[Yeah, I know, we'll get back to looking at bad fiction at some point. Anyway, more on the Selma Botman no confidence vote for now.]
Context matters.
Consider the phrase, “and they stayed
together forever.” Imagine that a story ended with that phrase.
Is that a good or a bad thing? Is the ending happy or sad. Is it a
reward or a punishment for the characters? You don't know. You
can't know. You lack context.
Depending on their relationship, and
the circumstances, and any number of other things those five words
could be anything from a down ending so brutal as to shake your faith
in humanity and leave you depressed for a week, or they could be the
equivalent of, “and they lived happily ever after.”
Context matters. And in terms of rules
it matters even more. When I joined the Student Senate at USM one of
the few things they did right was make sure that everyone understood
that our rules existed in context. We had our rules, and they were
withing the larger context of the Student Government Association
(SGA) constitution, which was within the context of the University
Governance Document, which was within the context of many things
reaching up to the US Constitution.
That's important to understand because
it informs how you read the rules. Taken in isolation a rule might
seem ambiguous when in context it is actually quite clear. Taken in
isolation a rule might seem to say one thing when in reality it says
the opposite. Taking rules in isolation can make true things seem
false and false things seem true.
Imagine that the SGA wanted to make a
new position and the decided that the rule would be that someone
could be appointed to that position based on whatever criteria the
Student Senate deemed appropriate. (As far as I know this has never
happened, but it's illustrative.) Take that rule in isolation and
you'd assume that the rule indicates that, “Must be a straight
white cis male Christian,” would be acceptable criteria if the
Student Senate deemed it appropriate, because the rule says whatever
criteria deemed appropriate. In reality the rule would say nothing
of the sort because it exists within the context of all the other
rules, and there are rules against discrimination.
Or, for a non-hypothetical example,
consider chess.
The rule governing how the queen moves
and captures reads as follows:
The queen may move to any square
along the file, the rank or a diagonal on which it stands.
- FIDE Laws of Chess Article 3, Section 4
That
rule is only helpful when looked at in light of other rules. For
example rule defining what a file is, the rule defining what a rank
is, the rule defining what a diagonal is, the rule saying that
bishops, rooks, and queens may not move over intervening pieces, the
rule saying what a move is, and the rule saying when it is legal to
move.
If you
take it out of context then you could use it to argue that, for
example, a queen is unblockable (it says any square,
not any unobstructed square.) Or that a queen can move as a knight
for surely a knight's move meets the dictionary definition of
diagonal.
Botman
is arguing that a queen can move as a knight. Metaphorically of
course.
She is
taking the rule described in Faculty Senate bylaws Section C, Subsection 5, Part b,
and interpreting it in isolation in hopes that she can convince
people that (1,2) is just as diagonal as (1,1) and thus the queen can
move as a knight and so she wins. (Checkmate.)
Or, to
be somewhat less metaphorical, she's using it to argue that since it
says 2/3rds it means two thirds of everyone, not just two thirds of
the votes. Which is all well and good and one of multiple perfectly
legitimate interpretations of the rule if it is looked at
in isolation. A knight's move
really is pretty damned diagonal when you think about it. Where it
falls down is when it is placed in context.
For
example, the document that governs these sorts of things, that being
the document that supersedes the Faculty Senate bylaws, specifically
states in no uncertain terms that the necessary vote is “a
two-thirds vote of those voting”. Which means that the queen
doesn't get to move as a knight. Selma doesn't win.
Except
that the media has, thus far, declined to check the rules of chess,
and awarded victory to the person who randomly claimed it in spite of
all evidence to the contrary. So if you're ever in a tournament in
Maine, keep in mind that you don't have to win, you just have to
claim you win and that's what everyone will report.
And I
didn't have to point to that particular document (the University Governance Document, if you're interested) because it's not the only
thing that governs how these things work, and thus is not the only
thing that says that a two thirds vote means two thirds of those who
actually vote. But since I'm not in the mood to dig through
parliamentary procedure, I'm going to stick with that.
It
states:
ARTICLE VIII: RECOMMENDATIONS TO CHANCELLOR AND BOARD OF TRUSTEES
On matters which require the approval of the chancellor or the Board of Trustees, recommendations of senates not concurred in by the president shall, upon a two-thirds vote of those voting, be forwarded with the president’s recommendation.
So
what should have happened is that the vote be considered a success,
reported as such by any who cared to report it, and then passed on to
the higher ups along with Selma's recommendation that it be
completely ignored. Instead Selma claimed that it failed, the matter
was over, let us never speak of it again, and everybody ran with it.
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