president or dean in a small college of the '70's, looking out over the island of faculty faces assembled for a faculty that he has called, may ponder a mystery: the college is causing its faculty to meet more, but is somehow employing it less. Similarly, his increasing the channels of communication or accelerating the fury of mimeograph machines seems to decrease the real flow of information and discussion. The more channels, it would seem, the more silt below and algae above; the more the presiding officer aspires to perpetual academic motion, the closer the faculty is brought to inertia. There doubtless is a host of reasons for this quick shuttle from Parkinsonian law to an equivalent disease. The causes include both a weakening in parliamentary discussion generally and a particular likelihood that many professors will view academic housekeeping with unbecoming levity. Such faults are chargeable at least as much to the faculty as to the administrative presiding officer. However, there probably is a more radical reason for the ailment: so-called faculty meetings seldom do much more than collect the faculty in order that they listen to the administration's pronouncements. However unwillingly or unwittingly, the president or dean becomes a Cato, come to give his little nonsenate laws. Although faculty committees may have been active somewhere in the background of the given meeting, the faculty itself will not have been involved in gathering information, drawing up agenda, or studying suggested programs. As a result, in its meeting the faculty is likely to whisper a lot, speechify a little, fecklessly reverse some previous votes, and, because the meeting is running five minutes overtime, make itself a rubber stamp even as it also makes for the doors.
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Aug 15, 2022
Josh Bowers 
Open Access
