Eating a Symbolic Worm

What is the point of an honor code?


Is the point of an honor code for an institution to indicate its adherence to norms and principles? Did someone doubt the institution’s adherence? Why would anyone, especially the Academic Standards Committee, doubt the institution's honor?

If the point of an honor code is reaffirmation of an institution’s preferring virtues to vices, wouldn’t endorsement of healthy food and sensible diet do students more good than coming out in favor of honor?

Is the point of an honor code largely symbolism? Does one espouse an honor code to posture in favor of virtue – despite the fact that the existence or non-existence of the honor code says nothing about the advocate’s possession of any virtues? Given psychological transference, why shouldn’t we suppose that the faculty most eager to denounce vices are those most familiar with vicious practices? Other than their own experiences as undergraduates, whence do faculty derive their suspicions?

Is the point of an hour code to stem some upsurge in dishonor? If so, exactly what is the theory behind the panacea? Are we to suppose that deviance is increasing because deviants are ignorant of the views of faculty and administrators regarding honor or cheating?

If more than symbolic, an honor code must spell out standards for deviants. Does anyone who has read "The Integrity Principle" or the standards to which students are held imagine that either or both make explicit any standards?

I have students read "The Integrity Principle" and the standards for student conduct each year in Politics and Government 316 -- so students may see how much due process and how many rights they surrendered by attending a private school and especially this private school. The students always conclude that the standards basically say, "If Student Affairs wants to nail you, they always will find a pretext." Last time around, a philosophy major asked whether anyone in the room purported even to understand "The Integrity Principle." He was reassured when no one could say what the author(s) of "The Integrity Principle" might have meant to argue.

In short, students find the standards applicable to students to be so elastic as to be ex post facto laws and "The Integrity Principle" to be incoherent mush. Other than that, the standards of our incipient "Honor Code" are quite explicit.

The content of the NEW! IMPROVED! Honor Code is so nebulous that the Academic Standards Committee incorporated them by citation

"I am a member of the community of the University of Puget Sound, which is dedicated to developing its members’ academic abilities and personal integrity. I accept the responsibilities of my membership in this community and acknowledge that the purpose of this community demands that I conduct myself in accordance with Puget Sound’s policies of Academic and Student Integrity. As a student at the University of Puget Sound, I hereby pledge to conduct myself responsibly and honorably in my academic activities, to be fair, civil, and honest with all members of the Puget Sound community, and to respect their safety, rights, privileges, and property."

How nice to have that all cleared up!

Passing an honor code is like eating a worm. It does little good. It does little harm. It keeps faculty and committees busy. It provides purpose to the aimless and empty. It lets trustees feel useful.

Our New Schedule

Is it too early to see returns on scheduling changes that were supposed to foment professional growth?

I suppose I know the answer, but let me ask anyway.

Colleagues who take Fridays or other weekdays "off" from teaching should soon be producing the professional growth that, we were told, justified the days off. What evidence do we have that "research days" have yielded the anticipated conference papers or published work?

Colleagues who flourished pedagogical reasons for teaching classes over 80-90 minutes had no reason not to show up on non-class days, so they will want to supply some other return to the students or the university from their absences. [I freely grant that the absence of certain colleagues from campus is reward enough in itself.] To refresh your recollection of cover stories, please see "U Stands for Unchained Maladies" 27 October 2007 in "Rump Parliament."

That is why defenders of fewer campus appearances had to rationalize their absences as "research days." I have no doubt that over extended weekends our colleagues were zipping to this library or engaged in that colloquium. So let's see some receipts.

A reviewed manuscript or a sizzling book review might go far toward answering those cynics who supposed that colleagues wanted to sleep in or pursue leisure activities.

If students ask why they cannot meet with their faculty often or at all, it would be pleasant to answer with evidence of the advances in human knowledge that more than make up for personal contact with our faculty. The same is true for colleagues who would prefer their committees not to meet on Thursdays at 8:00 a.m. to accommodate committee members who cannot make meetings on Fridays [ or Mondays ... or Wednesdays].

I see no point in looking at the productivity of recent hires. We have no "before" measures for them.

So let's take faculty who started before 2004. Certainly their CVs before 2004 and their CVs after 2004 should reveal startling increases in productivity by those who had one or more days free from classrooms that they could devote to professional growth. Each faculty member, relative to his or her own productivity before, should be expected to have profited from "research days." Faculty who have not secured days away from campus or hidden behind their office doors should, relative to their own productivity before the change, have exhibited far less growth on average than those who took advantage of "research days."

Is someone in Institutional Research on this matter, or should I undertake it as a hobby?

Scoundrels and Frauds

Puget Sound observes its ideals on Graduation Day.

A colleague spoke from the heart about graduation:

#####I am happy to attend for the kids but usually dislike
#####the speeches. The speeches are high-minded. I get
#####inspired then look around and see so many
#####scoundrels and frauds sitting near me. I feel soiled,
#####but say nothing. The hypocrisy bothers me.

Doesn't seem to bother most faculty or administrators.

Maybe you should turn off your critical faculties and let the nonsense pour over you.

Slumber through the ceremonies and be at most semi-conscious amid faculty governance or other dissimulations.

"Men go to bed with Gilda, but they wake up with me," said Rita Hayworth. Graduate students are seduced into academia; if they awaken at Coyote Date University, they feel used. This is all the more reason not to wake up.

Sleep in.
Talk critical thinking, but never practice it.
Advocate skepticism about change.
Let reassurance wash over you.
Avoid faculty meetings in favor of alternative soporifics.
Go along and you'll get along.
Stage more conversations among the folks.

There are no problems. The only problems are colleagues who espy problems. They're the problems.

But forget about them.

Have a lotus with that beer?

Before you give me grief about spelling out "STALAGS" along the left margin supra, please note that "stalag" was coinage from "Stamm" main body and "Lager" camp. Scoundrels and frauds are not the numeric majority at the university, but those who avert their eyes from scoundrels and frauds or apologize for the condoning of frauds and other abuses are the leading cadre.

Can you assist the FAC?

The FAC has issued a cry for help. Will you answer?

In its annual report dated 5 May 2009, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] has implicitly admitted its cognitive disarray:

"As we noted last year, a continuing concern of the Advancement Committee is 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 members have observed more guarded letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty though also by some senior colleagues, and a general reluctance by some to weigh in on change of status evaluations."



The FAC's deployment of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy disappoints. It is too bad that the FAC featured no social scientists or scholars familiar with logical validity or cogency.

Can commenters help out?

Please supply arguments that the FAC would advance if members of the FAC cared to be taken seriously.

Please assist your challenged colleagues.

The FAC flips the Senate the bird then invites senators to pull their fingers

The Faculty Advancement Committee Evades the Bylaws Again!

Every spring of late, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] evades the Bylaws. The Bylaws mandate that each Faculty Senate Committee appoint a chair. The Faculty Senate has insisted for years that the FAC follow the Bylaws. Whether through recalcitrance or arrogance, the FAC has instead upheld the cherished Puget Sound tradition that the Professional Standards Committee and the FAC do as they please irrespective of rules. When challenged on their misbehaviors, the power committees ply the credulous with aged canards and newly hatched rationalizations.

Aged Canard 1: The FAC objects to electing a chair because the FAC has never had a chair.

This objection is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that, over the years, the Academic Vice President or Dean has been unacknowledged chair of the FAC. The FAC has been guided by a de facto decanal chair more often than it has resembled any roundtable of six decision-makers of equal standing or identical function. Ask veterans who have visited the FAC on multiple occasions over the years whether they were able to detect a de facto chair.

If the FAC has never had an official chair, so what? Other than Puget Sound administrators and apparatchiks, who argues that never having followed the rules justifies continuing to ignore the rules? If only Al Capone had known this "argument" was available to him: "But I have never paid income taxes!"

That the FAC has never appointed a chair establishes only that the FAC has never considered itself bound by rules that apply to all faculty senate committees.

Aged Canard 2: The FAC objects to electing a chair because electing a chair might have legal ramifications.

At least one member of the FAC has argued unspecified legal perils might follow from following the Bylaws. How intriguing! Ignoring or evading the Bylaws has no legal downside, but following them imperils the University? Who vetted this legal argument—John Yoo? Did the FAC ask any competent attorney about the advisability of following authority—often reckoned a legal virtue—as opposed to defying both the Bylaws and the Faculty Senate? Or would asking a competent attorney divest the FAC member(s) of this excuse?

The FAC has supplied no legal authority for this "legal opinion" because any legal peril—to the chair of the FAC or to individuals on the FAC—from following Bylaws is a chimera.

Indeed, that one or more members of the FAC would invoke such hokum shows little faith in other FAC canards.


Aged Canard 3: Electing a chair would spoil the egalitarianism of the FAC.

The 2008-2009 report of the FAC features this drollery: "... the Advancement Committee discussed at its first meeting of the year the matter of committee chair. Affirming that it continues to prefer that all voices at the table be equal participants, the Committee elected Priti Joshi, Sunil Kukreja, Andy Rex, Stuart Smithers, Kate Stirling, and Kris Bartanen as co-chairs."

The FAC knows that not all its members participate equally or identically:

• Concerning third-year assistant professors and distinction, five members of the FAC recommend to the sixth member, the Academic Vice President and Dean.
• Unless the FAC has changed recently, the Academic Vice President and Dean handles correspondence for the FAC, while members of the FAC draft letters regarding individual evaluees.
• Through 2005, the Academic Vice President and Dean was never the lead person for a file; the other five members of the FAC took turns taking the lead.
• "Streamlined" evaluations result in no inequalities of participation?

However, the FAC presumes that most senators and most faculty will not know how often the voices around the table will not be "equal." So the FAC bullshits the faculty.

Even if the suggested equality or equivalence were true, this argument would not be cogent. The Bylaws require every faculty senate committee to elect a chair at each committee's first meeting. The Bylaws further require that the chair be responsible for inducing the committee to meet and producing a report at year's end. The Bylaws require nothing else. How a chair's being responsible for the committee's meeting and reporting would roil or spoil the FAC, we are never told. We are never told for the same reason that we are never told why George W. Bush was one of our greatest presidents.

The FAC does not want to follow the Bylaws and so will not. The rest is blather summoned to explain why members of the FAC are above ordinary rules and authorities.

Newly Hatched Rationalization 1: The FAC this year elected six co-chairs.

The latest evasion by the FAC collides with Article V of the Bylaws [boldface added]:

...

Sec. 2. Organization. The Senate shall name a Convener for each committee during the first month of the fall semester for the purpose of electing a Committee Chairperson and orienting the committee based on the committee's prior year-end report, except when otherwise provided in the organization of the committee.

Sec. 3. Committee Meetings.
A. The Chairperson of each committee shall convene the committee during the first month of the fall semester to plan the work of the committee. Times for additional meetings will be at the discretion of the committee members. The Chairperson shall be responsible for presenting reports to the Senate.


Who would be so wanting in candor as to claim that appointing six co-chairs matched the Bylaws' requirement of "a chairperson" and of "the chairperson?" To ask the question is to answer it.

Perhaps most remarkable, the two newbies on the FAC conformed to the FAC's defiance in their very first meeting. What profiles in credulity! Did they hold out for even ten minutes before abasing themselves?

So here's to the FAC, ladies and gentlemen!

Six doctors who believe that 6 = 1.

Someday Never Comes

As I read a recent memorandum regarding child care, I began to pick up snatches of Creedence Clearwater Revival. I have no idea why the tune crept into my mind as I read that "lean times" prevented the university from doing what it was unwilling to undertake when times were better. As the nuns used to say about every contradiction or antinomy, it's a mystery.


First thing I remember was askin' papa, "Why?"
For there were many things I didn't know.
And Daddy always smiled; took me by the hand,
Sayin', "Someday you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now each and ev'ry mother's son
You better learn it fast; you better learn it young,
'Cause, "someday" never comes.

Well, time and tears went by and I collected dust,
For there were many things I didn't know.
When Daddy went away, he said, "Try to be a man,
And, someday you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now each and ev'ry mother's son
You better learn it fast; you better learn it young,
'Cause, "someday" never comes.

And then, one day in April, I wasn't even there,
For there were many things I didn't know.
A son was born to me; Mama held his hand,
Sayin' "Someday you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now each and ev'ry mother's son
You better learn it fast; you better learn it young,
'Cause, "someday" never comes.

Think it was September, the year I went away,
For there were many things I didn't know.
And I still see him standing, try'n' to be a man;
I said, "Someday you'll understand."

Well, I'm here to tell you now each and ev'ry mother's son
You better learn it fast; you better learn it young,
'Cause, "someday" never comes.

Is it a mystery?

What are the boys afraid of?

A colleague asked a pertinent question at a faculty meeting: "Why are colleagues so afraid of diversity?"



At the most recent plenary meeting of the faculty, Professor Harlequin Sovery Zen made some faculty smirk and others scratch their heads instead of their butts or balls. Dr. Zen ased why minor changes in the bylaws regarding the Diversity Committee so agitated a few naysayers.

Is a rhetorical question still useful if it goes over most heads?

Targets of Professor Zen's pertinent impertinence likely neither smirked nor showed any reaction. Some of these faculty have been raging to one another behind closed doors about chimera once reserved to the rantings of the National Association of Scholars [NAS] and other cranks. Other atavists transmit emails complaining that Puget Sound's longstanding indifference to diversity might be ending. Among the bugaboos that headline such emails:

• Administrators might review departments' decisions about whom to interview or whom to hire. If you thought that deans and the president already did that, you are defying the hive-mind of some of our programs, schools, or departments. If you think that departments have nothing to fear from such supervision, you do not know some of the departments or programs involved. If you were in those academic units, you'd fear exposure.

• Reading lists, pedagogical tactics, and loaded language might be subject to review. Unless the NAS wants to censor I, Rigoberta Menchú or the rants of Ward Churchill or David Horowitz locates "the Left" across curricula and campuses, review and criticisms are not welcomed. Again, to know some of the individuals and some of the schools or departments involved is to appreciate why colleagues respond like feral felines. By contrast, those who know their teaching tactics and lessons will stand review cannot summon much concern. The contrast is telling.

• Some faculty, staff, and students put an editor of The Trail on the spot for an hour or more owing to multiple allegations of racially insensitive content in the student newspaper. A current version of this legend is that the Bias-Hate Emergency Reaction Team [BERT] grilled the editor about content in his or her paper. As the tale is retold, embelllishments turn a meeting into Guantánamo on campus. The more that opponents of the Diversity Committee or of diversity as understood by most faculty require a bloody shirt to wave, the more that we "learn" about "The Blunda in the Rotunda." Too bad that we learn so much that is not true.

Asked of those who spread the objections supra then, Dr. Zen's question answers itself.

What are the boys so afraid of? Startled by symbols and howling the rage of the privileged, the oh-so-conscientious objectors long for a meritocracy that never existed, for departmental autonomy they've not earned, and for security against change as Puget Sound moves from empty promises to the merest threat of sincere efforts to diversify.

How can I be sure of that? Because almost every objection to the Diversity Committee's NEW! IMPROVED! bylaws has nothing to do with the new text or the old text or new words versus old words. When professed concerns have little to do with matters under deliberation, one is entitled to infer ulterior motives for the opposition.

Take the example that the objectors have made into a thrice-told-but-never-quite-tolled-the-same tale. If BERT wears jackboots, that is due neither to the old wording nor to the new wording of the bylaws. Indeed, when the loudest of the objectors raised BERT in meetings of the Faculty Senate, the Dean of Students made it clear that BERT would be run out of the Dean of Students Office if the Diversity Committee abandoned participation. That is correct: either way the scared rabbits get BERT or something very like BERT. Maybe BERT did its job; perhaps BERT convened a Starr Chamber; probably BERT made an editor feel put upon. However, bylaws old or new do not define BERT or circumscribe BERT's conduct.

Would you care for any pickled red herring with your canard, sir?

I could go through the many objections raised by Professor Chanticleer across campus or by atavists in less public settings, but to what purpose? To listen to the objectors for even fifteen minutes establishes that they are exercised about demons and devils that the rest of us cannot see or exorcise.

Suppose, to pursue another scary story, that a big, bad Diversity Czar meddled in hiring of every department, program, and school.

• The objectors cannot plausibly connect such meddling to any existing or any envisioned language in the bylaws or the code.

So what are the objectors really afraid of? Why do they conjure such terrors?

• Departments, programs, and schools confident that their procedures and judgments would withstand critical scrutiny -- the skeptical perusal supposed to define the life of the mind -- should welcome another set of eyes. Faculty who recoil at the prospect that their departments, programs, or schools would be greatly impaired if compelled to explain decisions and processes should share with the rest of the faculty what they know about their own academic units that the rest of us would do well to learn. If they know that their units cannot withstand oversight, perhaps their fears are based on hiring inequities is their immediate pasts.

Whatever the objectors are really afraid of almost certainly resides in the departments, programs, or schools whence such rough beasts, their sour come up at last, slouch toward faculty meetings to be boring.

• Avant garde poseurs object to an emphasis on race, ethnicity, or nationality and admonish the campus to aim to for socio-economic or class diversification. They do so knowing that there is even less support for thoroughgoing socio-economic diversification than for diversification that is more familiar from the decades that other institutions have devoted to diversification. They strike progressive poses but secure most of their support from diehards and blowhards from the racial "Right."

Indeed, the poseurs resemble rabid proponents of laissez faire because they operate with the cynical assurance that policies they advocate will never be tried and hence never will fail.

So kudos to Professor Zen for unmasking the symbolic politickers. Woe to the rest of us that Zen's rhetorical question almost certainly went over the heads of most faculty. Those inattentive, clueless souls voted for the new bylaws but preserved the luxury of what they do not now and do not want to hear about.