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?
  

Coming Next: "Live Blogging the Senate"

Explaining the Ways of "Disney Does Dartmouth"

Ever tried to explain "Disney Does Dartmouth" to someone from an actual university? It's "... like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll."


Last Thursday, I dined with a professor from a Research One institution. As I described some customs and usages at "Disney Does Dartmouth," [Thank you, Diana Marrế!] an anthropologist reeled from shock to protest. Trained in encountering and contextualizing seemingly savage practices and bizarre behavior, this anthropologist could not fathom exotica of ersatz-Dartmouth based on her experiences at universities and colleges large and small.

I told her about issues regarding junior faculty and closed versus open files [see my posts in Rump Parliament for 21 and 22 November 2008 for more details]. She gasped, "What are untenured faculty doing evaluating colleagues for tenure?" She seemed unimpressed by the history of the practice at "Disney Does Dartmouth," almost as if she thought reiterating etiology was insufficient justification. [She probably thought Bruce Hornsby's "That's Just the Way It Is" was a lament about classism and racism instead of a call for quiescence and indifference when confronted with injustice.]

As often as she repeated, "Isn't that practice against AAUP guidelines?" I repeated that to the best of my knowledge most colleagues at "Disney Does Dartmouth" neither knew nor cared what the AAUP recommended or required.

When I mentioned candidates for tenure simultaneously evaluating other candidates for tenure, she asked, "Now how does that not raise conflicts of interest?" In defense of my institution, I pointed out that spouses were prohibited from evaluating one another. She seemed unimpressed by this height of ethical rigor. Of course, I have no idea why she might believe that a candidate for tenure or promotion might disparage other candidate(s) in the same department. How could that happen?

Guess how she reacted when I told her that for some competitions internal to "Disney Does Dartmouth" a curriculum vitae is neither requested nor welcome. "I had thought that the CV was the coin of the academic realm. How the hell can my record be irrelevant to whether I get funding?" I assured her that one's record was not irrelevant. Decision-makers attended assiduously to the sorts of performance normally not to be found on a CV. As an anthropologist, she understood favoritism and clientilism but seemed to think the spoils system a queer way of promoting scholarship. I did not trouble her with how patrons have for centuries cultivated sycophants and other dependents. [See my entry for 4 March 2007, "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" to see how faculty vie for patronage.]

How does someone from a major university fathom the senior colleague who told two disappointed aspirants for a Lantz Senior Fellowship that the "committee" went with someone who had produced almost nothing because "We knew you would accomplish your plans even without the fellowship?" Of course, the professor who got the award returned to campus with little to show for his year off-campus and the two spurned scholars did produce what they had proposed, so the prescience of the committee was vindicated. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" takes on new meaning courtesy of this leading cadre, this vanguard of the faculty.

And what of the persistence of "personal and professional characteristics" as considerations for promotion or tenure? An experienced scholar who believes that, to be professional, evaluation must be impersonal must be puzzled by a university proclaiming that it assesses personnel on "personal characteristics." All schools and many colleagues take "personal characteristics" into account, and candor about this practice has its charms. Still, to mandate such unprofessional evaluation may strike the uninitiated as crass. To strike that mandate from the Faculty Code in 1994 seems redemptive until one realizes that atavists continued to use "personal and professional characteristics" unabashedly at least until University counsel explained in 2007 that the practice was jurally indefensible. Even then some dead-enders stated in a faculty meeting that they could not believe that they had been violating the Faculty Code for so many years.

How do I explain routines at the "Disney Does Dartmouth?"

Do I restrict myself to misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, and other inequities rife on campuses large and small and say nothing about perversities peculiar to "Disney Does Dartmouth?"

I cannot claim, as in the movie "An Innocent Man," that it's an insane place with insane rules so things end up being logical. The rules are not insane. Rather, we ignore the rules when we please to do so. On those rare occasions when colleagues or administrators deign to account for themselves, "logical" is hardly the first descriptor that leaps to tongue.

Do I transcend? "This too can be understood on a higher plane." Uh-huh. "This too can be understood in a fevered swamp" does not seem sufficiently transcendent. Moreover, to understand or to purport to understand myths and rituals at "Disney Does Dartmouth" is to catalyze one's own demise as scholar and professional.

How does any veteran with three digits of IQ and any awareness of what happens at "Disney Does Dartmouth" explain DDD to those familiar with academia?

Next -- The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, 2007

'Tis the Season – Expect Decision-Makers to Bestow Surprising Gifts

Here's a tip for all you honkies:

Fa La La La La La La La La

It's the time we pay off donkeys!

Fa La La La La La La La La



Colleagues who are barely sentient

Fa La La La La La La La La

Profit from their supine penchant.

Fa La La La La La La La La



Freeze your expression like the icy tundra of Lambeau Field. Decisions about tenure, promotions, and awards have been made and soon will be known. Veterans know how it works: try to remain calm and profess to see logic in even the most preposterous pronouncement(s).

Commit no candor!

Please recall from previous blogs that at least one such decision per year reinforces the perception that merit is not the only criterion for this award or that honor. Our merciful systems allow those spurned to espy at least one unworthy colleague who got what the spurned did not. Since this or that result cannot be explained by established rules and standards, those who were spurned were not necessarily unworthy. Perhaps they lacked allies or advocates in strategic places. Maybe a disgruntled chair or disgraced opponent figured in the decision. No need to take rejection as an affront. No need to be taken aback.

Keep your reserve.

The harder task is to remember, when one receives some honor, how empty the accolade may be. If one served on a power committee or otherwise assisted some decision-maker, one may have received the honor as much for conformity and credulity as for one's other qualities.

At the University of Puget Clowns, that one doubtless earned an honor may have little to do with why one got the honor.

Next: Explaining the Ways of UPS

Why closed files guarantee innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt at least some evaluations.

Confidential evaluation files tend to feature more misinformation and disinformation than evaluation files that evaluees may inspect and police.

At the faculty meeting in the Rotunda on 8 December 2008, a former member of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] intoned that open files were inducing junior faculty to censor their remarks. One junior faculty member objected that the erstwhile evaluator was trafficking in anecdote. The FAC survivor asserted that his observations were not wholly subjective but were based on inquiries to junior faculty beyond merely reading their self-censored letters. The persistent junior faculty member scoffed that such "evidence" was nevertheless anecdotal. If only the 2007-2008 FAC had included a competent, candid social scientist to explain why many disciplines and scholars do not respond well to anecdotage, apocrypha, and other "evidence" too unreliable to be data, perhaps the FAC would not have issued its Fatwa Against Collegiality to the Faculty Senate in May 2008 [see "Open Files and Closed Minds" in this blog, 21 November 2008].

Let's not overcomplicate discussions of closed files [that is, those in which the evaluee waives her or his code-stated right to view letters from colleagues] versus open files [those in which the evaluee reserves his or her right to view letters]. At worst, the evaluee's right to inspect letters from colleagues may induce letter-writers to restrain themselves lest evaluees refute or retaliate. If the evaluee waives her or his right to review the letters, colleagues may write more freely. As a result, closed files may include more candor and more calumny. The issue need be little more complex than that.

Advocates of restricting the right of the evaluee to review letters that affect tenure or promotion often acknowledge the gain in candor and seldom acknowledge the increase in calumny. To advocate closing files, however, is to accept calumny as a price for securing candor. To advocate open files is to accept some diminution in information in return for some protection against misinformation [mistakes that would have been corrected if the evaluee could have known what falsehoods were introduced by evaluators] and disinformation [deliberately misleading or exaggerated "information" that evaluees are prudent to keep out of their files].

Amid the cavalcade of anecdotes and arguments to come on this topic, keep the foregoing in mind. As a class, closed files guarantee that mistakes, misstatements, innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt some evaluations. To fend off such corruption, circumscribing a few evaluators seems a reasonable prophylactic. Indeed, most scholars would rather suffer the rigors of correction and circumspection than to injure a colleague mistakenly or maliciously.

Which almost makes one wonder about tenured colleagues who ignore or minimize corruptions of evaluation that misinformation and disinformation work. What "information" do the proponents of concealment imagine vulnerable faculty to possess that would offset the pollution of the evaluation process? Could "evidence" available solely from vulnerable faculty be so dispositive and reliable as to make a substantial difference to the FAC or to the President and trustees?

And why is the FAC, as in its 2008 report to the Senate, trolling for and trafficking in the sorts of "evidence" more likely to turn up when closed files offer cover and camouflage?

Next: 'Tis the Season – Expect Decision-Makers to Bestow Surprising Gifts

RIP Doug Edwards

Douglas Ray Edwards, 1950-2008


For the second time this year I pay respects to a colleague and friend born in 1950. [See "RIP Michael Denning" supra at March 18, 2008.] Like Michael, Doug Edwards succumbed to cancer. The genetic code that erected him brought him down when it became altered. Thus does biology play its own version of the parlor game "telephone."

We boomers are entering deadlier years. We so enjoy extended life-expectancy that we do not savor every day as a gift that our forebears not so long ago neither expected nor received. However, boomers who mourn should recall that another boomer sang, "Only the Good Die Young," itself an alteration of an ancient aphorism. If only the good die young, most boomers have many years to go.

I have the solace that I am not, never was, and never hope to be as good as Doug Edwards was. If my extended span of scholarly life be decades, I shall still fail of Doug's virtues.

Doug's greatest virtue was fidelity. Doug adhered to scholarly ideals and professed not to comprehend academics who betrayed those ideals. When Doug discussed with colleagues standards for professional attainment, he made the unaccomplished or less accomplished fearful. Colleagues had learned that at Puget Sound professional excellence was attributed far more than achieved. Doug gave every evidence of expecting achievement. Ghastly!

Some of the trembling colleagues did what one would expect. They lashed out at Professor Edwards's "extremism." Dr. Edwards was extreme. He was extremely faithful to professional ideals. He was extremely faithful to scholarship. He was extremely faithful to evidence and objectivity. He was extremely faithful to thinking and speaking the truth. Doug's fidelity did not make him popular with sycophants and shammers, narcissists and nincompoops. [You know who you are.]

Doug's fidelity to truth, objectivity, evidence, scholarly attainment, and idealism made him an unattractive, therefore unlikely candidate for the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Somehow Doug clambered onto the FAC in 2004. Almost instantly, he made a difference. The difference Doug worked was less in results -- the design of the FAC, its traditions and rituals, and its personnel militate against adhering to rules, upholding standards, or reading files straightforwardly -- than in reasoning. Only one as civil as Doug could ask where exactly the department had located "excellence" in a file before the FAC when it was obvious that no excellence was extant. Only one as courteous as Doug could then greet risible rationalizations and sophistical subterfuges with a gentle "Well, I do not quite understand your argument." I have esteemed perhaps five colleagues more after we served together on the FAC than before, none more than Doug. That increase in admiration is all the more remarkable because Doug started so high in my estimation that he had little room for improvement.

I raise the FAC amid a memoriam to make the point that Doug Edwards had so much character and integrity that service on the FAC became him. He saw that the system was corrupted in ways that I have mentioned in various previous entries. No student of religions ignores the blandishments of group-think, but Doug resisted them heroically.

Doug was designated "distinguished" by the FAC. In this instance, the FAC was not designating one of its own for special praise. Doug would have merited special praise if he had never served on the FAC. However, were Doug to epitomize distinction at the University of Puget Sound, the university could save itself a generous sum. Perhaps a half dozen colleagues could approach Doug's attainments. I know I could not. I know as well that almost everyone designated "distinguished" during my stints on the FAC would be distinguished from Doug in a downward direction. Here was a professor who was distinguished more than titularly.

Doug could afford idealism and honesty because he measured up to the standards he used. In teaching, Doug so exuded sincerity that he could be intellectually rigorous. Doug never joined the Wigger Patwol -- those who project rigor that they do not possess -- but lived rigorously. Indeed, Doug's teaching and scholarship frightened some self-aggrandizing colleagues into extolling their own fanciful virtues all the more fulsomely. In scholarship, Doug exhibited more devotion than any other scholar I have known. In service, he was generous and dedicated, not just putting in time.

Already others have lauded Doug as family man, community member, and bass singer. Of these virtues I know little, so I defer to those who do know. What I knew, I have written above.

I offer to my friend and colleague and to his admirers Robinson Jeffers' eulogy to a dead hawk:


#####What fell was relaxed,
#####Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
#####Soared: the fierce rush:
#######the night-herons by the flooded river
#######cried fear at its rising
#####Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.


And to colleagues who adhere to the maxim "Let no great men walk among us," I offer my own sentiments less poetic. Doug's death means not just serenity for Doug but for surviving colleagues. The bar has been lowered by Doug's passing. I find it unlikely that the bar will again be raised so high for so long by performance rather than by PR.

Sleep well, Doug. Like Randall P. McMurphy, you had the courage to try. May I live long enough to discover the Chief Bromdens whom you inspired.


Next: Why closed files guarantee innuendo, hokum, spin, deception, and malice will corrupt at least some evaluations.

What kind of colleagues caution vulnerable or credulous colleagues not to opt for openness?

When colleagues frighten vulnerable faculty into surrendering their right to an open file, do they confess or do they project onto others? Both?

I do not know how many administrators, apparatchiks, and others are advising our junior faculty to elect closed files, but I should be surprised if there were none. Such advice amounts to a confession that the Faculty Code is being or has been violated. Such advice portrays colleagues as poltroons.

Invulnerable faculty cannot too often remind colleagues that the Faculty Code says about selecting open or closed files:

#####The faculty member being evaluated shall have

#####the right to examine letters of evaluation. ...

#####The decision of the faculty member to waive

#####or not to waive confidentiality shall not be

#####a factor in evaluating the faculty member.

#####Faculty Code Ch. III, Sec. 4, a. (1) (d); p. 12, lines 33-36 of the current code

You read it yourself!

Any colleague who states that any decision-maker looks askance at open letters admits that decision-makers have violated the Faculty Code. The code unmistakably states that the decision to assert or to waive the faculty member's right shall not be a factor.

"Bitter-enders" who argued and voted to preserve closed files have never admitted that -- even under the previous rules -- penalizing colleagues for selecting an open file violated the part of the code inset above. One head officer has long been particularly incorrigible in this regard. She repeatedly warned assembled faculty that she and her colleagues distrusted open files and encouraged colleagues, especially the untenured and non-tenureline, to choose closed files always. When she was, almost as repeatedly, informed that she was confessing that her colleagues and she were doing what the code said that they must not, she waved off the point by stating that the preference for closed files and trust in colleagues was part of their culture.

Before changes that increased openness and choice and faculty rights, enemies of open files argued that colleagues would not be as candid in letters for an open file as they would be in letters for closed files. To whom did they attribute such craven evasion of candor?

Did they confess that they lacked the fortitude to state their own views in open files and, hence, that they assumed others are as weak and fearful as they knew themselves to be? No! Such a confession would require more candor and courage than fans of closed files can muster. Instead, they blamed "human nature." That invoking human nature implicitly included themselves among the cowardly appeared not to have occurred to these enemies of openness.

Did some opponents of openness assume their own candor and courage but attribute cowardice to unspecified lesser faculty? Sure! More than once faculty have had to endure braggadocio: "I myself have always written the truth as I saw it, but I have gotten little support in evaluating colleagues rigorously."

If reactionaries try to deny faculty the right to open files, please ask them whether they are confessing their own spinelessness or assigning weakness to colleagues. Follow up by asking how many senior colleagues have exercised the right that they would now deny junior colleagues. If you enjoy watching colleagues sputter and spew, ask reactionaries why they do not argue for only closed files so that junior faculty may be protected as much as senior faculty are.

But only ask such questions if you are invulnerable. If you are not yet tenured or not eligible for tenure, simply notice this presumption that colleagues are weenies. Then take seriously your seniors' characterizations of the faculty and of themselves.

Next: Douglas Ray Edwards 1950-2008

Open Files and Closed Minds

A Faculty Advancement Committee communique recycles old rhetorical tricks but leaves the same old questions hanging.


Last May, the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] submitted to the Faculty Senate the following paragraph:


#####The primary concern of the Advancement Committee is
#####junior faculty participation in open file reviews.
#####The participation of all tenure-line colleagues in
#####departmental and program reviews is a long-standing and
#####highly valued practice at Puget Sound.
#####Evaluees have long had the option of open
#####or closed files for evaluations other than
#####the tenure evaluation. The recent vote by the faculty
#####to extend the option of open files to tenure evaluations
#####has raised the salience of the issue of junior faculty
#####participation in all open file reviews. Since the vote
#####to extend open files, FAC has observed more guarded
#####letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty,
#####and a general reluctance on their part not to weigh in
#####on change of status evaluations. We strongly encourage
#####the faculty to reconsider the open/closed files issue.



How marvelous for the FAC that they enjoyed a year in which concerns about open files were their primary concern!

Because this communication issued from the FAC, however, we must not overread it. The FAC may merely have meant that this concern came first in its list of two. The FAC and its members communicate in a manner as cunning as it is feckless, so we should not attribute to the FAC any weighting necessarily attached to this issue.

The expression of the FAC's "primary concern" is a masterpiece of misdirection: "Since the vote to extend open files, FAC has observed more guarded letters being submitted, particularly by junior faculty, and a general reluctance on their part not [sic] to weigh in on change of status evaluations." The FAC flirts with but does not commit a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: The faculty permitted candidates for tenure to choose open files, after which letters were observed to be "more guarded;" it follows that opening up at most three files in 2007-2008 led junior faculty to compose letters more guarded than would otherwise be the case. This enthymeme [an apparent syllogism with one or more premises unexpressed] might easily be misread to attribute cause and effect, but the FAC preserves plausible deniability because the FAC does not specify the links in its sequence.

Moreover, the FAC's language does not specify how many members of the FAC purport to have "observed" guarded letters and general reluctance. This permits readers to presume unanimity and an extensive list of members of the FAC. [I hope that I am excluded from that list, for I served on the FAC after the vote and "observed" not a scintilla of evidence of changes.]

The FAC specifies no means by which the reluctance and the guardedness were "observed." How were the counterfactual letters that would have been forthcoming before the faculty's vote to change policy imagined?

Please note the FAC's use of "observed." Readers might presume that the FAC draws on evidence or experience. However, "to observe" bears at least one other meaning. When bloggers and operatives "observed" that Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim or an Arab, they produced neither evidence nor experience. Nonetheless, they "observed." The use of "observed" in its report committed the FAC to no datum.

Please note as well that changes pertained only to evaluations for tenure. Prior to these changes, everyone else could elect an open or a closed file. How certain are the "observers" on the FAC that junior faculty have become more circumspect regarding files that would have been closed or open in any case?

Remember that any closing of files will not only compromise faculty rights and circumscribe faculty choices but will also return us to conditions that occasioned the change. If an evaluation file is closed, letters are summarized for evaluees. Ask candid veterans about such summaries. You'll discover that summaries are pitched so generally that evaluees often have difficulty learning exactly what spurious nonsense the letters contain. If the department does not see a letter, the FAC summarizes the letter. Who would trust a summary by such as wrote the report of the FAC to the Faculty Senate last May?

How many of the members of the FAC who agreed with this concern supported the opening of tenure files?

How many of the members of the FAC found what they had expected or predicted?

How many of the observers involved in this FAC report are disinterested observers?

The answers to these questions are blowing in the wind broken by the FAC last semester.


Next: What kind of colleagues caution vulnerable or credulous colleagues against selecting open files?