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.
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