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.
Showing posts with label factoids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label factoids. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Verisimilitude
FAC fakery depends on faculty flackery.
Walking away from Jones Hall after a meeting with the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], my colleague was still stunned. The FAC was disagreeing with our department, which had unanimously recommended tenure, and so had invited us for the discussion mandated by the Faculty Code. After that debacle, my colleague asked me whether the members of the FAC had managed to make even one statement factual enough to count as evidence. I told him I could not recall one. I joked lamely that he should remember that most members followed the “it would be convenient for my argument if A were true, so I shall presume A is true” school of factoid-fabrication even if they were not technically humanists.
I did a content analysis of the evaluee’s teaching evaluations to establish that the FAC’s mouthpiece [a self-admitted humanist] had been as factually challenged as we in the department had presumed. Others in the department corrected [in writing] other mischaracterizations of our colleague's record. All of our protests were to no avail, of course. The facts of the case mattered little because the judgment of the FAC was not based on facts.
Facts matter little in too many evaluations because departmental and FAC recommendations issue from holistic, summative judgments at some remove from official documents issued to evaluees. Official documents must resemble the rules and so must distort the process by which decisions are reached. The legally discoverable documents provide more or less credible justifications for decisions often reached on very different grounds.
Consider the process that the FAC follows. The FAC “discovers” its collective conclusions via a vote after bulling about various aspects of the file. After the vote, a member of the FAC constructs an argument that conforms to the rules, standards, and criteria. Like the Bush Administration and Iraq, the FAC often determines what it wants to do, then fixes the facts around that predetermined end.
Even if a departmental or FAC recommendation lacks verisimilitude, departments or colleagues will seldom be able to supplant any official account. Factoids [apparently empirical statements taken to be true because published], factlets [tidbits that are true but inconsequent], and folderol [misinterpretations, misstatements, and mendacity] will almost always outnumber facts in any case. Once the FAC is done with the file, most disconfirming information will have been secreted behind an official cover story.
The foregoing explains why sly departments and wily FACs will avoid facts in favor of factoids, factlets, and folderol. When a later FAC utterly misstated the facts of another colleague’s file, two members of our department met with the FAC to correct the record. The FAC retreated. The members of that FAC, I have no doubt, learned a valuable lesson: avoid facts in favor of the seemingly factual. Reach whatever decisions by whatever means, but do not open the FAC to accountability!
Next – “Who’s to Blame?” – He’s the Universal Soldier, and he really is to blame.
Walking away from Jones Hall after a meeting with the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], my colleague was still stunned. The FAC was disagreeing with our department, which had unanimously recommended tenure, and so had invited us for the discussion mandated by the Faculty Code. After that debacle, my colleague asked me whether the members of the FAC had managed to make even one statement factual enough to count as evidence. I told him I could not recall one. I joked lamely that he should remember that most members followed the “it would be convenient for my argument if A were true, so I shall presume A is true” school of factoid-fabrication even if they were not technically humanists.
I did a content analysis of the evaluee’s teaching evaluations to establish that the FAC’s mouthpiece [a self-admitted humanist] had been as factually challenged as we in the department had presumed. Others in the department corrected [in writing] other mischaracterizations of our colleague's record. All of our protests were to no avail, of course. The facts of the case mattered little because the judgment of the FAC was not based on facts.
Facts matter little in too many evaluations because departmental and FAC recommendations issue from holistic, summative judgments at some remove from official documents issued to evaluees. Official documents must resemble the rules and so must distort the process by which decisions are reached. The legally discoverable documents provide more or less credible justifications for decisions often reached on very different grounds.
Consider the process that the FAC follows. The FAC “discovers” its collective conclusions via a vote after bulling about various aspects of the file. After the vote, a member of the FAC constructs an argument that conforms to the rules, standards, and criteria. Like the Bush Administration and Iraq, the FAC often determines what it wants to do, then fixes the facts around that predetermined end.
Even if a departmental or FAC recommendation lacks verisimilitude, departments or colleagues will seldom be able to supplant any official account. Factoids [apparently empirical statements taken to be true because published], factlets [tidbits that are true but inconsequent], and folderol [misinterpretations, misstatements, and mendacity] will almost always outnumber facts in any case. Once the FAC is done with the file, most disconfirming information will have been secreted behind an official cover story.
The foregoing explains why sly departments and wily FACs will avoid facts in favor of factoids, factlets, and folderol. When a later FAC utterly misstated the facts of another colleague’s file, two members of our department met with the FAC to correct the record. The FAC retreated. The members of that FAC, I have no doubt, learned a valuable lesson: avoid facts in favor of the seemingly factual. Reach whatever decisions by whatever means, but do not open the FAC to accountability!
Next – “Who’s to Blame?” – He’s the Universal Soldier, and he really is to blame.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Unpersons
Once a colleague’s tenure becomes contested, most faculty begin to treat the colleague as if he or [more often] she were already gone.
A colleague who longs to disappear need only spread the rumor that she or he has detractors in a department or in the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Friends and supporters will express some sympathy before they begin to avoid the evaluee-in-trouble. Colleagues who do not know the vanishing evaluee or whose default position is deference often will not even be pleasant but will regard the not-yet-dead with all the courtesy that Ebeneezer Scrooge extended to Jacob Marley when he beheld him anew. Apparatchiks and apologists will disparage apparitions’ efforts to inform faculty: “Thrashing about while being erased is in such bad taste!” Of all the ways in which academic obliviousness hides processes and deviance, precipitous invisibility may be the most hurtful to the evaluee. Over time, it impairs governance, oversight, and memory among the UPS “community” by making all or almost all colleagues complicitous saps.
Almost all faculty are busy. Most messy evaluations are complex. Facts, especially regarding closed files, are hard to establish. Communications from the FAC can be Delphic. The fading of doomed colleagues, like so many other unfortunate campus developments, follows from sensitivity about being insensitive, from aversion to the suffering and shaming of valued colleagues, from embarrassment at colleagues’ misbehaviors and committees’ malfeasances that are rare but still too common, from credulity and innocence, from intimidation and vulnerability, and from everyday exigencies of families and jobs. Most colleagues do not mean to be mean or indifferent just as they do not intend to be marks or saps.
What may be worse, colleagues who act as if a negative recommendation from a department, school, or program or from the FAC is a death sentence rightly guess their colleague’s fate in almost all cases. Why request a hearing to set aright the FAC’s misjudgment when a successful appeal will avail the colleague about as much as laetrile would address a cancer? Why write to the President to right wrongs when chanting would work about as well? If decision-makers have abandoned or evaded the Faculty Code, keep it to yourself lest you become an unperson. Faculty designated responsible, reputable, and reliable do not point out circumvention of the code or other malfeasance. We have no problems at Puget Sound except for problems that irresponsible, disreputable, and unreliable malcontents raise.
Once a colleague is in trouble, no matter how specious the reasons or asinine the deliberations, the condemned is expected to play her or his part in degradation rituals so that her or his fading away will vindicate certain shared myths. If the condemned struggles or is less than gracious about being disappeared, she or he attests anew that she or he was “not one of us.” We the responsible, reliable, reputable faculty would have drunk the hemlock or the kool aid with gusto, so great is our loyalty and faith!
Busy [therefore gullible] Professors Pollyanna will quickly assume that whatever rumors or leaks defend the outcome have some merit, especially when such rumors or leaks are selected for their surreality. Tautologies will reign and rain. Baseless inferences will rule: “Well, if she or [less often] he had put her or [less often] his file together better [or differently or in iambic pentameter or on the back of a check for $10,000], she or [less often] he might have gotten tenure [or renewed or promoted or a positive review].” The only incantations reckoned unreliable will be heterodoxies such as “due process” or fairness. If the Faculty Code often fails as prediction or direction, it almost always serves as shibboleth.
So when a colleague begins to be denounced, most colleagues drive the spectacle from their minds by rite mind and rite action. They pour themselves strong drink. They review their own status to ascertain their ritual role. If an accomplished or aspiring apparatchik or apologist, the apparent survivor salutes those who have denounced for whatever virtue the denouncers most lack. If a workaday sap, the apparent survivor accepts without question or thought whatever reasons the department, school, program, or FAC might utter. Apparatchik, apologist, and sap alike avert their eyes from the corpse to the transcendent meaning of the sacrifice. Then they inure themselves to their own complicity in unfairness and indecency by returning to laments about injustice and inhumanity in the larger community in which they are even more impotent.
Should you, longsuffering reader, scorn such ritual, Jesuitical John offers an alternative liturgy:
… he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; …
… Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, …
John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions XVII (1623) “Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris” [Now, slowly sounding, {the bells} tell you that you will die]
Next – “Verisimilitude” – FAC fakery relies on faculty flackery.
A colleague who longs to disappear need only spread the rumor that she or he has detractors in a department or in the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Friends and supporters will express some sympathy before they begin to avoid the evaluee-in-trouble. Colleagues who do not know the vanishing evaluee or whose default position is deference often will not even be pleasant but will regard the not-yet-dead with all the courtesy that Ebeneezer Scrooge extended to Jacob Marley when he beheld him anew. Apparatchiks and apologists will disparage apparitions’ efforts to inform faculty: “Thrashing about while being erased is in such bad taste!” Of all the ways in which academic obliviousness hides processes and deviance, precipitous invisibility may be the most hurtful to the evaluee. Over time, it impairs governance, oversight, and memory among the UPS “community” by making all or almost all colleagues complicitous saps.
Almost all faculty are busy. Most messy evaluations are complex. Facts, especially regarding closed files, are hard to establish. Communications from the FAC can be Delphic. The fading of doomed colleagues, like so many other unfortunate campus developments, follows from sensitivity about being insensitive, from aversion to the suffering and shaming of valued colleagues, from embarrassment at colleagues’ misbehaviors and committees’ malfeasances that are rare but still too common, from credulity and innocence, from intimidation and vulnerability, and from everyday exigencies of families and jobs. Most colleagues do not mean to be mean or indifferent just as they do not intend to be marks or saps.
What may be worse, colleagues who act as if a negative recommendation from a department, school, or program or from the FAC is a death sentence rightly guess their colleague’s fate in almost all cases. Why request a hearing to set aright the FAC’s misjudgment when a successful appeal will avail the colleague about as much as laetrile would address a cancer? Why write to the President to right wrongs when chanting would work about as well? If decision-makers have abandoned or evaded the Faculty Code, keep it to yourself lest you become an unperson. Faculty designated responsible, reputable, and reliable do not point out circumvention of the code or other malfeasance. We have no problems at Puget Sound except for problems that irresponsible, disreputable, and unreliable malcontents raise.
Once a colleague is in trouble, no matter how specious the reasons or asinine the deliberations, the condemned is expected to play her or his part in degradation rituals so that her or his fading away will vindicate certain shared myths. If the condemned struggles or is less than gracious about being disappeared, she or he attests anew that she or he was “not one of us.” We the responsible, reliable, reputable faculty would have drunk the hemlock or the kool aid with gusto, so great is our loyalty and faith!
Busy [therefore gullible] Professors Pollyanna will quickly assume that whatever rumors or leaks defend the outcome have some merit, especially when such rumors or leaks are selected for their surreality. Tautologies will reign and rain. Baseless inferences will rule: “Well, if she or [less often] he had put her or [less often] his file together better [or differently or in iambic pentameter or on the back of a check for $10,000], she or [less often] he might have gotten tenure [or renewed or promoted or a positive review].” The only incantations reckoned unreliable will be heterodoxies such as “due process” or fairness. If the Faculty Code often fails as prediction or direction, it almost always serves as shibboleth.
So when a colleague begins to be denounced, most colleagues drive the spectacle from their minds by rite mind and rite action. They pour themselves strong drink. They review their own status to ascertain their ritual role. If an accomplished or aspiring apparatchik or apologist, the apparent survivor salutes those who have denounced for whatever virtue the denouncers most lack. If a workaday sap, the apparent survivor accepts without question or thought whatever reasons the department, school, program, or FAC might utter. Apparatchik, apologist, and sap alike avert their eyes from the corpse to the transcendent meaning of the sacrifice. Then they inure themselves to their own complicity in unfairness and indecency by returning to laments about injustice and inhumanity in the larger community in which they are even more impotent.
Should you, longsuffering reader, scorn such ritual, Jesuitical John offers an alternative liturgy:
… he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; …
… Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, …
John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions XVII (1623) “Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris” [Now, slowly sounding, {the bells} tell you that you will die]
Next – “Verisimilitude” – FAC fakery relies on faculty flackery.
Monday, March 5, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
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.
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.
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