A Meditation on Bureaucracy in the Modern University (with a Brief Interlude on the Seconding of Motions)

When I was a university professor, before I quit to go back to school to become a nurse, I found myself nervous and irritated with pretty much everyone and everything all the time. That may be partially a result of temperament, but some of my constant sense of aggravation must have arisen from the nature of the work I was doing. What never failed to distress me was the endless string of faculty meetings. At least at the university where I worked, these meetings were neverending and, like most things bureaucratic, were almost always pointless. I don’t think my experience was unique. Faculty meetings are pretty much the same everywhere. The size of an institution may matter some but probably not much.

Nor are university faculty alone in having to attend unnecessary meetings. My guess is that, in most non-familial organizations numbering more than one member and characterized by more than one level of authority/responsibility/prestige/pay (those things often being randomly related), one will find meetings functioning successfully to reduce productivity, morale, and, when food is served, physical health. Companies, firms, charities, clubs, church groups, support groups, and so on, all have meetings, most of them excessive in number. Indeed, any “body” of people that sees fit to hire or promote a person to a separate position in order to manage other people, can expect soon to find itself beset with meetings.

Ostensibly, most meetings are called for the purpose of communicating information; university faculty might meet, for instance, to review a new policy that prohibits children or pets from departmental offices, to plan the Christmas party, to assess a Christmas party recently planned, or to hear from the library liasion who has been sent to advise the department on the elimination of all print resources from the library. Such however only represent apparent reasons for bringing faculty together; the actual purpose of most meetings—in most institutions—relates indirectly to what appears on an agenda.

The majority of meetings function to exhibit power. Readers with some background in cultural theory may recall Michel Foucault’s discussion of state power in pre-modern Europe in Discipline & Punish. For the pre-eighteenth-century monarch, as Foucault explains (and my books are packed away molding in storage, so please forgive me if I get this slightly wrong), display was the key; kings communicated power physically, in the pomp and circumstance of their own public appearances (i.e., crowns, carriages, and castles) or in the violence with which they turned back the hint of a rival. Power was broadcast, writ big, dramatized. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in contrast, power became more insidious, interiorized in and embraced by individuals in the form of “conscience” and “self-command.” I suspect that, in our present-day, techno- systems-laden world, the workings of power are virtual; we experience power at the level of data.  Edisciplined, we modify our behavior according to an awareness of tracking cookies and analytics programs.

But to get back:  displays of power persist, and faculty meetings represent one example. Institutions of higher education use faculty meetings to flex their muscles and communicate order.  Posting organization charts on a website is not nearly as effective as twenty minutes with a bevy of warmly condescending, hand-shaking, joke-making provosts and vice presidents. At a faculty meeting, faculty see their status relative to those whose mandates constitute the purported “communication” of the meetings. Paradoxically, this is true even when the higher and highest levels of administration are absent—which is almost always the case.  Indeed, in the semiotics of faculty meetings, an upper-level administrator’s absence rather than his (the male pronoun is used advisedly in this essay) presence registers his proximity to the top. In other words, to be frequently referenced while not in attendance, or to “appear,” utter a few jocular words, and then leave for a more important engagement:  these are marks of status, sure to be noted by the nuts-and-bolts faculty whose supervisors are surreptitiously “taking roll,” making sure all their people are accounted for.

Another purpose served by faculty meetings is to justify the employment of the person or persons whose plan, initiative, or policy the meeting has superficially been called to discuss, announce, explain, or dictate.  This second purpose is closely related to the first but is not identical to it. When a medium-sized university has almost as many vice presidents as tenured faculty, those vice presidents know that their jobs (or next jobs) may depend on their ability to find something to do that will justify their six-figure salaries to the trustees or regents (yes, “rulers”). One way to legitimize one’s vice presidency is to initiate a “program” or, better, launch a  “commission” on some issue or some non-issue that can be construed into an issue.  Such initiatives are tremendous meeting generators.

"Faculty Meeting" by Kelly Detweiler.

It works like this:  an administrator gets sold a package by an educational consultancy. After using his influence to persuade the university to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the consultancy, the administrator taps a bunch of junior faculty in the humanities (they have no high-dollar NSF grants and thus nothing to do really) to participate in the administrator’s new project. For the junior faculty, this is called being “selected to serve” and is listed under the category “Service” on the assistant professor’s CV. Service is virtually meaningless to the committees that evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure, but the myth that such participation matters to one’s career advancement is assiduously propagated by administrators high and low and generally accepted by junior faculty smart and stupid.

Once the administrator forms a committee, he can have his secretary schedule a series of meetings among the junior faculty who will conjure up a convincing rationale for the committee’s existence. To do so, the committee first tackles the challenge of revising the committee name; this will exhaust two or more 90-minute meetings. During these initial discussions, every term included in or in any way associated with the committee’s name will be subjected to a thorough analysis that addresses the historical, cultural, economic, and possibly the literary meanings linked to its terms. Next comes an official announcement of the committee, its name, and its purpose at another meeting involving a larger group. The public announcement of the committee and its meetings is a significant step for the administrator since, even if the whole project loses steam at this point, the administrator can claim to have “done” something by having identified the issue and taken initial measures to address it.

"Taking Red Notes at a Faculty Meeting" by Jozef Hand-Boniakowski.

If the committee continues to meet, subcommittees of the original group will assume specific tasks related to assessment.  Assessment is the thing in the university. This is because assessment = numbers = facts = science = money. University administrators love assessment. Assessment involves gathering numbers and representing them in a graph, maybe, or a complicated chart that includes columns labeled standard deviation and margin of error. The data analysis is performed committees peopled by faculty who have trained for ten or more years to earn Ph.D. degrees in art history, Chinese pottery, or early American poetry. By not too much prestidigitation, the numbers, percentages, percentiles are manipulated into expressions of money, which is the lingua franca of administrators, legislatures, and taxpayers.

With the results of assessment in hand, the administrator tells the department chairs and/or division heads to call faculty together so they can hear about the committee’s findings. When all is said and done, the meetings for a given project will have been held sporadically over one to six semesters and will have engrossed umpteen hours of junior faculty time that could have been spent with students, researching and writing, designing courses, or preparing to teach individual classes.  Policy recommendations and even policy changes may follow, but those changes will come from places other than the faculty committee itself.  The changes rarely will involve more than the alteration of some words in a handbook or a shift in the chain of communication invoked in a specific situation. If all goes the way it is supposed to do, such fiddling can be translated as the administrator’s fulfillment of a goal linked however torturously to a source of money for the university (i.e., student retention, national student honors, faculty-grant awards, allusion to the university in a national news magazine of questionable quality).

I have some experience with faculty meetings. During my short five years as tenure-track faculty at a state university, I regularly attended meetings as part of the University Honors Committee, the University Fullbright Committee, the University Women’s Studies Advisory Committee, the University Common Scholarship Committee; the Undergraduate Summer Grants Committee; four faculty hiring committees, the College Curriculum and Instruction Committee, the College Scholarship Committee; the Commemorative Garden Anniversary Celebration Committee; departmental Undergraduate and Graduate committees; a committee to revamp the criticism course in the department; and a committee to revamp the capstone course in the department. Everything that appears here (and this is a selected list) points to a family of meetings that occurred regularly over a semester or more. In my recollection, none of the meetings lasted less than an hour, and most gave rise to additional subcommittee meetings for the purpose of assessing or following up on the earlier meetings or for the performance of specific tasks too substantive for the larger group to tackle. Shamefully, a few of these meetings were called and conducted by yours truly.

Different kinds of meetings carry stresses specific to themselves.  Most department-level meetings in my experience were bearable because our chair was either critical of the necessity of so much bureaucracy or clever enough to pretend that she was.  Her humor made much of the insult that faculty meet with from both students and administrators seem ludicrous and laughable rather than abusive and demoralizing. We were a small department and the tenor of our meetings was a reflection our leadership and the mix of faculty personalities; thankfully, most of my colleagues were well-disposed toward one another and gifted with a saving cynicism.

Still, even department meetings could make me want to shave my teeth and use them to etch glass.  For one thing, our department followed Robert’s Rules, which I hated, despite the system’s laudable goals of expediting business and equalizing participant voices.  It’s not so much that I feared being out of order.  I am always out of order.  But I was unwilling either to expose my ignorance of the rules or to learn them. To mask my fear and lack of understanding, I always tried to be the seconder, the one to say, “second!” when the department chair asked for a second.  Seconding seemed safe. It registered my presence and participation, and it gave me a gratifying sense of expediency, my assumed role being then to urge business forward. Seconding a motion was less apt to invoke a point-of-order correction from the chair than baldly making a motion. After all, she invited the second. Aside from the act of seconding, when Robert’s Rules were in force, I felt confident to speak only in the warm pool of “further discussion” and when prompted to say “aye” or “nay” in a vote. Even in voting, I had this  nagging feeling that I would spasm forth the wrong word at the wrong time somehow.

Other meetings were run with less protocol yet [and thus?] were more agonizing than run-of-the-mill department meetings. If I were handing out honors for the worst meetings, I would give top prize to the annual “State of the University” meeting held by the university president. After that, I’d tap the slightly more frequent assemblies presided over by the university faculty union representative.  Both of these were sure to leave me faint with exasperation. The first was slick and polished and included a higher proportion of pure crap than most other meetings. For one thing, the local news media attended the university president’s address in addition to the university community. This meeting always ended with a question-and-answer session that consisted of no fewer than three planted inquiries designed as invitations for the president to elaborate on his accomplishments of the prior year. The ticky-tacky attempt to conceal what was clearly a marketing tool (the questions and the meeting itself) embarrassed me for the institution. The union meetings were protracted, vacuous affairs presided over by the slowest talking man alive. I am sure, like the president of the school, the union rep was a genuinely nice person, but I still spent many an anguished hour imagining Wily Coyote scenarios that caused him suddenly to disappear.

The majority of meetings in most institutions are to my mind an evil.  I am convinced that more often than not, meetings are unnecessary, demoralizing affairs.  I am certain that some well-meaning, totally blinkered faculty member (future administrator) would say that meetings represent a window of  opportunity in which faculty can voice their opinions on the governance of the university. But I recall not a single expression of faculty criticism in a meeting that had any discernible effect on subsequent administrative decision making. In every instance of which I have recollection, meetings served as forums for the pronouncement of decisions already made or as contexts for busywork. Occasionally, faculty would be invited to give responses to policy changes after a deed was done, or, more rarely, as part of a process completely adjunctive to actual decision making. Indeed, not faculty meetings but newspaper editorials, strongly worded email petitions, even the very rare campus protest:  these seemed to pack more punch than expressions of critique or discontent made at meetings.

It seems to me that at least on a workaday basis there has been an unfortunate shift in university emphasis from the symposium or forum, in which faculty traditionally exchanged intellectual and political ideas, to the administrative meeting. The sheer number of meetings held to discuss policy and committee work no doubt reflects a university culture that increasingly looks to a business model—i.e., organizational theory—to guide its development and activity. This is too bad.  The corporate model leads to spurious meetings that eat up faculty thinking time. In my case, the unexpected demands of administrators with their service “invitations” and the myriad meetings that followed played a key role in dampening my enthusiasm for a profession that I had long admired and in which I was in the process of securing a place. Like an invasive species, administrative meetings and those who promote them drain energy and resources while managing to look natural, even necessary, to the environment. And, similar to an invasive species, such do not just weaken but can endanger a habitat, driving out beneficial species and permanently changing the ecological balance.

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First image: Unattributed public domain image.

Second image: “Faculty Meeting” by Kelly Detweiler.

Third image: “Taking Red Notes at a Faculty Meeting” by Jozef Hand-Boniakowski.

Last image by Despair.