On Being A Committee Member

I am on way too many committees this year.  While my service committee membership has increased substantially with the award of tenure, that's not what's dragging me down. Unfortunately the real problem is all my own doing: doctoral and masters' thesis committees.

At the beginning of the year I thought I was on 10.  This seemed like a lot to me and when I mentioned the number I was met with looks of shocked disbelief, pity, and humor by my colleagues.  Turns out I'm really on 12: I miscounted by one and then discovered one I had forgotten.  The one I forgot is for a student in another department.  I agreed to be on the committee my first year at SouthLite.  The student was ready for the proposal defense and was in a bind.  She had to scramble to reconfigure a committee due to a number of situations outside of her control.

She defended and barely passed.  Her topic is interesting but her proposal had several gaps. I gave feedback on revisions and then never heard from her again.  I honestly thought she had dropped from the program.  Fast forward 4 years to this past weekend when I received an email while I was on vacation requesting availability for the final defense in 2 1/2 weeks.  I've yet to see a finished product but have been promised it 2 weeks-to-the-day before the defense.

Two weeks is, in my opinion, a bare minimum for sending around a proposal or finished dissertation, especially one I haven't looked at in 4 years. Today I got a request from another student for a proposal defense date two weeks from today.  Again I have not seen a draft and it looks like the earliest I could expect one would be the end of business tomorrow.  I find this unacceptable.  I think I would have allowed it previously but in the next two weeks I need to: route my grant, review a manuscript, review two sets of internal grants, and participate in a doctoral defense in addition to my normal teaching and administrative duties.  My days are so chock full of meetings I literally have no time to review anything in between them.

Of the 12 committees that I am on, I am the outsider member for 7.  This, I now realize, is insanity.  I mistakenly thought the outside member would have less work, or at least no more work, than any other member, excepting the chair.  In most cases this has not been the case. Worse yet, for the committees within my department, I am chair on 4 out of the 5.

I find being the outside member particularly difficult.  It takes me several hours to really review a proposal or finished product and give good feedback.  Often I end up questioning the methodology, not because it is outside of my field but because it is incorrect.  I am never too sure if the advisor/chair left the student to his/her own devices without proper guidance or if the advisor/chair thinks the methodology is appropriate.  My university is one that is "growing its research abilities and infrastructure" and, to be blunt, some of the departments are weaker than others.  In my own department I (a) am more confident of our methodological abilities and (b) know what to expect from my colleagues in terms of how they do or don't mentor their students.  As the outside committee member I am uncomfortable being the person that needs to hold the student to a higher standard of rigor, but have ended up there several times already.

I know one of the reasons I am asked to be on committees is because I take the job seriously. Students know if they give me something to read I will give them thoughtful and detailed written feedback.  I'm not saying my colleagues don't take their roles seriously.  I think it is more likely they aren't very good at giving feedback and/or when pressed for time they read drafts quickly. I've been singularly unimpressed with some of the questions that are asked during comprehensive exams and defenses.  I am not mean and I don't ask trick questions but I am thorough and I press students to think through issues.  Most of the time it is appreciated and I enjoy doing it but it takes a lot of time to prepare for an oral examination or a defense.  I don't think students have a clue just how much time and effort it takes and if I had only one student a semester I wouldn't think about it either.

RBOC: End of Semester Edition

• Others may be in grading jail but I go straight to grading hell.
• I am currently grading 30 final papers but will have over 60 essay exams to grade by the end of the week.
• Today was a full-day faculty retreat (who holds retreats at the end of the semester???? Before grading is over????).
  
• The retreat was held in SouthLite's nicest hotel but no breakfast was served and coffee was scarce.
• Tomorrow we have a half-day retreat follow-up....at school....no coffee or lunch.
• Friday I have a full-day committee retreat.
• My affiliated department is trying to hire a faculty member before the semester ends. This week there are two presentations and a vote.
• Saturday b won a very special award at work. He was nominated and picked by his colleagues. He received a very nice watch and will be going to one of our favorite cities out west in the summer. I'm planning on tagging along.
• Saturday was also Angel's birthday. He turned 19. We visited him at college, took him out to dinner and then met his frat family at a semi-formal event.
• I miss him.
• Tonight we bought our tree. This coming Saturday we'll be trimming it....bittersweet.
  

A Tale of Two Committees

I serve on a committee that manages the undergraduate curriculum of an interdisciplinary program at my university. It is my main institutional service. I also serve on a committee that manages the graduate program within my department. It is my main departmental service.

Yesterday I met with my undergraduate committee. We have met twice so far this semester and have no plans to meet again until the Spring. At our first meeting we brainstormed a list of tasks for ourselves (mostly from last year's list of uncompleted tasks). I was given one task (a peer observation) to complete outside of the committee meeting. I completed the task and wrote a report. The report outlined concerns that I had that I felt should be addressed by the committee. I brought them to the attention of the committee chair and we agreed to discuss them in yesterday's meeting.

During the meeting we discussed my concerns (which everyone shared) and agreed upon a very watered-down solution. We then discussed the original agenda item (1 issue from the very long task list generated in the previous meeting). After discussing this issue for some time a decision was made to shelve any action and instead to concentrate on implementing the watered-down solution for the other issue by the end of the semester. There were no action items or tasks delegated by the end of the meeting nor was a new meeting date set.

I like the people on the committee and I am very committed to the interdisciplinary program. However when a program has no funding, barely any staff, and borrowed faculty, there is no chance of accomplishing much of anything. So instead we spin wheels and discuss what we feel we should do, as if we are ever going to do it, and then go our merry ways.

Drives me batty.

My departmental committee met this morning. We started the semester with a very long list of tasks, many of which are time sensitive. We also have a long range goal that the department has been putting off for some time now. All the committee members feel the time has come. We have opted to meet weekly throughout the semester and to devote a full day for our long range goal during the winter break.

While we often go off on tangents in meetings (as all academics do) someone always reigns us in. We have agendas for each meeting and work through them. We end with action items, delegated tasks, and confirmed meeting dates and times. We've made progress but still have far to go.

Again, I enjoy spending time with all of these people and I am personally committed to the tasks we have assigned ourselves. What makes it possible to progress in this committee? At the moment two of the members have been given lighter teaching loads to free up their time for administrative work. In addition we have been assigned an assistant who has no other administrative responsibilities outside of this committee.

This was not the case last year for this committee (which is why we have such a long task list this year) and has not always been the case for other committees in our department.

The entire process of managing by committee goes against my better judgment but I understand that it is the lifeblood of academia. What I really can't get behind is pretending we are accomplishing tasks just because we attend a committee meeting. Why spend time developing plans we know full well we don't have the resources to execute? I sometimes feel we would be better served by grabbing a cup of coffee and discussing the weather.

On Scholarship: A Rambling and Exploratory Post

I'm teaching a class this semester that has both graduate (master's level) and undergraduate students. It is a small class with an applied theme and group sessions are a mixture of seminar and project meetings. This is the first time I am teaching undergraduate students. Next semester I'll be teaching a larger course with only undergraduate students, although in my department we rarely get undergraduates before their junior year. I tell you all this as background to my thinking lately.

In class yesterday we had a prolonged discussion that covered several sensitive topics (race, gender, poverty, politics). This is not unusual for the class and the conversation went well by my standards. By which I mean everyone was respectful and thoughtful; we probed and pushed ourselves to get deeper into the topic, we tackled underlying assumptions, and we included both personal and professional experiences as evidence. I consider this type of activity engaging in verbal analysis and enjoy it when I can get a group of students to go there together.

After the class, as I walked to my afternoon meeting, I thought about 2 of the students who did not contribute much to the discussion. They are both seniors in their last semester. I could tell they were engaged in the discussion through their nonverbal behaviors. I also knew they had done the reading and had thought about the topic. In fact it is not unusual for them to remain quiet when the discussion gets deep. Nor is it only in this class that I have a few students who hang back once we are engaging in this type of intense discussion.

My first thought was what am I doing wrong? Why can't I engage these students in the discussion? But then I started thinking of the skill involved in engaging in a verbal analysis via a group discussion and I thought back to my own early experiences. I grew up in a literary and intellectual family where dinner conversation often consisted of analyzing a book, an author, sexism, politics, etc. My mother and my three older sisters were often far more skilled than I was at engaging in the discussion. But I learned how to see/hear the arguments and eventually to develop, propose and defend my own arguments. However when I went to college I felt like this skill did not transfer with me. In fact it was not until I was fairly well into my graduate career and had worked in my field (where these types of discussion were common and necessary) that I felt I owned the skill enough to engage in it in the classroom.

I hadn't quite worked through all of these thoughts before arriving at my meeting. It was a working meeting to recreate the course objectives for an undergraduate introductory course in an interdisciplinary program at my university. I do not teach directly in this program but do cross-list my courses there and I'm committed to it's success. I have never taught this particular course; never took a course like it as an undergraduate; and, as I mentioned earlier, have very little experience teaching at the undergraduates level. So I wasn't sure what I could meaningfully contribute to the tasks but I was willing to give it a try.

I'm often frustrated by committee work. Academics aren't trained to be administrators and I tend to think we avoid doing the actual work by talking away the time. I have a significant amount of administrative experience from my previous life and would rather just get to the task at hand. A lot of the excess discussion revolves around complaints, such as life in academia, the university, administration, and/or students. Now I like this group of faculty, so I mean no disrespect by them, but rather that this seems to be the norm for any type of meeting I attend.

So we are sitting around trying to discuss this particular course but are digressing onto what students are capable of, what our expectations are of students, and what can we reasonably expect to cover in any one course (or even in any one program). The word "scholarship" came up and people started talking about having students act like scholars, believe they are scholars, become scholars etc. The word "analysis" also reared it's head and someone asked for a clarification on what we actually mean when we say we expect students to analyze. There was also a discussion on whether analytic assignments could be in written form only or if other forms of analysis, such as verbal analysis, would work (writing assignments are problematic because students don't know how to write. The consensus seems to be that teaching students to write is (a) close to impossible and (b) no one's actual job).

This is where I need to go back again and think of my own road to scholarship--especially in terms of verbal and written analysis--which I believe started way before high school no less college, but didn't really "take" with me until sometime during my 2nd graduate program. I also need to keep in mind that I was someone who wanted to "be" a scholar. I went to college with that as a goal. I do not believe that is true for the majority of the students at my university.

As faculty I think we are frustrated because we are not able to teach the scholarship of our subject areas, which we love, to students because they do not yet have the skills of scholarship and may not want them. Instead they are probably better served by learning some of the skills of scholarship but we need to recognize that obtaining those skills may happen years after they leave us. These skills are taught through the content of our areas. That seems an important distinction from teaching the scholarship of our area. I feel it is unrealistic to expect them to "get how to be a scholar in X" from an intro course so that by the next level up they can engage in the scholarship of X.

But back to my students. Perhaps following a rich and thoughtful verbal analysis without playing an active role is an important step in my students' ability to think critically, both generally and with regard to the topic. Perhaps I worry too much about having everyone at the same level of participation and I just need to chill and accept both the way and the pace of how people learn?

Protecting Time

What with the new year and new semester, there has been a lot of talk in the blogworld about schedules. People have been busy creating schedules and figuring how to keep research or writing time sacred. I came up with my own variation on a workable schedule and I've been trying to stick to it.

My schedule has me teaching Mon & Wed afternoons and Tuesday evenings. I've delegated Tues & Thurs mornings to research/writing (done mostly at home). I've delegated all day Fridays to research/writing & the occasional class prep (preferably at home). Wed mornings are meetings (service-related only).

This schedule gives me Mon morning and late afternoon and Tues, Wed & Thurs afternoons, to schedule other meetings (service/student/project-related) as well as prep, grade, and do various assorted tasks that pile up during the week. I think that's a reasonable amount of time to leave open. Of course they are not permanently open. They get filled as I get requests for meetings and if you want to be on my calendar I generally need a week or two's notice. Again, I think this is reasonable.

The difficulty comes when large groups need to coordinate their calendars for a meeting. In the past, when it would became apparent that the meeting could not take place within a week or two without someone caving, I would cave and give up my research/writing/at home time. The semester has been in swing for two weeks and I have not caved. What has happened instead? No meeting. I'm thinking this new approach is beneficial in more ways than one.