rationalize mistakes behind elaborate, incredible defenses. Such dramaturgy fools no one who does not want to be fooled. For example, members of the Professional Standards Committees [PSCs] 2003-2005 still do not admit that those committees erred even though any fair-minded observer must concede they screwed up multiple times. That long line of evasions does not much imperil the University of Puget Clowns, however, because most faculty know nothing about it and because to hear from those PSCs is to disbelieve the members of those PSCs. In short, the PSCs' exculpations incriminate.

ε By contrast, persistent, persuasive verisimilitude follows from cunning, comprehensive, and copious dramaturgy far more than from good-faith errors or clumsy image-making. Worse, what is enduring and ersatz imperils the University of Puget Clowns. The colleague who faked a degree or an honor may have begun with a simple fraudulent line on his or her CV. The greater the honor or the more impressive the degree, the more tangled the web of "verification" the impostor wove. Accommodating colleagues or superiors then protected the counterfeit honor or degree because the impostor was too important to be forced out or too feisty to go down alone. Academic dramaturgy, alas, is group theater. It is an important part of the "contract of depravity" about which I have repeatedly, endlessly, tediously, exhaustively blogged.

ζ Therefore, the longer that the ersatz endures, the more invested in the fraud those who have accepted it become. Perhaps more important, the longer that the ersatz endures, the more that each responsible, respectable, reliable colleague [see this blog for 4 March 2007] must at least profess to believe the imagery and dramaturgy. Quia absurdum, credo! ["Because it is bullshit, I believe it!"] Hail fellows well kept must believe others' bullshit if others are to profess to believe the bullshit of fellows [female as well as male]. Thus does our "contract of depravity" entail collusion in mendacity and a culture of concealment of which the "Confidentiality Con" was the first example this blog explored.

η Cunning, crafted fakery, it follows, defines the University of Puget Clowns all too often. Take the Wigger Patwol -- please. The Wigger Patwol, readers of this blog will recall, consists of colleagues who are so busy professing to be demanding and stringent that they leave themselves less time to teach, to do research, to publish, or to serve the community than they might have if they were not so busy faking rigor. Most members of the Wigger Patwol are risible. How do they persist without dissolving amid derision? Because "civil" colleagues provide friendly audiences until their turn to perform comes around, at which time they may anticipate credulous colleagues who will pretend to believe the bullshit of "civil" colleagues. ["The Circle Game" now wafts into hearing.] The Wigger Patwol works the way the press corps worked in the 1980 Teddy Kennedy campaign: When Kennedy's advance people had failed to scare up a welcoming crowd at an airport, print reporters exited the planes first and whooped it up in range of cameras and microphones so that broadcast reporters would have tape to air. Many of our colleagues practice civility by scrambling to applaud colleagues for their rigor and by praising Rigor Itself.

θ In sum, at the University of Puget Clowns as at so many acacdemic institutions, seeming beats being because mutual admiration societies avert their eyes from what is and focus on what should be. Idealizations and mystifications perfect the virtual community and fend off embarrassing truths.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Seventeenth Law: Propagandists project crimes they are poised to commit.

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.

B is for Burden of Proof

The Faculty Advancement Committee can simulate fidelity to the code under almost any conditions.


“A is for Accounting” revealed some actualities of how some colleagues fail of tenure. Perhaps as enlightening is how colleagues who do not merit tenure – the “False Positives” I have discussed above – are awarded tenure nonetheless. False negatives and false positives slip through because the burdens of proof on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] are far from onerous.

Let us start with what should have been obvious in the immediately previous post: for all the arbitrary decisions and specious justifications flowing about campus, the Faculty Code’s standards and criteria relate strongly to decisions. That is, the code places the burden of proof on an evaluee to make her or his case. Schools, programs, or departments [hereafter abbreviated as “departments”] may help or hinder the effort to get tenure as well. If evidence regarding teaching and/or professional growth is insufficient, the code directs that tenure should not awarded. If conflicts with colleagues can be claimed to impair teaching or professional growth, then evaluators have their way of the evaluee. Burdens on evaluees and departments are so heavy that subsequent evaluators' burdens are light.

Let us see in some detail how the actuall allocation of the burden of proof licenses great discretion by the FAC.

If the FAC claims to espy some negatives in students’ evaluations that no one in the department saw [or will, on further review, see], the evaluee and the department are unarmed against claims that the necessary evidence or explanation is absent [the “A” claims in the immediately previous posting]. Each will sit before the Committee poleaxed when the Committee conjures a novel, sometimes fanciful reading of the file. How were they to have headed off an interpretation or a fabrication that they could not or did not anticipate? The question is rhetorical. The burden is on them, not the Committee.

The FAC will have its way with the evaluee and/or the department because neither will have met the burden of proof that they could not or did not see. The Committee will intone gravely that the burden of proof is on the evaluee or department [see the “B” claims in the immediately previous posting]. The Faculty Code says so for all to see! Thus does patent language mask latent subjectivity. By the time that the evaluee and his or her department learn what the Committee is up to, it is too late to remedy the file.

In a similar manner, conflicts [“C” factors in the immediately previous posting] furnish an occasion for the FAC to transcend squabbling and tantrums or to accede to the harsh reality that it is easier to fire one evaluee than multiple departmental malefactors, especially if scalawags are tenured. Whatever the Committee elects to do, the code will likely rationalize the result because the FAC effectively creates much of the file that the President and trustees will see.

For the foregoing reasons, FAC recommendations and rationalizations will almost always successfully allude to the Faculty Code. The Committee will take far greater care to appear to adhere to the code when the Committee is ranging furthest from the code’s letter or spirit. When favoring an evaluee by finding excellent professional growth where many colleagues would have difficulty finding any professional growth or by certifying excellent teaching when pedagogy has been desultory, the Committee will be crafty and clever in ways unnecessary when an evaluation is routine. When a negative recommendation is a close call, the Committee will be even cagier but will have to bamboozle the President and the trustees, not the department or the evaluee far more familiar with the file in detail.

If members of the FAC break through groupthink to compose minority reports, expect such reports to be buried. I presume that minority reports have usually reached the President. I do not know if they have routinely reached the trustees. In at least one instance, an FAC minority report did not reach a hearing board until that hearing board accidentally discovered the report.

In sum, even when the FAC does not manifestly violate the code, the Committee need not have adhered to the code. The Committee enjoys such useful presumptions and deference that there are few practical limits to the loads that it can forklift.


Next: “C is for Cooneying” – The Bush Administration’s bowdlerizing of scientific reports provides colleagues a useful verb.

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.

Factlets, Factoids, Folderol, Folklore, and Fabrications

Fabrications are the last refuge of “Power Committees;” usually, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore do the trick.

Please do not imagine that the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or Faculty Ad­vancement Committee [FAC] manipulate most colleagues most of the time. Expedient or bad-faith fabrications are such risky tactics that they are to be invoked only in emergencies. Most of the time, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore are means by which respectable faculty rationalize un­authorized discretion and acquiesce in injustices. Committees mislead faculty only when faculty will not deceive themselves.

Faculty most often deceive themselves by accepting factlets.* Factlets are inconse­quent tidbits of information. Take the tidbit that the FAC “addressed” an evaluee’s serial plagiarism, for example. How much or how little did the FAC know about the plagiarisms? Ordinary faculty cannot know, for the very selection of “address” occludes understanding. Thus did a vague or ambiguous factlet supplant information. Campus “civility” cannot long abide skepticism, so inquiring colleagues risk being thought as ill-mannered as credulous colleagues are ill-informed.

Faculty are also suckers for factoids.** Factoids are presumptions believed because they are published. [Once the tidbit about the FAC’s addressing plagiarism made The Trail, a factlet became a factoid.] Likewise, misappre­hensions about the code grow from confident, often comforting, proclama­tions of half-truths or misinformation in faculty meetings or faculty minutes. Factoids, being publicized, outstrip and outlast facts not publicized or covered up. Perhaps it is needless to add that factoids that encourage quiescence among faculty and staff will be disseminated ritually and routinely from committees, while facts that call widespread beliefs into question will be routinely and ritually obscured.

Worse, there is no folderol so preposterous that most colleagues will disbelieve it. Folderol is the campus equivalent of urban legend. Folderol may have originated in fabrications, factoids, or factlets, but its etiology cannot be traced. Around Puget Sound, one should not be surprised to hear folderol 170 degrees removed from even the official record. For instance, minutes of faculty meetings in 1994-1995 make it unmistakable that the faculty, with the support of President Pierce and the university’s attorneys, tried to eliminate “personal and professional characteristics” as a category for evaluations for tenure. Nonetheless, some on the losing side of that fight now claim that all that the faculty decided was that assessments of personal and professional characteristics were no longer mandatory. Many of these veterans evince failing memories in their scholarship and teaching, so we should not doubt the sincerity with which they cling to this folderol. By contrast, those who recall the meetings accurately and adequately must denounce the folderol as a subversion of faculty governance. The most important point is that folderol enshrines a frustration of the will of the majority to masquerade for majority will.

Why read the code or the bylaws, which may not support your own position, when you may invoke folklore that you select for its utility? Folklore consists of precedents and traditions – real and imagined – that veterans believe to be valid authority. I have heard dozens of colleagues who have been here for many years state that one who appeals a departmental denial of tenure, for example, must stick to procedural defects and cannot raise substantive violations. A glance at the code instantly disproves this canard, yet multiple hearing boards have dismissed appeals based on a misconception that reading the code would remedy. Folklore spares our colleagues from reading actual authorities, a shortcut that most colleagues deny their students. Recall that the very first folklore raised in "Rump Parliament" was the Confidentiality Con.

Fabrications, by contrast, fester when rogue committees are cornered. Sometimes, they have imprudently relied on factlets, factoids, folderol, or folklore that some bounder exposes as bogus. In other instances, they have improvidently presumed that no one will read the rules or raise a ruckus. Once a committee realizes that sins of omission or commission have been detected, fabrications flow. Usually fabrications are utterly implausible renderings of explicit, unequivocal authorities [implicit or ambiguous authority would have provided the committee plausible deniability already].

Absent plausible deniability, committees deny or affirm implausibly through risible interpre-tations. In 2003-2004, for example, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] postponed a grievance hearing beyond the fifteen days provided for by the Faculty Code. They “interpreted” the utterly unambiguous “fifteen days” to mean “fifteen working days.” When the PSC then blew past fifteen working days, the committee “interpreted” as a “hearing” a meeting of the PSC to which neither grievant nor respondent was invited. How was this contradiction of the express direction of the code justified? It wasn’t. A fabrication was merely asserted to cover the PSC’s delinquencies and a hearing to which grievant and respondent were invited occurred more than two months after the grievance reached the Dean [the code allows 20 days total]. Little wonder, then, that the PSC of 2003-2004 has been dubbed by some faculty "the Professional Standards Cult."

Only a few faculty, however, have the knowledge and courage to denounce even such obvious fabrications. When those few try to raise such issues, they are met with the Confidentiality Con, with disinformation and misinformation, and with suggestions that faculty should be prospective and civil. Insistence on honesty, integrity, and accountability in the presence of fabrications lacks civility, of course.

Outright fabrications are rare but reveal so much. Fabrications reveal the PSC to be at best lackadaisical about the very authority that apologists routinely invoke to justify PSC Confidentiality Cons. Fabrications also reveal the PSC’s contempt for the faculty that the PSC is supposed to serve. When exigencies loom, the PSC treats colleagues as marks, as rubes ripe for the taking. And woe betide anyone entangled with the PSC should he or she dare to invoke actual authority against fabricated authority. The PSC and FAC are called “the Power Committees” [PCs] both because they have the means by which to silence or to sanction the recalcitrant and because the Academic Vice President has, to say the least, been a member of both committees.

Usually, factlets, factoids, folderol, and folklore will spare the PSC or the FAC from revealing insiders’ disrespect for the faculty and facukty rules and will save administrators from broadcasting their disregard for citizenly virtues. Pseudo-authority, cover-ups, and buyouts usually manage acquiescence from colleagues busy with teaching, research, service, and family. The few faculty who learn what the PCs do will then easily be marginalized by the Confidentiality Con, by cover-ups, and by groupthink.


*I have borrowed this usage of "factlet" from Professor Michael Saks' 1992 University of Pennsylvania Law Review article.

**Norman Mailer invented this usage of factoid in his book on Marilyn Monroe.