What kind of colleagues caution vulnerable or credulous colleagues not to opt for openness?

When colleagues frighten vulnerable faculty into surrendering their right to an open file, do they confess or do they project onto others? Both?

I do not know how many administrators, apparatchiks, and others are advising our junior faculty to elect closed files, but I should be surprised if there were none. Such advice amounts to a confession that the Faculty Code is being or has been violated. Such advice portrays colleagues as poltroons.

Invulnerable faculty cannot too often remind colleagues that the Faculty Code says about selecting open or closed files:

#####The faculty member being evaluated shall have

#####the right to examine letters of evaluation. ...

#####The decision of the faculty member to waive

#####or not to waive confidentiality shall not be

#####a factor in evaluating the faculty member.

#####Faculty Code Ch. III, Sec. 4, a. (1) (d); p. 12, lines 33-36 of the current code

You read it yourself!

Any colleague who states that any decision-maker looks askance at open letters admits that decision-makers have violated the Faculty Code. The code unmistakably states that the decision to assert or to waive the faculty member's right shall not be a factor.

"Bitter-enders" who argued and voted to preserve closed files have never admitted that -- even under the previous rules -- penalizing colleagues for selecting an open file violated the part of the code inset above. One head officer has long been particularly incorrigible in this regard. She repeatedly warned assembled faculty that she and her colleagues distrusted open files and encouraged colleagues, especially the untenured and non-tenureline, to choose closed files always. When she was, almost as repeatedly, informed that she was confessing that her colleagues and she were doing what the code said that they must not, she waved off the point by stating that the preference for closed files and trust in colleagues was part of their culture.

Before changes that increased openness and choice and faculty rights, enemies of open files argued that colleagues would not be as candid in letters for an open file as they would be in letters for closed files. To whom did they attribute such craven evasion of candor?

Did they confess that they lacked the fortitude to state their own views in open files and, hence, that they assumed others are as weak and fearful as they knew themselves to be? No! Such a confession would require more candor and courage than fans of closed files can muster. Instead, they blamed "human nature." That invoking human nature implicitly included themselves among the cowardly appeared not to have occurred to these enemies of openness.

Did some opponents of openness assume their own candor and courage but attribute cowardice to unspecified lesser faculty? Sure! More than once faculty have had to endure braggadocio: "I myself have always written the truth as I saw it, but I have gotten little support in evaluating colleagues rigorously."

If reactionaries try to deny faculty the right to open files, please ask them whether they are confessing their own spinelessness or assigning weakness to colleagues. Follow up by asking how many senior colleagues have exercised the right that they would now deny junior colleagues. If you enjoy watching colleagues sputter and spew, ask reactionaries why they do not argue for only closed files so that junior faculty may be protected as much as senior faculty are.

But only ask such questions if you are invulnerable. If you are not yet tenured or not eligible for tenure, simply notice this presumption that colleagues are weenies. Then take seriously your seniors' characterizations of the faculty and of themselves.

Next: Douglas Ray Edwards 1950-2008

Open Files and Closed Minds

A Faculty Advancement Committee communique recycles old rhetorical tricks but leaves the same old questions hanging.


Last May, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] submitted to the Faculty Senate the following paragraph:


#####The primary concern of the Advancement Committee is
#####junior faculty participation in open file reviews.
#####The participation of all tenure-line colleagues in
#####departmental and program reviews is a long-standing and
#####highly valued practice at Puget Sound.
#####Evaluees have long had the option of open
#####or closed files for evaluations other than
#####the tenure evaluation. The recent vote by the faculty
#####to extend the option of open files to tenure evaluations
#####has raised the salience of the issue of junior faculty
#####participation in all open file reviews. Since the vote
#####to extend open files, FAC has observed more guarded
#####letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty,
#####and a general reluctance on their part not to weigh in
#####on change of status evaluations. We strongly encourage
#####the faculty to reconsider the open/closed files issue.



How marvelous for the FAC that they enjoyed a year in which concerns about open files were their primary concern!

Because this communication issued from the FAC, however, we must not overread it. The FAC may merely have meant that this concern came first in its list of two. The FAC and its members communicate in a manner as cunning as it is feckless, so we should not attribute to the FAC any weighting necessarily attached to this issue.

The expression of the FAC's "primary concern" is a masterpiece of misdirection: "Since the vote to extend open files, FAC has observed more guarded letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty, and a general reluctance on their part not [sic] to weigh in on change of status evaluations." The FAC flirts with but does not commit a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: The faculty permitted candidates for tenure to choose open files, after which letters were observed to be "more guarded;" it follows that opening up at most three files in 2007-2008 led junior faculty to compose letters more guarded than would otherwise be the case. This enthymeme [an apparent syllogism with one or more premises unexpressed] might easily be misread to attribute cause and effect, but the FAC preserves plausible deniability because the FAC does not specify the links in its sequence.

Moreover, the FAC's language does not specify how many members of the FAC purport to have "observed" guarded letters and general reluctance. This permits readers to presume unanimity and an extensive list of members of the FAC. [I hope that I am excluded from that list, for I served on the FAC after the vote and "observed" not a scintilla of evidence of changes.]

The FAC specifies no means by which the reluctance and the guardedness were "observed." How were the counterfactual letters that would have been forthcoming before the faculty's vote to change policy imagined?

Please note the FAC's use of "observed." Readers might presume that the FAC draws on evidence or experience. However, "to observe" bears at least one other meaning. When bloggers and operatives "observed" that Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim or an Arab, they produced neither evidence nor experience. Nonetheless, they "observed." The use of "observed" in its report committed the FAC to no datum.

Please note as well that changes pertained only to evaluations for tenure. Prior to these changes, everyone else could elect an open or a closed file. How certain are the "observers" on the FAC that junior faculty have become more circumspect regarding files that would have been closed or open in any case?

Remember that any closing of files will not only compromise faculty rights and circumscribe faculty choices but will also return us to conditions that occasioned the change. If an evaluation file is closed, letters are summarized for evaluees. Ask candid veterans about such summaries. You'll discover that summaries are pitched so generally that evaluees often have difficulty learning exactly what spurious nonsense the letters contain. If the department does not see a letter, the FAC summarizes the letter. Who would trust a summary by such as wrote the report of the FAC to the Faculty Senate last May?

How many of the members of the FAC who agreed with this concern supported the opening of tenure files?

How many of the members of the FAC found what they had expected or predicted?

How many of the observers involved in this FAC report are disinterested observers?

The answers to these questions are blowing in the wind broken by the FAC last semester.


Next: What kind of colleagues caution vulnerable or credulous colleagues against selecting open files?

Haltom's Twenty-Fourth Law: Neither Geniuses Nor Mediocrities Imperil Meritocracies as Much as Wannabees

Why do allegedly meritocratic institutions gather so many people who appreciate, envy, and therefore punish competence?



The Earth produces few geniuses, so we expect the learned to admire genius, to emulate geniuses [albeit about as well as Rich Little imitated Johnny Carson], and to hide their shortcomings absolute and relative, real and imagined. Maybe we should also expect learned sinecures to stifle those less credentialed. We know that retarding tyros does not move the learned any nearer to genius. Still, obstruction and destruction happen all around us. Let's recall why.

Learned critics assay the work of geniuses ostensibly to deepen our appreciation of the original genius, yet sooner or later to draw attention to the derivative genius of the critic [as a three-inch plastic replica of the Space Needle recalls the original]. The learned further call on those less schooled to retrace the steps of the genius, as if mapping some savant's path would blaze similar pathways in the brains of others. [Reciting all of Duston Hoffman's lines in "Rain Man" probably does not augur success in Vegas.] When the foregoing exhumations and exhortations do not calm their envy of geniuses, the learned try to hide their inadequacies, usally behind some magnum opus that is ever putative but never produced.

Lamentable as such fraudulence and flatulence may be, many learned easily metamorphose into stinging creatures. In "Good Will Hunting," Professor Lambeau [Stellan Skarsgard] laments that most earthlings cannot appreciate Will Hunting's talents but Lambeau can and that is what torments him. Such torment produces the wannabee, a waspish creature who stings others because his or her stinger will not reach the truer object of the wannabee's scorn.

Trained mediocrities -- that phrase comprises those who become mediocre through training as well as those who start out mediocre and are trained up -- long for excellence or greatness that they cannot attain and so must seem to have attained. They cannot be, so they must seem to be. The wannabee cannot much impede absolute genius or geniuses, so he or she works over relative genius or geniuses, especially developing genius or geniuses, to keep them down. This is to say that wannabees fear that colleagues and subordinates may surpass the wannabees and discover how far from genius the wannabees are. This fear is justified, for discourse between the wannabee and the genius is at least an overseas call and sometimes "sub-space radio."

So wannabees behave as if they were still in a grade-school hive. Wannabees create some distinctions that they "locate" just beneath or behind themselves to push competitors or unmaskers further from greatness than the wannabees have located themselves. "I may not be a Queen, but I am a princess, and you are merely a worker in the hive." To maintain an appearance of genius that they do not possess, they must keep competitors "away" from actual genius.


Suppose that in "Amadeus" Salieri had started to poison composers who might supersede himself instead of eliminating the composer so far above him that Salieri could barely see his superlative butt. Salieri would then have been defining greatness as "the two of us, Mozart and me" and sealing off this imagined duet from rivals. This is about as convincing as my noting that Marlon Brando and I, taken together, have won two Oscars. However, what alternative will avail the swarm of hapless wannabees?

We derived "genius" from the Latin for a protective, minor deity. In that etymologic sense, then, wannabees become geniuses that they make themselves ever pettier and ever more defensive.


Next: Open Files and Closed Minds

Haltom's Twenty-Third Law: What you overhear in public is usually not worth hearing..

When was the last time a noisy vehicle or person was worth hearing?


No car or motorcycle blasts music that you welcome. Your favorite tune is never on the stereo of a car trembling amid its sub-woofer. No song is truly foul until you have heard it involuntarily in public. The moron shouting into her or his cell phone never will utter a clause that justifies the call, let alone your forced eavesdropping.

"Fools' names and fools' faces always appear in public places," I heard as a child. Modern electronics has exponentially exacerbated graffiti and other unwelcome communication.

Worse, amid the present post-literacy -- Thank you, Jerry Collins! -- the voices and choices of fools will assail public places. One cannot look away from amplified noise. The channel-changer does not seem to work. It's worse than being wedged into a faculty meeting.

Next: Haltom's Twenty-Fourth Law -- Neither Geniuses Nor Mediocrities Imperil Meritocracies as Much as Wannabes

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

Those habitually disempowered generate symbols and spectacles of self-governance when chronic potentates find apparent democracy as useful symbolically as it is useless pragmatically and/or when potentates are divided.

The usually powerless govern most -- "most" meaning both "to the greatest degree" and "frequently" -- when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic to the powerless because elites welcome popular governance that serves or does not compromise elites' interests. This supposition is well established among some political scientists.

When established "deciders" divide into factions, there may be more opportunities for "self-governance" than will usually be the case, but we should expect such opportunities to be transitory because some faction will want to capture or to coopt newly mobilized forces. Savvy hegemons -- elites who dominate but do not absolutely control -- who espy negligible stakes in conflicts will not waste resources on the conflicts but will exaggerate the rites and rights of "the people" and other myths. Participation and exuberance testify to democracy when and so long as the masses do not imperil the classes.

Still, the classes permit masses to frolic without supervision rarely lest activists or participants develop a taste for or expectations of self-rule. Various rites have evolved to promote the appearance and to stave off the reality of self-rule. Political conventions, for example, permit "spontaneous" demonstrations that have been choreographed and timed to serve nominees and other party hierarchs. Rank and file may commit candor, if at all, in private but not before cameras, microphones, or reporters. The assembled must coalesce around blather and absurdity. Delegates are largely free to choose buttons, headgear, and signs that do not contradict approved messages. [Indeed, the more disconcerting the costumes, the more that viewers welcome party elites as alternatives to mobs of hayseeds and morons.]

At the University of Puget Clowns, the classes -- administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists -- circumscribe masses of faculty and staff to preserve order and predictability. Staff are reined in because they can be disappeared overnight. Control of faculty, by contrast, must be somewhat subtler. To assure that faculty do not blurt out or even learn disconfirming information, administrators station decanal agents on "Faculty Senate" committees, assign observers to dinners for trustees hosted at faculty homes, and trade on their titular status as members of the faculty. To conceal disconfirming information, administrators rely on apparatchiks -- "reliable," "responsible," and therefore "reputable" faculty who consistently support administrators and thus get appointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or other key positions. These appointees tend to be, shall we say, open to administrative direction. [To be certain, the FAC from time to time and the PSC almost always will include a gadfly or two to "demonstrate" the openness of faculty governance as well as the futility of reminding Power Committees what the Faculty Code and Bylaws say in opposition to what administrators and apparatchiks claim these authorities state.] Faculty not yet favored with sensitive posts on the Power Committees may apprentice as apologists. Apologists attest to the soundness of administrative decisions and to the bona fides of apparatchiks. When apologists stumble upon injustices that they cannot deny, they scapegoat faculty governance for problems. Apologists fulsomely praise civility and community, by which they mean servility and deference to authorities. Apologists acknowledge that the truest guide for governance is whatever administrators and apparatchiks say and that codes, bylaws, and other documents to which employment contracts refer can only undermine propriety and tradition.

Administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists overlap. Apologists who demonstrate their reliability and resistance to independent thought make themselves attractive candidates for service as apparatchiks. To preserve their reputations and status, apparatchiks must explain away malfeasance or nonfeasance without holding Power Committees or administrators accountable. Thus do doors between apologists and apparatchiks revolve. Administrators raised from among the Puget Clowns faculty will tend to have been apparatchiks, apologists, or both, but not every administrator is abjectly "reliable" or "responsible." Administrators who buck top-down policies and directives soon disqualify themselves from the elite and "restore" themselves to status beneath even apologists via memoranda that mention a desire to get back to teaching or research [whether or not the discarded did any research in recorded history or taught competently in collective recollection].

Guided by administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, faculty ostentatiously govern themselves but seldom interfere with elites. The masses validate and valorize the classes.

When colleagues profess not to understand why the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings of the faculty are so inconsequential, they mistake myths and rites for campus realities. The Faculty Senate, it is true, charges committees with certain responsibilities, but committees, under the surveillance and control of administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, then do as they please. As the FAC has shown repeatedly, members of the FAC care not what the Faculty Senate says or what the bylaws mandate. The PSC has consistently refused to admit what it has done or otherwise to answer to the faculty. Members of Power Committees assert hypertrophic confidentiality and revel in their status as servants of Jones Hall.

In sum, committees and the Faculty Senate enervate critical faculty. That is what they were designed to do. When ad hoc committees crop up from time to time, expect administrators to get on the ad hoc committee (1990, 1996) or, if administrative shills do not control the committee, to rally apparatchiks and apologists to undermine the ad hoc committee (1996, 2006).

When elites appear to lose, therefore, the sensible citizen will wonder whether elites were indifferent on the issue on which they lost, were sympathetic with ordinary folk for some reason, or went so far wrong that even somnolent masses used their superior numbers to outmaneuver the classes. The last possibility -- that "the folks" awakened and stopped the deciders -- is the least likely.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twenty-Third Law: Only lousy music emanates loudly from a vehicle.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haltom's Twentieth Law: The less likely one is to lift a possession, the heavier, more fragile, and more awkward the possession will be to lift

Like "chicken hawks" and "war wimps" eager to send others into war, friends and colleagues are attracted to anything they cannot move except their own asses.

I learned Haltom's 20th the hard way. A graduate student who ended up an administrator -- another good girl gone bad -- asked me to help her move. It should have occurred to me that graduate school selected for brawn even less than for brains, but I did not appreciate that until I arrived at her place. I beheld at least a half dozen men who might never have seen football, let alone played it.

It stood to reason that when a heavy, awkward, fragile case for display [in both the functional and anthropologic senses of "display"] needed to be transported up a narrow, steep staircase, I was selected to be gravity guy. A rugger who then outweighed me was steering at the top of the case. I was pushing from the bottom. No more than two alleged adults fit in the stairway, so Joe and I were elected. As I sweated and slogged, Haltom's 20th law came to me: "Of course, she treasures this display case! Anyone with a chance of having to lift it would have selected a lighter case."

This maxim has cognate propositions.

• Those with weak backs will tend to to have wanderlust and myriad buddies too proud and too stupid to fake a back injury.

• Those who cannot raise a bet will be most indecisive about where furniture should go -- and more indecisive the heavier the furniture.

• Whenever the moving van arrives, the proudest would-be participants in a move will discover that their desk drawer needs immediate reorganization.

• Those who cannot use technology will be most enthusiastic about its availability and adoption -- especially slackers who look for labor-saving devices that save them the capacity to work.

Feel free to comment on perversities that correspond to Haltom's 20th law.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's 21st Law: What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.