I've spent more than a few afternoons this summer reciting Robert's Rules of Order to my infant son. He's at that very early age when tone of voice counts for more than character, setting, or plot. Inflecting my voice in a certain way sends him into peals of laughter.
Sometimes, at a particularly exciting passage -- like, "When the meeting has completed its work, the chair says, 'Is there any further business?'" -- he will shriek with delight.
As a newly tenured associate professor at a research university in the Midwest, I've spent much of the summer visiting family. It's been a great break for me as I prepare to assume the duties of director of graduate studies in my large department. As an anniversary gift, my wife bought me a copy of an abbreviated version of Robert's Rules. ("The rules you need in a meeting! Made simple and easy!") She knows that I want to be able to run meetings of the graduate-studies committee fairly and efficiently. Yes, she's a real romantic.
My department's bylaws explicitly refer to Robert's Rules as the authority for procedure during faculty meetings. My perusal of this official guidebook of orderly conduct has caused me to reflect on faculty meetings and, more generally, on faculty governance.
My first tenure-track position was at a private university that never claimed to adhere to the principle of faculty governance. We were administered top-down: The president had final say and delegated decisions to various officers. The local potentate was the department head, who was selected by the dean after a department vote. While the dean usually selected the winner of the faculty vote, he had the power to act as an autocrat.
Raises, teaching assignments, and faculty hires were the sole responsibility of the department head. That worked to my advantage in my first few years, when the chairman who hired me put a premium on junior-faculty development.
Our annual raises were supposed to be kept secret. The chairman would meet with faculty members individually, praising our teaching and scholarship and handing us our new salaries on tiny slips of paper that he would draw from a drawer in his desk. Our forbidden comparisons revealed that he tried to keep things roughly equal, despite the conspiratorial wink that had told each one of us, "You're special."
Unfortunately, the next chairman singled out those who had not supported him in the election. Junior faculty members with major publications and stellar teaching records were hounded out of the department. Indeed, the new chairman seemed to be picking off the junior faculty hires made by his predecessor one by one. He had his own rules of order.
As a public university, my current employer is ostensibly much more open. Faculty salaries are available by a simple search on the Web, and our department's bylaws are posted online, too.
Even so, transparency does not guarantee order. Many of our common practices run against Robert's Rules, which are supposed to shape department governance when not explicitly supplanted by our bylaws. It may come as a surprise to my colleagues that "no matter how long established a custom is, it can never conflict with a written rule."
Did you know that, according to Robert's Rules, each member of a group is allowed to speak only twice during debate on a particular motion, unless there is an explicit motion to allow further contributions? I didn't, and have violated that rule at pretty much every faculty meeting I have ever attended.
It is doubtful that my newfound knowledge will reform my behavior. We all want to speak, and we all want our colleagues to shut up, listen to us, and praise us for our wisdom and vision. But even I must acknowledge that it would be desirable to enforce that rule, especially an hour into a meeting when only a third of the agenda has been covered.
Speaking of the agenda, did you know that an agenda is only binding if voted on by the whole body of members at the beginning of the meeting? At my graduate-studies committee meetings, I will probably pretend I do not know that.
I also am not particularly keen on the principle of the committee chair's remaining aloof from substantial issues during a meeting. My experience, with groups ranging from three-member advisory panels to universitywide faculty committees, suggests that the leader of a particular group needs to exercise a great deal of guidance. We have all seen thoughtful proposals ruined by colleagues offering one too many "friendly amendments."
What should be the relationship between fairness and order, between the individual and the group? Henry Robert, author of the Rules of Order and patriarch to a clan that still nominally edits the volume, wrote in the preface to his 1915 edition: "The object of Rules of Order is to assist an assembly to accomplish in the best possible manner the work for which it was designed. To do this it is necessary to restrain the individual somewhat, as the right of an individual, in any community, to do what he pleases, is incompatible with the interests of the whole."
Don Doyle, author of a scholarly article on Robert and his Rules, puts it this way: "For Robert the importance of rules of order was always linked to the good works of Christian citizens organized to improve society."
Those of us who are paid by the state probably prefer to dissociate our good works from our religious beliefs, but it would be hard to argue with one of the rules put forward in the list Robert established as a precursor to his published volume: Members of an organization must "love and be kind to each other." I move that no faculty meeting should be adjourned without a group hug.
Parliamentary procedure alone cannot produce good results. Some of my colleagues, whether through coincidence or canny jockeying, wait to spring important issues on the group until 10 minutes before meetings are scheduled to adjourn. That is not illegal, since we always hold a vote on the issue. However, because we have such an easygoing, familylike atmosphere in and out of meetings, our tendency is support motions if the movers can claim, even implausibly, that the motion speaks to our collective good intentions.
So, like town councils that pass measures against the deployment of troops overseas, our department attempts to right the wrongs of the university as a whole.
For example, last year we passed a measure that would provide our adjunct lecturers with de facto tenure and per-course compensation greater than what we give new assistant professors on the tenure track. That was trumpeted as the "ethical" thing to do.
Those opposing the measure received pitying, mournful stares, as if we were ogres for trying to think through the implications of such a measure for our research mission and for our already exploited graduate students, who would not benefit from the proposal.
One of my colleagues made the point that since we don't have the power to enact the measure, we might as well pass it to send a message. In my view, the message we sent to the central administration was "Don't pay attention to that ridiculous department."
In Book 2 of Paradise Lost, John Milton, who had seen his belief in representative government challenged by the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, presents a parliament of fallen angels. Their debate follows standard parliamentary rules (although the individual demons speak for longer stretches than Robert's Rules might countenance).
The convocation is a sham with about as much suspense as a modern political convention. Satan knows that he will be chosen as a standard-bearer with dictatorial powers, although he masquerades as a properly elected democratic leader. Paradise Lost is in my opinion the greatest single piece of writing in English, yet its depiction of parliamentary procedure leaves us distrusting the power of rhetoric and skeptical of the possibility of democratic decision-making.
In my budding career as an administrator, I'm not sure that I will be able to completely trust "standard procedure." But I know that I prefer the rule of law to the rule of men and women.
As a critical reader, I began reviewing Robert's Rules doubting whether a 19th-century military man's rule book should govern an academic program. After all, no guidelines to parliamentary procedure could stop Satan -- or even a particularly deceitful and malevolent colleague -- from wreaking havoc. But I emerged from the book believing it still does a pretty good job of helping basically benevolent colleagues pursue real discussion that can lead to real action.
