COMMITTEE SERVICE: OPPORTUNITY OR DANGER

The posting below offers some great advice on how to make your service on committees more rewarding and less time consuming. It is from: GOOD START: A Guidebook for New Faculty in Liberal Arts Colleges, by GERALD W. GIBSON. Copyright � 1992 by Anker Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission www.ankerpub.com

From Chapter 8: Citizenship and Service

Adam Newport has slipped deeply into the work of college service in his first three years. Although still a relatively junior faculty member, he is already in a position to help shape circumstances outside his own classrooms and laboratories and to help solve problems that are campus-wide in scope. More hours are being spent in committee work this year than he had expected, and the ad-hoc parking committee that President Fitzgeorge is creating will add to that number. The College of Port St. Julian has set no restrictions on committee service, and his department chair has not given him any particular advice regarding either the extent of or the approach to such service. If he gets off to a good start as a committee worker, it will be strictly through luck, or perhaps out of unusually incisive judgment.

Considering how much of the faculty member's career is spent sitting around committee tables, it makes good sense to reflect at the outset on how best to approach this responsibility along with all the others. Committee work can indeed represent opportunity for the new faculty member, but it can also be fraught with danger for the unwary neophyte. Being alert to both the opportunities and the dangers can save considerable time and frustration.

Henry Rosovsky, Harvard's former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, hints at the all-too-frequent flavor of committee work in his book, The University: An Owner's Manual:

The desire to participate is great, but self-governance comes only at a high price: it requires much time, knowledge, commitment, and a lot of what the Germans call Sitzfeisch...(T)hey sit on innumerable committees...spending hours in fruitless and inconsequential debates. Perhaps the total number of hours used is not all that large, but the cumulative effects are considerable.(1)

There are ways of making the most of committee time, both for yourself and in the interest of good faculty governance. No matter what you as a newcomer to campus may find to be the established modus-operandi, you can both (a) quickly become an influential force in governance affairs, and (b) see that your committee hours intrude minimally on the rest of your work. These are the guiding principles for committee work that I would commend to the new faculty member:

* Do your homework.
* Don't be bashful.
* Help keep the train on the track.
* Decide when to say no-and do it!

Let's look at each of these in turn. It is amazing what an edge one can have in a group enterprise simply by doing a little homework. You will discover early on that most committee members are faithful in attendance, but that they devote little or no time to issues on the agenda except during meeting times. There is a strong tendency to consider it to be the responsibility of the committee chair-but no one else-to think about things between meetings. It is far better to set aside maybe half an hour between times to review the agenda, minutes of past meetings, and other relevant materials, and to make a few notes to take back to the next meeting.

Prominent among the notes should be your own ideas about possible solutions to problems before the committee, disposition of items on its agenda, and/or initiatives that it might profitably take. With this modest amount of preparation, you will find it much easier not only to participate, but to become a leader in committee work-and thus in setting directions. You will also contribute significantly to the efficiency with which the group operates.

Some new faculty members will not need the admonishment, "Don't be bashful," in committee meetings, but most will. Recalling that the majority of faculty, especially those in liberal arts colleges, are by nature introverts, their inclination to keep quiet until very sure of their position comes as no surprise. Whereas extroverts think by speaking, introverts think before speaking. Add to this the proclivity of the newcomer to defer to those seen as more senior or as inside an established circle, and you have a near guarantee that new-faculty membership will be marked by reticence and minimal impact. This is not, however, an inevitable state of affairs. The new faculty member who comes in mindful of what is probable needs simply to resolve to change the probability. Particularly when he or she has done the pertinent homework and has jotted down ideas ahead of time, it becomes easier even for the introvert-the thinking through done in advance-to jump into the discussion, and even to play a major role in the very first year of service. I don't advocate this, please be assured, as a means of getting attention for oneself, but rather as a means of making the most valuable possible contribution to the committee's work.

Helping keep the train on the track is without question more of a challenge than either doing homework or being bold. Indeed, a great many of the hours spent "off-track," in what Rososky calls "fruitless and inconsequential debates." BY "off-track," I mean that committee discussion is prone to meander rather than to move purposefully toward conclusion. In part this traces to the lack of homework done by most members between meetings, and thus to the use of scheduled committee time for "thinking out loud," an activity that seldom proceeds in a straight line and often takes the group off on tangents. Even more thinking out loud takes place when either the chair or several members are extroverts for whom a committee meeting serves an important social function.

So what can you, neither chair nor insider, do to help keep things directed? You will have begun simply by committing to homework and not being shy about supplying ideas, as suggested above. Putting well-considered, pertinent proposals on the table will automatically direct conversation and business flow. But beyond proposals for solutions to problems, you should weigh, too, processes for focusing committee effectively and efficiently on the issues to be resolved. An entire committee thinking out loud may eventually to group consensus, or it may lead to agreement whether there is true consensus or not, depending on the dynamics in the group. One process that you might suggest the committee use to determine the degree of group accord-and to push the train back onto the track-is that of employing written opinions. When there has been a reasonable amount of discussion on some matter-say, whether a new course being proposed to the Curriculum Committee rates high, medium, or low in furthering the curriculum goals of the college-each committee member is asked to write down an individual opinion on a piece of paper and pass it to the chair. The chair then lists the results on the board for all to see; whether there is consensus becomes immediately clear. That question settled, the next one can be taken up. You might also suggest, in a similar vein, that debates about priorities be brought to closure by having members give individual ratings to the several competing items-say competing request for end-of-year funds-then using the group averages to arrive at committee recommendations for priorities in spending. On other occasions it may become clear that a small subcommittee would deal more productively with a task-say constructing a policy to govern applications for sabbaticals-than would the whole committee; if so, you should quickly suggest that assignment be made. You may be surprised at how useful strategically-timed proposals for processes of closure can be in moving the group along, reducing the effects of unhealthy dynamics (such as domineering personalities), and coming to sound conclusions. You may also be surprised at how welcome your ideas for keeping the train on track turn out to be.

The forth principle in the list, "Decide when to say no-and do it!", should probably be the first as you start out. Had Adam Newprof been forewarned in the first year that the calls for college service would grow so relentlessly, he might well have drawn a line at a point that would have averted the sense of overload that he is beginning to feel on too many afternoons. On almost every college campus you will hear grousing about the time spent on committees, task forces, panels and the like. Usually the diagnosis is "too many committees," but a more accurate description of the problem is that there are too many committees per faculty member, i.e., that individuals have said yes too often to calls on their time. While it may be natural to attribute the overextension to external sources ("They keep asking me"), the personal problem gets solved only if the person feeling overextended acts to solve it. Even the new faculty member, who wants to come across as cooperative and energetic, and who is conscious of the need to establish an impressive record during the pre-tenure period, can say no.

A good start in college service-and in committee service particularly-means setting a reasonable limit early on-and sticking to it. What is "reasonable" will vary with the person; some people can handle a little more than others. But a good rule of thumb is to limit your membership to no more than one standing committee and one other group that has regularly scheduled meetings. A second good rule is to take a "committee sabbatical"-a total break from committee work-about every fourth year. Faculty governance is important, and faculty member needs to accept a share in it. But every afternoon expended in or ravaged by a committee meeting is an afternoon out of the library or laboratory or studio, an afternoon unavailable for working with students, an afternoon when no papers get graded. If you are pressured into saying yes out of concern for "the record," don't forget that the record of teaching and scholarship will turn out to be far more critical than the list of committees to which one has given time. You have unquestioned obligations as a campus citizen; just keep a sensible limit on your total commitments.

(1) Henry Rososky, The University: An Owners Manual (New York, NY:W.W. Norton, 1990), p.277.