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.

Standing By

Behold the Ballast! Fear the Inert!

###########

I complied with a request from on high the other day and of course regret my cooperation. Asked to respond to a survey despite my having no dependents, I responded that I had no dependents. The web-apparatus thanked me for my participation and terminated. Perhaps I had little to contribute on that subject. Still, the survey might have solicited my views before dismissing me. That was survey etiquette when I attended graduate school.

Doubtless, my colleagues with dependents will be more solicitous of my views than the survey proved. If my views advance the interests of colleagues, I expect those colleagues to solicit my full cooperation. Many of those who seek my assistance or support will have been chronic bystanders: those who do little or nothing for others and seek to know little or nothing about others until they perceive that they have something at stake. Until they demand allies, that is, bystanders stand by.

The mass of bystanders have evinced little interest when I have served as mouthpiece for students, faculty, and staff abused by my university. Bystanders usually bear up under insults, injuries, or injustices not directed at bystanders but make appropriate sounds to extract themselves unscathed from an interaction. "I'm so sorry to hear that," they say, and they seem quite sorry to have heard anything about the university or "the community" that might get them sideways with administrators, apparatchiks, or colleagues.

"I am very sorry to hear that."

"Don't worry. In minutes it will be as if you had not heard and did not know. Next time, dive into a doorway to avoid me."

Bystanders distrust their perceptions and immobilize their cognitions unless they think that they stand to gain or to lose. Then bystanders belch platitudes, imagine insults, concoct injuries, and discover that they have always cared about justice and propriety. Then they chat up colleagues as if bystanders had not been above or beyond nearly every fray for years or decades.

Bystanders might seem to present yet another instance of economic collegiality and the hypocrisies that rationalize economic collegiality. At an individual level, bystanding may be simply self-regarding behavior. Considered as a class, however, bystanders form a mass that empowers and emboldens administrators and apparatchiks. As forces in campus policy-making, bystanders are perpetually potential and never actual. Bystanders standing by form the mass of predictable, inertial, and feckless faculty. They give administrators every benefit of every doubt by tirelessly suppressing doubt and evading information. They let apparatchiks assist the administrators by keeping themselves perpetually naive and, they think, innocent.

That the bystanders impassively stand by need not imply that they stand still. Among the most nimble bystanders are the hustlers of equality and equity. Because they are supposed to oppose injustices, they must simulate sympathy and feign surprise that sexism or racism or clientilism or favoritism have tainted personnel processes, although their ideology and rhetoric would dictate that such inequities are to be expected.

John Garfield:  "Somebody told a story.

Sure, a man at a dinner table told a story ...

and the nice people didn't laugh.

They even despised him, sure.

But they let it pass.  ..."



Dorothy McGuire:  "If you don't stop with that joke,

where do you stop?

Is that what you mean?  ...

Where do you call the halt? ...

I've been getting mad at Phil [Gregory Peck

in "Gentleman's Agreement," whence this dialogue comes]

because he expected me to fight this instead of

getting mad at those who help it along ..."



John Garfield:  "What about the rest of the dinner guests?

They're supposed to be on your side.

They didn't ..."



Dorothy McGuire:  "No, they didn't, and I didn't.

That's the trouble.

We never do."

I cannot summon much dudgeon against the gender- or race-mongers, however. Usually they are smothered by bystanders. The bystanders natter until they can excuse themselves on whatever excuse. After the nattering and amid their flight, I imagine that they congratulate themselves on fighting the good fight. Supposed to be on the side of equality and justice, they didn't. They never do. That's the trouble. Instead:



"Graffiti? How dreadful! You know, students really shouldn't be marking up school property in any manner, let alone in a sexist or nativist manner. ... "

"He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die, and he never sees the writing on the walls.” [Buffy St. Marie, "The Universal Soldier;" see "Who's to Blame?" 16 March 2007 in this blog.]


Less adroit bystanders must feign ignorance and practice impassivity. No matter what they believe that they have learned, they know nothing yet are eager, almost frantic, to learn no more. Until they have something at stake, one not only cannot fight city hall or Jones Hall but one should not. It roils campus and disrupts the community to dispute official accounts or to note Orwellian communiques.

Bystanders acquiesce. Bystanders go along that they might advance themselves as reliable, reputable, responsible colleagues in the eyes of patrons. [See "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" in this blog, 4 March 2007.] Bystanders dare to avoid conflict, awareness, and at times sapience. Confronted with a problem not defined by administrators or apparatchiks, bystanders suspend judgments and back away.

Neil Young: "How can you run when you know?" ["Ohio"]

The Bystander: "I do not know."

Bystanders know that the only problems are identified by proper authorities. Beyond such authorized, official problems, there are no problems -- except those faculty who see problems. Faculty who see problems that they have not been authorized to see are themselves problems. Bystanders do not want to augment such problems.

But we all are bystanders some of the time. When staff are sacked or furloughed or sanctioned, most faculty know little about who the staff were or are. Informed that so-and-so was dismissed for questionable reasons, we do not question. We do not even commit to a Panglossian "I suppose it is all for the best!" We cannot even "rise" to apologetics.

Instead, we preachers of civility and community stand by.

So shall I stand by when parents who were counting on benefits for their offspring rouse themselves from inertia and indifference? Shall I nod my understanding and ooze my sympathy for the parents' predicament? Shall I seem to attend to their complaints and concerns while I rehearse in my head the times when the grievant strived not to know or to know as little as possible?

Please stand by.

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University of Puget Clowns

President PieRce called this school "The University of Puget Clowns" at graduation ceremonies. Why do I delight in that moniker?

Faithful readers of this blog know that I delight in "The University of Puget Clowns" [® Susan Resneck PieRce].

To understand why, recall dialogue from a movie now forty years old:

"Frank Burns does not know his way around an operating theater, he does not know his way around a body. And if you will have observed anything, you will have observed that Major Frank Burns is an idiot. He has flipped his wig, that he's out of his head, that he's a lousy surgeon."

"Oh on the contrary, I have observed. And Major Burns is not only a good technical surgeon, he is a good military surgeon. I have also noticed that nurses as well as enlisted men address you as 'Hawkeye.' "

"Yes because that's my name, Hawkeye Pierce. "

"Well that kind of informality is inconsistent with maximum efficiency in a military organization."

"Oh come off it, MAJOR. You put me right off my fresh fried lobster, do you realize that? I'm now going to go back to my bed, I'm going to put away the best part of a bottle of scotch... And under normal circumstances, you being normally what I would call a very attractive woman, I would have invited you back to share my little bed with me you might possibly have come. But you really put me off. I mean you... You're what we call a regular army clown"


[Thank you Internet Movie Database!]

Every time I write "University of Puget Clowns," I think of the movie MASH. I think of the armies of "regular clowns" with whom I have worked over the last 24 years. I think that I am reputed to be a funny guy yet am intentionally far less comical than many colleagues are unintentionally.

Of course, the men and [too often] women rejected by the University of Puget Clowns may not see the humor in the holders of the "Hot Lips" O'Houlihan or Frank Burns professorships.

Apparat-Chicks and Maid Men

Given how few women have been employed here, this university has had more than its share of female apparatchiks.

Reflecting on "Women Against Women's Advancing" [WAWA] the other day, I reviewed the tormenters, abettors, and bystanders who have made this campus unfriendly to females over my years here.

And what got me thinking about women afflicting other women these days?

Coining "Women Against Women" in 1991-1996 to point out a disadvantage that sexist pigs and patriarchs faced at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], I pretended to lament that male colleagues who wanted to fire or otherwise torment women usually found the victim beset by too many female colleagues to participate fully. Relatively and absolutely few women were in decision-making positions in the 1980s and 1990s, yet the women who were in such spots often beat many men to the punching. Moreover, such women took the lead in defending decisions because firing women just looks better if it appears done by women.

Elder boars could not make their way through old sows to get at, so to speak, women standing or stooping or crawling for tenure. Those old sows founded WAW, which I now have restyled "WAWA." Please compare "W Stands for Women Against Women," 24 November 2007.

Know why the Old Girls were displacing the Old Boys?

I dispensed anew with one hypothesis common in the 1990s. "The Crone Hypothesis" posited that attractive, young professors annoyed colleagues of a certain age who were losing their looks, in some cases declining little from a less than lofty start. In 1991, 1992, 1994, and 1995, fans of The Crone Hypothesis argued, women denied tenure were far too fetching for their own good.

Recall that attractive young women who spurned advances from senior colleagues would be vulnerable, but such is a different hypothesis.

Crone-hypothesizers must know, however, that tenure-rejections were less about fetching females than about Stepin Fetchit. Attractive but accommodating women got tenure and promotions. Not particularly attractive but particularly accommodating women got tenure and promotions. The Crone Hypothesis, thus, mistook a spurious subset for the general relation. The Crone Hypothesis was always more about disappointed and disappointing males disparaging females for their looks than about explaining thuggery.

He who quite occasionally despises thuggery attacks the looks of female thugs. How convenient.

No, a more persuasive if incomplete explanation follows from what one victim of thuggery called "The Asshole Clause." "The Asshole Clause" abased all of its deployers, females more than males. Let us see how.

Excellence in teaching and professional growth aside, in the 1980s and 1990s candidates for tenure had to manifest "personal and professional characteristics" lest they be rebuffed. The Faculty Code explicitly demanded that evaluees "possess" qualities that promised to make them personable and professional for decades to come. In practice, this standard for decorum and congeniality was deployed when decision-makers wanted to deny tenure [or other rewards] to candidates who too evidently had met academically and intellectually appropriate criteria.

Really? How could awarding tenure according to congeniality lead to women who obstruct or injure other women?

In the view of most academics, "personal and professional characteristics" must be anathema. To self-respecting scholars, any evaluator who would deny tenure to an otherwise qualified evaluee owing to "personal and professional characteristics" would degrade himself or herself and the process of evaluation. Indeed, "The Asshole Clause" was what most sets of standards and criteria were designed to deny. What other schools tried to fend off as a calumny, this school enunciated as a calling card.

Simply explain The Asshole Clause to colleagues from elsewhere. They only half-believe that such a standard could have been explicit. They concede that such considerations taint tenure decisions everywhere. They cannot believe that any school announced it. "That seems like an invitation to litigation."

Lo it was that, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], evaluators were expected to embrace and to enforce what most institutions denied: that personality, docility, obedience, and deference were expected of junior faculty who wanted to retain their positions.

Our musical interlude -- "I've Become Accustomed to Disgrace" from "My Fair Lady"

Worse, personality, docility, obedience, and deference were qualities gendered in application if not in conception. Male faculty might be colorful, skeptical, rambunctious, and independent without threatening or upsetting the old boars who ran the school. Females lacking in orthodoxy or orthopraxy were improper, unladylike, bitchy, or prickly. Traditional, quiet, submissive females might be dismissed and derided, but females who challenged men would be targeted. Women who made themselves useful to men would be favored. Women who showed men up would be fired.

Rogues who objected to sexual misconduct were especially dangerous and instantly targets.

Intelligent maidens who became academic "maid men" under this gendered system did not much care to acknowledge how they had become responsible, respectable, reliable colleagues, so they had to erase acknowledgement of their own humiliation and subjugation by valorizing the system of faculty evaluation and by humiliating, subjugating, and firing junior faculty who would not submit to degradation rituals.

Encounter anew, please, my entry from 4 March 2007 in this blog. Males or females who craved a reputation for respectability, reliability, and responsibility had to degrade themselves all the while praising the degradation. They still do, readers. This Stockholm Syndrome is not peculiar to Puget Clowns but is endemic and ongoing.

When the faculty in 1994-1995 moved to delete "The Asshole Clause" from the code, many of those who had imposed that clause defended it assiduously. Even among the women, this was understandable. Women who had fired women for being uppity and women who had attained their decision-making positions by being obsequious could not have been expected to acknowledge their subservience, their opportunism, and their supple spines. Instead, like Winston Smith at the close of 1984, they loved Big Brother -- or proclaimed that they did for so long that it became true.

Is a colleague -- male or female -- regaling the faculty with professions of commitment to equality or justice? Ask "How much of whose blood is this professor trying to wash away?"

Now, some women destined for the WAWA leadership went further. Some so identified with their trainers and their trainers' values that they had long since incorporated patriarchy into their psyches. Their patina of feminist sensibilities disguised their willingness or longing to please the Old Boys as some women became more Old Boy than the old boys were. By the time I arrived on campus, then, many self-proclaimed [yet male-derided] "feminists" extolled and executed orthodoxy and orthopraxy all while denying that the process was gendered at all. Long since having submitted, they saw submission not as surrender but transcendence. They were apparatchiks, defined in this blog [4 March 2007] as those beneath the level of Vice President who collaborate with administrators and justify decisions.

Not long ago, a male colleague wanted to deny what a female denied tenure had said about advancement at this school. "You cannot map gender onto everything," he told me. That phrase is clown-talk. On campus it means "You cannot notice any use of gender that I'd prefer not to acknowledge," which soon enough amounts to "You cannot map gender onto anything." [Please see other tlansrations in the entry at 19 October 2007 in this blog.]

Even so, not all socialization into the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] was gendered. Some was general, which made submission and surrender seem less gendered. To advance, tyros female or male had to voice their agreement with policies; had to honor traditions, myths, and rituals; and had to master local newspeak and doubletalk. Male and female at first acted as if they believed so that they would not be disreputable and vulnerable. Soon enough, they did believe. Worse, they forgot what it was not to believe. Tenured and promoted, these women and men were no longer at Puget Clowns. They had become Puget Clowns.

Recall a twice-told tale: The single leader of WAWA perhaps most instrumental to the demise or detriment of women on this campus was walking away from a faculty meeting with a female colleague when she waved toward me and said that I'd never get tenure at this campus because I mouthed off at faculty meetings. She was on the FAC that recommended me for tenure but not the woman she was talking to. Interesting coincidence?

Norman Bates had to deny his matricide; so too those who had to disgrace themselves to get tenure had to deny the disgrace by which they secured permanent employment. Who could deny the disgrace if assertive, candid, loud-mouthed, threatening, disruptive females were parading about campus? Better that such women not torment the maid men by their presence.

Observe and mark well women who are touted for service to this university, for employment at the University of Puget Clowns once demanded especially from women service qua SubsERVIenCE.

Who will join "Women Against Women's Advancing" next?

?

?

?

At Least One Senator Tried

Amid bad faith and cynical evasions, the incoming chair of the senate offers hope.

After Randall P. McMurphy tried but failed to lift a heavy machine, he offered a resounding phrase in the screenplay to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:"

"But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that." http://sfy.r/?script=one_flew

I rehearsed that phrase several times in my head in an attempt to calm down before a report to the Faculty Senate last Monday [10 May 2010]. The always wily, always deceptive Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] had reported via one of its six chairs. See "The Persistence of Blather" [11 December 2009] and "O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here" [immediately previous entry in this blog, 24 April 2010].

The incoming Chair of the Faculty Senate, in his capacity as mere senator, had asked whether the FAC might move to change the Bylaws [one chair] to match FAC practice [six allegedly co-equal chairs]. He said that he preferred adjusting the Bylaws to circumventing the Bylaws. A novel notion that! Yes, we could follow the rules and, if we would not follow the rules, change the rules so that they resemble our practice.

The feckless, accommodating, thankfully outgoing chair of the Faculty Senate produced a communication from the FAC in which the FAC updated its deceptions and evasions. Does any member of the faculty remember when we had a Faculty Senate Chair who was not supine?

The member of the FAC presenting the report declined to pursue such a change. It would be unsual for a member of the FAC to take a straight path to any object or to acknowledge the authority of the faculty or the senate!

Then, in a usurpation that would have been merely hilarious were it not so pathetic and fatuous, the spokesperson attempted to "charge" the incoming chair to change the Bylaws himself. Ya gotta love FAC logic. A senator attempting to induce the FAC to follow the rules is asked to serve the FAC by changing rules that the FAC is content to flout.

Then senators were regaled with a flagrant misreading of a passage in the Bylaws that, if one were unfamiliar with standard English, might fool a dull sophomore. But let's keep it positive: how many FAC members have failed of our expectations for dull sophomores?

Rather than in anger, how might I respond to such vaudeville?

Shall I repeat "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown?"

Shall I rejoice that the spokesperson for the FAC wore flame-resistant pants amid her rendering of the Bylaws?

Shall I remind myself that many members of the FAC could not have found the meeting?

Shall I rebuke the faculty anew for electing to the FAC colleagues of so little credibility or ability?

Nope. Nope. Nope. And nope.

Shall I rejoice that the incoming chair of the Faculty Senate will not subvert the rules or suborn those who do?

Yep.

At least he tried.

God damn it! At least the new chair did that.

Amid the loons, one sane senator spoke truth to a Power Committee.

At the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], that is a miracle.

On the other hand, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce], loons run the asylum.

Let's see if the new chair will be leader or loon.

Can he do much worse than his predecessors?

O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here

Why do we let "souls undone undoing others" on the Faculty Advancement Committee preach at naifs?

A member of the faculty for almost two years went to a meeting with erstwhile members of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] to hear their advice for faculty who will undergo their third-year assistant professor review, the first full-scale assessment of their teaching, service, professional growth, and likableness. She learned so much that she returned to her department asking if one really cannot have an open file for tenure.

Well played, FAC authorities! The faculty have in this century made ONE change regarding tenure files, and you clowns managed to fuzz it up so that a PhD walks away from "mentoring" confused about a matter that she understood correctly when she entered the room. And you teach for a living?

That some former members of the FAC push closed files cannot surprise us. Members of the FAC have complained that since 2005 -- when candidates for tenure were permitted to select an open file -- letter-writers have been guarded in their assessments. [Can't have guarded letters. Calumnies provide the FAC "complete" information.] Now FAC emeriti instruct virgins that closed files are truly advisable. Maybe the "sophomore" who spoke to me misunderstood, but how coincidental that she misunderstood in a manner that suited the view of some FAC conspirators of recent years. And what a coincidence that, according to one or more attendees, each FAC veteran present indicated a strong preference for closed files.

To get, through deception of the uninformed and unwary, what they cannot get through meetings of the faculty, will closed-minded FAC bunko artists stop at nothing?

I do not blame the selected FAC alums alone. I also blame the decision-maker(s) who selected these closed-minded FAC alums for this forum. More important, I blame faculty who larded the FAC with fatheads. Those who have made careers from duping naifs in classrooms can scarcely be expected to develop new skills and proclivities once appointed to the FAC. When we faculty nominate shuckers and jivers to the FAC, we enable blatherers to bamboozle the gullible.

Not content to muddle through evaluation of personnel for three years or less, the few, the proud, the cloying suffuse campus with their baleful blarney even after their terms have ended.

Once deceivers and believers make the FAC, misdirection and bad faith become part of the way of working if not the way of life. The bylaws require the FAC to appoint one chair; the members of the FAC knowingly ignored the bylaws for years, then engaged in the subterfuge of naming every member of the FAC chair. This flouting too may be blamed in part on the faculty, for the Faculty Senate knows that the FAC is rejecting a mandate for which they do not care. Chairs of the Faculty Senate and senators do nothing about it.

But of course colleagues pretend to believe the FAC when the FAC says it assiduously adheres to authority.

On the FAC colleagues exemplify Orwell's proposition that the great enemy of clarity is insincerity. Like essays from desultory students, FAC letters celebrate murk and sloppiness as if they were virtues. Euphemistic encomia laud for their excellent professional growth evaluees with no professional growth but friends on the FAC or patrons in high places. Disfavored evaluees find their students' evaluations categorized in ways obviously at variance with the most straightforward readings to conjure an "excellence gap" in teaching. [Why should the FAC limit its bad faith to readings of the code or the bylaws?] The FAC then stonewalls the president on the rare occasions when he troubles himself to inquire into their "reasoning" and why it makes little sense.

Thus do "made men" unmake themselves.

None of the above should surprise anyone who has been at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] for even a few years.

As a prior entry in "Rump Parliament" [1-14-10] counseled, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

What may surprise even jaded veterans, however, is just how doltish FAC parolees can be. Did a recent member of the FAC truly say that he advises colleagues to select closed files for the same reason that he advises his students to waive access to letters of recommendation? He claimed that he tells faculty and student alike that readers take confidential letters more seriously, did he?

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Please permit me to advise Dr. Dumkopf about colleagues and about students/advisees in turn.

Favoring or disfavoring colleagues because they selected open or closed files flouts the Faculty Code. If one makes a habit of violating the code, I suppose that admitting violations forthrightly is more virtuous than concealing one's misdemeanors.

As for advisees or students, counsel your recommendees to waive their right to see the letter, then give them copies. That way, you protect your students and advisees both against the prejudices of the closed-minded and against any temptations to write what you would just as soon the subject of the letter not know you wrote. If you would not have your advisee or student read it, do not write it; if you must write what you would not have your student or advisee read, do not agree to write "for" the student or advisee.

Why do the simplest professional and ethical puzzles stymie the simple-minded?

I admit readily that the FAC might advise naifs to go with a closed file for their first FAC evaluation. That is one way to smoke out the assassins in the ranks of a program, department, or school. If mentors communicated that stratagem clearly and repeatedly, they might assist tyros.

However, if we advise newcomers to choose closed files to elicit negatives while probationary faculty may remedy defects real or concocted, wouldn't probationary faculty immediately infer that come tenure time they must select open files to be able to counter negatives that dissemblers will pour into the process?

Beyond that, junior colleagues should seek colleagues with reputations for candor and awareness and should neither seek nor accept mentoring from the apologists or apparatchiks. How are inexperienced faculty to sort apologists or apparatchiks from candid and aware veterans? They should inquire of those who proffer advice the capacities in which they have served the university. Apologists and apparatchiks do not work for free. They work for patrons who sanction negatively or positively. Colleagues frequently appointed over the years to positions of responsibility owing to their reputations for reliability have, in effect, been outed by their appointers. [Re-read "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" in this blog, 4 March 2007.] Many who have done time on the FAC are seldom or never paraded before junior faculty because of the likelihood that they will commit candor or acknowledge truths inconvenient for the powerful.

Joanne Herring: "Why is Congress saying one thing and doing nothing?"
Charlie Wilson: "Well, tradition mostly."

Naifs: "Why do so many members of the FAC advise faculty so poorly?"
Wild Bill: "Well, tradition mostly."

Third-year assistant professors should never listen to FAC members who are ignorant of "local" presuppositions, habits, or traditions. The FAC members will argue for stripped-down files because that makes the work of the FAC easier. They are prosecuting their own lassitude and preserving their own latitude. Having counseled evaluees to "keep it simple," members of the FAC will then sniff that the code explicitly burdens evaluees with making the case for advancement and will resolve silences or gaps against those who have listened to FAC advice.

"And you'll be amazed at the gaze / On their faces as they sentence you"

Rather, preparation of the newbie's file should be informed by the newbie's "local" culture, peers in department, program, or school. The third-year assistant should ask those who will supply specialized, expert assessments what those evaluators would prefer to be available.

Don't tell anybody, but the members of the FAC read only a small subset of submitted materials anyway.

Oh? The FAC members did not make that tidbit clear while urging skinny files?

I am shocked and amazed!

Miscreants Out Themselves

What our colleagues decry, they often make needful.

Amid his monologue in the meeting of the full faculty held 6 April 2010, a colleague professed concern about the second duty proposed for the Faculty Senate's Committee on Diversity. He claimed that many colleagues or departments would object to the Diversity Committee's participation "... in the development of initiatives that enable the university to hire new faculty from historically under-represented populations and to support better the retention and success of such faculty."

Yes, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] such a provision passes for audacity.

I suppose he was correct. Many colleagues would object to hiring from under-represented populations and supporting new faculty. After all, what we have done so far has worked so well! Do we have to keep priming the pump? And, of course, catering to social Luddites is the way to plan for the future.

That the speaker hailed from a department infamous for its shortcomings in hiring and support should have surprised no long-time observer. After all, faculty who object to scrutiny or assistance almost always come from departments, programs, or schools that should be scrutinized and assisted most.

To assist the objector and his department, I offer infra some generalizations about diversity at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce].


The more a department opposes scrutiny of any kind [not just diversity], the more that department should be scrutinized.

The more strenuously a department refuses assistance, the more that department needs assistance.

Departments, programs, or schools should have nothing to hide from colleagues or administrators. Indeed, competent departments, like competent scholars, welcome comments and criticisms because that is how competent scholars and competent departments perform their best. In evaluation of students or of peers, confident professionals welcome additional pairs of eyes because "outsiders" may catch errors or misjudgments that insiders missed.

In hiring as in scholarship, if you fear error or injustice more than criticism or questioning, you seek the opinions of other professionals. Referees for journals or publishers do not know as much about my data or topics as I do, yet they manage to alert me to missteps and misphrasings. Go figure!

When departments, programs, or schools hide from scrutiny or supervision, they invite us all to ask what they are hiding. If recruitment is on the up and up, why dodge review? If you believe you did your work well, why not have someone check that work? If candidates from chronically under-represented groups tend not to make the cut in your searches for good reasons, why not share those good reasons with others?

Experienced Puget Clowns faculty know that these questions answer themselves. Recruitment all too often is not on the up and up; the work was done sloppily or deviously; the reasons, far from good, would be unacceptable if known.

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By the way: Ever notice how perverse arguments and arguers become whenever diversity issues arise?

This colleague argues that BHERT [Bias-Hate Emergency Reaction Team] or something like it is utterly necessary. In the course of her argument, she makes it plain that she should never serve on BHERT because she is overzealous, self-righteous, and dopey.

After the meeting, another colleague argues that the meeting revealed the zealotry that makes diversity programs so dangerous. In making his argument, however, he reveals the atavism that makes diversity programs so necessary.

Am I the only one who notices these things?