The Curriculum Committee

There were three people from the religion half of the department and three people from the philosophy half of the department on the curriculum committee. The three religion scholars were Constance Alethea, Dave Denial, and Frank Forkedtongue, and the three philosophers were Tanya Turgid, Dolores Decepcion, and Richard Resentement. The reader will immediately see the problem with this. First, even if everyone on the committee liked and respected one another, there would still be the slight problem that an even number of members could result tie votes on the matters that came before the committee.

That the curriculum committee, one of the most notoriously dysfunctional committees in a notoriously dysfunctional department, had an even number of members was not, however, the result of any sort of oversight, but had been diabolically planned by Frank as a way of drawing out committee deliberations interminably and hence giving Frank, who had only ever published one paper, and that co-authored, an excuse for why he didn’t publish more. That is, Frank’s repeated failures to publish anything else had convinced him that he needed to conceive of himself as a kind of administrator, even though for most of his tenure at Cliff Edge, he had not actually held any kind of administrative position.

Of course that sort of argument would not have been persuasive to the other members of the bylaws committee when they were considering the structure of the various department committees, so Frank had hit upon the rationale that an even number of members would prevent a tyranny of the majority, so to speak. A five or seven member committee, he had explained, would have enabled the majority of three or four to force course changes on the disempowered minority of two or three. The logic was impeccable, and in a department where bullying was out of control and where people were thus sensitive to potential opportunities to fall victim to it, and where no one much cared about the future of the curriculum anyway, the specter of a completely ineffectual deadlocked committee held no horrors.

Even Willard Weasel had approved of this novel approach to faculty governance, since his main job, he knew, as head of this dysfunctional department was too keep the dysfunction from filtering up to the level of the dean, or God forbid, the provost. Anything that would keep the faculty preoccupied with sniping at one another rather than at upper-level administrators outside the department seemed a good thing. Unfortunately for Willard, things did not go as planned with the curriculum committee.

Dave had had it in for Constance ever since she’d leap-frogged over him to a tenure-track position while he’d been forced to remain at the level of a mere “instructor.” They’d actually been friends in grad school, not close, or anything like that, but they’d hung out together and had been a source of mutual moral support when both had been on the job market. They’d both come to Cliff Edge as “instructors,” which was a non-tenure-line position with twice the teaching load of the tenure-line faculty. Constance had succeeded, however, in securing a tenure track position. Both Dave and Constance were good scholars, but Constance had had the advantage of being a woman at a time when “diversity hires” were all important. So even though both had applied for the tenure-track position in religion when one had opened up, it was Constance who got it. This was not Constance’s fault, of course, but once Frank had hung the “kick me” sign on Constance’s back, she became the most natural target for Dave’s anger at having been passed over, and indeed for his anger at all the tenure-line professors who despite trumpeting what they believed to be their progressive bone fides, could not have been more conspicuously contemptuous of the “instructors” and adjuncts who made up what is known in the profession as the “contingent” faculty, which is to say the faculty who did not enjoy the job security of tenured faculty.

Dave was one angry dude. To be fair, he had a lot to be angry about. He was every bit as good a scholar as most of the tenure-line faculty in the department, and even better than some. He was also a dedicated teacher, but he labored under an absolutely debilitating teaching load, so his work on his magnum opus, the book he hoped would make him famous: Queering Heaven, was progressing with glacial slowness, while Constance, who had had half the teaching load since she’d moved to the tenure track, was already on her third book and seemed to publish at least one new scholarly article every year.

Dave hated pretty much everyone in the department. His most intense hatred was directed toward the tenure-line faculty, but he also hated all the female instructors and adjuncts, whom he believed relied on their husbands’ incomes for living expenses and viewed their own meager salaries as sufficient for “mad money.” Of course there weren’t really many women in such situations but that didn’t keep Dave’s over-active imagination from assuming that most of them were. He generally liked the male instructors and adjuncts, since they were the one group to whom he could feel comfortably superior, unless they failed to commiserate with him over the injustice of their respective fates, in which case he hated them too.

Dave would never admit he hated anyone, though. He liked to think of himself as a good guy, socially conscious, liberal, progressive, and all that. He went out of his way, as religion program director, to make sure women were represented in the various course syllabi, even while he secretly loathed and despised most actual flesh and blood women, but again, this was something he would never admit to himself. His particular cause was LGBTQ rights. He was always championing this cause, challenging as that was at an institution such as Cliff Edge that had almost no LGBTQ students or faculty.

Dave had decided Cliff Edge needed a 200-level indigenous religions class. Frank had put him up to that, whether Dave realized that this was yet another attempt on Frank’s part to piss off Constance, who had several times lamented that they didn’t have anyone qualified to teach such a class, or whether the fact that he, Dave, saw it as yet another opportunity for him to harass and bully Constance is hard to say. Dave repressed a lot.

So anyway, Frank wrote up the proposal for the new course, and Dave brought it to the curriculum committee for a vote. In the meantime, however, unbeknownst to either Frank or Dave, but beknownst to Constance, the department had just received permission for a new hire, and Constance was elated at the thought that they could finally get an actual specialists in the field of indigenous religions. So when Dave presented Frank’s new course proposal to the committee, Constance politely opposed it on the grounds that since the college curriculum committee required that new courses could be proposed only by full-time faculty with a demonstrated competence to teach them, they should first argue for the new hire to be an expert in indigenous religions and only after they had appointed such a person, should they propose the new course.

That was when all hell broke loose. Frank had several times included indigenous religions in his 100-level “Introduction to the Study of Religions” course and had begun to think of himself as an expert in this area. Of course he wasn’t. He simply made up everything he said about indigenous religions. He didn’t realize he was doing this, of course. He viewed himself as sort of channeling the spirit of the peoples whom he had come to think of as his ancestors, and without an expert to contradict him, he could basically say anything he wanted. Frank liked that. He liked being king of his classroom, so the specter of a new hire who could actually expose his teaching for what, he knew on some level, it was —i.e., a complete fabrication — was profoundly disturbing to him.

Tanya was the chair of the curriculum committee. Her discipline was philosophy, but she and Constance had discussed the need for an expert in indigenous religions. They were both very excited when they learned that the department had been given permission for a new hire because there was basically no difference between indigenous religions and indigenous philosophies, so they could advertise the position as in either philosophy or religion and in that way increase the likelihood of getting a really good hire, a hire who would straddle both disciplines in the department (because the religions course could be cross-listed as a philosophy course) and hence enhance the department as a whole.

On the other hand, if they put through a proposal for a new 200-level course on indigenous religions, the college curriculum committee, which is to say the dean of the college of arts and sciences, and eventually the senate committee on academic matters, which is to say the provost, would assume that they already had a full-time person competent to teach such a course, and they’d never get approval for a hire in that area. The new hire would go to someone in liturgical studies, or the Protestant reformation, or some other area that students could not care less about and would not help the department as a whole at all. No, the new hire had to be an expert in indigenous religions. That was the only way they could expand both the religion program and the philosophy program at the same time.

But Dave dug in his heels. When both Tanya and Constance pointed out that Frank’s forays into indigenous religions in his into to the study of religion class didn’t qualify him to teach a 200-level course in which he had no graduate training and no publications, Dave disingenuously argued that even if Frank didn’t have the competence to teach a 200-level class on idigenous religions, Vince did have such training and that he was willing to affix his name to the new course proposal, even though Frank had been the one who’d actually written it.

Vince didn’t have any such training, of course, but he knew what side his bread was buttered on. He wasn’t tenured yet, and Frank had been on his mid-tenure review committee. He’d seen Frank go after colleagues he didn’t like, so he was determined to get on Frank’s good side and stay there. Vince’s area of specialization was environmental ethics and there were indeed strong tie-with indigenous religions so he looked like he might be competent to teach a 200-level course in that area. He had no plans actually to do that, however, because that would have meant adding a second course to his pedagogical repertoire, and that, in turn, would have cut into his “research” time. He knew, though, that all he had to do was to be willing to append his name to the proposal and that once the course had been formally approved, he would not be required to teach it, that Frank could teach it, or that they could just farm it out to an adjunct.

The committee was deadlocked for weeks. It had been the men against the women. Once Dolores, who was notorious for her bullying and harassment of other female faculty, tired of the debates, however, she threw her lot in with the Dave, Frank, and Richard cartel. The proposal for the new 200-level indigenous religions class taught by Vince Viscous passed with a vote of 4 to 2.

Tanya and Constance were, to put it mildly, livid! Both were young enough to actually care about the future of the department and the quality of the education they provided to their students. Both suspected that Vince not only did not have the competence to teach a course on indigenous religions, but that he wasn’t going to teach it anyway once the course had actually been formally approved, so they simultaneously drafted an email to Manny to that effect so that he would be prepared when the proposal came to the college curriculum committee.

They also drafted a complaint to the Office of Equity and Diversity that the men on the committee had harassed and bullied the women until they’d succeeded in getting one to vote with them. They pointed out as well, that adding a course on indigenous religions to the curriculum when they had no one who specialized in that field could potentially offend native American students, of which Cliff Edge had quite a few because of a special scholarship fund that had been set up by a native American alumna who was the head of a small oil company in Oklahoma.

Cliff Edge didn’t really care much about sexism, which was pervasive throughout the school. It did care, however, about offending native Americans, and cared even more about offending a particularly wealthy donor, whom Tanya and Constance had intimated in their email might inadvertently learn of this slight to her heritage.

And Manny cared very much about catching Vince in a deception.

Sucker Law

The Sucker Law firm, was actually short for Sucker, Liar, Bungler, and Cheat. In the law world, though, they were generally referred to as “those assholes over at Sucker,” or just “Sucker.” Sucker was infamous in a world where infamy was pretty much the standard. Where other law firms would manipulate damning evidence to make it look less damning, or try to get it excluded on technical grounds, Sucker attorneys would literally manufacture exculpatory evidence for their clients. You may wonder how any lawyer could get away with something like that. In a world, though, where most cases settle out of court, there was little danger of Sucker’s contempt for the federal rules of evidence being exposed for what it was. This danger was diminished even further by the fact that Sucker specialized in representing colleges and universities. Mostly, they defended these institutions against discrimination lawsuits from students and faculty who rarely had enough money to see a case all the way to trial and frequently had to pull out even before a satisfactory settlement could be reached. That meant Sucker rarely had to face the possibility of exposure, and so far, had managed to avoid exposure even in those few instances where that possibility had loomed threateningly.

The culture at Sucker was, to put it mildly, pretty nasty. Law firms in general are not warm, fuzzy places to work, but Sucker set a new standard of misery for its attorneys. They used every trick in the book, padding hours, overstaffing, making sure that Sucker himself was assigned to every single case they took on so that the firm could bill his hourly rate, in addition to the lower rates of the other attorneys assigned to the cases. Sucker excelled in the creation of what was known within the firm as “fake motions,” or motions that had no chance of being granted, but which provided unparalleled opportunities for padding clients’ bills. Sucker held the record for firms in the tri-state area for number of documents filed in a case with over a thousand documents in what should have been a straightforward discrimination suit, you know, the kind of suit where you had maybe a hundred docs filed at the most.

Sucker did well for a long time. They made money hand over fist. Jock Sucker had discovered, you see, that while personal injury cases were where the big awards were to be had, they were also both costly and risky. Companies tended to spare no expense in defending themselves and going up against them, even for a stellar graduate from a top-tier law school, could involve years of hard work with no payout whatever at the end. Add to that the complication that Sucker wasn’t a stellar graduate of a top-tier law school, but had graduated near the bottom of his class at the now defunct for-profit Louisville Law Academy, and plaintiffs’ personal injury law was simply out of his league.

On the other hand, Sucker discovered quite by accident, that the one place where even the most feeble-minded attorney could clean up was in representing universities in discrimination suits. Like corporations, universities always had their own in-house counsel. Unlike corporations, though, universities seemed to have no standards whatever in terms of who they hired for these positions. They paid less than in-house counsel for corporations (which in turn paid less than any actual law firm) and so, in the world of law, where money is the standard for everything, in-house counsel for universities tended to be the real bottom of the legal barrel. Everyone knew this, of course, but few people worried about it because they figured that any case that the in-house counsel couldn’t handle themselves, would be farmed out to outside counsel, whom, it was assumed, would be more competent.

The only flaw in this system was that the in-house counsel were the people who secured the outside counsel, and being the legal-losers they tended to be, they were unusually subject to obsequious flattery and tended to hire outside counsel based on how effective such counsel was at flattering their egos rather than at winning cases. But again, this rarely mattered because most students and faculty simply couldn’t afford to see a case all the way to trial and so the legal ineptitude of both in-house and outside counsel rarely interfered with the system of law firms that represented colleges and universities bleeding these institutions of what little money they had.

And bleed they did. Most people are afraid of lawyers, even upper-level academic administrators and members of boards of trustees. These people tend to feel, a feeling reinforced by in-house counsel, that they don’t know anything about law. So, rather than keeping watch on what their in-house counsel were doing, they tended to give them an absolutely free rein, a situation exacerbated by the fact that most colleges and universities have legal insurance, so even if their annual legal bills were in the millions of dollars, they generally paid little attention to why. The fact that a law firm paid by the hour had no incentive ever actually to settle any lawsuit, seemed to escape the notice of academic administrators and legal insurance meant that they probably wouldn’t have cared much anyway at a time such as that in which our story is set, when enrollments were declining precipitously and filling seats was a far more urgent issue than reducing legal costs.

Everyone knows the saying that there is no honor among thieves. Few people realize, though, in our smash-and-grab society, that there isn’t much happiness either. Attorneys in general, and the attorneys at Sucker in particular, quickly learn, though few would admit it consciously to themselves, that happiness cannot be obtained by screwing over innocent people, (people who had already been screwed over pretty brutally by their employers), no matter how lavish a living one made doing it. So the attorneys at Sucker were mostly miserable, mostly in perpetual bad moods, and constantly sniping at one another.

They were making money, though. They were making money hand over fist and had been doing so for some time. The problem was that every time a Sucker attorney got away with some sort of fraud or other, the firm as a whole became cockier. That was its undoing. Like Icarus, Sucker ended up flying just a little higher than they should have understood they would be able to get away with. That is, everything was going along more or less fine, until the irresistible force of Jock Sukker’s love of money encountered the immoveable objects of Constance Alethea’s commitment to her vocation of teaching and the fact that she had unlimited free legal support in the form of her boyfriend, the obscure, but brilliantly talented plaintiff’s employment law attorney, James Justice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When Whoretensia Lügnerin was assigned to defend Cliff Edge College against Constance’s charge of sex discrimination the firm was still doing well. True, they had lost a very high-profile academic freedom case, but they had not yet seen the mass exodus of clients they would later experience. In defense of the debacle Whoretensia made of Constance’s case, I am compelled to point out that she, Whoretensia was, like most attorneys, way overworked. She didn’t bother to do any research concerning whether Weasel’s depiction of Constance’s character and situation in the department was accurate. What attorney in Whoretensia’s position would have wanted to do that, anyway? Weasel’s depiction of Constance was a godsend. Here was an arrogant, bullying, uncollegial, piece of academic deadwood, the kind of “scholar” with which the academy was littered and whom humanity as a whole would be better off without. This was the image of Constance that Whoretensia, and the Sucker firm more generally, needed to promote to win the case, so why bother to do any actual research to determine whether this picture was accurate? There was little danger, after all, that it would ever be exposed as inaccurate, even if that were the case.

Or so it seemed, at the time, to Whoretensia.

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.