Although I'm 47 years old and a full professor, academic meetings catapult me back to my grade-school days.
I become uncontrollably antsy sitting on a hard chair as a person more grown-up than I, usually someone with authority over me, holds forth at the front of the room. Like the kid who seeks any excuse to leave his chair, I stand up too often: to get a drink, to throw away scrap paper, to close the door on the pretense that people outside are being too noisy.
In my lap, like the Nancy Drew book that used to occupy me during elementary math lessons, rests my folder of illicit activities: an interesting journal article, quizzes to grade, Sudoku puzzles.
I'm always embarrassed at my immaturity until I look around and realize I'm not alone. There's Professor A, whose scorn for a colleague's question is written on her face in the perfect middle-school sneer. Professors B and C are whispering and giggling. Even the usually staid Professor D has been enticed into note-passing. Meanwhile, Professor E puffs up like any teacher's pet, raising her hand to echo the administrator's proposal in slightly different words. As the speaker drones on, I long for Professor F, our class clown, who used to jump in several times every meeting with loud, inappropriate, yet hilarious jokes. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, he didn't get tenure.
Which brings up the problem: Too much poor behavior during meetings can damage your career. So I present a meeting-hater's survival guide.
Choose your seat well. The first decision to make upon walking into a meeting room is where to sit. As in grade school, this is important, so arrive a couple of minutes early for the best selection.
Generally, if your tolerance for meetings is low, sit as far as possible from anyone who could get you in trouble: deans, provosts, senior colleagues.
Whether to take a chair by your friends is a difficult decision; it's fun, but dangerous. I love sitting with my friend David, but the last time I did, I lured him into helping me with my crossword puzzle, thereby rendering him unable to answer a question from the dean. Oops.
My own prime location is at the left-hand end of a row or table. That's because I'm left-handed, so any covert activities I am engaged in will be tilted toward the left, out of reading range of my colleagues on my right.
Bring an activity pack. Trust me, it will help you tolerate the dullness of most meetings. What to bring depends on the meeting's size. If it's a general assembly, in a big room with seats in rows, anything goes: a book, a stack of student papers, the latest bevy of departmental forms. All of those have the benefit of being "work," so some colleagues may even admire your industriousness and ability to multitask.
Our music professors almost always bring sheet music to meetings, subtly tapping time as they study it; I'm waiting for the day when one of them inadvertently bursts into song.
If you happen to lack actual busywork or forget it, the crossword solution can be a happy one, though if you're seated next to a fellow cruciverbalist ... well, see above.
If you're in a small meeting, seated around a table with no more than 10 people, don't despair. Taping a Sudoku into your pad of paper can allow for subtle self-entertainment, especially if you've chosen your seat well. You can also brainstorm ideas for your next book or article, and if you occasionally interject a relevant comment, you may actually appear to be taking notes.
Know when to pay attention. Is a meeting ever important enough to actually listen to? Yes, albeit rarely. If the topic is course work you teach, you may need to pay attention.
And if there are fewer than six attendees, there's a possibility you might actually accomplish something. When we built our graduate program in popular fiction, most of the work was done in meetings of two or three people.
In another example, three or four of us completed a departmental review that resulted in our developing a new major and hiring a new colleague -- important results that affected our working lives and helped our students.
But if a meeting's topic is an abstract word like "mission" or "identity," or if the group is large, feel free to entertain yourself. Little or nothing will actually be accomplished.
But what if I'm the one running the meeting? I'm so sorry, friend. The law of karma is in effect, and your meeting will undoubtedly be peopled by colleagues acting like seventh graders. When you open a topic for discussion, 12 people known to be at the top end of the IQ scale are likely to stare at you in dumb silence.
It helps to remember that few are actually listening, so the silence probably isn't about what you just said. It also helps to read studies about classroom management of gifted students. Researchers identify a lack of challenge as the most frequent cause of boredom in gifted students, and studies of gifted underachievers cite boredom as a major cause of inattentiveness and disruption.
To prevent your meeting from falling into chaos, limit the presentations and offer short, challenging assignments. When people realize they may have to do work, they are likely to snap to attention, if only to argue against the task's viability. The meeting may then degenerate into brainstorming and arguing.
At that point, you must call on all the patience you have and let people talk. Most of them just want to feel that others are listening; in fact, according to my friend the psychologist, being heard is one of our deepest human needs.
If the impractical suggestions you hear alarm you, take deep breaths and remain calm; the craziest ideas will be forgotten by the next day. Metaphors like "herding cats" are made for leading faculty meetings, and after all, what's not to like about cats?
Appreciate the beauty of meetings. By now, you know I dislike meetings. Oddly, though, they were one of the things I missed during my sabbatical. Now that I'm back on the campus, I realize that meetings are not about getting things done. They're about community.
Having let go of my urgency toward accomplishment, I'm free to watch my colleagues misbehave and to reflect on my fondness for them.
Last week, I sat in my usual back-row seat at a faculty forum, and when the audiovisual system failed, I enjoyed the distraction like any grade-school kid. A senior administrator who's good with technology, but who has had some health problems, climbed up on a high table to poke at the overhead camera.
Before the rest of us could get beyond worried gasps, a young co-worker raced to his back, arms raised protectively, ready to catch our colleague if he teetered off the table's edge. The younger man didn't embarrass the elder one by advertising his presence, and the administrator, not knowing how he'd been supported, fixed the camera and hopped down, pride intact. The spontaneous applause was for both men -- and, of course, for the welcome disruption to the work at hand.
It was a small moment, but one that I'm glad I didn't miss by skipping the meeting and staying in my office.
"The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up only one body," St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthians. And so it is with a university's faculty, a body united in the purpose of educating students, but diverse in its styles and ways. We need the teacher's pet, the creative note-passer, the contentious nitpicker, to function in our full capacity. We may argue and misbehave, but when it's crucial to support one another, we will.
Most of the faculty's actual functioning happens in classrooms, laboratories, offices, or the library, but meetings offer an opportunity to observe our colleagues in all their wondrous variety. So as long as I've got my activity pack, I'm good to go.
Lee Tobin McClain directs the master's program in writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa. For an archive of her previous columns, click here.
