Friday, September 9, 2011
What the FAHC?
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Undistinguished Distinctions
Colleagues assert that the Faculty Advancement Committee makes arbitrary distinctions. As distinguished from what other decision-makers at the
When colleagues who have been at the
When the FAC makes decisions that can neither be understood nor believed, I mutter, “Forget it, Jake; it's
The process by which the FAC names certain full professors “Distinguished” has been suspect to me at least since 1997 when I first participated in those decisions. [Specifics forthcoming over a martini.] Many “Distinguished Professors” actually are distinguished in a positive direction. Some full professors are distinguished from other full professors more by their patrons or allies or buddies than by their performance or any discernable merit. Still other “Distinguished Professors” are “Extinguished Professors,” distinguishable from other full professors in a negative direction.
From 1997 on I have warned colleagues who would listen to me that some designations that seem arbitrary are in fact not arbitrary but artful.
The title “Distinguished Professor” was, if the oral historians who have informed me are reliable, an invention of the Phibbs-Davis Regime. For years the designation was somewhat secret. Only “Distinguished Professors” and a few of their buddies knew about the title and the booty that went with it. I have repeatedly heard that President Phibbs and Dean Davis used “Distinguished Professor” to reward loyalty and conformity at least as much as merit. [Given the general paucity of merit, especially scholarly productivity, when Drs. Phibbs and Davis took over, finding merit to reward might have required Sherlock Holmes.] If this oral history is at all correct, then designating “Distinguished Professors” has been artful when not corrupt almost from the inception of the “honor.”
That the FAC makes not very defensible decisions has long struck me as one reason for confidentiality.
Regular readers of “Rump Parliament” are more familiar than most colleagues with failings of “Power Committees,” especially of the FAC and the “Professional” “Standards” Committee [usually designated the PSC or Starr Chamber in this blog]. Indeed, this blog began with an entry about confidentiality and its abuses. [See “An Apology for Conning Colleagues” 21 January 2007.] When we consider the oral history, we should keep in mind that in previous years and regimes, the FAC and the PSC were even more secretive and conformist than in the last decades. From my experiences with each, they had much to be secretive about.
Judgments made amid secrecy occasionally diverge from ideals, methinks.
The very process by which faculty nominate but the Dean selects respectable, reliable, responsible, reputable faculty for the FAC makes clear to eyes that will see that President Phibbs and/or Dean Davis preferred loyal lackeys to critical colleagues on the FAC. [Please consult “Respectable, Reliable, Reputable” in this blog 4 March 2007.] Some faculty managed to be selected by faculty for the FAC multiple times before they were finally permitted to serve on the FAC by deans. Some were never permitted to serve. They were not obsequious, predictable, deferential, or conforming respectable, reliable, responsible, or reputable enough to suit the dean.
Given the process by which colleagues reach the FAC, I seldom can be surprised by decisions of the FAC.
In addition to a pliable FAC, administrators long relied on an accommodating PSC. “The Starr Chamber” for so long served as the privy council for and to the dean or other administrators that many faculty [not just cynical I] abandoned hope whenever an issue entered The Starr Chamber. Indeed, the silence behind confidentiality was welcome relative to the suborning of colleagues' honor worked whenever members of the PSC came out to the Faculty Senate.
Owing to evidence and experience, then, I have consistently asserted and argued in this blog that many matters in multiple venues are subject to Type One and Type Two Errors―respectively, false positives and false negatives. Many professors awarded the designation “Distinguished” have not earned that designation. They are false positives. Good teachers and obedient servants of the administration have enjoyed patronage despite research records unadorned by recent accomplishments or by anything that would be counted as professional growth at an actual university. The false negatives are much better than satisfactory at teaching, at research, and at service, but they have run afoul of an administrator or otherwise made themselves unworthy on grounds other than teaching, professional growth, and service. Perhaps they were not respectable, reliable, responsible, or reputable?
Evaluees tenured or promoted with no professional growth cannot puzzle me, and colleagues awarded honors despite failings that should be disqualifying cannot flabbergast me, so a designation without discernible standards and with only a legendary provenance cannot trouble me.
Not just I but everyone who has dared to look behind shibboleths and slogans knows that professors at this university have received chairs with designations that the chair-sitters belie. This colleague resides in a chair for distinguished teaching yet he has always been a desultory instructor? Welcome to Puget Clowns. Arches declares that a professor is a legendary instructor? I did peer observation of one such instructor who was far more legend than actuality.
I have found that some products touted as excellent are at least good; some touted teachers are terrific. I have also found that much touting exists to camouflage unpleasant realities.
I have learned in two stints on the committee that the FAC routinely relies on students' evaluations for decisions far more momentous than a few thousand bucks per year. The FAC from time to time denies evaluees tenure based mostly and sometimes solely on members' tendentious, Procrustean constructions of students' evaluations. You read that right. The arbitrariness of promotion and tenure often issues from the personal quirks or animosities of FAC decision-makers rather than from the usual combination of disinformation from peers or students.
I realized that colleagues were selected for teaching awards based mostly on students' evaluations when I came to see that the FAC had almost no valid, credible evidence or sustained, professional judgments on which to rely.
When “professional growth” is being constructed or deconstructed, assessments are even shakier than they are regarding teaching. The FAC cannot very easily or very often rely on substantive assessments by experts, for the University cannot afford much overlap in many departments. Whenever some tyro mentions that actual universities rely on external reviews, the Puget Clowns behave like chimpanzees with an ample supply of feces. Hence, professional growth will be judged by standards that are often evanescent, unreliable, and invalid. [This is also true of substantive judgments about teaching, but students' evaluations and evaluators' stylistic predilections will seemingly validate teaching judgments.] Members of departments, programs, or schools conjure impediments to promotion and transmogrify “professional evaluation” into an oxymoron about as often as those evaluators falsify the record or fabricate evidence to get some pal a promotion that she or he does not deserve.
With professional growth as with teaching, false positives and false negatives abound behind walls of confidentiality and quires of flim-flam.
In addition to students' evaluations of teaching the FAC reads briefs candid communiqués written by departmental or other colleagues about teaching or researching. I long ago became aware that colleagues' letters often resulted from reasoning backward from evaluators' conclusions or whims or animosities, so I cannot in the 21st century be surprised that “Distinguished Professor” is an arbitrary judgment from a committee that arbitrarily denies or grants tenure and promotion.
I have said no to drugs, so I can no longer join the Puget Clowns congregation in believing.
How many peers denied tenure or a promotion in the last few decades were doomed by the dislike of one or more strategically situated evaluators? I cannot be sure. What I can be certain about is this: Sometimes the record is so strong that the denial is actually corrupt rather than arbitrary.
Indeed, my experiences at Puget Clowns have inclined me to ignore baubles such as “Distinguished Professor” altogether.
In 2001 and again in 2006, I was designated a “Distinguished Professor.” In 2011 I was not. I have never placed “Distinguished” anywhere near my name or rank. I never would, for I can tell the difference between genuine distinction and arbitrary swag. When last I became “Distinguished,” I respected the FAC and its judgments to such a degree that I did not read the letter from the FAC. I still have not read that letter. I respected exactly one member of that FAC enough to care what he or she might say.
At the
Many recent nominees and appointees to the FAC have manifest far less professional growth than other attainments, such as obsequiousness to authority and obliviousness to merit or suffering or decency. Some members of the FAC have, shall we say, a relaxed attitude toward verisimilitude alongside their passion for truthiness.
How could I take such decision-makers or their decisions seriously?
So I leave this crusade to colleagues not yet so jaded as I. However, I warn my colleagues as Lou Mannheim [Hal Holbrook] warned Bud Fox [Charlie Sheen] in the movie “Wall Street:” “The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things that you don’t want to do.” At Puget Clowns the money involved is chump change, which saves most of us from venality most of the time. Instead, we should fear praise, honors, or awards lest we get accustomed to them and find perfidy a Pavlovian acquisition.
How do I avoid despair? I heed Lou
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Faculty Meetings, Administrators, & Deliberation
Maybe expecting attendance at faculty meetings is not extravagant; expecting increased transparency, superior deliberation, better ideas, and improved decision-making is extravagant. Indeed, such expectations are bullshit.
In this posting I respond to some passages that most intrigued me.
Perhaps the dean is correct, but I do not believe she is. I believe that colleagues are concerned about a lack of transparency owing primarily to a lack of transparency. Many colleagues feel "out of the loop" when they have been excluded from decision-making. After all, leaving or keeping staff and faculty out of loops via decision-making far from transparent is a long-standing yet current tradition.
I began "Rump Parliament" with an entry on the "Confidentiality Con," a confidence game in which members of Power Committees such as the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] claim that The Faculty Code or Bylaws commands secrecy in proceedings. This claim, almost always untrue, excuses excluding faculty from knowledge about and apprehension of proceedings by which faculty are governed. This claim, far from furthering transparency, rationalizes opacity. Please do not miss what this claim also does: decision-makers who hide behind confidentiality get to pretend that they would love to share with colleagues the inner workings of the PSC or FAC but, alas, are not permitted to reveal goings-on. Indeed, the apparatchiks most respected and rewarded by administrators claim that, if the insiders could only reveal their decision-making processes, colleagues would be impressed with the rationality and fairness exhibited by the Power Committee at every turn. Many of the most important decisions around campus, in sum, are precisely the opposite of transparent; members of Power Committees assiduously assiduously keep colleagues "out of the loop."
Those who repeat the "Confidentiality Con" are uninformed or misinformed unless they have read the code or the bylaws with any comprehension. If they have read the code and the bylaws with understanding, those who repeat this claim propagate untruth. Worse, those who propagate the untruth ought to know that they misstate the truth. Usually we call deliberate untruths "lies." Let's be collegial and settle for "bullshit."
The Confidentiality Con is bullshit. Worse, confidentiality bullshits colleagues about decisions on promotion and tenure [the FAC], on sanctioning, dismissal, and evaluation criteria [the PSC], and on other matters of concern to staff and faculty. Please examine any entry in "Rump Parliament" with the label "Starr Chamber" for example after example of non-transparent decisions. Or simply ask yourself how the PSC acquired the moniker "Star Chamber" long before I added an "r" thereonto.
Perhaps the Dean would prefer that we read her missive closely. If so, when she wrote "Given a concurrent lack of attention to minutes and other electronic communications, many colleagues feel 'out of the loop' or are concerned about lack of transparency. ..." the Dean may have meant that the problems were the feelings and the concerns, not being out of the loop or actual absence of transparency. Perhaps the missive was aimed at reducing the feelings and the realization. I cannot know.
Perhaps faculty are out of the loop because they have been in recent years targets of myriad electronic messages. The Dean's phrasing may lead colleagues to blame themselves and to forget that each day they must triage electronic communications. I do not know.
At the least, then, colleagues who infer from modest attendance at plenary meetings that ideas about curriculum, benefits, or planning may not be usefully discussed risk a non sequitur. Such faulty inferences should not imbue us with confidence in deliberation, thoughtfulness, or prudence in groups small or large. Still less do such inferences inspire confidence in administrators. Indeed, I suspect that such inferences are bullshit excuses.
I have no idea which "people" choose not to bring ideas to faculty meetings, but maybe there are some. I think it more probable that so few colleagues attend faculty meetings that the probability of some proponent proposing at a plenary meeting is less.
"We have returned the meeting location to McIntyre 103 in order to allow space for more of you to attend the meetings. In all, I hope that with this advanced notice you will be able to make arrangements (such as alternate childcare, school transportation, or other adjustments) in order to be a part of a well-informed and deliberatively active faculty community. In short, I expect attendance."
Who will be the wag who connects the Dean's expectation to a trustee's bold proclamation? I speak of the trustee who intoned that the University had neither a legal nor a moral obligation to honor its promises to faculty with children. Do faculty now get to respond to their dean with "The faculty have neither a legal nor a moral obligation to honor the expectations of administrators?"
I'm just asking.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Bromance With the Big Man
There weren’t a lot of blacks in my high school graduation class — two, to be exact — which meant that race was somewhat of an abstraction, happening elsewhere, mostly on a screen or from the grooves of a record.
And then I saw Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen. Mind you, this was a stage, only a bit more of projected reality than television. Still, the Big Man and the Boss — opposites in look and style, Southern Baptist black and Jersey Shore white — projected a kind of joy that made it easy to believe that this mess of a country could get along. My friends and I came home from that first concert doing air saxophone riffs.
They were fused, these musicians from an iconic album cover, and not just in the magical merge of Clemons’s sax with Springsteen’s vocal charisma. Clemons was one tradition, of gospel, storytelling, and swagger; Springsteen was another, the garage band with blue-collar urgency and a poet’s lyrical touch. But even when they met in the early 1970s, the great American hybrid of rock ’n’ roll was becoming a single-race affair.
“You had your black bands and your white bands, and if you mixed the two you found less places to play,” Clemons wrote in his memoir. Sad to say, his voice and his soulful sax are gone, following his deathon Saturday at the age of 69.
The ideal he represented, at least in rock ’n’ roll, may have followed him to the grave as well. With a few exceptions, the most segregated place in America on a given night can be a stadium rock concert — on stage, and in the audience. In one sense, rock mirrors Major League Baseball, where black players made up only 8.5 percent of rosters on Opening Day this year, a 50 percent decline from 20 years ago.
In baseball, blacks integrated the big leagues by force of a few brave pioneers. In rock, whites basically stole the genre, and in some cases have taken it to odious extremes, as with Ted Nugent and his Confederate flag T-shirts and machine gun props.
Springsteen’s E Street Band was all about possibility, uplift, and how music could save a soul. Playing off of Clemons, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, Springsteen could always turn one of his concerts into a spiritual revival from the Church of Rock ’n’ Roll. It was a nod to the roots of the music, as well as the 6-foot-4 sideman. And for someone from a homogenous background, it was transformative.
In its infancy and through its early years, rock had plenty of African-American stars, of course, from Fats Domino and Little Richard to my fellow Pacific Northwesterner, Jimi Hendrix. In their hands, rhythm-and-blues jumped to another dimension.
When rock went big-time and, ultimately, corporate with British bands and the California sound, most of the black, bluesy edge had been stripped away. The Beatles, near the end, recorded with Billy Preston, who brought a gospel-infused keyboard to the band. And, yes, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards paid homage to their Chicago and Mississippi Delta heroes. They were whites doing black music, as they honestly admitted.
Clemons made his splash on the cover of the greatest American rock album of the last century, “Born to Run.” He is the man Springsteen is leaning on, in more ways than one, and smiling back at. The sentiment — hey, these guys really like each other — came through in concert after concert. “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love,” Springsteen once recalled of their first encounter. “And it’s still there.”
That kind of racial bromance can be forced and phony in cop-flick movies that try to convey the same feeling — two buddies, one black, one white, on a mission. Springsteen and Clemons never seemed to fake it. A crowd-rousing moment of any show was when Springsteen sang the lyric from “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” that goes to the mythic foundations of the band:
“When the change was made uptown
And the Big Man joined the band
From the coastline to the city
All the little pretties raise their hands”
After the death on Saturday, Springsteen issued a short statement. “He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music,” he said.
Far deeper, indeed — for it was a story that affected many rock fans. With Clemons’ death, we are one vibrant man short of a cultural example of how the divides of race can come together over music. Bruce Springsteen lost a friend of 40 years; the rest of us lost an ideal.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Have You Seen This Fellow?
Isn't he a bit like you and me?
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?
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