Haltom's Sixteenth Law -- Whatever is not as it seems is the product of calculated, crafted fakery far more often than of error

If seeming beats being [Haltom's 11th], expect colleagues to work hard on seeming to be what they cannot be. They cannot perfect themselves, but they hope to perfect their imagery. If they succeed too well with the assistance of others, expect the perfected imagery to be (mis)taken for fact.


Would that I could attribute Haltom's Sixteenth Law! I believe that I learned this maxim from Erving Goffman, but it might have come from Kenneth Burke, Daniel Boorstin [The Image], or some other thinker central to my education. All I am certain about is that I learned it from another; I did not think of this myself, which certainly speaks well of this law.

Nonetheless, the gist of Haltom's 16th is as simple as Haltom.

α Most of what we perceive is largely what it appears to be. If colleagues in high dudgeon are deluded, they usually are sincerely deluded rather than feigning delusions [with a few exceptions for particularly cunning colleagues]. Who once were "rebels without a cause" decay into "reactionaries without a clue" not as a means by which to impress but in an earnest attempt to state misgivings and anxieties. [Indeed, most faculty reactionaries posture as Emile Zola but more closely resemble Emily Litella, befuddled commentator Gilda Radner played on "Weekend Update" on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, except that sincerely deluded colleagues never wise up and say, "Never mind." They just accuse more innocents of perfidy.]

β However, if our perceptions seem to mislead us or to obscure actualities, we must admit that whatever is not as it seems is the product of calculated fakery far more often than of error. To seem the least bit believable, a performance must persuade audiences or the performance will be taken for humor or parody or folly. Missteps immediately violate the dramaturgy or imagery and demand instant remediation and emendation of messages. Thus, when being belies seeming, seeming and being must be renegotiated between a protagonist and his or her audiences. [Strains of "Send in the Clowns" swell in the background.]

γ Artless fakery exposes itself and its creator too quickly and too easily to take in an audience. The colleague who looses a screed against students' evaluations/forms takes in no one because she or he lacks the methodological chops to make his or her points stick. Peers effortlessly tlansrate the screed into "I want better evaluations than I have been getting" or "If I do not fault students or forms, I may have to fault myself." If feckless teachers mistake the complaints of self-serving, self-exculpating ostriches for sensible, valid points, they imperil students, staff, administrators, and faculty. However, sensible colleagues dismiss such periodic mewling rather quickly. Much if not most such fakery exposes itself readily.

δ While anyone can make mistakes, errors usually do not align to fake out academics. When "mistakes" all or almost all suit some image that some colleague wants to be taken for reality, almost all PhDs immediately see fakery afoot. When "mistakes" are admitted, the performer may start to repair the imagery. However, many colleagues camouflage or rationalize mistakes behind elaborate, incredible defenses. Such dramaturgy fools no one who does not want to be fooled. For example, members of the Professional Standards Committees [PSCs] 2003-2005 still do not admit that those committees erred even though any fair-minded observer must concede they screwed up multiple times. That long line of evasions does not much imperil the University of Puget Clowns, however, because most faculty know nothing about it and because to hear from those PSCs is to disbelieve the members of those PSCs. In short, the PSCs' exculpations incriminate.

ε By contrast, persistent, persuasive verisimilitude follows from cunning, comprehensive, and copious dramaturgy far more than from good-faith errors or clumsy image-making. Worse, what is enduring and ersatz imperils the University of Puget Clowns. The colleague who faked a degree or an honor may have begun with a simple fraudulent line on his or her CV. The greater the honor or the more impressive the degree, the more tangled the web of "verification" the impostor wove. Accommodating colleagues or superiors then protected the counterfeit honor or degree because the impostor was too important to be forced out or too feisty to go down alone. Academic dramaturgy, alas, is group theater. It is an important part of the "contract of depravity" about which I have repeatedly, endlessly, tediously, exhaustively blogged.

ζ Therefore, the longer that the ersatz endures, the more invested in the fraud those who have accepted it become. Perhaps more important, the longer that the ersatz endures, the more that each responsible, respectable, reliable colleague [see this blog for 4 March 2007] must at least profess to believe the imagery and dramaturgy. Quia absurdum, credo! ["Because it is bullshit, I believe it!"] Hail fellows well kept must believe others' bullshit if others are to profess to believe the bullshit of fellows [female as well as male]. Thus does our "contract of depravity" entail collusion in mendacity and a culture of concealment of which the "Confidentiality Con" was the first example this blog explored.

η Cunning, crafted fakery, it follows, defines the University of Puget Clowns all too often. Take the Wigger Patwol -- please. The Wigger Patwol, readers of this blog will recall, consists of colleagues who are so busy professing to be demanding and stringent that they leave themselves less time to teach, to do research, to publish, or to serve the community than they might have if they were not so busy faking rigor. Most members of the Wigger Patwol are risible. How do they persist without dissolving amid derision? Because "civil" colleagues provide friendly audiences until their turn to perform comes around, at which time they may anticipate credulous colleagues who will pretend to believe the bullshit of "civil" colleagues. ["The Circle Game" now wafts into hearing.] The Wigger Patwol works the way the press corps worked in the 1980 Teddy Kennedy campaign: When Kennedy's advance people had failed to scare up a welcoming crowd at an airport, print reporters exited the planes first and whooped it up in range of cameras and microphones so that broadcast reporters would have tape to air. Many of our colleagues practice civility by scrambling to applaud colleagues for their rigor and by praising Rigor Itself.

θ In sum, at the University of Puget Clowns as at so many acacdemic institutions, seeming beats being because mutual admiration societies avert their eyes from what is and focus on what should be. Idealizations and mystifications perfect the virtual community and fend off embarrassing truths.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Seventeenth Law: Propagandists project crimes they are poised to commit.

Haltom's Fifteenth Law -- Academic sub-units can be inferior far longer than superior to their larger institutions.

It puzzles us more than it should that some departments have been sub-standard for decades yet no department is above-average for long. Judgments of departmental weakness usually are concrete and empirical; judgments of departmental strength usually are fanciful and dramaturgic.


Soon after one gets a job in the academy, one begins to form impressions of departments, schools, and other sub-units of the academic institution that hired one. A dust-up in a department induces old-timers to recall the department's chronic inability to handle conflict or to manage its own affairs. "That has always been a weak department" leads to multiple anecdotes or apocrypha about departmental dysfunction and personal dementia over a very long haul. When some largesse is conferred on another sub-unit, tongues wag to the effect that administrators or other benefactors have recently cossetted that sub-unit and esteemed it far beyond what objective assessments would justify. "They have been favored by the administration lately" leads to anecdotes and apocrypha to show how ill-deserved much of the uptick in favor actually is.

Jealousies and invidious distinctions aside, Haltom's 15th Law notes that identifiably weak departments seem to retain reputations for weakness while departments thought strong will not be thought strong for long. Why?

The short answer is that assessments of sub-units' weaknesses usually follow more from concrete observations and valid inferences than do assessments of sub-units' strengths. Assessments of sub-units' strengths often issue from rationalizations for distributions of favors and largesse. The rest of this entry elaborates on that short answer.

The credulous may believe that virtues lead to rewards and honors, but the savvy appreciate that rewards and honors more often lead to attributions of virtues than vice versa. Chronically fractious and feckless departments will continue to be divided and ineffective whatever subsidies or symbols patrons supply, so patrons invest collective resources and accolades in less risky departments. The distribution of collective spoils must be justified to an extent, so patrons conjure some collective strengths to rationalize the system of collective spoils. [To be sure, patrons also command individuated subsidies and sanctions with which to coopt members of weak sub-units, not so much in hope of improving sub-units as in pursuit of grateful, subservient allies. This entry is not primarily concerned with individual spoils, which will be a topic for one or more subsequent entries.]

When I arrived at the University of Puget Clowns, my mentors warned me of "the chosen ones," a department on which resources had recently been lavished out of proportion with visible accomplishments. As I came to understand how undeserved, even inexplicable, much of the praise of that department was, I came to recognize political-anthropologic patterns of command and cooptation [see F. G. Bailey, Stratagems and Spoils or Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils]. The greatness of "the chosen ones" lay less in published scholarship or practiced pedagogy than in fulsome bluster emanating from Jones Hall and a succession [pun intended] of decanal appointments and other sway and swag. That almost none of "the chosen" even approximated Jones Hall's plaudits was crucial to the cooptation because Jones Hall always had the option of admitting observable facts if administrators became dissatisfied with returns on their "investments." It was, therefore, predictable that most of "the chosen" a) provided reliable votes and spokespersons for administrative schemes, b) garnered designations such as "distinguished professor" when no objective observer would have discovered much distinction [at least in a positive direction], and c) harvested more than their share of individual and collective honors and booty. The strength of the department and the designs of the administration were symbiotically articulated.

It should go without saying that such symbioses were most likely in departments in the humanities, for humanities [variously understood] suited the University's arriviste dedication to "liberal arts" [variously understood]. The more that a sub-unit exemplified or at least dramatized the teaching of works celebrated for being famous, the more probable it became that excellences would be discovered in the sub-unit and spoils dispensed.

Likewise it should go without saying that the superiority of "the chosen ones" was more apparent than real [cf. Haltom's Eleventh Law: Seeming Beats Being] because the actual department was in some respects mediocre. Had Jones Hall and other outlets of propaganda and flackery been restricted to the observable, the concrete, and the verifiable, no case for the superiority of "the chosen ones" likely could have succeeded. Because Jones Hall could indulge in self-validating flim-flam with little risk that anyone would commit candor [candor is so unprofessional!], it could continue both to buy the allegiance and support of "the chosen ones" and to instruct other collectivities and individuals about the benefits of sub-unit tractability and conformity as well as the costs of critical thinking or independence by sub-units. [As noted already, similar manipulations of costs and benefits applied at the individual level, but this entry is about collectivities.]

None of the foregoing implies that a sub-unit cannot be superior to its institution in one or more regards. If qualities are distributed across sub-units, some sub-unit's strengths minus its weaknesses may sum to some figure greater than the institution's aggregate "net." Rather, the foregoing suggests that supposed excellences are, like the glory of the world, usually temporary fictions constructed for the purposes and convenience of the managers and the credulity of the managed.

Strengths are usually more reputed than demonstrable; weaknesses are often [but not always] both demonstrable and reputed. If a sub-unit is both weak and seen to be weak, individuals in that sub-unit face at least a dichotomy: Does one chance improving the sub-unit or does one concentrate on improving one's own reputation? This dichotomy might seem false, a candidate for Haltom's Fourteenth Law ["Never Do Either/Or When You may Do Both/And"]. However, improving one's own reputation is usually realistic when improving one's department's reputation is dauntingly improbable. Cooperating with Jones Hall and other campus potentates will secure one individual awards with far greater probability than undertaking to elevate a chronically pathetic department. After all, if improving the sub-unit were easy, the sub-unit would not have langushed for years or decades. Moreover, whatever absolute personal advancement one may effect, advancement relative to one's substandard department is usually far greater and far more probable.

Indeed, some colleagues have discovered a way around the dichotomy defined above: They strive to be the best of a bad lot, which impels them not only to pursue self-advancement but simultaneously to keep their sub-unit as unprepossessing as possible. In recruitment and hiring, they fend off rivals and thereby preserve their relative, local superiority.

#####How awful to be somebody,
#####How public like a frog,
#####To tell your name the livelong day
#####To an admiring bog.

Those who aspire to be the most visible frog in a risible bog thus acquire an interest in keeping their sub-unit down to keep themselves above the sub-unit. In hiring, "the best of a bad lot" may prefer candidates who will not challenge or overshadow the sub-unit's best. Promotion and tenure decisions may turn on willingness to go along with some of the foibles that make a sub-unit substandard. They certainly will turn on evaluees' fidelity to the local great and, far more important, the greatness of the local great. These tendencies and others predict that departmental stagnation or decline will be sustained and departmental improvement will be rare and transient.

When sub-units are actually [rather than putatively] superior to some campuswide median or mean, look for happy accidents or altruistic behaviors. Since lucky streaks soon break and altruistic behaviors soon give way to habitual selfishness, sub-units cannot long remain above the norm. Hence, Haltom's Fifteen Law obtains.


Coming Soon -- Haltom's Sixteenth Law: Whatever is not as it seems is the product of calculated, crafted fakery far more often than of error.

Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Most alternatives, Kenneth Burke reminded us, need not exclude other alternatives. Many trade-offs can be transformed into syntheses or amalgams.

I derived Haltom's 14th Law from the literary analyst/theorist Kenneth Burke. Beyond the obvious advice to avoid false dichotomies, Burke counseled analysts to consider ways in which contrasting perspectives or passages might complement or mutually reinforce. Perhaps Certs is both a candy mint and a breath mint. To those with numb palates, Miller Lite may both taste great and be less filling. The nuns insisted that Jesus was both man and God.

Both/and!

Perhaps the most dispiriting either/or afflicts campus when one presumes that advance(s) by a peer come at one's expense. Your contract, publication, or opportunity makes the rest of us look bad, these envious dogs believe. Since there are always fewer people with some honor or accomplishment than without [even in a three-person department], such either/or, zero-sum attitudes guarantee more misery and jealousy than celebration and community. Those who want "no great woman or man to walk among us" guarantee mediocrity, sniping, and schadenfreude. That is how middling and weak departments stagnate.

Both/and!

Around campus, the either/or versus both/and problem arises whenever colleagues assert a sanitized, selfless motive as if such a motive precludes a corrupt, selfish motive. When I first raised concerns about permitting colleagues to take Fridays off by offering courses on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:00 p. m. until 4:20 p.m., proponents of four-day weekends quickly corrected me. "The point is not to take Fridays off but to clear Fridays for tasks other than teaching." These colleagues knew that this was a false either/or. As I showed in "U Stands for Unchained Malady" [the 10-27-07 entry in "Rump Parliament"], those pressing to be on campus fewer than a five days per week include slackers, shirkers, shuckers, and other cynics who hide behind few sincere colleagues who would put "free days" to good use. Long weekends reward both colleagues who put days away from campus to good use and far more numerous colleagues who sleep in, leave town, watch TV, luxuriate in tubs, swap spouses, or pursue other leisure activities. The slot on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1500 hours to 1620 hours may be devoted by some to legitimate pedagogy, but it is available for other purposes as well.


Both/and!

How many colleagues have presumed that one publishes only at the expense of one's teaching? Usually such a presumption excuses those who do not publish. While it is true that publishing more means that one must do less of something else, one may do less service, less hobnobbing, less dissipating, less kvetching, less traveling, or less bar-hopping. Publication feeds into teaching less directly and less often than some colleagues claim in personal statements, yet each has been known to improve the other. Thus, the zero-sum tradeoff between publishing and teaching is a false dichotomy. Publishing and teaching may have some positive-sum combinations, and publishing may come at the expense of activities other than teaching.

Both/and!

For decades decision-makers have presumed that the university needed ever-increasing SAT medians and other indicia of academic prowess to continue its transition from a local party-school to a national liberal-arts college. [Why it could not be both was never explained to me. Perhaps it is assumed that fun and learning are mutually exclusive.] Such concerns precluded diversification of our student body by classes, ethnicities, and other demographics we were told. This was more than an empty excuse for temporizing; it was another unnecessary choice dangled before credulous, craven faculty.

Both/and!

When some brave undergraduates in Spring 1993 held an event called "Sex, Lies, and Tenure," one or more members of the Faculty Advancement Committee spoke to students and assured them that recent firings of women had been based on considerations other than the women's facilitation of undergraduates' complaints against multiple members of the women's department. For some reason, the students were not taken in by the claim that this or that overt rationalization precluded certain covert motivations. [That is, the students were not drooling morons.] Indeed, students reasoned that overt rationlizations based on "personal and professional characteristics" might be a cover story that permitted decision-makers to punish whistle-blowers and those who sided with prey against tenured predators. Where did the students get such ideas? Well, many majored in Politics and Government.

Both/and!

Members of the Wigger Patwol insist that one cannot be both rigorous and supportive. This either/or concerns more than men with very small penises who argue about which of them assigned crummier grades to disoriented first-years. Faculty committed to being supportive take all or almost all students as those students enter courses. The supportive teachers strive to make students better. Supportive faculty do not believe that support makes them flaccid, any more than they believe that giving rotten grades makes them better teachers. The deluded in the Wigger Patwol, by contrast, insist that instructors may either be harsh and belittling or permissive and hand-holding. That is scarcely the only dimension along which Wigger-Patwol boneheads exhibit unusual thickness.

Both/and!

The Wigger Patwol, however, may exceed in IQ those who believe that any emphasis on careers, jobs, or practical education defeats attempts to run a liberal-arts curriculum. Need I explain how established liberal-arts colleges teem with alums who get jobs and pursue careers other than post-graduate education? We do not have to crank out professional students to prove that we are not "vocational."

Both/and!

Is there a faculty member who actually believes that paucity of majors demonstrates strength of the major? Cannot strong majors nonetheless be popular or attractive?

Both/and!

Thank God the current president believes the university can and should sport and support students who are engaged in Tacoma and other matters local while at the same time they think about big questions and enduring puzzles.

Both/and!

Now if we could only imagine a faculty both critical and loyal.

Coming Soon: Haltom's Fifteenth Law -- Academic sub-units can be inferior far longer than superior to their larger institutions.

RIP, Michael Denning

Michael James Denning, 1950-2008 Dr. Michael Denning died of leukemia last Thursday. Michael had struggled with illness for some years. He was tough but realistic. Like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, Michael knew what we all have/had coming to us. He did not use mortality as an excuse. He used it to spur himself to "get busy living" (The Shawshank Redemption).

                   

I met Michael in 1977 in graduate school. He liked what I said in a seminar on modern political theory but wanted to push me on my views. The Blue Moon Tavern was on his walk home, so we took the matter one mile and thirty feet off campus to that legendary watering hole [emphasis on "hole" in those days] to which he explicitly dedicated his dissertation in 1984. This was the first of many confabs at the Moon, where the motto was that "There are nights when the Moon howls and the wolves are silent." I swear that Michael pushed me during every single one of our visits.

             

Michael chuckled at my impatience with philosophical gibble-gabble. When a professor elaborated a dilemma that Hamlet faced ― regicide at his father's request versus regicide based on his own anger with the King and Gertrude ― I replied that we each do many things for multiple reasons and that either way Claudius dies, so where's the dilemma? Michael waited out the professor's explanation of the profit of such classroom exercises, then pounced on the professor's distinctions unburdened by differences. That day the professor learned that I was bumptious but Michael far more dangerous.

                   

Michael and I seldom shared coursework, but when we did we made the most of it. We wandered into a graduate seminar in Sociology and scandalized the worshipful, weak-kneed sociology grads:

      #####

Professor: "Bill, that is a fascinating idea, but how would you operationalize it?"

Me: "I wouldn't!"

Professor: "Why not?"

Me: "Because I am working out a theoretical proposition, not writing a journal article. Operationalization should follow thought, not substitute for it."

 

Later that same afternoon, Two-O took the stand to testify. #####

Professor: "So Parsons makes Weber seem like Pareto."

Michael: "Bullshit!" A Greek chorus of Sociology grads sucked in air.

Professor: "So how would you differentiate Weber from Pareto on this point?" 

Michael: "By reading what Parsons and Pareto wrote and realizing that it does not resemble what Weber wrote. [4 minutes of diatribe, screed, and shouting omitted]"

 

Michael recruited me to his softball team, the Lynn Street Dogs, because he needed an outfield arm. The Dogs kept me after it turned out that, for me, the first thing to go was the arm. Sunday after Sunday, Michael patroled the shortfield between left and center and assured that the Dogs beat the other team to the keg. He also led the Dogs in heckling the other team, passersby, and anything else he espied.

Michael and I defended our dissertations on 24 May 1984. He defended in the morning. I went in the afternoon. "The Doctors Dog" then repaired to the Blue Moon to celebrate the end of a raucous era in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington. I am not sure that docility and deference broke out among the graduate throng thereafter, but that's how Michael and I told the tale. 

From 1977 to 2008, Michael and I commiserated on the sheer stupidities that Political Science foisted and fostered. Just today I received notice that the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for last year's Midwest Political Science Association meeting had been awarded to a paper entitled, "Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging." Although I cannot be certain which expletives Michael would have uttered about such a title, I can be sure that "mindless" would have been among the colorful words. I can hear Michael rasping now: "How can sex cause anything other than pregnancy?" Michael did not go gentle into the post-literate era. 

Michael became Assistant Professor at Indiana University, where he discovered that departments welcomed candor even less than professors in seminars. He tired of Bloomington and headed back to Seattle. He became intellectual in residence at the Port of Seattle. This was a dazzling accomplishment. Bottom-line executives and hard-nosed maritimers employed Michael to distill scholarship and to incubate new ideas. This impressed on Michael and on the executives just how practical the academic could be. 

Eager to return to the classroom, Michael undertook graduate education anew at the Maritime Institute at the University of Washington. This time he was the leader [and lader] of the seminar, pulling tyros back to realities.

However, Michael adhered to his plan: to retire to the life of a dilettante scholar. That is, Michael lived the life to which so many of us aspired when we began grad school. He read books. He thought. He followed his bliss. He financed his scholarship with well-selected investments and, let's be honest, fiendish frugality.

He handicapped the NFL draft every year in the hope that the L. A. Rams, then the Indianapolis Colts, and finally the Seattle Seahawks would stock their rosters well. Michael admired the offensive line of the Rams, so I played the loyal friend and did not mention the manifest superiority of the O-line of Oakland Raiders: Do the names Upshaw, Shell, Otto, Dalby, Buehler, Vella, and Casper now seem familiar, Michael? Regarding baseball [Michael did and I did not], Michael loathed the Designated Hitter while I disliked watching pitchers make outs in what was already a tedious sport when not played with a beer in one hand. Born in St. Louis, Michael remained true to the Cardinals for his lifetime. He tended to loyalty in myriad regards far beyond the sports world. 

Michael loved to argue and loved to save and loved to invest. He loved his wife and his family. He loved the road. He was charismatic and charming when he felt like it. When provoked, he was an intellectual berserker. He was intense, becoming a hermit for days when in the throes of some frenzied investigation.  

He was my closest friend in Political Science. I shall miss him. I shall not miss the pain that he withstood for years. A mutual friend suggested that "Michaelangelo" from Emmylou Harris's "Red Dirt Girl" is the appropriate eulogy for Two-O [his nickname on the Lynn Street Dogs, from a youthful fling in Pasco with Mogen David 20-20]. She was correct once again: 

Last night I dreamed about you/ I dreamed that you were riding/ 

On a blood-red painted pony/ 

Up where the heavens were dividing/ 

And the angels turned to ashes/ 

You came tumbling with them to the earth/ 

So Far below/ 

Michelangelo/ 

 

Last night I dreamed about you/ 

I dreamed that you lay dying/ 

In a field of thorn and roses/ 

With a hawk above you crying/ 

For the warrior slain in battle/ 

From an arrow driven deep inside you/ 

Long ago/ 

Michelangelo/ 

 

Did you suffer at the end?/ 

Would there be no-one to remember?/ 

Did you banish all the old ghosts/ 

At the terms of your surrender?/ 

And could you hear me calling out your name?/ 

Well I guess that I will never know/ 

Michelangelo 

NOW you are truly a dilettante, Michael. I hope you've found a worthy library. Will, the Dog Catcher

Coming Soon --- Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Haltom's Thirteenth Law: Only lowlifes espouse Übermenschen.

Why do people who give credence to some master race or outstanding breed so often seem to be seriously damaged if not deranged?



I do not imagine that Haltom's 13th Law is original, but I have never heard anyone come out and state what almost all think: talk of supermen belongs in comic books.

In some classic treatments of characters who think themselves transcendent, the deluded seem taken with themselves for no reason apparent to the mass of men. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is said by many around him to be a genius, but Dostoevsky hides Raskolnikov's superiority well. In Hitchcock's "Rope" and Fleischer's "Compulsion," cinematic Leopolds and Loebs are as callow and feckless as Raskolnikov albeit less depressive. A far more impressive product of eugenics in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" -- as I shift to cultural creations that cost me less time and brought me more pleasure than those mentioned already -- seems outstanding for a while but is bested by Captain James T. Kirk. On the television "Star Trek," Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalban) lost a previous bout to Lieutenant Marla McGivers (the late Madlyn Rhue), who was far from a formidable opponent.

Perhaps such cultural commentaries are not to be trusted. Their audiences are people of middling abilities or less. Perhaps authors were merely soothing too-human humans so that they would not fear the super-human reapers who operate beyond good and evil. Maybe the authors saw in themselves too little superiority and so lampooned their masters like so many valets and maids on holiday. It could be that Western culture is addicted to Manichean portraits about struggles between good and evil about which I believe Zoroaster had views, too.

Nonetheless, the few persons I have known who took master races, higher breeds, or transvaluing over-men seriously and recognized themselves as such Übermenschen were, as the Brits like to say, not prepossessing. I do not propose here a genealogy of morons. A quick example may suffice.


A friend from my teens in Ballard tended to admire the Nazis and joined the American Nazi Party. If this was merely a phase, it was an ominous one. This Irish lad was given to shooting at hobos on passing railroad flatcars with his .22 rifle. He was a good but not great chess player, which is to say that I won perhaps one game in ten from him. Other than that, however, I cannot remember a solitary virtue in the lad. This superman lived in the perpetual twilight of the idle that was adolescence in Ballard in the 1960s. He did escape Ballard by joining the Navy. Now that was super!

To be polite about it, my experiences in academe have not improved my assessments of those who propound some next big human thing. I profited from reading Nietzsche far more than from slogging Dostoevsky. Cliff's Notes improved on the latter far more than on the former, to be sure. I have also known graduate students and professors who could derive insights of value from Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, although I never knew one who actually got beyond gay science to testable propositions. Still, their political patter had a distinguished lineage. Like the futurist who purports to understand it all courtesy of Yeats' gyres or the Straussian who decodes classic texts to discover truths, the intellectual who sees supermen and hears dead people writes fabulous articles for the New York Review of Books without advancing understanding much that those of us with too little will to power can appreciate.

In sum, those who sip the Nietzschean Flavor Aid have deftly hidden their genius from me. They partake of the public timidity and circumspection of Clark Kent more than the pluck and persistence of Lois Lane. They exude the competence and capacity of Lex Luthor's henchmen. Jerry Lewis might mistake them for Professor Moriarty, I suppose.

If these are the Übermenschen, we all owe pessimists a big apology.



Coming Soon --- Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.

Haltom's Twelfth Law: No matter how well you teach a class-session, students would have preferred you to cancel.

Most students have better things to do than to listen to professors. If they do not, they are losers.

Professor, be not proud. Generous evaluations, awards from student organizations, and plaudits from the Faculty Advancement Committee cannot gainsay a simple fact. On almost any day of the semester, almost every student in your section had a place she or he would rather have been. Haltom's 12th Law does not maintain that lectures are pointless or that taking pride in presentations is counterproductive. Instead, Haltom's 12th Law suggests that professors adopt more realistic attitudes about how entertaining and how informative they actually are on any given class-day.

Were you showing a boffo movie? Students would have preferred to have watched the film over refreshments at some reasonable hour. They likely would have gotten more out of the watching as well. Spin the DVD and do your best not to talk over the soundtrack like a demented disk jockey, but realize that you are saving yourself a lecture and entertaining the internees and that "mixing it up" is tacit admission that normal classroom activities are tedious.

Are you about to loose your most riveting presentation? Save it into PowerPoint and let students process the slides at their own pace in their own quarters -- if you dare to be bested by a pillow.

Do you protest that students love your classes and would not miss them? Then admit that you are an entertainer who has found ways to overcome students' alternative activities by pedagogical arts, crafts, devices, and dodges. That is, your refutation of Haltom's Twelfth Law reinforces the truth of Haltom's Twelfth Law.

No matter what protests brash blowhards belch, no matter what platitudes self-promoters chant, and no matter what self-aggrandizement full pustules ooze, some class-sessions represent substantial opportunity costs for every student with a life and a mind. Any student who could not have found multiple activities superior to those in a classroom deserves pity instead of a bump for class-participation.

Colleagues note and grade attendance because they must wield sanctions to fill their sections. Haltom's 12th Law helps peers admit what they are doing. In 1999, for an example, one of my advisees was graded down from the B- he had earned to a D because he had missed too many meetings of a course. I asked the professor about the matter. She or he replied that the penalty was listed in the syllabus. "When students miss class, they do not do well on examinations and do not learn!" He or she had no apt answer when I responded to this pious pronouncement with logic: "Then shouldn't a grade based on examinations and other course responsibilities represent any such gaps in learning?" I was not surprised that the instructor had no back-up bullshit. I was happy to help her or him see that he or she was affronted that some student could do average work without her or his assistance. He or she seemed less happy to receive my help.

In sum, deductions for missing classes often become more severe the more that instructors, in their few moments of reflection, realize that absences do not reflect in performance, learning, or grades. Such is not to say that students should not be encouraged to attend, that students who are blowing off class too often should not be rounded up, or that providing rewards and penalties for attendance or deportment is atavistic. Again, Haltom's Twelfth is about attitudes rather than actions.

Indeed, Haltom's Twelfth Law articulates with Haltom's Ninth Law. See what you are doing [XII], then do what you are doing [IX]. Get out of the habit of denying what you are doing, for that habit will induce you to lose sight of what is before your nose in your own classroom. Lose too much sight and you'll blindly join the "Wigger Patwol." Among the Wigger Patwol, thumbscrews and waterboarding demonstrate anew how eager your students are to be in class this morning.

I know that "the few, the proud, the professoriate" will never acknowledge that, at least for some students, weathering lectures, deciphering scrawl, and "engaging" in gabfests that raise students' evaluations more than students' acumen are often related more to pumping up the performer than to learning or to grades. They'd rather coerce captive audiences before whom they perform shtick that will secure evaluations that will get the performers raises and praises and the hapless audience an hour closer to their deaths [with or without learning].

Such colleagues are correct to suppose that coercion serves professors far better than voluntary consent ever would. One need not have done much peer evaluation to see why so many colleagues will not leave attendance up to students' assessments of relative rewards.

However, if you suspect that colleagues sanction attendance because they despair of defeating video games, slumber, and good books [as opposed to required readings] by any other means, you are a cynic, "[a] blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are ..." [Ambrose Bierce] rather than as your peers' rationalizations require.

When cynics are correct, they imperil mindless conformity even more than when they are wrong.

Coming next -- Haltom's Thirteen Law: Only lowlifes espouse Übermenschen.

Haltom's Eleventh Law: Seeming beats being

Imagery and dramaturgy tend to displace veracity and verity.


Haltom's 11th salutes seeming, which usually outperforms being.

Haltom's 11th should not be interpreted to do more than state a routine inequality: appearances will avail most people most of the time far more than actualities will. The apparent need not displace the actual because appearances work best when they accommodate or accentuate actualities. Indeed, appearances often complete actualities on first dates or in weddings. The competent observer pays attention both to actualities and to appearances, both to what what is going on and to what is being said, sung, shot, or otherwise conveyed about what is going on.

The late David Mayhew stirred political science when he noted how seeming rounded out being in the U. S. Congress. Professor Mayhew did not argue that congresspeople were indifferent to vindication of principles, to improvements in policies, to acquisition of power, or to advancement of agendas personal, partisan, or pecuniary. However, he helped us to see that, to approach any goal or goals, the congressperson had to get herself or himself re-elected. This led lawmakers to seek publicity ["advertising"], to orate eloquently on problems and bills ["position-taking"], and to bribe their constituents with benefits ["credit-claiming"]. Of course, cynics -- my volk! -- tlansrated [sic] advertising as public-relations blather, position-taking as empty posturing, and credit-claiming as pork-barrel politicking. Either way, congresspeople performed well and secured re-election through dramaturgy. Because their survival as members of Congress demanded fraud, frauds they delivered. Congressional con artists made certain that their appearances accommodated and augmented actualities.

Appearances accommodate and complement actualities in other institutions as well. Academic institutions abound in advertising, position-taking, and credit-claiming because they abound in con artists. Institutional and individual web-pages advertise virtues and accomplishments that are more about seeming than being. Schools and scholars alike take positions athwart ignorance and inveigh against evils of an age, evils from when most immediately shrink rather than back their shibboleths or slogans with any actions that might cost them anything. How quickly Dr. Alligator Mouth becomes Professor Ostrich Head! And, of course, this university and that professor claim credit for any good that might be associated with higher education and evade responsibility for any harms that might be attributed to them personally or institutionally. No professor is so complete and utter a fraud as when he or she sits through a celebration of her or his retirement without rebutting the recited litany of ways in which the retiring single-handedly extended the frontiers of knowledge. [Remember! The frontiers of knowledge may be extended by shrinking what is known.]

Haltom's Eleventh Law applies to academic institutions differentially. The more respected and respectable the institution, the more that seeming must be backed by being eventually. The less respectable an institution and the less respected its faculty, the more that seeming will substitute for being over a longer period.

Accordingly, at a respected institution, a manuscript must appear between covers and be issued by a respectable press to continue to be touted as a "book." Books, articles, and reviews each have looming expiration dates after which the author must forfeit repute for his or her fecundity. At even mediocre schools, someone at some time will contrast the record [being] with the reputation [seeming] eventually. If the seeming outpaces the being too much for too long, an evaluator will flirt with such f-words as "fraud" or "failure." At sub-par schools, by contrast, "the culture of evidence" is so occasional and so selective that the author of some of the best rotogravure inserts a tourist bureau could underwrite may parlay such "refereed publications" into tenure and promotion. Indeed, some schools are so desperate to simulate greatness that their faculty will salute fulsomely some colleague for producing a book that has never appeared even as a manuscript in a dozen years. At some point, those who have praised "the book" over the years do not want to acknowledge that they have been lauding an accomplishment more apparent than actual. Belonging to an academic cargo cult would embarrass the laudatory. Better to praise a colleague's invisible manuscript and the latent glory with which it showers the institution and the institutionalized.

Whatever the level of academic institutions, those who cannot be must seem if they are to preserve their sinecures, secure prizes, and maintain an aura of potential. Most of us can simulate much more than we can realize, so seeming beats being for almost all of us almost all of the time, even at the better institutions. The worse the setting and the less accomplished the peers, moreover, the more that seeming may supplant being. Indeed, at truly weak venues, faculty are so busy covering up their lack of productivity that they have too little time in which to be productive. Seeming takes up all their time.

Haltom's Eleventh hints at high art when candidates for tenure must seem excellent without being even competent. As I have noted in previous blogs, at the University of Puget Clowns the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] will certify perhaps 85% of candidates for tenure as excellent teachers and excellent scholars. Some will not just seem but be excellent teachers. Some will be truly excellent scholars rather than performatively and ritually excellent scholars. Almost no one will excel at both teaching and scholarship unless the FAC and co-conspirators manipulate appearances to mask realities. If a candidate for tenure is beloved by her or his department, the department will furnish intra-disciplinary perspectives from which flawed or non-existent accomplishments are "actually" evidence of excellences. Of course, if a department or an FAC or an administrator wants rid of someone, evaluators will pronounce themselves disconsolate that she or he has failed of some standard of which everyone else in his or her tenure-class also failed.

Seeming is more than enough for those whom Puget Clowns wants to keep. Being is not enough for those whom Puget Clowns wants to go. Thus does seeming profit one more than being at the University of Puget Clowns.

After tenure, such seeming must be taken for being. This explains why so many colleagues will shake their heads at junior faculty who worry about verisimilitude. Colleagues addicted to discovering and communicating truth might expose this renowned intellectual as a mirage or that legendary teacher as an urban legend. Naïve faculty who say that "the book" is not invisible but non-existent imperil not only the author of the manuscript that never appears but also the system of evaluation and the institutional publicity that apotheozies him or her. The stubborn realist who opines that a renowned campus intellectual "... knows the first three sentences of every book ever written and nothing else" must be driven from our midst. Exile is too good for anyone who says that evaluation processes that promote fictions and folderol are corrupt; such a knave must be subjected to one or more degradation rituals, then exiled.

If seeming is to continue to outpace being, in sum, those who seemed excellent must be vigilant against demystifiers. Otherwise, a converse of the differential stated above becomes too obvious. Above I wrote, "The more respected and respectable the institution, the more that seeming must be backed by being eventually. The less respectable an institution and the less respected its faculty, the more that seeming will substitute for being over a longer period." One does not want to reverse that premise: "The longer and more that seeming substitutes for being, the less respectable the institution and the less respected its faculty."


Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twelfth Law: No matter how well you teach a class-session, the students would have preferred you to cancel.