The Few, The Proud, The Clowns

This week on Dancing with the Stars: the Puget Clowns do the Charlie Foxtrot.

¶

The plenary meeting of the faculty 19 April 2011 considered new forms for students to evaluate their courses and professors. Among the assembled faculty were

• colleagues who had worked on committees or subcommittees concerned with this issue,
• faculty senators who had consulted with colleagues and committees,
• surveys of the views of students and faculty, and
• others who had acquired thorough familiarity with existing forms and alternatives.

¶

But strains of "Entry of the Gladiators" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0CyOAO8y0&feature=related lofted through Trimble Forum. The Puget Clowns barred grounded inquiry and systematic thinking soon enough. Familiarity with issues and outlooks, attention to detail, and comprehension of the range of interests and contexts disappeared as the Puget Clowns began to speculate and to parse, to grouse and to pontificate, and to posture and to preen.

¶

The faults, Dr. Brutus, lie less in our forms than in our faculty.

¶

The dean warned the assembled that the university invests in reams of forms, so tampering and tweaking are as costly as casual. This slowed down no Clown. I reminded the assembled and the dissemblers that nothing worthwhile was ever drafted on the fly at a plenary meeting of the faculty. Maybe the Clowns kept that in mind[less] as they proposed and disposed at bearkneck [sic] speed.

¶

Deliberation? We don't need no stinking deliberation!

¶

The Clowns plunged recklessly into ad hockery. The Clowns woorded [sic], reworded, and deworded with such brio that the Secretary of the Faculty had to ask one colleague -- a veteran of the Starr Chamber who flabbergasted the Faculty Senate in 2004 when she reported that the Professional Standards Committee interpreted the Faculty Code so often and so quickly that they had no time in which to write down PSC interpretations -- to slow down so that the changes could be recorded. I began to wonder whether my colleagues wrote their syllabi and constructed their courses with similar insouciance. I was thankful that, for most of those present, I need not worry whether they went about their research with similar patience and craft.

¶

Professional Growth? We don't need no stinking professional growth!

¶

As I emerged from the meeting -- "Recalled to Life" [Dickens] -- multiple colleagues who had voted in the affirmative asked me what had been decided. They knew not on what they had voted. Perhaps they had responded to the Chair of the Faculty Senate, who stated his hope that some cloture on this issue would be effected by the assembled. After that, the Chair informed us, we could always repair the evaluation forms over time. This remark, of course, echoed one of the most infamously fatuous remarks by a member of the Starr Chamber: Let's change the Faculty Code today so we can get it done; we always can fix mistakes later.

¶

What rot had the Clowns wrought?

¶

I assured them that nothing had been decided or done. The Clowns were the Clowns prior to the meeting; they remained Clowns in the meeting; the traveshamockery [Woody Allen] of faculty governance continued apace. The faculty made the faculty and the idea of faculty self-governance look bad again [and again and again]. Like drunks in a midnight choir [Leonard Cohen], colleagues testified to what they did not know and could not understand about their students' classes or concerns. And, of course, much of what the assembled endured spoke much more about the speakers than about their subjects [in either sense of "subject"].

¶

Other than to faculty self-governance the outcome made little difference. For here is the central fact that few in the meeting seemed to comprehend: The evaluation of faculty at the University of Puget Clowns suffers far more from shady, shaky interpretations by evaluators than from murky messages from undergraduates or from confusing wording on students' evaluative questionnaires.

¶

As we lose colleagues to departmental snipers and departmental sniping, the Puget Clowns debate the caliber of the slugs that inflict the best head shots and gut shots.

¶

Charlie Foxtrot!

¶

As members of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] fabricate latent -- truly latent, as in "I wish I had not read the evaluations so that I might believe that what you are claiming was actually anywhere therein" -- designs in the students' evaluations to justify decisions on which they have settled for other reasons, the Puget Clowns debate nuances in wording items.

¶

Charlie Foxtrot!

¶

The presiding officer at faculty meetings accepts as a friendly amendment an emendation that is then debated for minutes and passed by voice vote.

¶

Charlie Foxtrot!

¶

Once again a plenary meeting of the faculty devolved into masterful misdirection.

http://ia700103.us.archive.org/13/items/BarnumAndBaileys/Barnum_and_Bailey.mp3

Have You Seen This Fellow?

Isn't he a bit like you and me?

In Ferdinand von Schirach's Crime – Stories (Knopf 2011) I found the following sentences of interest: "He was sly rather than intelligent, and because he was weak himself, he recognized the weaknesses in other people. He exploited these even when it gained him no advantage."

Of whom did I immediately think?

Possessed of some talent in book-learning or blather-slathering, perpetual students eventually land a job and enter a system that selects for

• "professionalism," which in context means cowardice and aversions to conflict and to candor;
• "civility," which in context means smarminess and unctuousness; and
• "smarts,"which in context means cunning and cravenness.

So of whom at the University of Puget Clowns did I immediately think?

Greatest Moments in Faculty Meetings

What is your favorite moment from a plenary meeting of the faculty?

¶ When the University of Puget Clowns assembles its faculty, travesty results. About 90 minutes per show, vaudeville lives again:

• Rigor is burlesqued but never practiced.
• Gravitas is parodied but lighter than air.
• Flatulence is celebrated but more substantial than gravitas or rigor.
• Fatuousness is erudition in service of faithlessness and disloyalty to liberal education.
• Obsequiousness is courage among the conflict averse.
• Ignorance is strength especially ignorance aligned with decanal orthodoxies.
• Civility is candor unafraid to voice the thoughts of the powerful.
• Sincerity is unknown absent delusion.

¶ But what were the greatest shams and shames in a plenary meeting of the Clowns?

Please look over the candidates below and propose alternatives.

¶ Professor Lance Rosywiz spoke of extensive, controversial changes in The Faculty Code: "I am the kind of person who likes to get things done. Why don't we pass these changes and fix any problems in subsequent meetings?" Was this call to alter the employment contract of each member of the faculty in a fast and facile manner the worst fraud attempted by a chair of a Power Committee? Was this former member of the Professional Standards Cult channeling Professor Irwin Corey <http://www.irwincorey.org/>?

Whether the remark was careless, reckless, half-clever, or half-cunning, was it the greatest spit-take in the history of faculty meetings? Read on.

¶ In the hallway after another inept attempt by an administrator to deceive the clowns, Professor Soviet Tankard opined, "I don't mind if you serve me a platter of turds, but don't call them sausages!"

Is this the funniest remark immediately after a plenary meeting of the faculty? Does hallway badinage count as faculty meeting vaudeville?

¶ The presiding administrator granted Professor Eve Slimehatch 10 minutes in which to defend a curricular proposal the administrator favored. The proposer took 30 minutes to present 5 minutes worth of material, so smarming the assembled colleagues that this presentation is itself a candidate for most fatuous self-abuse at a plenary meeting of the faculty.

Truly to realize how off-putting the presentation was, one had to have been there. I estimated amid that meeting that Ol' Slimehatch had lost 10 votes for the proposal by the manner of presentation.

¶ The speech by Professor Slimehatch prompted one of the great time-wasting members of the faculty, Professor Terry Snarl, to wave a wristwatch at Slimehatch to stop Slimehatch's blathering. One of the greatest moments of irony in faculty history, this incident was the equivalent of the Unibomber's questioning the ethical propriety of a letter to a representative.

I was getting very sleepy, very sleepy. Then Snarl started to wave his wristwatch.

¶ Before he waved his wristwatch side to side as if trying to hypnotize the administrative favorite, Professor Snarl triumphed by beginning a speech explicitly affirming one side of a debate and ending that same speech minutes later announcing that the opposite side in the debate had the stronger case. The seamless segues distinguished this speech as perhaps the greatest self-parody in a meeting renowned for intentional and unintentional self-parodies.

"Madam President, I rise in opposition to this proposal. It is such an affront that I am taken aback. Its passage would be such a blot on the eschatology of this institution that I am compelled to vote in its favor. I thank you."

¶ Professor Snarl also worked behind the scenes to induce the vilest speech ever delivered at a clowns' meeting I attended. A Puget Clown who went to graduate school with a whistleblower used phony hypotheticals to defame the whistleblower and to defend the most notorious philanderer on the faculty. Professor Ed Needspiers followed Professor Snarl's direction to a zone of twilight infamy.

Hypotheticals that are not hypothetical but are flat-out falsehoods. What will these wackos think up next?

¶ After a colleague had observed that politics makes strange bedfellows, the next speaker began,"As someone who has had more strange bedfellows than anyone here, ..."

But seriously, folks!

¶ One member of a youth movement, Dr. Van I. Smugdad, ended a salute to "Science in Context" -- also known as "Science in Contempt" -- by noting that Smugdad had secured a grant via the program. Colleagues who missed the meeting cursed themselves because they were not there to hear a dazzling defense of the only category of the previous core curriculum of which the student body asked the faculty to rid the university: "I got a grant to pursue it!"

What a candid canard! But was it the greatest revelation of the "me" in "team?" Read on!

¶ At the start of a meeting, the President asked for announcements from the faculty. Professor Hazel-Don Annuls said, "I don't know if this is an announcement, but did anyone else have trouble parking?"

You want self-absorption bordering on solipsism? Faculty meetings got it!

¶ As the faculty debated whether to permit candidates for tenure to select open files, two wonderful moments glistened. First, a notorious assassin argued to keep tenure files closed, saying, "I trust colleagues to be fair." Across the meeting hall, a colleague who had inside knowledge of the assassin's notions of fairness mouthed "Unbelievable" multiple times. Another colleague stared at the speaker in what seemed shock and disbelief.

Did O. J. worry much about Nicole's slicing his throat?

¶ Second, a senior member of the faculty broke out the finger puppets to reveal the perversity of closed files at tenure. "When you, an untenured member of the faculty, come up for tenure, I may write whatever I please about you, and you may not read what I have written. That is, I may savage you in a manner that denies you your job and defames you forever, and the most you will get to see is a tepid summary that attributes the remark to a colleague. However, when I next come up for a five-year review, I may elect to read every word in your letter. You cannot much harm me, but I get to read your letter and hold it against you if I choose."

If jobs and careers did not hang in the balance, the spectacle of a tenured, full professor having to connect dots for a recent Ph. D. might amuse me more.

¶ Professor Ed Fern Carollens repeatedly denounced false rumors that, if anything, were euphemistic with "respect" to a renowned philanderer. Professor Carollens then acted shocked when the philanderer fessed up, but that performance occurred outside a faculty meeting and thus may not count.

The satellite, rarely overhead, was aligned with the Mother Ship to the endless infamy of Dr. Carollens, who for decades was a strong candidate for the most addled member of the faculty.

¶ Amid discussion of electives that seniors tended to select, a professor observed with disgust that many advisees chose ceramics to complete their degrees. "Ceramics!" the colleague snarled as if seniors were choosing a practicum in child abuse. Many colleagues marveled for weeks that the University of Puget Clowns was so fortunate to have such minor foibles pass for problems at a faculty confab. What they may have missed was the virtuosity of the professor's preening. To identify a happy feature of the undergraduate experience at Puget Clowns as a blot on the rigorousness of the curriculum was genius!

Where else but the circus could one luxuriate in such pretentious nonsense?

¶ Munching potato chips, a colleague wandered into a meeting of the faculty just as a dean completed a curricular rant. The dean insisted that the most reckless thing that the faculty could do was to pass the measure on the floor without much further deliberation and debate. A colleague suggested that the eater of potato chips should call the previous question. This he did without realizing what the dean had just said. The dean glared at Professor Potato Chip as the faculty voted in favor of the measure and against the dean.

Stop it! You're killing me!

¶ A legendary psychotic appeared late in a meeting, moved to adjourn, then left. Could anyone do better than that?

Always good to hear from Professor Rebel Screwtrout!

¶ And what of likening a perfectly respectful presentation to denial of the Holocaust? You cannot make this crap up -- unless you're David Lodge or Richard Russo or Jane Smiley.

Who pulled her finger?

Quo Warranto?

By what authority did the Starr Chamber proceed?

My immediately previous entry in "Rump Parliament" -- for senior faculty, that is the blog you are presently reading -- recalled that the Professional Standards Committee of 2003-2004 [always designated "The Starr Chamber" in this blog but only sometimes "the Professional Standards Cult"] was the worst Faculty Senate committee in my nearly 25 years at this university.

Below I list some reasons why I single out The Starr Chamber for dishonor. I do not list all of the missteps and misprisions of the Starr Chamber below.

In each instance below, I ask whence The Starr Chamber derived its authority. I tried to ask members of the Starr Chamber directly and indirectly, but they spurned me repeatedly. The Senate tried to bring these renegades to account, but the renegades did not care to explain themselves and an ad hoc committee colluded with the renegades to cover up the Starr Chamber's record. On another ad hoc committee four senators courageously noted some of the Starr Chamber's shortcomings; the only answer on behalf of the Starr Chamber came from one senator who relentlessly defended the Starr Chamber as acting other authority higher than The Faculty Code. [This dogged, mulish defender did not specify what higher authority he was invoking. I guess that higher authority is confidential.]

My abbreviated list:

The Starr Chamber took over the evaluation of a member of the faculty and directed a departmental evaluation. Whence did The Starr Chamber get the authority to involve itself in any department’s evaluation?

The Starr Chamber set aside recommendations of a formal hearing board. What discernible authority in The Faculty Code or the by-laws permitted the Professional Standards Cult [PSC] such sway?

When the chair of the hearing board protested The Starr Chamber’s takeover of the evaluation, a member of the hearing board not only mocked his stammering but threatened any member of the hearing board who discussed the remedy directed by the hearing board with anyone except the Professional Standards Cult. Is "contempt of PSC" authorized somewhere aside from the febrile mind of this or that tyrant?

The Starr Chamber, informed that it was overruling a hearing board by inverting the remedies that the hearing board had directed, declared that the hearing board had expired the moment the hearing board issued its directives. Where does the code say that? Was this a formal interpretation? If so, why wasn't the Faculty Senate informed and why weren't the trustees asked to approve? Was this an informal interpretation?

The Starr Chamber declared the hearing board to have completed its work despite the fact that the hearing board had held no hearing. The Faculty Code prescribes that hearing boards conduct hearings before making determinations and directing remedies. The Starr Chamber overruled The Faculty Code based on what higher authority?

Starr Chamber heard a formal grievance almost 60 days after that grievance reached the committee. The Faculty Code allows the PSC 15 days. The Starr Chamber overruled The Faculty Code based on what authority?

The Starr Chamber “interpreted” The Faculty Code to demand that the PSC hear a formal grievance within 15 “working” days rather than the 15 days explicit in the code itself. The Starr Chamber reported this “interpretation” to no one – not the grievant, not the respondent, not The Faculty Senate. Square that with the bylaws or the code, if you will.

Having reinterpreted the code to excuse the tardiness of The Starr Chamber, the committee then convened the grievance hearing more than 15 working days after the committee had received the formal grievance. Yep! The Starr Chamber concocted "15 working days" to excuse the PSC's tardiness, then dallied past its re-imagined code. It seems that for some of its decisions, even the Starr Chamber could not imagine authority.

The Starr Chamber then entertained a grievance that the grievance itself showed to have exceeded the 30 working days allotted by the code. Quo warranto, tyranni et tyrannae?

Having decided against the grievant, The Starr Chamber then issued a report to the President that criticized and characterized the respondent harshly. The Faculty Code authorizes the PSC to condemn anyone whom it chooses?

The President shared the report of The Starr Chamber with grievant and respondent because The Starr Chamber decided that The Faculty Code did not permit or allow The Starr Chamber to share its report with either party to the grievance. The Starr Chamber had shared its report immediately with grievant and respondent in a grievance earlier in that very academic year [2003-2004]. One or the other interpretation might be consistent with the code. It is hard to see how both could be. I am certain the fact that a member of the PSC was the respondent -- the person grieved -- in the first grievance had nothing to do with the differential treatment.

Has this list suggested one reason why the Professional Standards Cult had, over the years and the deans, invoked various sorts of confidentiality not to be found in The Faculty Code or elsewhere?

Do you now see why the staunchest senatorial defender of the Starr Chamber cited only double-secret authority higher than the code?

Did I just pose rhetorical questions?

Quo warranto? By what authority?

My Annual Salute to the 2003-2004 PSC -- The Starr Chamber

As malfeasant as the Academic Standards Committee was 2008-2010, the 2003-2004 Professional Standards Committee was worse.

Reading over my seven posts between 3 and 7 December 2010, you might believe that the Academic Standards Committee between Fall 2008 and Fall 2010 was the worst Faculty Senate committee in my 24.5 years at the University of Puget Clowns. To the best of my reckoning, the nadir for committees still belongs to a committee so malfeasant that it merited designation as “The Starr Chamber” after Kenneth Starr and the English court [“The Star Chamber” – one “r”] renowned for abusing its powers.

As is my annual custom, I salute the Starr Chamber -- the "Professional" "Standards" Committee between September 2003 and May 2004 -- as the worst Faculty Senate Committee of my time at the University.

I begin from an elementary distinction to console the Academic Standards Committee [hereinafter abbreviated ASC] that its performance 2008-2010 did not descend to the depth to which the Professional Standards Committee [hereinafter abbreviated PSC] sank:

The ASC 2008-2010 performed as abominably as it could, but supervision by faculty got in the ASC's way; the PSC 2003-2004 plummeted far deeper because faculty could not even learn what the PSC was doing, let alone stop the PSC's doings.

While the ASC ran amuck in academic years 2008-2009 and 2009-2010, the faculty voted down the impostures of the ASC. By contrast, the Starr Chamber was policed neither by the Faculty Senate nor the faculty as a whole and was directed [in fact if not in theory] by an administrator far more powerful, far more cunning, and far more compromised than any fixture on the ASC.

The ineptitude, inequity, and iniquities of the Starr Chamber were Homeric, so there is no shame in the ASC's falling short. I am certain that individual members of the ASC have sunk and will again sink to the inanity and insanity that individual members of the Starr Chamber sustained in 2003 or 2004. Still, a collective effort demands just the right combination of arrogation and anarchy to produce truly malign results.

I need not in this entry rehearse the missteps and mendacity of the Starr Chamber. My entries in this blog for 11 February 2009 and 9 February 2010 preserve acts and statements of buffoonery and buncombe to which most faculty cannot aspire or conspire. Even in those entries taken together, I did not detail all of the failings and double/multiple dealings of the Starr Chamber.

Even the limited record in this blog establishes, however, the degree to which the Starr Chamber parlayed nonfeasance with malfeasance, audacity with mendacity, and recklessness with fecklessness.

Of course, holdovers from the 2003-2004 PSC, having earned their dubious distinction, then characterized a hearing board as "rogue." Don't you admire colleagues who leave the Caps Lock on when they type hypocrisy?

Five veterans of the Starr Chamber still walk among us on campus, so watch out for them.

Moreover, as I noted in my entry for 5 December 2010 [Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses III] in 2008-2009 the ASC featured three Starr Chamber veterans.

For those three veterans, for all five holdovers, for the two emeriti, and for the single most malign force on this campus over my 24.5 years here, I pray:

Áve Manía, deduco pléna, Dóminium técum.

Próspero Año y Felicidad

Puget Clowns can get you down.

Illegitimis non carborundum.

=========================================

Please raise your glass to a new year of focus.

Let no Puget Clowns wear you down.

----------------------------

Faculty:

Answer "Is our children learning?" [Dubya] in the affirmative or bust your butt to make the answer more affirmative more often. Your students matter far more than your colleagues. Make your teaching your highest priority; the rest of the campus will evanesce.

After your students, consider your intellectual or academic agenda. What was it you meant to accomplish beyond a paycheck in academia? You got a job. You acquired the means. Now, do you recall any ends worthy of your exertions to get the means? Once you take care of your students' needs and your desires, you will find you have too little time to waste on colleagues' psychoses, departments' intrigues, administrators' fecklessness, or other folderol. Pity!

----------------------------------------

Staff:

Listen to Willie Nelson sing "Hands on the Wheel:"

At a time when the world seems to be spinnin' hopelessly out of control,
There's deceivers an' believers an' old in-betweeners,
That seem to have no place to go.
Well, it's the same old song, it's right an' it's wrong,
An' livin' is just somethin' that I do.

...

I looked to the stars, tried all of the bars.
An' I've nearly gone up in smoke.
Now my hand's on the wheel, I've something that's real,
An' I feel like I'm goin' home.

...

Make working just something you do. Then go home. Give deceivers, believers, and in-betweeners not one thought.

They're clowns.

They're Puget Clowns.

Not even real clowns.

When the Puget Clowns are funny, the comedy is not deliberate. Hence, you are not supposed to laugh.

Pity.

Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses VII

To

a) the groupthink of fixtures on the Academic Standards Committee [See this blog, 3 December 2010];

b) hackneyed formulas that purport to justify the changes that the fixtures prefer & proffer [This blog, 4 December 2010];

c) veterans of THE rogue committee of all time [This blog, 5 December 2010];

d) inert and indifferent time-servers on the committee;

e) uncritical students [This blog, 6 December 2010];

and

f) a dozing Faculty Senate [This blog 7 December 2010]

let us now add the leadership of a rogue committee:

The Academic Standards train went off its tracks largely owing to the proclivities of its conductors and engineers.

::::::::::::::::::::::::

Explanation 7 -- Authoritarian Personalities

.....

..Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde:

misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb,

zu strafen, mächtig ist!

But thus do I counsel you, my friends:

distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

.......

The ASC 2008-2010 proved Nietzsche [Thus Spake Zarathustra] prescient. More than one authoritarian on the ASC longed to punish students who disappointed members of the committee. Students who chose other than the authoritarians would prefer disappointed the authoritarians. Students who elected options that authoritarians wished the students did not have disappointed the authoritarians. That is the way authoritarians think and behave. That is why I label them authoritarians.

:::::::::::::::::::::::

In the 4 October 2010 entry in this blog I noted with F. G. Bailey the preponderance of deceivers, especially self-deceivers, among those who dedicate themselves to the work of committees. I presume much delusion and many deceptions on any committee, so that is not what I am getting at with this seventh explanation.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Rather I intend to note that a will to power distorts the deceptions of delusional colleagues into tyranny. As it was with the Professional Standards Committee 2003-2004, so it was with the Academic Standards Committee 2008-2010:

• members with powerful impulses to sanction, to coerce, and to punish drove committees to precipitate decisions that could not be defended before colleagues; as a result,
• chairs of each committee mismanaged communications between their committees and overseeing or superordinate entities; and
• chairs misled, misstated facts, or lied.:::::::::::::::::::::::::

.....

These tyrannical drivers of renegade committees are not fascists. They are fantasists. Deceived and deluded by their own dogma and doggerel, these tyrants must live up to images that they concocted to hide from colleagues shortcomings that their tyrannies make evident. As a result, these tyrants must redouble their efforts to seem to be what they cannot be. Denial and duplicity are overdetermined and overwhelming whenever an academic makes being himself or herself impossible.

..........................

I fault malfeasant and nonfeasant fantasists in the rank and file of the ASC, to be sure. They are supposed to be responsible and accountable. Yet, about the irresponsible, incompetent, unaccountable, and inexplicable fantasists what can we do? The fixtures are group-thinking apparatchiks who serve masters and missions over which faculty have little sway. Mantras that have bedeviled the "Academic" "Standards" Committee are immune to argument, instruction, reason, or suasion, so faculty can no more cure shibboleths and sloganeering than herpes. If we rid the ASC of these defective fantasists, those defective fantasists likely take their places.

---------

Membership on the ASC is largely self-selected. All too often, authoritarians bent by and bent on rigor elect to "serve" on the "Academic" "Standards" Committee. Fantasists with irresistible impulses to punish those who do not conform then re-imagine their own undergraduate triumphs and concoct spurious explanations for their own excellences. With each passing year the noncommissioned officers of the "Rigor Patrol" become retrospectively magnificent. Imbued with enthusiasm to transform undergrads into the intellectual figures that the rigorous refashion their autobiographies to conjure, these apostles of "hard love" then belch

• "I never used pass-fail when I was an undergraduate."*
• "I worked hard to get my degree; I expect our students to do the same."**
• "I don't see why a senior at a national liberal-arts college should have to take a first-year-level course pass-fail."***
• "Our students have to learn that grades do not matter."****

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Such statements, derived from members of the "Academic" "Standards" Committee 2008-2010, should dash any hopes of remedying the powerful draw of that committee for colleagues who misremember their past and prosecute that fanciful past on the undergrads of the present.

------------------------------

It may be, however, that faculty may do something about leadership of and in the ASC. Let the Faculty Senate attend to processes by which the willful ascend to authority and descend to tyranny.

• Each time a committee elects as chair the member who arrives latest at the first meeting of the committee, that committee disdains competence for convenience.
• Each time that shirkers elect a junior colleague chair, they risk that someone with something to prove will assume a position for which she or he will prove ill-suited.
• Each time a member of the faculty yearns to chair a committee [or a department, program, or school], she or he marks herself or himself as a potential malefactor.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The Faculty Code leaves committee chairpersons to the accident and expedient of first-meeting elections. Thus the Code devalues design and deliberation from the start.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Given ASC leadership in 2008-2010, a rogue ASC should shock us about as much as we are shocked when a young Cuervo-drinker talking on a cell-phone is piloting a muscle car 50 mph the wrong way down a one-way street. You can pronounce the results an accident, but most adults would find the result predictable.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

It is now past time for the Faculty Senate and the trustees to amend The Faculty Code so that committee chairs are annually elected by faculty or appointed by the Faculty Senate.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Enough accidental amateurs! No more tyrannical tyros!

* And? So? Some of our colleagues do not use dental floss now, let alone when they were sophomores. Your assertion would be inconsequent if true, moron!

** If you worked hard to get an undergraduate degree in the 1970s or 1980s, you must be even dumber than your remark.

*** But you understand why careful drivers might carry insurance, Bozo?

**** Did you get into graduate school based on your looks or your personality, Doctor?
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

..........................................................