Sordid by Faith

Have faculty and students at this university been "sorted by fate" to enjoy classics?

Ten to twelve years ago a now-retired colleague shared with me that he addressed students on the first day of class with the sentiment that they were all fortunate to have been "sorted by fate" to be in that class and that classroom to contemplate some classic texts.

Someone is rather full of himself, what? Fate must be omnicompetent to bother with a dozen or two humans in Tacoma, Washington.

How do I ridicule my erstwhile colleague's sentiment? Let me count the ways.

Unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I actually count the ways below. She said she would count the ways, then she did not count.

On the other hand, in every other respect, Elizabeth Barrett Browning counts far more than I.

First, "fate" usually holds a place for and thus supplants understanding. Fate makes thinking and understanding less likely. We invoke destiny when we have no better explanation or when we do not want to formulate a more concrete, more accurate explanation. Who invokes fate relies on, if not revels in, ignorance.

"Ignorance is strength!" said some author in some classic that I was sorted by fate and assigned by a summer reading list to read.

Second, the perfect, passive participle "sorted" saves us the trouble of identifying agency beyond "fate." This usage is very close to the British "sort out," which [when transitive] means that someone arrays something by class or type, but [when intransitive] is used utterly impersonally to indicate unexplored evolution, unexplained developments, or blind contingencies without little human design. "Let's wait and see how things sort out" invites listeners to be patient while some unspecified force(s) determine advantages and disadvantages.

I suffered some Catholic guilt until I realized that heretics and the faithful had been sorted by divine will. His will be done!

Third, taken together the words "fate" and "sorted" attribute a situation to an abstract, ineffable and impersonal entity that separated us fortunates from those less fortunate, that ordered the universe to bring us into the presence of greats and greatness, and that therefore must like us -- must really, really like us.

Hard not to be happy with ourselves, the class and our class, our status, our situation, our breeding, our genetics, our . . . after that introduction to what is, after all, a college course.

Fourth, "sorted by fate" euphemizes past factors so chronic, common, and substantial that disciplines define themselves thereby. Whatever sorting fate did was ably assisted by stratification, kinship, subculture, class, status, party, conformity, courtesy, credulity, and other factors or forces about which social sciences have nattered from time to time.

You may have already won big prizes!

Fifth, the inevitability of fate excuses us from any trace of guilt or shame that our advancement comes at the expense of many others who cannot afford to attend the University of Puget Clowns or who suffer from some disadvantage(s) related to anthropology, sociology, or other subjects that might complicate moral or personal responsibility. This is especially important for self-esteem on Graduation Day: We stand at commencement like self-made men and women in part because kindly professors conditioned us to believe that fate got us into the classroom and we [great author, great expositor of author, and about 15 receptive admirers of author and expositor] did the rest.

"Sorted by fate" my ass! No wonder Plato opted to rid his ideal state of poets!

Shall we demystify just a little? Maybe a little less ignorance will make for a little more strength, Big Brother to the contrary notwithsianding?

Students who think themselves in the presence of Plato do not comprehend that multiply translated words do not make the man or the thinker. At most students circle an honored text while a teacher circuits his or her notes. Hey, kiddies. It's called a "course"* for a reason. Or as Dr. Joni Mitchell phrased the refrain:

And the seasons they go round and round,
And the painted ponies go up and down.
We're captive on the carousel of time.
We can't return; we can only look
Behind from where we came,
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.

* Sorted by Sister David into Seattle Preparatory School, I learned that "course" evolved from "cursus," the Latin for track or a road or circuit to run.

Haltom's Nineteenth Law: The greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership you are

When ambition overweens, fantasies and visions take the driver's seat and take the bus over a cliff by a very direct route.


Innumerable academics have asserted that anyone who wants to be chair should by that wanting be disqualified from being chair. They produce many examples of those who want to lead in the worst way and do. In my 19th law, I slightly reformulate their truism to make it truer and a bit more general. Haltom's Nineteenth applies to presidential campaigns and to clubs or college reunions as well as to head officers of departments, schools, programs, and other insignificant billets.


My law is simply stated: the greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership your ambitions will usually make you. I suppose there are exceptions, but why mess up an apothegm with subtlety?

The problem is not people who want to lead. The problem is people who need to lead. When ambition is yoked to some other psychological drive(s), ambition secures the office that the other drives will misuse.

Beware Pseudo-Cincinnatus!

When others must beg someone to lead, that someone might be Cincinnatus, a leader who accepts leadership as delegated duty and unwelcome burden to be surrendered immediately when dangers pass. Historical Cincinnatus became a military dictator because panicked Roman senators believed it necessary. After he put down the Aequi, Cincinnatus put down the fasces and picked up his plow. A statue outside Cincinnati, Ohio tells us so. [Cincinnatus also opposed attempts to benefit plebeians at the expense of patricians, but I am certain that that played no part is his acceptability to patricians as dictator. Well, maybe a little bit. Military dictators who are also egalitarians make things so messy, don't they, Fidel? But perhaps I digress.]

Wherever seeming beats being -- Haltom's Eleventh Law applies, for example, to the United States but not necessarily to all human societies -- expect the myth of Cincinnatus to be ritualized into mystification and usurpation. Some would-be decider reveals his ambitions but hides his certainties in an effort to be offered some top spot. [Is it coincidence that the word "certainty" hides "cretin" within? Readers from Louisiana may want to note as well that "certainty" is an anagram for "cretin yat." Yat denotes a dialect in New Orleans and those who use it. But perhaps I digress.] He mystifies the credulous with his willingness to serve them and thereby enthralls them. In the name of fantasies with which he plied them during his accession, he discards traditions and restraints. Nothing must condition the triumph of the will, will popularized the more personalized it in fact is. If Pseudo-Cincinnatus spins his regime well, he may align allies and successors with his will via spoils, patronage, and sloganeering. Born, bought, or broken, followers and wanna-be successors love Big Brother and propose new prerogatives today for The Leader but tomorrow perhaps for themselves.

Of course, the dynamics need not be so dramatic or revolutionary. As Aaron [Albert Brooks] warns us in "Broadcast News,"

What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? ... He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing. He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance just a tiny bit. ...

Aaron is correct: enthrallment is gradual far more often than revolutionary. A little self-governance lost this time; some consultation faked next time; slight amplification of slogans to dismiss objections based on standards, practices, precedents, and norms.

Through revolution or evolution, the Devil needs souls but cannot seize them. He must seduce them. Either way, the Devil comes disguised as Cincinnatus.

Beware Pseudo-Cincinnatus!

Once offered the top spot for which he has slobbered and schemed, putative Cincinnatus turns into some cheap knock-off of Howard Fast's Marcus Licinius Crassus [Laurence Olivier in Kubrick's Spartacus] of whom Sempronius Gracchus [Charles Laughton] says, "This republic of ours is something like a rich widow. Most Romans love her as their mother, but Crassus dreams of marrying the old girl to put it politely." [As far as I know, this is historically accurate: Marcus Licinius Crassus remains one of the richest men ever but died in pursuit of a triumph. But perhaps I digress.]

Gracchus is barely polite and hardly subtle but exactly right. Having played the reticent fellow whose leadership qualities have shown through and inspired a Senate frightened by Spartacus to bid him dictate, Crassus just happens to have his senatorial toga under his cloak and a plan to consummate his dictatorship under wraps. Crassus summons Senator Gracchus and informs him, "The enemies of the state are known; arrests are being made; the prisons begin to fill." Gracchus sees his prophetic characterization of Crassus fulfilled. Rome must "assume the position." Cincinnatus got back to his plow in under three weeks; Crassus seems determined to take his time and to enjoy his prerogatives. [In the movie, Gracchus notes, "Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant, and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?" Here history and Howard Fast pun. In Latin, "crassus" means fat or heavy. But perhaps I digress.]

Crassus is an ambitious, wealthy schemer who waits for Rome to turn to him, then launches his deliberate reckoning with slaves, with plebeians, with the mob, with the Senate, and with just about everyone else who stands in the way of his triumph. Crassus is the model Pseudo-Cincinnatus. [Did I mention that Crassus's undoing is that tantalyzing triumph that he wants to cap off his career? Crassus has more money than Croesus but wants a monument and a parade and a laurel held over his head. That leads him to his demise. But perhaps I digress.]


Beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!


Crassus is the epitomic Pseudo-Cincinnatus not least because his drives and desires are readily discerned, or would be if senators were not so spooked and if the mob were not so credulous and impotent. Crassus longs for liaisons with Spartacus's wife and Spartacus's best friend -- paging Dr. Freud -- but needs to liaise with fame to match his capacious fortune. [Crassus's marriages and affairs resemble the HBO series "Big Love" or certain outlaw sects in Utah or cults in Texas. But perhaps I digress.]

Crassus' needs define and drive him according to Kubrick: "If there were no gods at all I'd still revere them. If there were no Rome, I'd dream of her." [If one has sufficient funds, delusions are doable, I suppose. But perhaps I digress.]

Like Crassus, other Pseudo-Cincinnati almost always chase fantasies that doom not only those dictating but those dictated to. Pseudo-Cincinnati have visions. They see things. They foresee their own triumphs and so undertake fiascoes that take them down. They dream of Romes built in some short term but take Rome by a short route to chaos. Like many fanatics, the further their mirages recede from their efforts, the more they dedicate themselves to throw new efforts and old followers at causes that were lost before the Pseudo-Cincinnati accessed authority. When they fail of those visions, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

Of the Great Leader's necessity, failures betoken not the faulty vision or foolish schemes of an ersatz Cincinnatus but the deficient loyalty and halting perseverance of the followers, who do not deserve their Great Leader but are about to absorb punishment that their Great Leader believes they deserve for frustrating his fate. [This entry reminds me of certain madmen in authority in the world today, but I mustn't digress.]

Beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!

In sum, Haltom's 19th warns us that ambitious, energetic people who need to get their way and disregard decorum and decency to get their way should be contained and constrained. This is especially the case in academia, where very little good can be done and so very many students, staffers, and faculty may be harmed before the tinniest pots "fulfill" their delusional destinies.

What might be done? What should you do? Simulate collegial courtesy. Invent effete but therapeutic tasks for which the power-mad are well-suited. Let them seem to be in charge of something safe, like a Web site. Redirect their drives and desires into the world's most perfect bowling league.

But never let them take charge. All too often members of programs, departments, schools, colleges, and universities set out to find Cincinnatus but turn up not even Crassus but Captain Ahab or Captain Queeg.

If you would not hunt white whales or missing strawberries or weapons of mass destruction, beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!


Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twentieth Law: The less likely someone is to lift or move a possession, the heavier, more fragile, and more awkward the possession to be lifted or moved will be.

X Stands for X-Rays

Institutional occlusion is the next best thing to transparency.



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

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


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


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


Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant.


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


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


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

J Stands for Jokers and Jokes

Evaluators all too often consist of jokers rather than colleagues whose judgments should be taken seriously.


The University of Puget Clowns – a label that President Pierce repeatedly justified before and after she uttered it at graduation – must consistently replenish its bag of tricks and its complement of tricksters. While the sources of jokes – the folderol, fictions, flim-flam, factoids, figments, and fabrications that I have discussed above and will cover anew in future entries – vary, jokers recruited by departments and evaluated by departments, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC], and one or more administrators tend to resemble one another. Viewed as mordant self-parody, the output of such jokers would be infotainment if the jokers were better informed or dispensed more information.

Because the process by which we staff the FAC is farcical, all too often the jokers who climb thereon augur jokes that will issue therefrom. I have remarked in this blog about features or factors that select for false-positives, faculty who should never have been hired or tenured or promoted. To eke out tenure or promotion increases one’s odds of nomination and appointment to the FAC. Of course, faculty nominate false-positives more often relative to their proportion in the faculty than false-negatives because most false-negatives are being shown the exit. Perhaps faculty nominate false-positives more often than true-positives relative to their proportion in the faculty because colleagues hope that someone who has been subjected to savagery, fickleness, and unfairness might be especially sensitive to miscarriages of procedural or substantive justice. Perhaps this sensitivity to injustices inheres immediately after monkeys escape false-positives’ asses.

Of course, false-positives are usually more available for service on the FAC than faculty who are more talented and accomplished. Other service demands talent, efficiency, and effectiveness to a far greater extent than the FAC. The FAC functions more smoothly with faculty who will follow the choreography and mark stage directions. Critical, analytic, or intellectual faculties get in the way of scripts and foil hoaxes and pranks. You cannot have buffoons actually running into one another as they race around. Someone other than evaluees might get hurt. The buffoons must cooperate in operatic obtuseness and dramatized obliviousness. The FAC's routines can withstand only so much independence, intelligence, and integrity.

However recruited, jokers are socialized by the FAC in much the way that departmental jokers are indoctrinated by programs or schools. As this blog has shown, the FAC overlooks, circumvents, or flouts rules when it pleases to, so the Faculty Bylaws and the Faculty Code shape boilerplate more and more foten than they shape decision-making. In challenging cases, the FAC augments extant authority with figments and folderol. This provides members ample wiggle room, for they may invoke the letter or spirit of rules when the rules get them where they want to go but deviate when they feel a whim coming on or when they may court favor with administrators or colleagues. The process described in rules and procedures provides the set-up; absurd decisions deliver the punch line. Zaniness ensues.

FAC gags are inevitable because explicit flaws in procedures yield risible results irrespective of substantive merits. In any review during the third year of an assistant professor, for instance, the Faculty Code directs that the FAC recommend reappointment [or not] to the Academic Vice President [AVP]. The AVP then makes a decision that is not subject to any explicit criteria or standards.

One great flaw in this process is that the AVP sits with the FAC while the FAC is deciding what to recommend. The FAC considers the file and recommends to the AVP, who has been sitting in the room all along! Members of the FAC easily learn of the AVP’s concerns and orientation. The AVP automatically learns the issues and concerns lurking behind the official letter. The FAC releases to the evaluee and her or his department a rationalization of the committee’s recommendation(s), but a host of considerations, suspicions, and pretexts never make the FAC letter although they made the FAC’s decision.

The potential for groupthink to prevail and for other forms of cross-fertilization or cross-contamination to afflict decisions should be obvious to everyone except a practiced FAC apologist. The code nearly guarantees collusion in hackneyed [yet inadvertent] humor.

In third-year assistant reviews as in other momentous evaluations, FAC letters are redolent of stale shtick and practiced pratfalls from the moment that the diminutive FAC fire truck pulls into the center ring under the big top that is the University of Puget Clowns.

"Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am / ..."


Next -- "K stands for Kyrie eleison" --