Members of the community at the University of Puget Sound have heard much talk about the need for "conversations." Plenary meetings of the faculty and of the Faculty Senate are too few to accommodate all the conversations that the community could use. RUMP PARLIAMENT fosters more conversation, and, in keeping with prior slogananeering, participates in the "Culture of Evidence."
Hypothesis One, the immediately preceding post in "Rump Parliament," proposed that chronic fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] have over the years indulged in groupthink. These ASC insiders accept orthodoxies and verities that students and faculty across campuses and eras have not shared. The immediately preceding post [3 December 2010] also noted, however, that these disjunctions between longtime ASC insiders and the broader campus community change slowly if at all. "Inside groupthink," then, is nearly constant. How can a constant predilection explain the ASC stampede 2008-2010?
.........................
Explanation 2 -- Stagnant Mantras Fend Off Information.
.
Once a long-(dis)serving member of the ASC substitutes shibboleths for reasons, he or she is unlikely to stop or to learn. Instead, she or he will recite formulas that spread a contagion to credulous colleagues who cycle onto the ASC. Even if mantras evolve slowly, sooner or later such mantras will find faculty or students more credulous than most.
Please permit me to illustrate how shibboleths can long gestate before breaking out when the makeup of the ASC permits.
.......
Long ago an associate dean who was technically a member of the faculty but who never to my knowledge taught a class at UPS or earned tenure in a department declared that many students were using pass-fail in ways not explicitly authorized by the faculty. Ensconced on the ASC, this dean so treasured his thought that he would voice it over and over. Over the years, he repeated his saying so often that he came to believe its truth more and more. Even as this Ass. Dean was persuading himself of the gravity and probity of his mantra over the years, he was winning converts among the fixtures on the committee [see Hypothesis One, 3 December 2010]
...............
This Ass. Dean emulated a caricature of a filiopietistic martinet in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall:"
Perhaps the key clause quoted above, for present purposes, is "... as it seems to me ... ." Frost, as it seems to me, presumed that his readers would agree with Frost that rebuilding stone fences between pine woods and apple orchards was largely wasted effort. So it was with this Ass. Dean when I served with him on the ASC. He would intone his inconsequent drivel that students used pass-fail for purposes other than taking risks. Most faculty with whom I served stifled the obvious response: "No shit!" Most members of the ASC presumed that most motions that elicit faculty agreement have one or more official rationales and multiple ulterior motivations. I suspect that most members of the ASC presumed that the Ass. Dean knew that faculty meetings consist of good reasons and real reasons and that good reasons are voiced more often and more loudly than some real reasons are. The Ass. Dean was being disingenuous because he had no stronger arguments to advance and because he did not want to admit his own ulterior motivations and real reasoning: pass-fail is bad because grades promote rigor and because pass-fail coursework may promote inflation of GPAs.
------------------------------
More than once I invited this Ass. Dean to move against Puget Sound core curricula, which faculty explicitly designed to do what the core curricula never did. He never did. Nor to my knowledge did he protest when a reaccreditation report claimed that the core at that time ensured undergraduates a "unifying experience." This reaccreditation document -- to keep matters short and clear -- lied about the core curriculum. That was no problem for Jones Hall or for the Ass. Dean. But when students use pass-fail for any purpose not explicitly authorized by faculty but tacitly acknowledged by every colleague who recalls his or her undergraduate years, the Ass. Dean and a few fixtures espy a problem.
None of the foregoing is very mysterious. Many long-serving members of the campus community have never reconciled themselves to pass-fail. They repeat mantras to mask their long-standing opposition to decisions of the faculty. Repetition makes slogans and shibboleths seem less fatuous and less reactionary than they are. Uncritical faculty accept repeated nonsense. If intra-committee sloganeering is insulated from colleagues' questions and disputation, the mantra persists.
.
For the very reasons noted in the 3 December 2010 post, however, we must see that shibboleths and slogans cannot alone explain how policies that garner almost no support in plenary meetings of the faculty could issue from the ASC. Such mantras must be adopted by students and faculty on the ASC. What spread the long suppurating discharges through the ASC and into the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings?
.......
Stay tuned to "Rump Parliament for the answers to that query.
Too many hypotheses chase too few data when we try to understand why the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] went astray or ran amok over the last two years. Undeterred, I inventory explanations that might be offered.
The ASC habitually features a representative of the Academic Vice President who is usually the only faculty member of the ASC who serves more than three consecutive years. In addition, the Registrar, the head of advising, and a representative of the Dean of Students repeat on the ASC year after year while faculty and student members come and go.
........
Faculty or staff who fester on the ASC for more than three years tend to acquire and to generate beliefs or presuppositions that most faculty need not share. This can lead to groupthink: "... a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink> ASC fixtures will tend to share enduring dogmas, doctrines, anecdotes, and shibboleths as well as perspectives and orientations that may diverge starkly from the beliefs, frames, concerns, or priorities of students and faculty "outside" the ASC sub-culture.
..................
When the fixtures as a group UNDER-represent students and faculty and/or OVER-represent the distinctive problems, concerns, and goals of a department or office, the fixtures lose touch with what most of the community sees, believes, thinks, or wants. The fixtures become fixed upon in-group perspectives.
Is the current policy regarding incomplete courses troubling this repeater on the ASC? Then the ASC should finally do what the repeater has long recommended. From the view of insiders/fixtures, the ASC has repeatedly failed to act on the insiders' preferences for policy.
Another fixture on the ASC has for years argued that permitting students choices is permissiveness? Then clearly [to insiders and fixtures] the ASC newbies and especially the ASC students should accede to the expertise of and the "history" brandished by that fixture.
A long-serving administrator on the ASC abhors what he calls grade inflation? The moment he chants "grade inflation" or uses "grade inflation" to explain anything, the fixtures will "observe" that "grade inflation" has troubled the ASC acutely and repeatedly. Insiders' lamentations and liturgy will conjure what no serious attention to evidence and inferences can disclose -- grade inflation..........
Thus do repeat performers recycle their causes and their prejudices over the years, especially if faculty who were around for the last epidemic of groupthink have cycled off the ASC so that the ASC's "history" may be not simply brandished but brandied.
Explanation 1, then, invites us to look to the beliefs, values, prejudices, shibboleths, and blarney of those who persist on the ASC for more than three years. Perhaps unwitting victims of groupthink themselves, these repeating members encourage groupthink [and lack of wit] among transient students and faculty on the ASC. This is especially the case with faculty who are merely serving their time on the committee, a special matter to be considered in a subsequent part of our inventory.
........
But the fixtures together constitute largely a constant. Constants seldom explain variables.
How different is faculty life when faculty governance works?
Very different from normal.
Hell, if faculty governance works, faculty committees might serve faculty.
?ty
***********
¶ Let 16 November 2010 go down as the date on which, for one fierce, shining moment, faculty governed themselves as they should. Gilbert Keith Chesterton's donkey once brayed about "one far fierce hour and sweet." For the tattered outlaw of the Earth who blogs here, Tuesday was all that -- the meeting took but an hour. A donkey of a different sort brayed about "one brief shining moment that was known / As Camelot. /" The faculty had such a moment without swordplay. For that fierce, shining hour, the faculty corrected an errant committee and disciplined some arrogant colleagues.
********
¶ The faculty scooped droppings from a rogue, irrational Academic Standards Committee [ASC] off the floor of a faculty meeting for what I hope is the last time but fear is merely the latest time. The ASC decided to prevent students from taking courses in their majors or minors pass-fail; perhaps six faculty supported the ASC's position in the plenary meeting. The ASC voted to restrict pass-fail coursework to juniors and seniors; maybe ten faculty endorsed that change in the plenary meeting. These results might have been as humbling and as enlightening as they were predictable if willful members of the ASC were open to "outside" views from, say, the vast majority of their colleagues. I have never seen the authoritarians who tend to populate the ASC learn. Maybe this time? Don't bet on it!
¶
¶ For years the ASC has been indifferent to information and evidence when not outright scornful of each. In recent years the ASC has routinely arrogated policy-making based on scant evidence and reckless presumption. Told of a problem, the ASC overreacts by lurching to a "solution" dizzyingly more extensive than the problem reported to [and usually by a member of] the ASC. Confronted about ASC effrontery, ASC members feign being affronted. Then ASC veterans adduce inconsequent numbers as if those statistics bore on any issue. [Of course, if any members of the ASC have facility with statistics or quantitative analysis or argument, such numbers might evince bad faith rather than questionable judgment.]
¶
¶ The immediate instance of changes in pass-fail originated when a member of the ASC said that her class relied on groupwork that was compromised by pass-fail shirkers. She wondered how she could restrict pass-fail enrollments in that course. The ASC pondered the matter and, much to the surprise of its own members, voted quickly and without much argument, thought, evidence, or information to eliminate the option of pass-fail at the University of Puget Sound. This revolutionary purge the faculty promptly overruled -- as any experienced member of the faculty would have told the cloistered authoritarians would happen had the ASC deciders cared what a majority of the faculty might think.
¶
¶ [If apologists would respond that the ASC passed the ban to provoke discussion among senators or the faculty, I should like to know why the ASC did not solicit views from faculty or from senators before precipitously and insouciantly banning pass-fail. I do not deny that some colleagues may elect to believe that the ASC was encouraging inquiry or raising the issue. I doubt that such was the ASC's primary motivation.]
¶
¶ The ASC's decision-making looked and looks insipid relative to the wisdom of the faculty once faculty were eventually informed of the problems. The plenary faculty meeting capped the number of pass-fail registrations at the discretion of the instructor. Instructors whose pedagogy could not bear pass-fail loafers could set the number of pass-fail registrations in their course or courses at zero. Other instructors could welcome every pass-fail registration for their courses. The problem articulated by a colleague who is no longer a member of the faculty nor of the ASC had been addressed with minimal violence to the options of students or faculty. Unless the ASC were acting out some vendetta against pass-fail itself, the faculty solved the problem brought to the ASC. What is more, the faculty tailored the solution to the problem. Try conveying that concept to recidivists on the Academic Standards Committee!
¶
¶ Demonstrating the tin ears for which the ASC has of late been renowned across campus and learning nothing from the faculty's dismissal of the ASC's original over-reach/over-reaction, the ASC proposed solutions for problems too microscopic to be worthy of the time of the Faculty Senate:
Perhaps one-tenth of 1% of all students' decisions resulted in students' opting to take pass-fail an elective in their major; the ASC was not going to suffer that affront with equanimity.
Perhaps a dozen students per year [accounting for less than six one-hundredths of 1% of all student-selections] came to regret their having taken a course pass-fail because they wanted to major in that course's department; the lone faculty-member from the ASC in the meeting yesterday assured faculty that either the department or the ASC easily remedied these rare problems, yet she defended the ASC's eliminating options for perhaps 100 times as many 1st- or 2nd-year students!
¶
¶ If the ASC were capable of opening their decision-making and their minds to the experiences and views of colleagues, they might not be upbraided so often in faculty meetings. And if my aunt Marilyn were a man, she'd be my uncle.
¶
¶ Many or most faculty thought problem 1 so trivial that they could not understand why the ASC bothered with the matter [again, unless animus toward pass-fail impelled the ASC to see in this or that sniffle an epidemic]. Amid Tuesday's meeting the faculty saw clearly that the ASC had put so little thought or craft into the first proposal that their rule would have prevented a French major from taking a course in another language pass-fail. [It was fortunate that the sole faculty member of the ASC who deigned to attend the meeting pointed out that the rule would under those circumstances not be enforced as written and that the ASC or some other decider would permit the student to use pass-fail in, say, Spanish 101 despite the student's having majored in French. Like so many faculty, I welcome assurances that whatever motions the faculty pass will be subordinate to what authorities decree from Jones Hall.]
¶
¶You read the above correctly: The ASC misphrased its motion so abjectly that the sole member of the faculty from the ASC had to disavow the language of the motion to save the motion. Great work, apostles of rigor!
¶
¶ Problem 2 made the ASC look even more foolish. Presiding over the meeting, President Thomas asked whether instructors' grades were preserved after the computer assigned passing or failing grades. Instructors do not know which students are taking courses pass-fail and so assign ordinary letter grades. The registrar and the computer have those grades, as anyone who considered the matter for even a moment would expect. When the President then asked why a pass-fail grade could not be converted to the letter grade assigned by the instructor if a student decided to major after taking a class pass-fail, the inanity of the ASC's second proposal was clear to everyone not on a crusade to rid the campus of the sloth and laxity of pass-fail.
¶
¶ Given the silliness of the ASC changes in policy, who could be surprised that nearly all members of the ASC 2008-2010 dodged the faculty meeting? Their absence did not remedy the absence of reasons or reasoning and of evidence or inference for the ASC's excrescence of policies over the last two academic years. The Faculty Senate heard on Monday [11-15-10] that the ASC was demoralized because ASC decreees were so resoundingly and so routinely discarded in faculty meetings. Deciders who, to judge from ASC minutes, devoted very little time, thought, or discussion to problems or to solutions before lurching into major changes did not care to be second-guessed by colleagues who cheated by thinking proposals through then voting them down or by a President who eliminated a problem with a few seconds' reflection.
¶
¶Petty overlords of rigor had been overruled. Woe is they or them!
¶
¶ Nor did the singularity of the membership of the ASC who dared to appear obscure the ASC bullies' getting their comeuppance from a student at the faculty meeting. The ASUPS President tolled the irrationality of the ASC by reproducing ASC minutes that showed that the committee's feces had no theses. ASC decision-makers so bold when it came to punishing students for deciding other than how the scions of rigor would have students decide left a staffperson and an associate dean to answer for the presumptuous, precipitate policies that would regiment 2500 students to eliminate the problems of a few students or even fewer faculty.
¶
¶I doubt not that the ASC absentees have prepared excuses for their absences. I denounce their claims in advance without hearing or reading them. [In other words, I ASC them.] If any aspect of attacks on pass-fail had been passable, the absent ASC members would have made the meeting.
¶*** **ns.
¶
¶To sum up: A committee behaved recklessly and irrationally. The Faculty Senate did not directly discipline the committee but did set the reckless, irrational rogues up for rebuke by the faculty as a whole. The faculty scorned the deciders' decisions. The President of UPS and the President of ASUPS seemingly effortlessly exposed the ASC deciders as clowns who are not quite in on their own jokes.
¶
¶ When an object of a self-parody does not know that his or her parody is [self-]parodic, it's a UPS faculty meeting.
¶
¶ Will a future ASC learn from the rebuke? We shall see. Do not bet on it. One does not join the Wigger Patwol unless one is compensating for shortcomings actual or imagined.
On the dark side look for decanal types and those who revel in being on committees. ##### ##### In The Prevalance of Deceit [xi], anthropologist F. G. Bailey alludes to the Lapps, deans, and dedicated members of committees:
#####My academic colleagues who have risen above #####scholarship and teaching to become administrators #####or dedicated committee members could benefit #####from this example of Saami,* who are at least #####straightforward about their own lack of virtue. #####The academic arena, too, is populated by deceivers, #####whether sporty or malicious or obsessed with #####triviality, public-spirited gamesters enjoying their #####politics. But very few would concede that mostly #####it is a game (the spoils being often of little substantive #####value); still less would they admit to enjoyment. #####But most of them do little harm. Moreover, if my #####argument is correct, since they are contenders for #####power, they could not do otherwise than practice #####deceit while being enthusiasts for truth.
W##### What do I love about this quotation?
First, I shall steal the phrase "My academic colleagues who have risen above scholarship and teaching to become ... dedicated committee members ..." because I shall laugh at that phrase every time I write it, say it, or see it or hear it. What could be more pathetic than one dedicated to being a member of a committee in academe? Even being a dedicated member of a bowling team would be better.
Second, I love of course the caricature of deceivers who can or will admit neither their deceptions and their mendacity nor their enjoyment of deceiving and lying as they compete for next-to-nothing than getting their way.
Third, Bailey's pity is devastating but hilarious: the deans and dedicated committemen or committeewomen do little harm. Since they do little, I guess they can do little harm.
Fourth, I love the "syllogism:" Committeemen and committeewomen would have power; therefore, they must endorse truth even as they must exemplify deceit. Nyuk!
Fifth, academe is populated by deceivers? Who knew?
What's not to love about this quotation? ##### #####
*F. G. Bailey quotes Myrdene Anderson on the Lapps, as we know the Saami: "Lying, bluff, secrecy, and espionage are all coordinated into their dealing with non-Saami and nonhumans and in their daily routines with other Saami, to form an instrumental and expressive drama. The challenge for Saami actors resides in orchestrating a distinctive social character in which one's reputation as a humorous, clever and sporty deceiver exceeds that as an excessive, trivial and malicious one. Moreover, individuals expect others, including herding dogs, reindeer, and ethnographers, to behave deceptively."
From time to time one learns from local "mass" media what title a colleague has provided reporters or editors. It could sadden us that colleagues concoct ties to departments that do not exist at the University of Puget Sound, just as we feel sorry for colleagues who mistake a designation from the Faculty Advancement Committee for genuine distinction or who wear their Phi Beta Kappa keys too often [or, in my view, ever].
Instead, let us all enjoy this pretense. Shall I lead off?
First, I steal from "The Flim-Flam Man" for my title. [Nyuk!] Mordecai Jones awarded himself the designation "M.B.S.C.S.D.D -- Master of Backstabbing, Cork-Screwing, and Dirty-Dealing." Isn't every political scientist at least a student of chicanery, perfidy, double-talk, and shucking? True, I am not a humanist and so not entitled to call myself a distinguished professor of posing and pretending. Still, might I play one in the media or on campus?
I teach "Law and Society" every year, so I suppose I am Professor of Law at the University of Puget Sound. Since we sold our law school, I guess I am the final remaining professor of law at the University of Puget Sound. Does that make me "The Last Standing Professor of Law" despite my having spent not even a minute in law school? Quite the accomplishment! What about the colleagues who hold a J. D.? Can they be professors of law or law and ethics or social control or normative studies irrespective of the University's not having such departments?
I teach "Public Opinion" every other year. Dare I relabel myself "The Commata Gallup Professor of Occasional Polling and Perpetual Trolling" to follow the lead of my colleagues?
I also teach "Constitutional Law" every year. Does that justify "Professor of Inconsequent, Intermittent, and Over-Hyped Barratry and Litigiousness in Lieu of Rational Governance" perhaps?
How about my introduction to U. S. politicking and governing? May I please claim to be a proctologist?
######### Each member of the faculty is in some measure a perpetrator, a bystander, and a victim. However, when faculty become dean-like, perpetration increases, bystanding becomes more active, and victimization decreases. ########## In Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945, Professor Raul Hilberg differentiated those who created or expedited the Holocaust [perpetrators] from those who did little to stop the Holocaust [bystanders] and from those who died in or suffered through the Holocaust [victims]. Academic politics and government, to be sure, are far less important and far less murderous than the Holocaust was, so I intend no comparison between the misdeeds I cover below and the crimes and outrages of the Nazis and others. Rather I aim to use the concepts "perpetrator," "bystander," and "victim" to explain how administrators go over to the dark side.
In this entry I shall not differentiate the doers, the done-to, and the done-too-little for the University of Puget Clowns [® Susan Resneck PieRce]. Rather, I aggregate those roles or descriptors. Every academic, I presume, is to some extent a perpetrator ofanda victim ofanda bystander amid the lesser outrages and delicts of academe.I further presume that the modal academic is mostly a bystander, occasionally a victim, and only rarely a perpetrator. Hence, the mix of roles or dispositions interests me in this post.
I expect that any increase in administrative responsibilities or expectations will increase perpetration even if it does not reduce victimization. What may be less obvious is that the more administrative one's duties, the more that one is expected to be a bystander. Although administrators may often be bystanders, administrative roles require less passive and more active standing by than professorial roles require.
Recall from my entry "Standing By" for 26 June 2010 in "Rump Parliament" that passive bystanders stand by apparently idly and inertly. Passive bystanders know little and want to know less unless a matter or issue lines their pockets or threatens their positions or interests. Compelled or induced into some academic fray, passive bystanders avoid controversy, agree with and reaffirm the basic goodness of as many colleagues as possible, decide nothing, and establish no truths or facts. Passive bystanders want all of us to get along. Indeed, the passive are so averse to conflict that they avert their eyes and close their minds to injustices and improprieties. Even if passive bystanders do not become apologists, they strive not to know, try not to hear, euphemize in every way, and thereby resist being drawn into frays or phrase.
Faculty have far more opportunities for passivity and apathy than dean-like or dean-light figures do. Untenured faculty had better be active apologists, accomplices, or enablers at least some of the time lest they run into "Double Secret Personal and Professional Characteristics," but professing to know almost nothing and to be unconcerned about whatever senior faculty tell junior faculty to be unconcerned about secures tenure and promotuion most of the time. Unternured and tenured alike will usually strive to be credulous and conforming. Knowing and caring get in the way of conformity and credulity. To be sure, passive bystanders must declare their basic decency: "Oh, our colleague got shafted? I had not heard that. How dreadful for her! I am so saddened by this news -- which I had not heard anything about -- that I am not certain I shall recover by my nap."
By contrast, dean-like or dean-light colleagues must be more active and less passive than even sinecures. Associate deans, assistant deans, or petty decanal figures [e.g., chairs or directors or members of Power Committees] may be expected to be cover up administrative decisions or non-decisions rather than to ignore them, to rationalize or apologize for policies or ukases rather than to describe them and conform to them, or actively to support or to cheer on actions or inactions, especially when actions or inactions are indefensible. Hence, a shift to an administrative role may not change the degree to which one is a bystander but will change bystanding from more passive to more active standing by. Administrators are expected to stand by what their superiors have dictated.
Members of Power Committees tend to stand by administrators and other superiors, so their bystanding will be more active while they occupy committees and more passive when they do not so serve. After service on a Power Committee, faculty may revert to passive bystanding, but they may be more active bystanders if the acts they perpetrated on the Power Committee especially rankled departments, programs, or a few conscious colleagues. On rare occasions when Power Committees or the Confidentiality Con is challenged, veterans of Power Committees will stand by the actions of "their" committees with aggressive and defensive rhetoric and, of course, the usual stonewalling.
Some chairs of programs, schools, or departments quite predictably become aggressive bystanderswhen they are not flat-out perpetrators. Indeed, some departmental chairs were so obviously perpetrators-in-waiting that I am reluctant to pronounce them bystanders at all, except in the sense that a Rottweiler on a short chain is "standing by." A colleague salivating at the thought of having her or his way with a school or program may actively stand by her or his administrative betters to get into positions from which to tyrannize. Such colleagues range between bystanding and perpetrating.
When we reassure ourselves and others that a professor will not be changed by becoming decanal, we probably have in mind that the professor is no perpetrator. But we are not thinking matters through. Even if a decanal figure evades stark perpetration for some months or years, administrative office will move him or her toward more active bystanding. [It should go without my adding that members of Power Committees, chairs, directors, and deans sooner or later become perpetrators. It comes with each job, even if one is temporarily chairing the smallest program. Indeed, for some chairs, perpetrating tyrannies is their reason for accepting responsibilities.]
Multiple members of the faculty have not merely claimed that becoming an assistant dean or associate dean or a chair would not change them but boldly proclaimed such immunity. Understanding more active bystanding explains why such predictions have proved misleading.
Many of the predictions, of course, were designed to mislead. After one professor served in a decanal position, any colleague with three digits of IQ knew what a tyrant he would be if he ever became an assistant dean or an associate dean or, God help us, a "full" dean. To my knowledge, he was tyrannical only in two dean-like or dean-light capacities. So when he explicitly reassured long-serving colleagues that he did not want his "accession" to change relations with colleagues, he was at best being clever. In theory he did not want relations to change; in practice they would. They must.
More than one member of the faculty has counseled a colleague to get out of a position that requires deception or distortions. More than one member of the faculty has asked what happened to a colleague who became more administrative and began to parrot nonsense or support malfeasance. At such times, faculty exclaim, "He's gone native!" or "She's gone over to the dark side." I have shown above why that should be expected.
So when a veteran warns that someone has "gone over to the dark side," the veteran is not necessarily committing to the prediction that decanal darkness will involve flat-out misconduct or corruption. Some combination of dishonesty, misprision, malfeasance, and nonfeasance is highly probable but not inevitable.
On the other hand, the probability that a decanal figure will be victimizedis far less than the likelihood that she or he will victimize. Thus, I define "going over to the dark side" as increasing one's propensity to victimize, decreasing one's propensity to be victimized, and increasing one's active bystanding.Those trends are inevitable. That is "going over to the dark side." That is why colleagues caution against taking decanal positions.
If you would be a chair, a director, an assistant dean, an associate dean, or worse, remember your Dante: Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'entrate. Abandon hope for your own soul. Abandon hope for your colleague's soul. Those who enter Jones Hall or chair a department or serve on a Power Committee plummet into active or aggressive standing by, into covert or overt sins of commission or omission, and into a spiral of rationalizing and covering up.
Yes, I am serving my third year on the Professional Standards Committee after two stints on the Faculty Advancement Committee. Why do you ask? ##############
Eric Arthur Blair's palliative measure that masks symptoms but does not actually cure underlying conditions does not suit The University of Puget Clowns[ ® Susan Resneck PieRce]
In his classic essay "Politics and the English Language," Eric Arthur Blair informed me that
######What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word,
######and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can
######do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a
######concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want
######to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably
######hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it.
######When you think of something abstract you are more
######inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a
######conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect
######will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense
######of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably
######it is better to put off using words as long as possible
######and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and
######sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the
######phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round
######and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make
######on another person.
########## ########## Kindly overlook the many aspects of that passage that are patent blather and focus please on the blather that may be latent:
If you let your meaning choose your words and if your meaning is at all nuanced or complicated, almost no reader will be able to understand you amid post-literacy, and you will run afoul of Mr. Blair’s own rules.
That is my contention and my meaning in this entry.Let me now choose my words.
I know not when literacy gave way to post-literacy. The first person whom I heard call ours the Post-Literate Era was Jerry Collins. I'll have to ask him to fix a threshold or period.
I know that academics live unabashedly in post-literacy because colleagues have taught me as much over the years. I have often relied on a colleague to proofread my drafts intended for academic audiences. My Proofreader has counseled me to keep things simple even at severe costs in oversimplification. In other words, let simplicity and facility of wording and phrasing shape or bound my meaning. When I have protested that I have chosen exactly the words that should convey my meaning and my case, My Proofreader has patronized me and my audience by the reminder that I must dumb down even prose intended for faculty.
Mr. Proofreader must regard his colleagues as clowns!
In this counsel My Proofreader has often reiterated the tactical advice of another Puget Clown, who claims that one always prevails in campus forensics if one says something like: "I am clear; my opponents are confused." If one's opponents are confusing a meeting of faculty by admitting realities or sorting through tradeoffs or thinking carefully, precisely, and honestly aloud, the opponents have delivered themselves into the clutches of a gibe. What the faculty cannot understand they will not vote for, so assure colleagues that they do not understand the novel, the logical, or the seldom uttered because the originator of an argument is himself or herself confused. In effect, The Tactician advises that one deploy this "syllogism:"
########## ##########The speaker has said something unexpected.
##########The unexpected is harder to understand than the predictable.
##########The difficulty of understanding lies either with the speaker
####################or the audience.
##########The lack of understanding cannot be yours.
##########Thus, whenever you are not speaking, the absence of
####################understanding is due to shortcomings
####################of the speaker, not of you.
##########Hence, what confuses you is not your fault but the speaker's.
##########Hence, you should adhere to the familiar, the clichéd,
####################and the reassuring and reject the
####################speaker's confusion.
########## ##########
The Tactician revels in his own superiority to stooges who, like recently unthawed cave people or a recently assembled monster, fear what they have never heard and do not want to trouble themselves to think about, let alone to understand. My Proofreader at least has the grace to lament post-literacy, but The Tactician spies an opportunity to get his way and to have his way with colleagues.
The Tactician assuredly regards faculty as jokers ... at best.
The Tactician and My Proofreader have taught me that the sort of writing that Mr. Blair was on about is overly optimistic for governance of and politicking at Puget Clowns. If, following Mr. Blair, I determine my meaning precisely and select just the right words or phrases to convey that meaning, I will make myself obscure to colleagues.
Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am
Perhaps worse, I have been advised by colleagues who do not acknowledge an implication that My Proofreader and The Tactician accept:
We are so deeply into Post-Literacy that an academic who uses vocabulary beyond common usage or the SAT [whichever bound comes first] insults his or her colleagues.
More than once a sensitive fussbudget has warned me not to phrase matters as I have lest most colleagues be unfamiliar with a key term. When I have found ways to elaborate, in notes or in the main text, precisely why the unfamiliar word or phrase or concept conveys my meaning, Dr. Fussy Wuzzy has protested explicitly that colleagues would be put off and put out that I should teach faculty arcane vocabulary – say, words once found on the GRE.
How presumptuous! How insulting! How didactic!What kind of fool am I?What must Dr. Wuzzy think of the Puget Clowns?
Please do not misunderstand me. I accept the notion that one parades learning or teaches readers at great peril to readers’ understanding or patience. I do not accept, however, the contention that a self-proclaimed "community of lifelong learners" get(s) to protest that thinking in novel terms or viewing matters from a different perspective or altering one's language to get matters exactly right is so challenging that the writer may fairly be said to insult readers who have PhDs but too little facility with what was, until recently, academic or intellectual English. I am not defending argot, jargon, or jactitation for the sake of showing off.
I know what you're thinking! "Jactitation?" I learned the word in the fifth grade from Stanley Kramer's movie of "Inherit the Wind" (1960). Doctor, do you know less than a fifth grader? ... a fifth grader watching a movie in Ballard? Sheeesh!
I am saying that stating matters as clearly as one can and informing hearers or readers why one has used a complicated concept or a rare word once was a norm for intellectual discourse.
Indeed, need I note that My Proofreader, The Tactician, and Fussy Wuzzy have each and all lamented the laziness of students who will not learn vocabulary and concepts and ideas?
I should be so fortunate that I might write what I mean and let my meanings choose my words, Mr. Blair [writing as "George Orwell," a name that there is no reason for me to suppose is familiar to a PhD on the roster of Puget Clowns]. After I figure out what I think and should like to convey, I then must settle for 11th-grade words and phrases [My Proofreader] that do not in any way challenge or inform or awaken or alarm fellow faculty [The Tactician] lest sensitive faculty feel hurt that I should use English in way that demands close reading, an active mind, and a willingness to learn [Fussy Wuzzy].
Do I insult post-literate readers if I alert them to a transition ["segue" is shorter, no?] in my entry as I move from letting the meaning select the words to the inconsistencies between letting the meanings select the words and Mr. Orwell's rules? How about if I call him "Orwell" below for contrast with "Blair" above?
What's more, Mr. Orwell in the very same essay enumerated rules that contradict his advice to let my meanings select my words:
##########(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. So I let meanings choose my words, then eliminate familiar idioms and tropes even if those tropes and idioms articulate exactly what I meant?
##########(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. So I let my meanings choose my words, then let the inability of my audience to handle longer words -- more syllables? more letters? -- drive out the longer even if it is clearer and more familiar than the shorter word? If I mean "understand" or "perceive," I use "ken?"
##########(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. [I'll try not to take your order literally, Mr. Orwell, since word-processors make cutting words out always possible.] So I select the words that most perfectly convey my meaning, then I see how many of them I can eliminate? After I exclude some words because I may/can, do I re-evaluate their ability to convey my meaning exactly and clearly?
##########(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. [Again, the literal reader concludes that one always should use the active voice.] So I should eliminate any meanings that might select for passive constructions? So words should not select my meanings but grammatical voice should?
##########(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. How will I know if the everyday English equivalent will convey the meaning by which I selected the foreign word -- schadenfreude -- before I applied your fifth rule?
##########(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. So I should avoid thinking or averring meanings, visualizations, or ideas that might lead to expressions that could be seen as alien, different, or issuing from some linguistic or cultural others?
I sum up Orwell's advice: Avoid communication with humans. If you must communicate with humans, do not use "palliative." Instead, say "measure that masks symptoms but does not actually cure underlying conditions." Always use "assay" rather than "assess" or "evaluate" because "assay" is shorter. Never use "professoriate" or "professoriat" but know that either spelling is accepted and that you might save an "e" by going with "professoriat" when writing in your diary.
