O! To be Mentored by Mental Midgets now that Spring is Here

Why do we let "souls undone undoing others" on the Faculty Advancement Committee preach at naifs?

A member of the faculty for almost two years went to a meeting with erstwhile members of the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] to hear their advice for faculty who will undergo their third-year assistant professor review, the first full-scale assessment of their teaching, service, professional growth, and likableness. She learned so much that she returned to her department asking if one really cannot have an open file for tenure.

Well played, FAC authorities! The faculty have in this century made ONE change regarding tenure files, and you clowns managed to fuzz it up so that a PhD walks away from "mentoring" confused about a matter that she understood correctly when she entered the room. And you teach for a living?

That some former members of the FAC push closed files cannot surprise us. Members of the FAC have complained that since 2005 -- when candidates for tenure were permitted to select an open file -- letter-writers have been guarded in their assessments. [Can't have guarded letters. Calumnies provide the FAC "complete" information.] Now FAC emeriti instruct virgins that closed files are truly advisable. Maybe the "sophomore" who spoke to me misunderstood, but how coincidental that she misunderstood in a manner that suited the view of some FAC conspirators of recent years. And what a coincidence that, according to one or more attendees, each FAC veteran present indicated a strong preference for closed files.

To get, through deception of the uninformed and unwary, what they cannot get through meetings of the faculty, will closed-minded FAC bunko artists stop at nothing?

I do not blame the selected FAC alums alone. I also blame the decision-maker(s) who selected these closed-minded FAC alums for this forum. More important, I blame faculty who larded the FAC with fatheads. Those who have made careers from duping naifs in classrooms can scarcely be expected to develop new skills and proclivities once appointed to the FAC. When we faculty nominate shuckers and jivers to the FAC, we enable blatherers to bamboozle the gullible.

Not content to muddle through evaluation of personnel for three years or less, the few, the proud, the cloying suffuse campus with their baleful blarney even after their terms have ended.

Once deceivers and believers make the FAC, misdirection and bad faith become part of the way of working if not the way of life. The bylaws require the FAC to appoint one chair; the members of the FAC knowingly ignored the bylaws for years, then engaged in the subterfuge of naming every member of the FAC chair. This flouting too may be blamed in part on the faculty, for the Faculty Senate knows that the FAC is rejecting a mandate for which they do not care. Chairs of the Faculty Senate and senators do nothing about it.

But of course colleagues pretend to believe the FAC when the FAC says it assiduously adheres to authority.

On the FAC colleagues exemplify Orwell's proposition that the great enemy of clarity is insincerity. Like essays from desultory students, FAC letters celebrate murk and sloppiness as if they were virtues. Euphemistic encomia laud for their excellent professional growth evaluees with no professional growth but friends on the FAC or patrons in high places. Disfavored evaluees find their students' evaluations categorized in ways obviously at variance with the most straightforward readings to conjure an "excellence gap" in teaching. [Why should the FAC limit its bad faith to readings of the code or the bylaws?] The FAC then stonewalls the president on the rare occasions when he troubles himself to inquire into their "reasoning" and why it makes little sense.

Thus do "made men" unmake themselves.

None of the above should surprise anyone who has been at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] for even a few years.

As a prior entry in "Rump Parliament" [1-14-10] counseled, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

What may surprise even jaded veterans, however, is just how doltish FAC parolees can be. Did a recent member of the FAC truly say that he advises colleagues to select closed files for the same reason that he advises his students to waive access to letters of recommendation? He claimed that he tells faculty and student alike that readers take confidential letters more seriously, did he?

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Please permit me to advise Dr. Dumkopf about colleagues and about students/advisees in turn.

Favoring or disfavoring colleagues because they selected open or closed files flouts the Faculty Code. If one makes a habit of violating the code, I suppose that admitting violations forthrightly is more virtuous than concealing one's misdemeanors.

As for advisees or students, counsel your recommendees to waive their right to see the letter, then give them copies. That way, you protect your students and advisees both against the prejudices of the closed-minded and against any temptations to write what you would just as soon the subject of the letter not know you wrote. If you would not have your advisee or student read it, do not write it; if you must write what you would not have your student or advisee read, do not agree to write "for" the student or advisee.

Why do the simplest professional and ethical puzzles stymie the simple-minded?

I admit readily that the FAC might advise naifs to go with a closed file for their first FAC evaluation. That is one way to smoke out the assassins in the ranks of a program, department, or school. If mentors communicated that stratagem clearly and repeatedly, they might assist tyros.

However, if we advise newcomers to choose closed files to elicit negatives while probationary faculty may remedy defects real or concocted, wouldn't probationary faculty immediately infer that come tenure time they must select open files to be able to counter negatives that dissemblers will pour into the process?

Beyond that, junior colleagues should seek colleagues with reputations for candor and awareness and should neither seek nor accept mentoring from the apologists or apparatchiks. How are inexperienced faculty to sort apologists or apparatchiks from candid and aware veterans? They should inquire of those who proffer advice the capacities in which they have served the university. Apologists and apparatchiks do not work for free. They work for patrons who sanction negatively or positively. Colleagues frequently appointed over the years to positions of responsibility owing to their reputations for reliability have, in effect, been outed by their appointers. [Re-read "Respectable, Reliable, Reputable" in this blog, 4 March 2007.] Many who have done time on the FAC are seldom or never paraded before junior faculty because of the likelihood that they will commit candor or acknowledge truths inconvenient for the powerful.

Joanne Herring: "Why is Congress saying one thing and doing nothing?"
Charlie Wilson: "Well, tradition mostly."

Naifs: "Why do so many members of the FAC advise faculty so poorly?"
Wild Bill: "Well, tradition mostly."

Third-year assistant professors should never listen to FAC members who are ignorant of "local" presuppositions, habits, or traditions. The FAC members will argue for stripped-down files because that makes the work of the FAC easier. They are prosecuting their own lassitude and preserving their own latitude. Having counseled evaluees to "keep it simple," members of the FAC will then sniff that the code explicitly burdens evaluees with making the case for advancement and will resolve silences or gaps against those who have listened to FAC advice.

"And you'll be amazed at the gaze / On their faces as they sentence you"

Rather, preparation of the newbie's file should be informed by the newbie's "local" culture, peers in department, program, or school. The third-year assistant should ask those who will supply specialized, expert assessments what those evaluators would prefer to be available.

Don't tell anybody, but the members of the FAC read only a small subset of submitted materials anyway.

Oh? The FAC members did not make that tidbit clear while urging skinny files?

I am shocked and amazed!

Miscreants Out Themselves

What our colleagues decry, they often make needful.

Amid his monologue in the meeting of the full faculty held 6 April 2010, a colleague professed concern about the second duty proposed for the Faculty Senate's Committee on Diversity. He claimed that many colleagues or departments would object to the Diversity Committee's participation "... in the development of initiatives that enable the university to hire new faculty from historically under-represented populations and to support better the retention and success of such faculty."

Yes, at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] such a provision passes for audacity.

I suppose he was correct. Many colleagues would object to hiring from under-represented populations and supporting new faculty. After all, what we have done so far has worked so well! Do we have to keep priming the pump? And, of course, catering to social Luddites is the way to plan for the future.

That the speaker hailed from a department infamous for its shortcomings in hiring and support should have surprised no long-time observer. After all, faculty who object to scrutiny or assistance almost always come from departments, programs, or schools that should be scrutinized and assisted most.

To assist the objector and his department, I offer infra some generalizations about diversity at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce].


The more a department opposes scrutiny of any kind [not just diversity], the more that department should be scrutinized.

The more strenuously a department refuses assistance, the more that department needs assistance.

Departments, programs, or schools should have nothing to hide from colleagues or administrators. Indeed, competent departments, like competent scholars, welcome comments and criticisms because that is how competent scholars and competent departments perform their best. In evaluation of students or of peers, confident professionals welcome additional pairs of eyes because "outsiders" may catch errors or misjudgments that insiders missed.

In hiring as in scholarship, if you fear error or injustice more than criticism or questioning, you seek the opinions of other professionals. Referees for journals or publishers do not know as much about my data or topics as I do, yet they manage to alert me to missteps and misphrasings. Go figure!

When departments, programs, or schools hide from scrutiny or supervision, they invite us all to ask what they are hiding. If recruitment is on the up and up, why dodge review? If you believe you did your work well, why not have someone check that work? If candidates from chronically under-represented groups tend not to make the cut in your searches for good reasons, why not share those good reasons with others?

Experienced Puget Clowns faculty know that these questions answer themselves. Recruitment all too often is not on the up and up; the work was done sloppily or deviously; the reasons, far from good, would be unacceptable if known.

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

By the way: Ever notice how perverse arguments and arguers become whenever diversity issues arise?

This colleague argues that BHERT [Bias-Hate Emergency Reaction Team] or something like it is utterly necessary. In the course of her argument, she makes it plain that she should never serve on BHERT because she is overzealous, self-righteous, and dopey.

After the meeting, another colleague argues that the meeting revealed the zealotry that makes diversity programs so dangerous. In making his argument, however, he reveals the atavism that makes diversity programs so necessary.

Am I the only one who notices these things?

Confederacy of Naked Emperors

How redolent the phrase; how repulsive the image!

Long ago on a campus far away from Tackytown, a few academics came to characterize faculty meetings as a "confederacy of naked emperors."

"Naked emperors," of course, recalls "The Emperor's New Clothes" [see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes]. Hans Christian Andersen told a variant on the tale of tricking a none-too-bright monarch into acting as if non-existent raiment were resplendent. Told that the sartorial splendor will be obvious to the competent and the innocent, the emperor must first act as if his new suit does not leave him naked lest the trickster tailors "discover" the emperor to be incompetent and corrupted. Then the emperor must delude himself of the magnificence of his new "threads" so that he can parade in the nude among his subjects. In some versions, the emperor even gets past the child so innocent that he can say, "Look! The emperor is naked." Now that is self-delusion. But do not overlook the subjects who professed to admire the new suit.

"Naked emperors" captures the vanity and pretentiousness of academics. Among academics as among others, wily operators can only con those who are not honest. Moreover, attend to the sequencing. Incompetent or corrupt academics encourage flatterers and clientele to lavish praise for virtues that the praised do not possess but ought to. Fulsome flattery or flatulence then turns the head of the academic [and the stomach of anyone with common sense and powers of perception at least equal to their powers of suspending disbelief]. Convinced that their colleagues manifest incompetence or malice if they do not join the praises for those not praiseworthy, the flattered cleaves to confederates who get, prolong, and further the delusions. Taken in by their own blather, these nudists glory in their greatness. They fool themselves about fooling others. They find other naked emperors, who must maintain the pretense, and the emperors confederate to delude one another as they delude themselves.

Usually, one does not want an academic to be unclothed in the presence of sentient beings, but "naked" conveys the more pleasing image of pretentious fops who fool themselves while attempting to fool others. The nudity conveys the peril: woe unto all colleagues who see through the pretense and behold the nakedness. Holy Medusa! Wholly Medusa?

In addition, I think that the term "confederacy" works as no synonym quite would. "Conspiracy" or "cabal" might connote practicality or planning, both unlikely among academics. "Confederacy" suggests, by contrast, an aloof alliance preserved by exchanges of favors. The exchanges need not be planned. Fidelity need not last into the next exchange. Opportunism reigns among all who must hide from themselves and from others their inadequacies.

Most "coalitions" involve candid acknowledgment of opportunism and interest, so "coalitions" might not capture the mutual interdependence of pretenders and those who pretend along with the pretenders.

"Congress" has more talented dissemblers, so "confederacy" works better than "congress."

"Collusion" might understate the sheer necessity behind confederation. Collusion may be ephemeral. Those who collude this year may be subjected to collusion that excludes themselves next year. "Confederacy" builds on the Latin for a treaty or compact. This imparts an ongoing character to pretenders and pretending-alongside, to an ongoing "contract of depravity" between/among flattered and flatterers.

So it's gotta be "confederacy."

At the next faculty meeting, watch as lunatics swap stories, favors, and spit. Colleagues by turns preen and posture before admiring confederates, then join the audience to swoon at the blather of others.

After a short lecture, a colleague rises to praise the lecturer and poses a question that the lecturer answered in the opening three minutes of the lecture. ADHD [Attention Deficit Hypocritical Disorder] is common among naked emperors.

A naked emperor regales the assembled with an impassioned speech utterly unrelated to any business in a meeting and utterly unburdened with facts. The other naked emperors join the formation renowned as "The Loon Coalition" to reiterate the necessity of the first emperor's eloquence and erudition.

A narcissistic blatherskite intones a blatantly obvious point then luxuriates as other naked emperors argue about whether the blatherskite has displayed more perspicuity or perspicacity.

When you see episodes such as the above, it is important to translate. "Professor Dithers makes a fascinating observation that we all are liable to overlook," for example, is the emperor's code for "My, Professor Dithers, but you are looking very fashionable today. Are those trousers new? They nicely display your manly bulges."

For a second example, "I want to thank Professor Dodders for all of the hard work that obviously went into her utterly unrehearsed remarks" is emperor's code for "Professor Dodders, you are as much a fashion plate as you are a scholar."

In classrooms and other venues in which the credulous and the cowed congregate, nudists glory in inadequacies displayed but never pronounced.

Recalling My Letter

Waiting out a colleague's fate, I remember my own tenure-decision.

As I await for a colleague "the lame feet of salvation" (Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks") from a committee that too often plays "death the redeemer" (Ibid.), I recall waiting for word from the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] when I was considered for tenure.

I had a unanimous endorsement from my department and letters from colleagues at Harvard and other creditable institutions. Still, I had not kept my mouth shut and "the asshole clause" -- possession of appropriate personal and professional characteristics -- had yet to be excised from the Faculty Code. In the semester I stood/stooped for tenure, I had noted in the Faculty Senate that the general education core had yet to pass according to rules that the faculty had agreed to. Throughout the renegotiation of general education in 1990-1991, I had questioned such prescriptions as "Science in Context," calling them pork-barrel projects and an "International POlitical Economy" syllabus that was risible. Before that, I had questioned the delay of fraternity and sorority rush on the ground that the faculty had no business saying when clubs could recruit.

Moreover, a member of the FAC had warned me not to disagree with the dean again after a dean so calm that he was nearly comatose had struck me over a governance dispute. At first I thought the member of the FAC was joking, but he made it clear he was serious. "You're saying that this university is so chickenshit that my disagreeing with the dean and my getting struck by the dean might doom me?" I asked rhetorically. One sixth of the FAC there and then assured me that this university did not need troublemakers. [This was before I learned to say, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Please see the entry in this blog for 14 January 2010.]

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had at least two advantages. First, I was a male. It would be some years before I learned just how advantageous that Y-chromosome was. Second, a contemporary bereft of a Y-chromosome was given to obeying federal law on sexual harassment despite sentiments in her department such as the immortal, "If she followed the law, then that law is wrong!" The FAC lavished ammunition on the whistleblower. Maybe they ran out of ammunition (Admiral Stockdale, 1992) before me. [The university ran out of ammunition when she sued and got a huge settlement. She threw a great party, but I still miss her.]

By the time the FAC sent me its letter, I was in Vermont. I opened the letter and smiled that the FAC had recommended me for tenure. Then I read the letter aloud to my friend. She was a voracious reader and learned, so she gasped along with me as solecisms and errors in the letter accumulated. I do not think that she was much impressed with the institution at which I had just received tenure. "This letter was written by a professor?" she asked. "Nope," I answered. "It was written by six professors."

In the final paragraph of the letter, the FAC explicitly hoped that I would conform more and squawk less than I had in my probationary period. I found the FAC's presumption droll. [Think Victor Laszlo in "Casablanca:" "If I didn't give {names of the underground leaders} to you in a concentration camp where you had more persuasive methods at your disposal, I certainly won't give them to you now."]

When I returned to Tacoma, the main author of that letter took me to dinner to explain away its final paragraph. He apparently did not want me to think that the letter, especially in that final paragraph, meant what it said. I cut him off. "My letter will always say what the words literally meant. Anything you say now is gloss beside the point." My interlocutor seemed flummoxed and frustrated by my unwillingness to go along with his re-mystifying. How lacking in civility of me after all he had done for me!

Thus did I come to understand why my pre-tenure period was called probationary. When I completed my probation, I received a lifetime sentence.

Sunshine Thugs

Are you a Sunshine Thug?

Our colleague is a Sunshine Thug. He may even be The Sunshine Thug.

The Sunshine Thug beams to see me as he asks me how my life is going. The Sunshine Thug's face shines on everyone most of the time. The Sunshine Thug radiates diffidence about his own competence as a means of suggesting that whomever he speaks with is a far better member of the faculty than he.

Do not be taken in! The pleasantries are mannered rather than truly civil or cordial. His sunshine is shtick.

If his betters close a door and grant Dr. Sunshine confidentiality, his dark side will come out. If it nets him a course release, he'll support a decision to push you down a well. Give him a title, no matter how trivial, then watch him dispatch his good friends, his cherished colleagues, his longtime department, or anyone else if it might please those who can grant him favors or save him bother. Smiling all the while and professing to be uncertain what has happened or why, this Mack the Knife flashes his shark teeth as he fingers the blade out of sight.

Having alluded to Bertolt Brecht, I am uncertain whether I now should steal from Edmond Rostand. Rostand has his hero Cyrano denounce some Sunshine Thugs. These folks "seek for the patronage of some great man, and like a creeping vine on a tall tree, crawl upward, where [they] cannot stand alone ..." Clinging to the lofty, Sunshine Thugs "... play the buffoon in the vile hope of teasing out a smile on some cold face ..." and make their "knees callous, and cultivate a supple spine ... ." Shaded by their patrons and protectors, the Sunshine Thugs "[t]ickle the horns of Mammon with [their] left hand, while their right, too proud to know his partner's business, takes in the fee ..." Betraying whatever smidgeon of talent they may have and usually do not need, Sunshine Thugs "[u]se the fire God gave [them] to burn incense all day long under the nose of wood and stone ..." even as they burn vulnerable colleagues out of the sight of most colleagues. In sum, Rostand/de Bergerac might say that Sunshine Thugs "[c]alculate, scheme, [live in fear], love more to make a visit than a poem, seek introductions, favors, influences..." all while acting the part of the affable, slightly daffy academic too distracted to have any part in dastardly deeds in which they play a prominent but latent part.

Shall I invoke Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, MN, instead?

You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning

You got a lotta nerve
To say you gota helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that's winning

...

You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, "How are you?" "Good luck"
But you don't mean it

When you know as well as me
You'd rather see me paralyzed
Why don't you just come out once
And scream it

...

If in public you praise excrement as excellence while in private you serve anyone who can do you any good or any harm, you may be a Sunshine Thug. If you loudly, proudly endorse independence even as you punish independents in any circumstance that hides your other face, you may be a Sunshine Thug. If you are craven in the shadows but gay in the daylight, you may be a Sunshine Thug.

Please do not be a Sunshine Thug.

What's Wrong with Collusion?

Do veterans of the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce] hear what they have become when they quibble over corruptions of peer evaluation?

Upon hearing scuttlebutt about collusion in a tenure evaluation, colleagues with 50 years of service at our fine university independently inquired, "What's wrong with collusion?"

Such a question asked without irony limns a depravity* of faculty evaluation here. I have quoted from "The Hustler" more than once the jarring characterization of Sarah Packer [Piper Laurie]: "We have a contract of depravity. All we have to do is pull the blinds down."

Some Puget clowns no longer pull the blinds down.





* To go all etymological on your butt, to deprave is to descend ["de-"] into crookedness ["pravus"]. Perhaps our colleagues were straight and whole when they arrived so long ago. Their speech illuminates what has become of them.

Malfeasant or Nonfeasant?

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



Lest we forget, three 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 misbehavior and to make recommendations to prevent violations of the Faculty Code and due process in the future. That ad hoc committee produced no findings, instead insulating the 2003-2004 PSC and insulting the Faculty Senate and faculty. 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.

This 2006 report was one of the most cunning or cowardly or contemptible or clumsy or clownish actions by a committee or subcommittee ever. Was that ad hoc committee truly malfeasant or merely nonfeasant? You make the call!

The resulting communiqué from the Starr Chamber was a marvel of haughtiness and misdirection. Having committed undeniable errors, the Starr Chamber claimed 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 then Academic Dean, himself 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 next grievance hearing 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.

Yes! By their own admission, the Starr Chamber erred once or twice in 2003-2004. Even the senators desperate to fend off any accountability had to admit this fact. Thus, the flimsy acknowledgment of the Faculty Senate merely stated a fact. Was the Starr Chamber in its disparaging the Faculty Senate flat-out malfeasant or merely nonfeasant? You make the call! Maybe you do not mind deceptions from the Starr Chamber. Maybe you expect no better.

The Senate had noted other errors or irregularities that the Starr Chamber could not have denied if the members of the Starr Chamber had spoken to senators or cooperated in any way. No one can dispute that the Starr Chamber conducted a 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 failed of the Faculty Code's explicit deadline.

That was a violation of the Faculty Code, a violation that one hopes was mistaken but may have been deliberate. No one may dispute that violation and argue in good faith. Was the Starr Chamber arguing in bad faith or was it that incompetent? You make the call!

To cover its misstep or mission, the Starr Chamber "interpreted" the Faculty Code to set the deadline at fifteen working days, an interpretation by which the Starr Chamber hoped to negate the mandate in the Faculty Code.

That was another violation of the Faculty Code. If the Starr Chamber believed they could substitute their own deadline for the code's deadline, they compounded their errors. If they knew that they had no authority to overrule the Faculty Code, they deliberately violated the code. Was the Starr Chamber mistaken or misbehaving? You make the call!

It is not only beyond dispute but beyond belief that the Starr Chamber then blew by the "reinterpreted" fifteen working days -- another incontestable violation of its duty. You read that last sentence right: the Starr Chamber disobeyed the explicit mandate of the code [15 days], "interpreted" that explicit mandate to excuse their disobedience [that is, they went to 15 "working" days as the new limit], than failed to hold the hearing within 15 working days.

Was this trifecta of violation merely three mistakes, as the Faculty Senate charitably proclaimed, or was it deliberate arrogation? The Starr Chamber should have thanked the Faculty Senate for calling flouting of authority error.

When the second grievance was eventually heard more than two months after it reached the Starr Chamber, one of the two claims advanced by the grievant turned out to have occurred more than 30 working days in the past according to the grievant's own complaint. That is correct! The Starr Chamber had delayed and delayed hearing a grievance that it could, if even one member of the Starr Chamber could or would have counted to 30, have dismissed in a timely manner. The Faculty Code limits grievances to 30 working days. Despite the code's "statute of limitations," the Starr Chamber at long last entertained that grievance.

Behold yet another violation that senators did not have to investigate or to prove; the grievant's complaint and a calendar proved the nonfeasance or malfeasance of the Starr Chamber.

The Valentine's Day greeting from the Starr Chamber to the Senate in 2007 teemed with still more deceptions. The most inept and/or feckless 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. The Starr Chamber phrasing was thus cunning and misleading in the extreme. The Senate as a whole had not investigated, but the Senate's ad hoc committee had discovered that "mistakes were made."

Was the Starr Chamber's clever phrasing malfeasant or nonfeasant? You make the call!

The recklessness of the Starr Chamber in conducting its proceedings in 2003-2004 made the Starr Chamber's call for careful work as amusing as it was hypocritical. The Starr Chamber then augmented its hypocrisy: "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 multiple standards deployed by the Starr Chamber and its 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 dared to write "due process" without fear that members' tongues would burst into flames?

Was the Starr Chamber's reference to "due process" malfeasant or nonfeasant? You make the call!

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 had 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. This effrontery of the Starr Chamber recalls the classic definition of chutzpah: A son kills his parents then demands mercy because he is an orphan.

Was the Starr Chamber more malfeasant than nonfeasant in claiming that the Faculty Senate did not consult all parties when the Starr Chamber itself refused to be consulted based on a fictitious confidentiality? You make the call!

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.

More malfeasant? More nonfeasant? You make the call!

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.

Malfeasant? Nonfeasant? Pathetic? Embarrassing? You make the call!

Still, the 2006-2007 Senate weathered the whining duplicity and abject 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.

So little genuine supervision or accountability so aggravated the Starr Chamber that I wonder what genuine, routine Senate supervision would do to such popinjays.