ARE YOU SUFFICIENTLY SENSITIVE TO ADMINISTRATIVE INTENT?

I was an assistant professor aspiring to become associate; and had to prove my teaching, publications and service met the mark. My "course evaluations" were quite good. (Actually they were my customer satisfaction ratings — but it is unwise to call them that.) My publications also met muster. The problem was my "service."

 

In this institution, "service" was defined by service on college committees. Here I was drawing a blank. Despite regularly volunteering, in writing, mind you, for whatever committee slots were available, I received no assignments. 

Favored faculty, who often had been educated by the religious order running the school, got the great majority of the key committee assignments. They even garnered these coveted assignments when they hadn't filled out the requisite areas of interest form. In contrast, I filled mine out regularly. I indicated preferences, but even expressed willingness to serve on any committee, Nevertheless, I got zero assignments.

An absence of committee work would doubtless sink my prospects for promotion. So I decided to inquire into this situation. Assignments were made by our faculty senate's "Committee on Committees. It largely consisted of old boy faculty who were alums of the formerly all male school. Oddly, though, this committee was chaired by a woman. What distinctive qualities won her this position? It seemed to me there were two. First, she was a co-religionist. That seemed to be an unwritten qualification. Second, and of far greater importance, she demonstrated slavish servility to every administrative power holder. 

I requested an appointment with this woman, and was in no mood to genuflect. So I opened the meeting abruptly by boldly declaring that I had repeatedly volunteered for any committee assignment, but got nowhere. I noted other faculty had received one assignment after another. What, I asked, was going on? Her reply? It had somehow been determined that I was "insufficiently sensitive to administrative intent." 

Perturbed, I reminded this academic weather vain that my promotion was at stake. I told her that I had kept a careful record of all my futile efforts to volunteer and, as well, those who had received them instead. Then I suggested that if I failed to get promoted because of any alleged "lack of service," she and the other committee members might find themselves legally liable.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 I never again had any trouble getting committee assignments. And my promotion followed in due course.

Care to guess what subsequently became of this weather vane chair of the Committee on Committees? It wasn't long before she was appointed, perhaps "anointed" is a better word, Dean of Arts and Sciences. And once in this exalted office, she continued to manifest her finely-tuned sensitivity to administrative intent. Of course, the consequences of her newly-acquired influence frequently disadvantaged the very faculty whose interests she supposedly represented. Before she rise to power this gal was a professor of English, not meteorology. Nevertheless, she always knew which way the wind blew.

What can be learned from this story? 

1. That course evaluations actually measure customer satisfaction. 
2. That there are irreconcilable, though unmentionable, tensions between the interests of the administration and those of the faculty. 
3. That a surprising number of faculty are craven lick-spittles. 
4. That brown-nosing pays — at least in terms of promotion.
5. That one's alleged colleagues might not be collegial. 

What else, more generally, can be learned from this? That there are covert academic realities reminiscent of the often missing genitalia on human anatomical illustrations. Genitalia are obviously critical components of human anatomy. Nevertheless they frequently get “disappeared” on such illustrations. But mentioning their absence is risky.

Are there times to confront the academic equivalent of those anatomical illustrations, point to the blank crotch area and ask, “What the hell happened here?" Apparently there are. But when should one do that? Only when you have more to lose if you keep pretending you don't notice the absence. 

Pulling the sheet off these covert realities can produce a sobering effect on academic power holders when all else fails. It can cause them to stop and weigh potential costs and benefits before messing with you further. But remember, breaking the silence will forever change your status both with the power holders and your colleagues. For good or ill, neither will ever view you, or treat you, in the same way again. 

THE END OF IGNORANCE? sure, if you're politically "correct"

 "In the age of information, ignorance is a choice." Donald Miller

In the world of the most politically correct, no one is ignorant — not even flat wrong, They're "differently informed." Folks who were convinced that Barrack Obama was an African-born Muslim, for example, weren't gullible knuckle-heads. They were, at least according to these relativists, just "differently informed," When Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested a Jewish, Rothschild-financed, space laser might be igniting devastating wildfires in California, she was not astoundingly ignorant, malignantly anti-Semitic, nor engaging in hate-mongering demagoguery. She too was "differently informed. In this case by "alternative facts." 

How deliciously nonjudgmental. No assertion is too ridiculous nor obviously laughable to merit dismissal. Preposterous assertions are merely "differently informed." Informed by whatever half-baked nonsense some nincompoop happens to subscribe to. In this house of mirrors, no one is wrong. It's more like being left, instead of right, handed. You see, there is no right or wrong. Just different, equally acceptable, conceptions of reality.

Yes, really "woke" folks even reject the possibility that some sources of authority are more accurate than others. That is too judgmental for them. Instead they implicitly deny that ignorance even exists. Take, for example, folks who adamantly insist that the condensation trails left by planes flying at high altitude are actually "chemtrails" maliciously laced with harmful substances, being released by the villain of their choice. In a normal world this abysmally ignorant claim would simply discredit the believer. Not in the woke world. Here, any and all conceptions, even those in clear violation of a known natural causes, are plausible. Why? Because factual claims no longer require adequate supporting evidence. If some dimwits believe it, that's good enough.

In the real world individuals embracing puerile buncombe are dismissed out of hand. Not in this world. In this fact-free zone there are no ignoramuses, no blockheads, no dimwits, no cretins. Not even a single shit head! For instance, if someone insists the earth is a mere 6,000 years old, not the scientifically affirmed 4.5 billion, they're not way, way off. The're not utterly wrong. They're merely "differently informed." 

In this Alice in Wonderland any sources become authoritative should someone subscribe to them. When born-again believers embrace the preposterous notion that earth is 6,000 years old, as mentioned above, they probably are unknowingly relying on the calculations of Bishop Ussher — a 17th Century Church of Ireland prelate who painstakingly added up the generations of the Bible, cranked in every post-Biblical generation he could find, and gravely concluded that creation took place on 23 October, 4004 BC at 6 P.M. (Actually he was a bit uncertain about the precise time of day.) 

Was Usher correct? Of course not. In fact, he was as full of crap as a Christmas turkey. But for the fully "woke," the late Bishop's reckoning is at least as good as centuries of painstaking scientific investigation that has unearthed vast amounts of contrary physical evidence. Nevertheless, in the wacky world of the totally politically correct, any fact claim, however hare-brained, is just as good as any other. Of course, the enormous amount of drivel available on social media reinforces this idiocy many times over. Search the internet and you will come up with an enormous amounts of puerile none-sense that enjoys an abundance of believers.

How far does their factual relativism take these true believers? The most zealous end up in a world where truth and fact have become inoperative. The scientific method is coequal with the crystal ball readings of store-front gypsies or the self-enriching preachments of flimflamming televangelists. In this world, the earth really is flat if you believe it is. 

How, in the name of reason, do these zealots end up in this ridiculous position? Well, there is a long-standing debate about whether knowledge is structured by a unique relationship to "reality," or is "socially constructed." In the former an "objective" organization of facts about the world can be constructed, in the later that organization totally depends upon the interests of the organizers?

The value of a socially constructed point of view is that it helps identify potential stakeholders. It suggests whose interests are being served. But it also nullifies the power of a truly revolutionary method for factual discovery: the scientific method. Designed to be independent of special interests, this methodology continuously produces astonishingly powerful results. Consider, for example, nuclear bombs or the eradication of small pox after a successful world-wide vaccination campaign.

Unfortunately, the most "woke" accept the socially constructed view so enthusiastically that they end up believing that all knowledge — except their own, of course — is entirely relative. They therefore believe it follows that all knowledge claims must be given equal weight even if careful scientific .  

analysis reveals them to be wrong.

What are the implications of such unreserved "tolerance" for schooling? For one thing, it lays waste to every form of education that is based on the scientific method. So too all historic claims based on overwhelming evidence. In fact, with the search for truth abandoned, with knowledge a matter of opinion, with any viewpoint as good as any other, scholarship itself is vaporized and insipid, suicidal "tolerance" takes over. 

Worse, schooling's sorting function, in which competence and knowledge are measured and reported, becomes completely inoperative. No more graduating with honors. No more failures either. Everybody get's an "A." Just don't count on expertise in any area of your life. Need skilled cardiac surgery? Good luck with that if your "surgeon" was allowed to become one for political reasons. Live in a high-rise? Make sure your life insurance is paid up because that building might have been designed by some knucklehead who passed his civil engineering exams only because one view of structural integrity is now just as good as any other. Remember, everybody passes!

Does that seem an unlikely happening? Well more and more of it is going on. For instance, I know of a professor at Georgia State who openly states that he cannot bring himself to award any failing grades.He sees that as entirely too judgmental; plus it thwarts the expectations of the students involved. So, semester after semester, he awards counterfeit grades without challenge from the administration. This kind of thing ultimately destroys the value of a college or university degree. Is that what we want?