Faculty Follies
My life in the faculty senate.
By Holbrook Robinson
Robert-of Robert's Rules of Order-was obviously
not a fun-loving individual. He was, after all, a general. His magnum opus,
without which the deliberative bodies of the Western world could put down
their gavels and go into another business, seems deliberately designed
to reduce one of the pleasures of civilized life, spirited debate and argument,
to a stultifyingly pompous enterprise devoid of anything remotely pleasant
or life-affirming. The work's directing impulse, to be self-conscious and
self-referential about levels of discourse, is pleasingly ironic at times,
but its general effect is to make debate labored and unspontaneous.
For many years, my antipathy to this poor man's
creation led me to ply my trade of academic administrator in venues impervious
to its constrictions. When I ran meetings of the Department of Modern Languages,
only very general principles applied, such as the understood
prohibition of everyone talking at once, or eating
complex meals during the meetings. As the moderator of these gatherings,
I was able to actually participate in the debates (as well as lead them)
without being called to order and could do many other things besides, such
as forgo asking for seconds. I remember dimly an admonition of one of my
high school teachers: you were not supposed to say, "I would like
to make a motion," because to him this meant moving in a funny way.
Everybody knew that you were supposed to say, "I should like to move
. . . " As if this were an improvement. So in departmental meetings
at Northeastern, I avoided both formulations, preferring something like,
"What do you think of this?" And, oddly enough, we got our work
done.
Imagine my alarm when some well-meaning colleagues
approached me three years ago and asked whether I would be interested in
(a) running for the Faculty Senate, (b) running for the Faculty Senate
Agenda Committee (SAC), and (c) running for chair of the SAC. All at once.
And I didn't even know whether I had a copy of Robert's Rules. This was
certainly a defining moment. I was saved, however, by a narrow defeat;
parts (a) and (b) came true, but (c) eluded me. Several colleagues who
had promised to support me missed the meeting held to elect the agenda
committee, and I lost my presumptuous bid by one vote. It was my introduction
to the treacherous waters of politics.
So I spent a year learning my new trade from my
benevolent and skilled predecessor, engineering professor Arvin Grabel,
who kindly took me under his protective wing and introduced me to characters
in various areas of the university of whom I had only been dimly aware
before, as well as to ways of accomplishing goals efficiently and with
little fuss.
At the end of that first year I was more fully
prepared to pursue option (c), the chairmanship of the agenda committee.
I wrote what I thought was a wonderful speech to be given at the meeting
where such choices were to be made, only to find that my candidacy was
uncontested. So the speech remained folded in the pocket of the suit I
wear on such occasions, I won the chairmanship, and my new career was launched.
A baptism of fire came in the fall of 1997, when,
as part of my new duties, I was asked to give what amounts to the "State
of the Faculty" address to the assembled university community. It
meant standing in front of several thousand colleagues and friends in Blackman
Auditorium, trying to say something intelligent without sounding scared.
So I wore my special suit, the one with the folded unread speech in its
pocket, and I pretended I wasn't scared, and I gave the speech. I'm told
that one of the greatest fears in most Americans is public speaking, and
that medications and members of the medical community are often summoned
to overcome these fears. That's too bad, because the activity is completely
positive: you have a sense of power, albeit transitory, and a sense of
community hard to match. If you say something funny, a thousand people
laugh. Afterward people come up to you and say kind things. Just recently
a man from Building Services asked whether I was the person who gave that
speech and told me he had enjoyed it. He made my day, even my week, because
of the spontaneous nature of his remark, and because it meant I had had
an impact on constituencies that I had never before had a chance to address.
Back on the floor of the Faculty Senate, the treacherous
waters of politics were getting deeper, because one of the worst possible
things had happened: I had begun to enjoy myself. Those nice little moments
of ego gratification and the bright light of appreciation were beginning
to become altogether too beguiling. I began to think of ways to extend
my reign. Maybe I'd run for office again at the end of the year. After
all, my predecessor had enjoyed three good years at the helm. And people
still actually liked him.
I tucked these thoughts into the back of my mind,
resolving not to decide anything until later (which, in general, I find
to be a good habit), and went about my business. This business consisted
of running weekly SAC meetings, meeting with groups around the university
(many of which felt disaffected), taking calls from colleagues concerned
about different issues, and attending and occasionally running senate meetings
when the provost was absent, sometimes to the dismay of fellow senators,
who immediately divined that I was essentially Robertless.
The most gratifying aspect of all this is that
I had achieved a goal common to many of us: the desire to be consulted,
to be asked, to be made part of an organization's functional activity.
The president (of the university) would routinely call and ask my opinion.
He invited me to lunch, fed me well, and asked what I thought. Sometimes
he asked a much harder question: what did my colleagues think? I became
good at pointing out that I did not possess the ability to know what anyone
would think about any prospective action-not a terribly helpful answer
for my interlocutor, but one which deep experience had taught me was true.
Then I would go out into the university world and try to find out what
the faculty did think. This was always interesting.
Others, aside from the president, also called.
The treasurer. Deans. Vice presidents. All of them wanted to know what
I thought. It became clear after a bit that they really did care, not so
much because I was I, but because they all thought I represented, in some
almost metaphysical way, the will of the faculty.
One of the constant tensions at a university,
and certainly at this university, is that existing between various groups
who wish they had power, or imagine they do, or really do have it. It's
the question of who is the true soul of the university, who is master,
who is servant, who does what at whose bidding. The frontiers of these
disputes are constantly changing, and every bulge or retreat in the front
line is viewed with alarm by one of the interested parties. It is generally
a benign contest, with ample good will on both sides, but occasionally
testy disputes arise. Tensions grow and diminish, being dependent on the
personalities involved and more general conditions that form the background
against which the university operates. Faculty often perceive the administration's
main goal to be to diminish their importance and marginalize them; administrators
sometimes seem to view faculty as an unnecessary impediment, an impractical
obstacle to efficient and purposeful action. These tensions never completely
disappear, somewhat like landlord-tenant relations.
As SAC chair I found myself in the middle of this
give-and-take. Constituents from both sides would approach me with their
point of view, and it would be necessary to make subtle adjustments of
phrase, nuance, or intent to bring about agreement. Like so many other
activities in life, this often involved the balancing of incommensurates,
the formulation of intricate comparable-worth arguments that would attempt
to equate quite different realities in an attempt at some provisional moral
calculus.
Of course, all such attempts border precariously
at all times on total failure, so the only possible recourse is to try
one's best and not worry too much. I read recently that seeing the world
rationally predisposes us to think of it as a comedy, while seeing it emotionally
could cause us to think it closer to tragedy. That's university politics
in a nutshell. The SAC chairmanship in a nutshell. Robert's Rules in a
nutshell.
At the end of the year, I decided not to run again.
The bright light of appreciation had dimmed, I had become tired after having
to deal with other people's problems during almost twenty-two years of
administrative work at Northeastern, and maybe the balance had begun to
tip too much toward the tragic. Or perhaps it was toward the comic . .
.
I find myself now very close to being a real person:
a faculty member on sabbatical worrying about the Russian philosophers
Fedorov and Constantinov rather than next week's senate agenda.
Holbrook Robinson is an associate professor
of modern languages.
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