Month: July 2022

Manny Wahrsagen

Mandelbrot, aka Manny, Wahrsagen was the Associate Dean for Academic Standards, and kind of the Greek chorus of everything that went on in the College of Arts and Sciences, or he would have been, if he’d ever commented on anything that went on in the College of Arts and Sciences. Mostly he just looked unhappy. He saw everything, though. Nothing escaped Manny. Sadly, he had almost no authority to actually do anything. He’d been chasing Vince Viscous ever since he’d learned that Vince basically taught only one course. Manny, you see, was the one assigned to ensure quality control of the curriculum. Manny was the one who had to make sure that everything was ship shape when the accreditation people did there periodic reviews of the college. The problem was that he had no authority to speak directly to Vince about the disturbing uniformity of his various syllabi. 

Manny had to work through the College Curriculum Committee of which he was an ex officio member. He could come down hard on new course proposals that failed to adhere to the guidelines established by the provost’s office. Once a course was approved, however, it could basically be taught any old way the person assigned to teach it wanted. This made some people, such as Tanya, wonder what was the purpose of the course approval process. Syllabi were always subjected to merciless scrutiny to ensure that they conformed to the Provost’s Office guidelines, first by departmental curriculum committees and then by the college curriculum committee, and then, finally by the Senate Committee on Academic Matters.  They were frequently returned to the instructor in question, at various stages of the approval process, with detailed instructions for elaborate revisions. But then once a course was approved, “academic freedom” dictated it could be taught any old way any old instructor wanted, which meant, or course, that the instructor in question could substitute an entirely new syllabus for the one that had been approved. 

Manny’s authority extended only so far as his position on the College Curriculum Committee. He could make it known, of course, to program directors and to heads of departments that he was aware that many of the syllabi faculty actually used bore no relation whatever to the syllabi that were included with new course proposals as part of the course approval process and that he was not happy about this. That was all he could do, though. It was the job of program directors to ensure that faculty under their direction approached their courses in a responsible manner and the job of department chairs to make sure that program directors did this. 

The problem was that program directors had no means of disciplining errant faculty and department chairs had few means of disciplining program directors. Everyone at every level of university administration enjoyed his or her post, more or less, at the behest of the faculty. Program directors had no control over raises, all they could do to discipline faculty was to assign them shitty courses at shitty times. If they actually did that, however, they risked faculty complaining to the chair about them. Department chairs don’t want to have to deal with faculty complaints, so program directors generally tried to make the faculty under their direction happy, and that meant, of course, that they were extremely reluctant to criticize them. 

Department chairs were in a similarly powerless position. There was a steep learning curve for program directors because program directors handled the scheduling of what was sometimes upward of a hundred courses. They had to be familiar with the scheduling of courses in other departments so that they could avoid scheduling courses that conflicted with required courses in other disciplines. English majors, for example, were required to take History 101 their first year, along with MATH 100: Math for Humanities Majors, so it was incumbent upon the program directors that they be aware of when these course were offered so that they would not schedule ENG 101 on the same day and at the same time as either of those other two courses. 

There were lots of these potential conflicts. When one figured in the situation of English minors as well as majors, scheduling became almost unmanageably complex (that Cliff Edge had not developed scheduling software that would automatically detect such conflicts was one of the enduring mysteries of the place, as was the fact that they paid millions of dollars for online learning platform software, human resources, and payroll and benefits software, etc., when one would have thought that faculty and graduate students over in the College of Information Sciences could have developed software for the university for which they would not have had to pay anything over and above faculty salaries and graduate-student stipends they already paid). It took so long for program directors to learn the ropes that once they did, department chairs were extremely reluctant to replace them. 

Of course when we talk about disciplining faculty, we are referring to the proverbial stick and everyone knows that the carrot is a much better motivator than the stick. But alas, raises, when they came (because some years they didn’t) had hovered between 1%-2% for as long as anyone could remember. Worse, department chairs were not free to give anyone and everyone even these minuscule raises. Dean Debbie was so tight with the college purse strings that there was seldom enough money to give more than a couple of people the whopping 2% raise. Most people would have to be content with less, and some people would have to be content with no raise at all, independently of how hard they had worked. These were hard times in higher education, Dean Debbie always explained. 

And yes, indeed they were hard times because department chairs, typically felt that they could not give glowing annual reviews to people to whom they knew they could not give raises, so they often strained to find something in everyone’s performance of which they could be critical. Sometimes they flat-out invented things, such as when Willard Weasel penalized Tanya for not giving finals when, in fact, she did give finals, just in the form of a final essay rather than a final exam. Of course these grasping at negative straws made the process of giving and receiving annual reviews incredibly unpleasant. Not only did chairs have to face disgruntled faculty one on one in their annual review meetings, they were hounded during those long fall months in which the reviews took place by the specter of open faculty revolt.

Manny was a firm believer in the carrot over the stick and felt that praise often worked as well as raises depending on the faculty member. In this respect, however, he was a voice crying in the wilderness. The thing that really galled him, though, was that the stick was so often wielded for the wrong reasons. Willard was the worst offender in that regard. Tanya, one of the most promising members to join Cliff Edge’s faculty in years, was routinely throttled by Willard, while Vince, whose skills at ingratiating himself with anyone and everyone with any authority obscured that his “scholarship” consisted of publishing what was essentially the same paper over and over again, was one of the few faculty whom Willard provided with a steady diet of carrot salad. Vince had been given every break in the book. While Tanya was routinely criticized for everything from her teaching to how she carried out the committee work that was piled upon her, Vince received course release after course release and was publicly lauded for everything he wrote, even letters to the editor of the local paper.

As I said, Manny had been chasing Vince for some time. It wasn’t just that he felt his position as the guarantor of academic quality in the College necessitated ferreting out fraudsters such as Vince. It was personal. That is, Manny felt that Vince was making a mockery of higher education more generally and hence lowering the public esteem which Manny’s mathematician parents had ensured him that he also would enjoy if he pursued a career in the ivory tower. Manny, being basically decent and kind hearted, found it difficult to admit to himself that his pursuit of Vince was based not merely on professional reasons, but also personal contempt and loathing. He was in one of those unusual situations where the right thing to do was also the selfish thing to do, hence it was relatively easy for him to avoid acknowledging the schadenfruede that now accompanied his conviction that he finally had Vince (and possibly also Willard) in his clutches.

The Title IX Office

Oliver Obfuscater had it made. He wasn’t making so much money as he would have if he had stayed in big law, but his life was a lot easier and a lot more satisfying. It hadn’t actually been his choice to leave big law. He was let go. It wasn’t that he didn’t bill enough. It was that he didn’t work enough. He was, to put it kindly, not a workaholic, so he didn’t really fit into the world of big law. Plus, if truth be told, he wasn’t actually all that smart. He was one of the increasing army of humanities grads who decided to go to law school because they didn’t know what else to do after they got out of college. He was young enough that he was a product of “the student is always right” attitude among university administrators. His instructors had mostly been overworked adjuncts who had little time to grade assignments and so basically didn’t give any, and who were so afraid of negative student evaluations that they routinely gave everyone high grades. So basically, Oliver had never really had to work in college. He’d been able to wrangle a decent GPA by making veiled threats to any instructor who had appeared poised to give him less than an A, so he actually had a pretty decent GPA. So did everyone else, though, so he’d had to take one of those LSAT prep courses just to get into a third-tier law school. 

He hadn’t gotten an offer from a top firm, but he had gone into big law none-the-less, and he was still in recovery from that when he heard from a friend that Cliff Edge was looking for someone to head its Title IX office, or Office of Equity and Diversity (OED for short). The job was perfect for him. There was hardly any work. The work was done by the “investigators,” a bevy of attractive young recent law-school grads that he liked to think of his harem. He rationalized hiring only young women on the grounds that most of the complaints his office received came from female students, so they would likely feel more comfortable talking to a woman than to a man, and the closer that women was to their own age, he figured, the more comfortable they would be. And everything, in higher education at this point, was about making the students happy. None of the investigators was very bright, but that didn’t matter. Oliver knew that his job was not actually to root out discrimination, but to protect the university from lawsuits. He’d devised a system for doing that that was absolutely foolproof. Even the most inexperienced and intellectually challenged young attorney couldn’t go wrong. 

It worked like this. A student, faculty member, or administrator would make a complaint to the office. The “investigator” would take the complaint, interview the people against whom the complaint had been made, as well as anyone else who might be helpful, write up the interview testimony in the form of an “investigative report” and then present that report to the complainant. He did have to coach the investigators a little on how to ask the relevant questions. For example, if the complaint, as often happened, came from a female faculty member who felt excluded from discussions of her male peers and discriminated against in the assignment of courses, released time, committee work, etc., etc., to say nothing of being outright defamed, bullied, and harassed, then it was important that the investigator not simply ask for facts relative to the complaints, but work in references to intentions. If, for example, an investigator asked a male head of a department how often he met with senior faculty to discuss department matters and with whom he had met on each occasion. It might actually emerge that he met with only senior male faculty.

On the other hand, if the investigator asked instead, “Did you deliberately exclude Professor X (who was a woman) from meetings with senior faculty?” then you would get the answer you needed. No department head who wasn’t brain dead would admit to deliberately excluding any faculty member, male or female, from meetings with faculty. So the trick to the “investigations” was making sure you phrased all the questions in such a way that you got the answer you needed. Basically, the investigators were instructed never to ask neutral questions. Rather than collecting facts that might support charges of discrimination they simply confronted people with the charges that had been made against them so that they could flat-out deny that there was any truth to them. The investigative reports were thus pretty much he-said/she said affairs. 

To make the investigative reports even more difficult to interpret, Oliver instructed his investigators to make sure they were long, that absolutely nothing was left out, and that they included lots of repetition so that it would actually be difficult to figure out where the testimony that might help the complainant could be found in the report. Not only did the reports list the names and positions of all the parties against whom complaints were made. They listed the history of each individual’s position at the institution, all the positions the person had held, all the responsibilities that went along with that position, etc., etc. That was listed first, immediately after the charges, long before any testimony was presented. Next the charges were presented in excruciating detail (though not always detail that corresponded to the charges as they had been articulated by the complainant because the process of correcting errors in the investigative report was very helpful in the process of drawing out the investigation so that it would exceed the 300-day statute of limitations for a lawsuit). Finally, after all that, each charge was listed yet again, with the bullet-pointed testimony of the person against whom the charge had been made. 

So the reports were incredibly difficult to interpret and never included any actual “findings” of the investigation, but only lots of testimony from as many people as possible. Even so, it occasionally happened that information emerged as the result of an investigation that could be damaging to the university, as had happened a few years ago when a professor against whom a charge of discrimination against female colleagues had been made, went on and on about all the “incompetent women” in the department. This is where Oliver’s real genius came into play. Complainants were required to come physically to the OED to review the investigative report. They were not allowed to keep their own copy of the report, so the OED could basically always deliver a finding of “no discrimination” independently of what the report said. What could the poor complainant do? Oliver made sure that every single investigation into a complaint made to the OED took so long that it exceeded the 300-day statute of limitations for a lawsuit. That is, complainants had only 300 days from the time a discriminatory event occurred to actually sue for discrimination. After that, they lost their right to sue. So Oliver made sure that each and every investigation the OED undertook, took more or less a full year. 

That was probably an unnecessary precaution, however, at least with respect to faculty complaints because even if someone were still able to sue the university and got a copy of the investigative report as part of the process of “discovery,” most would be too afraid to pursue a lawsuit against the university when its own Title IX office had investigated their complaint and found no discrimination. Plus, most faculty, even tenured full professors, couldn’t afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars a lawsuit would likely cost them.

The situation was different, of course, with respect to students who made complaints against faculty. The investigative procedure was more or less the same, so students usually found themselves without standing to sue by the time the investigation was concluded. But while student complaints were never actually vindicated, students were placated by various means such as moving them to different sections of the same course, or allowing a different instructor to recalculate their grade to something they found more satisfactory. Oliver suspected that most student complaints were really about grades rather than discrimination of any sort, and, in fact, most students seemed pretty satisfied with the old “raise the final grade approach” to dealing with their complaints. The fact that the OED pretty much never found anyone guilty of actual discrimination didn’t keep the them from recommending disciplinary action against faculty. Students had to be placated and faculty had to be kept in their place. The findings were usually something like “inconsistent grading” or “hostile” or “unprofessional” behavior and the case then turned over to HR. 

Oliver wasn’t all bad, though. He reviewed the investigative reports, and when it seemed clear that there probably was a problem with a given individual, he would read that person the riot act. He’d authorized repeated findings of “unprofessionalism,” and even non-gender, non-race-based “hostile workplace environments.” He’d successfully inserted such negative findings into people’s personnel files, and even successfully ushered a few particularly vicious and bigoted faculty into early retirements. 

Oliver felt pretty good about what he was doing as head of Cliff Edge’s OED. He was helping protect the university from lawsuits, while also doing what he felt he could to improve the climate at the place. Everything had been going along pretty smoothly until COVID hit. Unfortunately, when everyone was working remotely, and the offices were thus closed, it had become necessary to send complainants links that would enable them to view the investigative reports online. They couldn’t print them out, of course, he’d made sure of that. What he hadn’t anticipated was that one particularly outraged female faculty member who clearly had been a victim of unrelenting gender discrimination ever since she had first arrived at Cliff Edge, and whose investigative report tended to support that, despite the best efforts of the investigator to skew it otherwise, had managed to preserve for herself a copy of the report. She’d written to the office repeatedly requesting that they explain how she could print it out. Oliver felt he’d dodged that bullet by simply failing to reply to her emails. 

Unfortunately, when she didn’t hear from the OED, she finally decided to take a screen shot of every single one of the nearly 100 pages of the report. So she had a copy. 

That was when things began to unravel.