A Petition That Begs Condign Neglect

Not content to get their way, sophomoric thinkers demand to have their way with faculty.


Many faculty have expressed to me concern about a petition "crafted" by one or more Puget Sound students.  The faculty should not be concerned. One colleague got matters right when he said, "They're college students." That is, Spring Semester is always the silly season for students.  This silly season produced an uncommonly silly document.
     
The first published version of the petition was as laughable as some of my first drafts:

           

Petition for Transparency in Senate Faculty Vote

The faculty senate voted through Wednesday, April 9 on whether to accept the KNOW diversity overlay requirement. The measure passed by a vote of 123 to 88. We believe that this many professors voting against a diversity core overlay is unacceptable at a university claiming to be concerned about diversity and social justice. There is no excuse for the perpetuation of the old core requirements when so much of this campus remains exclusive to white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, upper middle-class students.

 

We demand transparency because:

1.      We are robbed of meaningful education when that education reflects only the standards and values of a hegemonic western culture. We believe that the professors who voted against the requirement must be held accountable for voting to perpetuate the unacceptable state of our curriculum prior to the introduction to the overlay requirement.

       

2.      We are not represented in this university’s governance structures when faculty who make decisions on the content of our curriculum are insulated from accountability for their votes that perpetuate an unacceptable educational program that considers critical analysis of power, social location, the construction of knowledge and identity a politically correct garnish rather than an integral part of a liberal arts education.

             

3.      We are irresponsible members of the campus community if we do not do everything we can to make this community more accessible to people from historically marginalized communities. Some of us are students from these communities who know that this university, despite its best efforts, continues to perpetuate social inequality. Faculty members who voted against the overlay requirement voted to uphold a curriculum that did not reflect the experience of students from historically marginalized communities and therefore perpetuated this social inequality.

         

We are not under any delusions that the overlay will resolve this campus’ failure to meaningfully address issues of diversity. But we think that it is less bad than where we were before. Any argument to the contrary is ridiculous because despite progress the university has made the state of our diversity efforts remain unacceptable because there are obviously members or groups within the administration and faculty resistant to change.

We therefore request the release of the names of all faculty who voted on the diversity overlay requirement and the names of those who abstained. Secrecy is antithetical to the democratic values of a liberal arts college and prevents students from engaging with the college administration and faculty. If the University of Puget Sound is serious about increasing diversity, we need to have a meaningful dialogue about what it means that eighty-eight faculty members voted against this requirement. Excuses for secrecy are not acceptable. We demand transparency.
 

My initial response to this initial petition was laughter.  The information in the petition was askew.  If we were to dignify the contents by calling them "arguments," the arguments in the petition were far from cogent.  The demand that became a request by petition's end could be met if someone provided the students with any document or website that lists all full-time faculty, for that would list all who voted or sustained.  I suspect the University of Puget Sound's Bulletin would suffice.  All the names are at 
   
<www.pugetsound.edu/files/resources/6782_Bulletin13-14_UG_WEB.pdf>.
     

          

<www.facebook.com/groups/1470043629893175/1470054679892070/> tidies the petition a bit, but it remains far from compelling [sic].  The petitioners are still undergraduates in an era after literacy. Rather than review the post-literate posturing, I suggest we continue to ignore the fatuous document.
    
Faculty who over-read the petition -- giving it a second glance, for example -- risk overreach.  Youths are entitled to tantrums.  Their naïve obstreperousness distresses me less than the disingenuousness of colleagues.
   




    

The Challenges and the Blather of the New Graduation Requirement

A proponent for the graduation "overlay," recently passed by the faculty, set a high standard for Puget Sound education and for faculty oratory.
    
Opening remarks on behalf of [sort of] proponents of a new graduation requirement articulated [sort of] the urgent needs [sort of] that the overlap might meet [sort of].  The speaker who formally moved the overbite asked whether a Puget Sound education would prepare Puget Sound students for the following situations [I draw from the speaker's own notes]:

• "Upon returning home, encountering an overworked, underpaid Molly Maid"
• "After graduating and buying a house, considering a roofing company staffed by undocumented immigrant laborers, who cannot bargain with the contractor for fear of deportation"
• "Alone in a elevator with three young black men"
• "Learning that the 'beau' of a sibling has undergone sex-change surgery and therapy."

This array of grueling dilemmas must daunt every reader as it did every awake listener last September 23rd.  Puget Sound students demand the graduation over/under so that they may handle the problems that await them in their Puget Sound afterlife. Otherwise, what will our students do? Work their maids less and pay them more?  Avoid elevators frequented by minorities?  Kill their siblings?
      

Still, how will Puget Sound faculty devise courses to cover the crises listed?  One thing is certain: administrators will have to supply swag and bring the booty to induce faculty to craft courses to meet the challenges.  We are talking major release-units and maximum marketing.  Is there enough blowsy vacuity [Mencken] even in Puget Sound faculty to deliver on the promise of the diversity overreach?

  
Which faculty possess education and experience commensurate with dealing with domestic help upstairs and down;  anticipating and indemnifying home repairs and enhancements; sharing elevators — not to mention escalators at Neiman Marcus or gondolas at Gstaad — with young adult males of perhaps indeterminate ancestry or sexuality; and other problems typical of the lives of alumnae and alumni of the University of Puget Sound?
   
Forget student loans!  Look past post-literacy!  We are talking real First-World problems of the one-percent, Puget People!
   
The First Speaker, great subwoofer that he was and is, not only set the tone for faculty discussion of the overpass requirement;  he established as well the epitome of faculty oratory.  As my mind drifted, I thought back to a like Demosthenes in 1984.
  

Several years ago I was given an assignment to write a letter. It was to go into a time capsule and would be read in 100 years when that time capsule was opened. I remember driving down the California coast one day. My mind was full of what I was going to put in that letter about the problems and the issues that confront us in our time and what we did about them, but I couldn’t completely neglect the beauty around me — the Pacific out there on one side of the highway shining in the sunlight, the mountains of the Coast Range rising on the other side, and I found myself wondering what it would be like for someone, wondering if someone 100 years from now would be driving down that highway and if they would see the same thing. And with that thought I realized what a job I had with that letter. I would be writing a letter to people who know everything there is to know about us. We know nothing about them. They would know all about our problems. They would know how we solved them and whether our solution was beneficial to them down through the years or whether it hurt them. They would also know that we lived in a world with terrible weapons, nuclear weapons of terrible destructive power aimed at each other, capable of crossing the ocean in a matter of minutes and destroying civilization as we know it. And then I thought to myself: what are they going to say about us? What are those people 100 years from now whether we used those weapons or not. Well, what they will say about us 100 years from now depends on how we keep our rendezvous with destiny. Will we do the things that we know must be done and know that one day down in history 100 years, or perhaps for those people back in the 1980′s, for preserving our freedom, for saving for us this blessed planet called earth with all its grandeur and its beauty. You know, I am grateful for all of you giving the opportunity to serve you for these four years and I seek re-election because I want more than anything else to try to complete the new beginning that we charted four years ago. George Bush, who I think is one of the finest vice presidents this country has ever had, George Bush and I have crisscrossed the country and we’ve had in these last few months a wonderful experience. We have met young America. We have met your sons and daughters.

I am encouraged that, as Puget Sound's faculty strive to stave off the Scylla and Charybdis of staffing manors and otherwise living large in the 21st century, Puget Sound students will be compelled to learn from faculty educated in such domestic sciences and experienced with the subtle arts of estate and leisure management.  More, I marvel that such education and experience pass for "diversity" over the rainbow at the University of Puget Sound.
   

Live Blogging a Buffalo Chip Throw

4:00 p.m.    OT/PT faculty whom I have seldom seen at faculty meetings filter in to pack the meeting-room.  May we anticipate self-interested, self-serving colleagues will populate meetings to come?  Will faculty repeat the 25 March 2014 bum-rushing in future meetings?  Will bum-rushing faculty continue to object to electronic ballots that negate or reduce stratagems and subterfuges?
   
4:04 p.m.   The President opens with minutes.  The minutes are accepted.  Thus ended the suspense.  Everyone now could relapse relax.
   
4:05 p. m. The President proceeded to another gratuitous report.  Thank God/god/gods that such reports are not sent via email.  Better to waste faculty time with transient factlets & factoids.
   
        4:09 p. m.  Then The Vice President provided information that might better adorn a memorandum.  The pedagogical Scam of the Month, it appears, is "experiential learning."  Branding, marketing, and shibboleths rained upon faculty again. Multiply the length of the report [5-6 minutes] by perhaps 50 attendees and divide by 60 to see how many hours of faculty time & attention we are pissing away every meeting.

          4:16 p. m.  The Chair of the Senate then intoned about, among other things, electronic voting.  How proponents of the new graduation requirement kept from hissing at the prospect of an outbreak of democracy I know not.

        4:20 p.m.   As tradition dictates, a member of the Curriculum Committee misstated the motion regarding degrees at the OT School.  Faculty, perhaps still snoring from earlier inaction, did not notice.
    
             Adjourned at 4:23 p.m. without further incident.  I got no chance to use my finger puppets to illustrate any points I might have made [see "I'm Sorry" from 4 April 2014].
             
           
   
   

I'm Sorry

In a recent faculty meeting I presumed literacy.  I apologize for that presumption.
   
On 25 March 2014 I proposed an amendment: “Implementation  The ‘Knowledge, Identity, and Power’ requirement for graduation shall not be implemented until a majority of the faculty shall consent by means of a mail ballot corresponding to the electronic process used to elect members of the Faculty Senate.”  The faculty promptly passed this amendment.  A bit later a member of the faculty asked whether "a majority of the faculty" meant more than half of all faculty rather than more than half of all faculty who voted.  I confirmed that such was my reading of the language.  After some folderol, the faculty reconsidered and relaxed that amendment so that a majority of all faculty who voted could implement the diversity overlay.
   
Since that meeting some colleagues have faulted me for failing to tell faculty what they were voting on.  I read my amendment aloud.  I distributed printed copies of the text of the amendment.  That was apparently not enough to indicate to colleagues what they were voting on.
  
I presumed the faculty literate.  I apologize.
  
I promise that, the next time I move any language in a faculty meeting, I shall use finger puppets.
    
On behalf of "Rump Parliament," I thank my colleagues for parodying themselves.  That eases my workload.
  

Dedication

This one goes out to proponents of the diversity overlay who voted against an electronic ballot on 25 March 2014.
    
    
When she was 13-14 years old, Janis Ian wrote "Society's Child (Baby, I've Been Thinking)," a lyric about interracial dating.  I'd like those who packed the faculty meeting last Tuesday afternoon [25 March 2014] to listen to the version of that lyric released in 1967.
   


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QPF-duKQro
  
   
Maybe that lyric would suit a diversity-themed course.  Let's look over the lyrics.

 
 

Come to my door, baby
Face is clean and shining black as night
My mother went to answer
You know that you looked so fine

Now, I could understand your tears and your shame
She called you 'Boy' instead of your name
When she wouldn't let you inside
When she turned and said, "But honey, he's not our kind"

She says I can't see you any more, baby
Can't see you anymore

Walk me down to school, baby
Everybody's acting deaf and blind
Until they turn and say
Why don't you stick to your own kind

My teachers all laugh, they smirk and stare
Cuttin' deep down in our affair
Preachers of equality, think they believe it
Then why won't they just let us be?

They say I can't see you anymore, baby
Can't see you anymore

One of these days I'm gonna stop my listenin'
Gonna raise my head up high
One of these days I'm gonna raise my glistenin'
Wings and fly

But that day will have to wait for awhile
Baby, I'm only a society's child
When we're older things may change
But for now this is the way they must remain

I say, I can't see you any more, baby
Can't see you anymore
No, I don't wanna see you any more, baby

I commend two lines of that lyric to ringleaders of the diversity overlay who voted against sending the motion to the entire faculty:  

"Preachers of equality, think they believe it /

Then why won't they just let us be?"



You who would pack a meeting with allies then disenfranchise those who could not or did not make the meeting, are you preachers of equality who think you believe in equality but elect not to practice it?

You oppose discrimination and long for inclusion but would discriminate against those not present at the meeting and would exclude them from an expression of an alleged "will of the faculty?"

You want to promote dialogue but want to cut off debate because you have the votes in the room to get your way?

Hmmmm.  


To slightly restate a sentiment from Vonnegut, we become what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be lest we pretend to be so interested in inequality that we exploit inequalities to get what we want.

Starr Chamber, I Have Not Forgotten You

Should old affliction be forgot and never brought to mind?
Should old miscreants be forgot and daze of auld lang syne?

I have made an annual point to recall the worst performance by a Faculty Senate Committee in my years at the University of Puget Clowns [1986-present].  I reprint below an entry from Rump Parliament in 2009.


Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, 2007

On 14 February 2007, a mostly bygone Professional Standards Committee soiled itself over the slightest imaginable supervision by the Faculty Senate.



Lest we forget, two years ago the Professional Standards Committee from academic year 2003-2004 [hereinafter, the Professional Standards Committee will be abbreviated "PSC" and the PSC for the year 2003-2004 designated "the Starr Chamber" to commemorate the secrecy of their proceedings and decision-making and the inequity of their methods and reasoning] sent the Faculty Senate a mewling memorandum.

The Faculty Senate, by the barest of margins, had passed a resolution in which the Senate took responsibility for mistakes made by the Starr Chamber in its annus horribilis 2003-2004. The Senate, deciding to exercise oversight just to see what it might be like, had appointed an ad hoc committee to investigate recent PSC [mis]behavior and to make recommendations to prevent violations of the Faculty Code and due process in the future. That ad hoc committee produced no findings. I do not know whether to attribute the ad hoc committee's misprision to cowardice, collegiality, collusion, cunning, cleverness, or some other word beginning with "c." What I do know is that the ad hoc committee insulated the 2003-2004 PSC and insulted the Faculty Senate. When seven senators responded to the absence of findings by acknowledging the errors and misjudgments of the Starr Chamber, that was entirely too much for the Starr Chamber [and for its chronic, conniving apologists on the Faculty Senate].

The communiqué from the Starr Chamber was a marvel of haughtiness and misdirection. Having committed undeniable errors, the Starr Chamber, like mafiosi, pointed out that the Senate had not proved the errors. Even that subterfuge was not quite true. For one thing, senators had noted that the Starr Chamber had proceeded in very different ways to deal with two grievances, one in Fall 2003 and one in Spring 2004. When the Academic Dean, a member of the Starr Chamber, was the respondent regarding a grievance, he and the grievant received the report of the Starr Chamber at about the same time that the President received it. The Starr Chamber after the second grievance sent its report to the President but denied the report to the second grievant and to the second respondent. Logic dictated that at least one release had to be contrary to the Faculty Code, which had not changed in the interim. Senators therefore concluded that the Starr Chamber had committed at least one mistake.

Pesky, punctilious senators! Why can't they mind their own business? Why do they oversee the Starr Chamber when they could be banning Pass/Fail or addressing plagiarism? Don't they know with who [sic] they're messing?


The Senate had had noted other errors or irregularities that even the Starr Chamber could not have denied had members of the Starr Chamber deigned to speak with senators. It cannot be disputed that the Starr Chamber conducted the second grievance hearing more than fifteen days after it received the grievance from the Dean of the University. It is beyond dispute, therefore, that the Starr Chamber tarried past the Faculty Code's deadline. That was a first violation of the Faculty Code, a violation that one hopes was mistaken but may have been deliberate. To cover its mistake or misstep, the Starr Chamber "interpreted" the Faculty Code to set the deadline at fifteen working days, an interpretation that negated the mandate in the Faculty Code. That is a second incontrovertible error or evasion. It is not only beyond dispute but beyond belief that the Starr Chamber then blew by the "reinterpreted" fifteen working days -- a third incontestable violation of its duty. When the second grievance was eventually heard, one of the two claims advanced by the grievant was more than thirty working days in the past according to the grievant's own complaint. Despite the code's "statute of limitations," the Starr Chamber entertained that grievance. This fourth violation senators did not have to investigate or to prove; a calendar proved that nonfeasance or malfeasance.

Senators may be able to count, but they do not count. The Starr Chamber is far too important to be bothered with calendars or duties or instrumentalities of lesser beings, especially when the Starr Chamber dispenses justice and rights wrongs and picks favorites and follows decanal directions. Besides, for all outsiders know, the Starr Chamber interpreted thirty working days as thirty-three working days because thirty-three made a prettier number and allowed the grievance to be entertained.


The Valentine's Day greeting from the Starr Chamber to the Senate featured other deceptions. The most inept PSC in recent memory objected that the Senate had not carefully investigated mistakes. As noted above, the Senate's ad hoc committee had investigated mistakes and malfeasance, so the mistakes of the Starr Chamber were carefully investigated. Because that ad hoc committee issued no findings, neither senators nor members of the Starr Chamber could know what the ad hoc committee might have found. Senators knew that each member of the ad hoc committee admitted before the senators that he or she had discovered mistakes, however. The Starr Chamber phrasing was thus cunning but misleading. The Senate as a whole had not investigated, but the Senate's ad hoc committee had discovered that "mistakes were made."

"Mistakes were made!" That passive construction does not hide agents effectively enough. The Starr Chamber deserves greater camouflage. Maybe senate proceedings should be confidential.

The recklessness of the Starr Chamber in conducting its proceedings in 2003-2004 made the Starr Chamber's call for careful work ironic and amusing, not to say hypocritical. The hypocrisy followed: "In our opinion, the Senate passed its motion without exercising due process, without gathering evidence from all parties involved, and without assuring itself that it had received an impartial and complete account of events." Shall we peel this onion and weep at the double standards employed by Starr Chamber apologists?

• The Starr Chamber violated due process repeatedly in 2003-2004 beyond what I have listed above. For one thing, the Starr Chamber so constructed a list of charges that an accused colleague had to prove her innocence rather than the accusers having to prove her guilt. The Starr Chamber's product passes for due process but the Senate's motion does not?

• The Starr Chamber repeatedly insisted that a confidentiality found neither in the Faculty Code nor in the bylaws prevented them from speaking with the Senate about their activities despite the Senate's oversight capacity and duty. Hence, those who protested that evidence had not been gathered were themselves parties who refused to provide the evidence that they then said had not been accumulated. [Please consult the very first posting in "Rump Parliament" to see that two members of the Starr Chamber had explicitly informed the Faculty Senate that no member of the Starr Chamber would break confidentiality to speak to the senate or to its ad hoc committee.] Having obstructed the investigation, the Starr Chamber then protested that the investigation was incomplete. The effrontery of the Starr Chamber recalls the classic definition of chutzpah: A son kills his parents then demands mercy because he is an orphan.

• A final hypocrisy: the little information the Starr Chamber had released was partial and incomplete, not to mention every bit as misleading as the Starr Chamber's Valentine's Day memorandum.
  
  Let senators have their truth. The Starr Chamber will settle for arrogance and presumptuousness. All hail the Starr Chamber! The Few, the Proud, the Unelected Elect. By appointment to the Dean, Chief Privy Attendants!
  
  Had anyone with even the slightest common sense counseled veterans of the Starr Chamber, he or she would have noted that defensive over-reaction to the merest hint of oversight and accountability did not become the Starr Chamber. It did, however, show what the Starr Chamber had become.
  
  Senators are just jealous. Senators must work in open meetings and must account to faculty for their decisions and activities. The Starr Chamber, like President Dubya, answers to a Higher Power. It does not account for itself or its actions to ad hoc committees, to the Faculty Senate, or to hoi polloi. The Starr Chamber transcends mere faculty governance and accountability. The Starr Chamber rules!The Faculty Senate drools!
  
  
  Still, the 2006-2007 Senate weathered the whining duplicity and hypocrisy of the Starr Chamber. Thus, the Senate was steeled when the 2006-2007 PSC was found to have issued a major interpretation that it had sent forward neither to the Senate nor to the trustees. The Faculty Code requires the assent of the trustees to a major interpretation. It also requires that the Faculty Senate be notified of the interpretation. The PSC once again had ignored or forgotten elementary demands of the Faculty Code, just like the Starr Chamber.
  
  Faculty Code? Bylaws? Authority? Due Process? What were those to the Starr Chamber? What are those to any elect on a mission from God or the Dean, to cite a distinction of which the Starr Chamber proved incapable?

Haltom's Eighth Law & The Offense Card

   

At a recent meeting of the Faculty Senate, a colleague pronounced a survey of the faculty "offensive."  What offended our colleague?  Not necessarily anything.
 
 
The minutes of the Faculty Senate for 25 November 2013 disclose that a colleague "... viewed a survey structured in the way the Senate was proposing as demeaning the expertise that the Burlington Northern Group brings to the issue of power, privilege and diversity and makes it into 'either/or.' He stated that the survey undermines faculty expertise and that he found it to be borderline offensive." After cringing, I began to consider what his gambit may have betokened.
     
Was he sincerely offended?  I neither know nor care.  My Eighth Law reminds us all that "No one may be offended;  one may only take offense." http://rumpparliament.blogspot.com/2008/02/haltoms-eighth-law-no-one-may-be.html  Our colleague took offense.  He played "The Offense Card."  That public act makes his private state(s) irrelevant.
   
"The Offense Card" is almost always a stratagem or plea in lieu of effective, rational argument.  Logic will not avail you?  Go for an emotional ploy.  In the instance last November, there was no reasonable argument that the faculty should not be surveyed regarding a requirement that the faculty are asked to impose on all Puget Sound students.  Our colleague and others might reasonably discuss wording, sequence, or other methodological or logistic issues.  Senators might decide whether a survey was an appropriate way to elicit what ordinary faculty think or whether other means might work better or might have been working well already.  To play "The Offense Card," by contrast, was to short-circuit an attempt to find out what colleagues think.  Manufacturing offense—sincerely or slyly—amounts to telling the assembled to STFU.
   
This pitiful and pitiable episode of taking offense while blustering expertise was itself offensive, if one elects to regard it as such.  The faculty have before them a proposal to force all Puget Sound students to take one or more courses.  No one can honestly state of what such courses will consist.  The inchoate requirement, the colleagues who will be importuned or authorized to teach authorized courses, the materials and lessons to be employed, and almost every other characteristic of the proposed requirement remain unsettled at best.  Yet our colleague takes offense that the Senate might ask faculty what faculty, rather than an élite coalition professing specialized expertise, thought students might be forced to endure.
 
Still, the episode is not exclusively cringeworthy.  It is instructive as well.  One or more of the proposers who would conscript our students barely deign to converse from their lofty expertise with faculty who can scarcely appreciate the knowledge and virtuosity of the proposer(s).  Our better(s) find it insulting to have to explain themselves to the rest of us, let alone to listen to what we might have to say under circumstances not under the control of the élite(s).
 
So the comments of our colleague are instructive and perhaps revealing.  I have heard the "appeal to expertise" voiced by other proposers before the Faculty Senate and elsewhere.  I have chosen to laugh it off rather than take offense.  It is sad if one chooses to see it that way.  It is insulting, if one opts to be insulted.  I prefer to regard it as entertaining self-parody.
 

One or more self-appointed tell elected representatives not to inquire of colleagues what colleagues might think about requirements and curriculum.  Instead, the diversity overlord(s) proclaim their openness and transparency while insisting that diversity thralls defer to the overlords' authority.
 
Enjoy this burlesque!  This was a mean ploy in a sense, but it was no mean ploy in another sense.  It was an audacious tossing off of "The Offense Card."