Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses IV

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In previous episodes [infra] Festering Groupthink among Fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee ["Rump Parliament" 3 December 2010] maturated into Captious Shibboleths, Slogans, and Other Rationalizations ["Rump Parliament" 4 December 2010] that were in turn carried by Recidivists from THE Rogue Committee of All Time ["Rump Parliament" 5 December 2010].

In this entry's episode, suppurating contagions meet little resistance from faculty who are simply punching a clock or a tenure-ticket on the ASC.
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Explanation 4 -- Sentence-Servers

I do not claim that all or most faculty on the Academic Standards Committee were malfeasant in 2008-2010 or in any other period. A majority, to judge from the committee's minutes, were merely nonfeasant [or nonsapient or non-sentient]. Why?

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Many faculty serve on committees the way convicts serve in prisons. They do their time.

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They avoid displeasing colleagues who have loud voices or sharp remarks. To get along, they go along. They do not resist; they submit. They keep their heads down. They turn their senses off. They avert their eyes as ravishers commit ravages in the name of "Rigor."

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Indeed, I suspect that one of the recidivists who served on the Starr Chamber [as I call the Professional Standards Committee of 2003-2004] was barely cognizant of what was going on at the ASC because the goings-on had nothing to do with what he values. To my knowledge, that colleague has only seen matters that way for 25 years. This colleague on 3 May 2004 informed the Faculty Senate that the Starr Chamber could not keep track of its less substantial interpretations of The Faculty Code because the Starr Chamber was inventing interpretations too quickly and wildly even to write down what they were deciding.

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What a moment for the senators present!

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Great defense of the committee, colleague!

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"We work too fast and loose to keep track of what we're doing."

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"I was never in the Texas Book Depository, officer. I was cleaning my carbine on the grassy knoll when it accidentally discharged a few times."

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In short, the ASC or any other Faculty Senate committee teems with time-servers, especially dutiful junior faculty who will go along with any outrage or stupidity lest they be thought less than rigorous.

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Just as human innards have reduced resistance to infections where evolution has not "anticipated" introduction of sepsis, time-serving shirkers and slackers barely resist groupthink and doubletalk, especially when blunders and blather are wielded by experienced dupes, dopes, and dodgers.

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But the students on the ASC know better, don't they? Why don't the students resist nonsense on the march?

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Radar O'Reilly: "Wait for it!"

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses III

What spread the suppurating discharges from the Academic Standards Committee into the Faculty Senate and infected plenary meetings over the last two years?

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Shibboleths and slogans [Hypothesis II, 4 December 2010] that have long festered amid groupthink among ASC fixtures [Hypothesis I, 3 December 2010] do not explain why the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] extruded policies that garnered almost no support in plenary meetings of the faculty. The contagion of groupthink must radiate beyond fixtures into the faculty and students on the ASC. How did arguments so hokey that almost no faculty will support them in a public meetings gain consensus in the ASC?

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Explanation 3 -- Starr-Chamber Deciders Erupt Anew.

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In the most recent episodes, a rogue committee [the ASC] carried three faculty who had graced the rogue committee of all time, the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] of 2003-2004. Since two members of the rogue PSC have retired since 2004, 60% of the available veterans of the renegade 2003-2004 PSC voted to do away with pass-fail on the ASC in 2008-2009.

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Frequent readers of this blog need not read "Malfeasant or Nonfeasant?" supra at 9 February 2010, but infrequent readers should. In that entry and some earlier entries, I chronicled and ridiculed the sheer ineptitude [at best] of the 2003-2004 PSC. Re-read the 2-9-10 entry to see why I call that PSC "The Starr Chamber" and why the 2003-2004 snagged my designation as the most renegade Faculty Senate committee of all time.

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An Iconic Interposition....

..

In 1961 President Kennedy likened the "vitality and devotion to public interest"

of President John Adams and various of his descendants to

a "scarlet thread throughout the entire tapestry"

of the history of the United States.

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Faculty who fouled the Professional Standards Committee 2003-2004

evinced indifference to injustices and derelictions of duty

and so constitute a scarlet thread marring the white toga

of faculty governance.

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Faculty who countenanced and complemented savagery against at least two untenured faculty in 2003 and 2004 could scarcely be expected to recognize what the ASC was doing, let alone to summon the courage and wit to stop the savaging of undergraduates. If those three members of the Starr Chamber believed what they said or wrote publicly in 2003-2004, they could go along with anything -- including hackneyed formulas and ASC hacks.

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Of course, to get consensus on the 2008-2009 ASC, policy contagion needed to spread beyond the Starr Chamber recidivists. In addition, a Starr Chamber recidivist susceptible to opportunistic infections of "Rigor-Osis" or "Self-Involvement-Itis" might spread policy contagion to similarly vulnerable faculty and students.

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So truly insipid ideas spread from the groupthink of the fixtures [Hypothesis I] via years of mindless sloganeering [Hypothesis II] to Starr Chamber" recidivists [Hypothesis III]. What explains the etiology beyond the fixtures and the recidivists?

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Next entry!

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Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses II

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?

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Explanation 2 -- Stagnant Mantras Fend Off Information.

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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.

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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]

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This Ass. Dean emulated a caricature of a filiopietistic martinet in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall:"

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He moves in darkness as it seems to me

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Stay tuned to "Rump Parliament for the answers to that query.

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Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses I

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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.

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Explanation 1 -- Stable Misrepresentation Foments Groupthink.

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.

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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.

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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.

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But the fixtures together constitute largely a constant. Constants seldom explain variables.

What If Governance Worked?

How different is faculty life when faculty governance works?

Very different from normal.

Hell, if faculty governance works, faculty committees might serve faculty.

?ty

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¶ 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.

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¶ 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

¶

¶

The Dark Side Two

On the dark side look for decanal types and those who revel in being on committees.
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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."

Titular Inflation

Anyone notice the entitlements across campus?

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?