Talk of the Gown

The Committee Conundrum

HOW TO COMPLICATE EVEN THE SIMPLEST PROJECT
BY BILL KIRTZ

Quick, name three worthwhile things (besides camels) designed by a committee. Nevertheless, in our academic groves off the Green Line, status depends on how often you interface with fellow scholars. Action plans, task forces, five-year projections-we love 'em all. A day without a meeting is a day without sunshine, because studying something sure beats doing anything about it.

Those of you outside the ivory tower shouldn't be so smug. We all know about government, where exClinton aide Harold Ickes recalled, "You prepare for meetings, you go to meetings, and then afterward you talk about what happened in those meetings." In the private sector, who hasn't endured a retreat, a sensitivity seminar, or an intensive bonding experience featuring ropes, rapids, and foraging for insect hors d'oeuvres? Haven't you survived a facilitator's two-hour rationale of why knowing your division head's favorite tree will help you interact with him/her/it?

Although we pointy-heads may have literally written the book on boredom, the tendency to ponder instead of produce permeates all institutional life. Here are some Northeasterners' tips on how professors and real people alike can emerge from that next focus group almost as sane as when they left.

Suzanne Leidel, director of conference and events planning, calls the ten to fifteen meetings she has to attend each week "the bane of my existence. I try to avoid them, 100 percent." She thinks eight out of ten of them really don't accomplish anything and are simply "a venue for anyone to pontificate on their own importance." And they're too long. When people go on for an allotted hour, "I shut down after twenty minutes."

When Laura Waters was Student Government Association president last year, she hopped to at least three meetings a day, but defends them as a way to make people feel heard. She says a meeting's success depends on who's leading it. "I need to get in and out, assign jobs, and move on." She agrees parliamentary rules are necessary "to some extent to keep order, but when they overcome the comfort factor, that can become a problem. Sometimes procedural details can take over, and you spend more time in the meeting on how to argue the issue" than on anything else.

Network Northeastern director Susan Kryczka considers herself lucky to average only four mandatory meetings a month. "I try not to go unless there's an agenda, something with a beginning, middle, and end," she says. "I'm phobic about them. Someone's got to prove to me that it's worth it." She's seen committees chew over simple matters for years simply "because the job they're supposed to do hasn't been given to anyone." Costs, however, concentrate the committee mind wonderfully. Since satellite time for Network Northeastern's teleconferences is expensive, it tends to be used more efficiently. She praises conference calls on legal matters for the same reason. "When attorneys are involved, there's money involved. If it's somebody's time and money, it goes real well."

Also concerned with the clock is Robert Vozzella, vice president for cooperative education. "I try to hold meetings to only time necessary-never more than an hour. I try to reserve some breathing space between meetings, particularly around critical subjects. I want ample time to make essential phone calls, get my thoughts together. It's really a matter of endurance." While Ickes has called the art of White House success knowing which sessions to attend and which to skip, Vozzella says that in higher ed, "Unfortunately, it's not appropriate to try to avoid meetings. We're all in the same boat. The higher up you go on the administrative ladder, the more you have to deal with that particular problem" of more meetings.

Michael Dukakis has been pretty high up the ladder. The former Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential nominee believes in "meetings held at a regular time to get things done and to do business," but not in "frequent and endless" get-togethers. Now Northeastern's distinguished professor of political science and head of the university's Urban Outreach Council, he finds that "things move much more slowly in academe, perhaps because we're so process-oriented. It takes much longer to get things done."

Caffeine is often thought of as the fuel that makes the meeting engine run, but Northeastern provost Michael Baer takes a tongue-in-cheek opposite view. Before a meeting, "I never drink coffee because I don't have to stay awake." To be useful, he says, meetings "should have a focus or a goal. It's important for the chair to be a facilitator, even if he has a point of view, and not go into a monologue." Baer says about half of his twelve meetings a week have a clear purpose. "Some, I wonder why we had them."

Stop wondering. If you're stuck in that latter type of meeting, ease the ennui with a few simple tricks. Find something to occupy yourself-macramé, origami, or-if you're a teacher-paper grading. After all, that last has to be done sometime, preferably before the current sophomore class graduates. (Comments on papers don't require much concentration; you'll want to keep your head clear enough to disrupt the meeting with shouts of "Point of order" or "Call the question.") Phrases like "Nice effort but needs work" or "Interesting theme but lacks focus" or "You've obviously spent a lot of time on this" are easy to scribble and can cover virtually any grade. If all this is beyond you as you try to figure out when or if the meeting will ever break, simply scrawl, "See me." Bear in mind, however, that this commits you to actually meeting with students-a pedagogical practice we veterans deem rather tacky.

Second, count your blessings. As a fellow prof drones on and on, consider what a pleasure it is to encounter someone even more tedious than yourself-an increasingly rare phenomenon as the quarters go by. These close encounters of the stultifying kind let you experience what your students go through as you change them from insomniacs to narcoleptics in a matter of weeks, luxuriating in the power to bore all of the people all of the time. Novice pedagogues should note that protocol dictates that you rouse snorers so they can proceed to their next nap-er, class. And keep in mind that a brief snooze never hurt anybody. In The Art of Napping, a new book sure to close a few eyes, Boston University psychology professor William Anthony claims that brief periods of sleep improve your mood and performance and suggests students leaven seminars with the large-scale lecture courses he calls "one huge napping opportunity."

If somebody rudely interrupts your own committee-room slumber with a question, ask him to repeat it. When he does, reply, in an icy tone implying your interrogator's rashness has no place in a civilized society, that the matter is too complicated for a hasty decision and that a special subcommittee should plumb the depths of the paradigm. Caution: although using the term "special subcommittee" marks you as a person of substance and "paradigm" as a scholar with more than the usual measure of profundity, gravitas, and je ne sais quoi, colleagues' lips may curl a tad if you're already in a special subcommittee meeting. Although it's considered bad form to know anything about an agenda item, remembering your group's name helps avoid such spots of bother.

Now, skeptics might protest that anyone who proposes a study automatically volunteers to head it. Not if you regretfully state that the ongoing press of committee assignments renders you unable to take on yet another arduous task. Declining a duty in such fashion carries a double bonus: avoiding work while sharpshooting others. A while back, a member of a university promotion committee didn't deign to help draft the group's report. That didn't stop him from interjecting "I don't like that word" every other sentence. His master stroke, the one distinguishing the full professor from the academic rabble, was rejecting requests to share his own suggestions for improvement. The group had to play Twenty Questions with him to determine what word he would accept. It got to be kind of fun in a Sesame Street way-pleasure undiluted by the fact that higher-ups bounced back the group-cliché report for a couple of years until they tired of the game and elevated the wretch.

Not that committees always produce verbal mush. After all, group editing sired the American Revolution. During two sweltering July days in 1776, amid establishing military shipwrights' wages and benefits, the Continental Congress trimmed, corrected, and rearranged Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. In the glorious tradition of scribes, the Sage of Monticello grumbled the rest of his life about how the quill pens of know-nothing nitpickers like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin lacerated his prose.

That collective triumph is the exception that proves the rule. We should all strive to cut conference time. All around us are depressing examples of the fact that with enough effort, you can complicate the simplest project. So let's find a cure for meeting-itis. Start with a discussion. Then hold a conference. Reach a finding. Draft a report. Maybe even a mission statement.

You do the writing. I'll tell you what words I don't like.

Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the Gown."