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 Monday, February 23, 2004
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On Thursday, February 19, I attended two division meetings (Language Arts and Biological and Health Sciences) so this seems a good time to talk about meetings and their function in an academic institution. In the years I served as an administrator, I might have a formal meeting every day, sometimes several in a day. When I was active in faculty politics, I'd have several meetings a week. Now, as simply a faculty member, I have about one meeting a week--a committee, the department, the division. I rarely attend meetings of college governance groups now, though I co-authored a book titled Leadership in Governance which examined decision-making processes in community colleges. What I'm saying here is that I'm something of an expert on meetings of academics. This is nothing to brag about.
The old joke goes that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. The two critical terms of that claim ("vicious" and "small stakes") don't really apply to my current meeting experiences, just those of long ago. When I came to De Anza as dean in 1977, I was appalled by the first meeting of English faculty I attended. Two male colleagues came within inches of a physical confrontation. I spent my first two years as division dean trying to figure out just what good could be done at meetings and trying to get us organized so that meetings had a chance of accomplishing some purpose. I was modestly successful, since we reorganized the division into departments. The concept was that departments would discuss matters specific to their discipline and their curriculum and then bring proposals forward to the division for formal action. Division meetings, which used to be dominated by the concerns of English faculty, would be more focused, with a business meeting agenda. Discussion would take place in relation to matters to be decided at the meeting. The meetings also provided for reports from Academic Senate and Union represenatives. I would report on issues from administrative meetings. I was always sensitive to the fact that 45 or 50 faculty in a room for an hour was an expensive proposition. Business should be substantive and time should be allocated fairly and efficiently.
At 12:30 p.m. today, about 45 division faculty assembled in the computer lab to hear a presentation by English as a Second Language faculty and a panel of six ESL students. The meeting had no agenda. It was a repeat of a similar meeting a year ago, though the students on the panel were new. The presentations took nearly 50 minutes (just like a class) with no interaction among the faculty. We all just sat (and 8 of us stood because the room isn't really set up for such presentations) and listened. The students were articulate and sincere, but no more so than the students in my classes. [The orginal ESL curriculum was created by my colleague Phil Stokes (now retired) and me in 1966. When I came to De Anza, I established the ESL department, hired faculty who still lead the department, and oversaw the first of numerous curricular developments that now serve thousands of students every term. However, it has been about 15 years since I have taught an ESL course. At the same time, every class I teach is rich in second-language students. As reported at the meeting, 62 languages are spoken by current De Anza students, with the chief ones being Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Russian.]
The exigency for this meeting never became clear to me. The good news is nothing vicious was said. We are a very civil lot these days, perhaps because where we once were 75% male (30 years ago) now we are about 75% female. Even so, I could see most of my colleagues glazing over after about 40 minutes, just like students do when they are lectured to about material they already are familiar with. At the end of the presentation, I pointed out that the pedagogy of the meeting was not up to our standards and that we did not make good use of all the faculty time and brainpower present. No one challenged that view publically, though one colleague said afterward she thought the presentation was well-designed.
For whatever reason, academics do not apply what they know about learning to their own meetings. We hold many of the key meetings where policy gets developed in the mid-afternoon, the very time everyone should be taking a siesta or having tea. We often load meetings up with information that could be presented in print or online and minimize the conversation among faculty, the one thing you can't do very well in print and has yet to develop effectively online at our campus. My sense is we often don't feel we need to prepare for learning outcomes in meetings in the way that we do for classes. Meetings have ritual purposes. They allow us to say we have met, even if nothing really comes of it. To the degree that happens regularly, faculty come to see meetings as deadly boring chores that one endures.
When I was still dean, I seriously proposed that the entire college cancel all meetings for a month: no one, faculty or administrator, would be allowed to call a meeting. I suggested the experiment could have two outcomes: (1) we would be able to learn which meetings really made a difference, seeing which meetings, if any, were essential to getting our work done; (2) everyone would keep notes on how they got business done without meetings. Of course, everyone was amused and complimented me on my cleverness. And, of course, no one ever tried the experiment. My hunch is most administrators depend on meetings to structure their week the way most faculty depend on classes to structure theirs. The difference is we've got no measures of what comes of meetings: they just happen.
| Posted by jocalo@a... on 2/23/04; 12:20:44 AM |
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Since last spring, I've had at least a dozen conversations with colleagues across the campus in which, in various ways, we noted the lack of faculty-wide discussion of academic matters. Not every colleague analyzed the problem in exactly the same way, but virtually everyone agreed that corporate faculty life has practically disappeared from the campus.
This is not to say that we don't meet in small groups such as committees and departments or even, sometimes, divisions. All of that activity certainly exists. The issue is that we don't seem to have common topics before us and ways of discussing them across department, divisions, and disciplines. The closest we come to such a forum is the letters column of La Voz, which is not really the ideal place for faculty to debate educational policy and academic issues.
One of the people I've had these conversations with is Dan Mitchell, who is our current Academic Senate President and an advocate of electronic discussion forums. And so we bring you FACULTY FORUM, a place where colleagues can raise issues of concern, create campus-wide awareness of issues that affect faculty and students, and engage one another in conversation, maybe even debate.
Another common perception that emerged from those many conversations is that it's politically unwise to have strong opinions and voice them publically at De Anza. I've never figured out what the source of that perception is, but I can report that it is widespread. One good way to dispell the notion will be to participate here. The heart of what we try to teach students, regardless of discipline, is that open inquiry is the heart of building knowledge and that each of us should seek understandings through study of authoritative sources and debate of the merits of those sources and their methods. One of the best ways to teach those values to our students will be to embody them in our own efforts here. Please join in. Each of us can learn from one another's unique perspectives and experience, even when we disagree.
| Posted by jocalo@a... on 2/23/04; 12:13:10 AM |
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