In which Piers Spies Some Gaslighting

As I sat in yesterday’s magic workshop, looking at the faces around me (I am an incorrigible scanner of the room), I saw the faces of many of my colleagues drained of energy and will. I saw bewilderment, resignation, and fear.

I am afraid that what I saw was by design. For scholars accustomed to working in the liberal arts, the bureaucratic and technocratic language employed by administrative units and their representatives is painful to endure. . . it begs too many questions, depends on murky definitions, and reveals far too much magical thinking. And it does so in huge quantities without letup, so the careful thinker is browbeaten into passivity or submission.

For example, one of the issues raised by a philosophy professor yesterday was the issue of the use of grades. The facilitator, who claims her faculty background for rhetorical purposes but who long ago traversed the gap to professional administration, asserted that grades cannot measure “student learning” and are thus inappropriate for outcomes based measurement. What she said was undoubtedly true, because she had already defined “student learning” and “outcomes based measurement” not explicity but implicitly - and in such a way that her assertion could not be disproven. The question has already been answered by the very terminology that has been made available. To question the premise, as a philosophy or literature professor should, is to place oneself in opposition to self-evident facts that are incontrovertible because there is no language provided to dispute them.

There is no changing things for us; we faculty members (especially those of us in the humanities) have no power and no leverage to use in any negotiation. Events like yesterday’s magic workshop, and the further events and directives that will follow, are intended to break our will and keep us always on the defensive. It works; we have limited reservoirs of energy to pull from and cannot possibly stay ahead of the relentless pounding of administrative demands. Those of us who also wish to tend to our families and our teaching demands, to say nothing of whatever slivers of research and intellectual development we can manage, will submit . . . as we are intended to.