First Person

The Art of Meetings

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By James M. Lang

I'm taking a drawing class at the local art museum this semester -- my first creative-arts class since grade school -- and my teacher frequently tells us how lines and figures can capture the moods and feelings of our subjects. On the first day of class one of our tasks was to draw lines that expressed different moods. Draw a happy line. Draw a silly line. Draw a shy line.

I have an offer to make to the artists among The Chronicle readership: If you would like to create a stirring portrait, come and draw a picture of my face at one of our departmental meetings. You will find human misery and suffering there, etched into furrowed lines of my brow, the grimace of my mouth, and the angled curves of my body, slumped awkwardly into my chair. Draw an angry line. Draw a frustrated line. Draw a miserable line.

God, I hate meetings. I hate meetings with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, as the Diane Chambers character once said on Cheers.

I'm sitting in a meeting as I draft this essay. Someone is talking about something. Now we are voting about something or another. I second a motion and raise my hand. They all probably assume I'm taking notes dutifully. I am too busy hating this meeting for that sort of attentive participation.

None of my colleagues who happen to read this column should feel singled out by my hatred of meetings. I do not hate our departmental meetings because of any single participant or even any group of participants.

My hatred of meetings, in fact, extends beyond the boundaries of academe. I am on a committee at my church that plans social work and community-building events. I hate those meetings, too. I don't discriminate. I hate all meetings.

I find it hard to believe I am alone in this, and sometimes I wonder if my colleagues all, deep down, hate meetings as I do. At one point in my life I was quite sure this was the case. We all hated the meetings equally, but we had to put up brave fronts in order to please whatever puppetmasters were creating issues that required meetings for us to make decisions about important, and often unimportant, matters.

But I was speaking to a colleague once before a meeting at my previous institution, a former psychology professor who actually expressed enthusiasm about meetings. He went on to claim that the ideal length of a meeting was 90 minutes.

So now I have begun to suspect that I am alone in my hatred of meetings. I sit backed into my corner chair, scowling, while my colleagues eat brownies, exchange jokes about Beowulf, and debate whether we want our students to "analyze" or "interpret" literature.

I hate meetings for all sorts of reasons.

They are almost invariably scheduled in the late afternoons, the time when I usually would be picking up my children after school and playing with them. Instead I am sitting in a meeting.

At least 50 percent of the time we spend in the meeting consists of announcements we could have just as easily received over e-mail and chit-chat that we could just as easily have conducted in the hallway or over lunch.

The other 50 percent usually consists of discussions of departmental and college matters that surface the buried tensions in the department. Everyone gets along fine when we are in our offices and classrooms; put us all together in a room, and I can see within 10 minutes the onset of the slow encroachments we begin to make on each other's nerves.

The discussions we have at the meetings can deal with matters of real importance to the college -- but they can also deal with matters of ... less importance. Like the food we are serving at a banquet for our seniors. Or the amount of money we should request from the provost for our photocopying budget. Do we really need to gather all 13 of us together to make these sorts of decisions?

So let me tell you the worst part about meetings: At times I find myself getting caught up in these discussions myself.

One of my colleagues recently told me about "Dolan's Law," a maxim about meetings that his graduate adviser invented and named for himself: Every time you open your mouth at a meeting, you add 10 minutes to the meeting's length. You may speak for only two minutes, but you will then inspire four other people to say their two minutes' worth in response to your comments.

So I try. God knows how I try to keep my mouth shut. But sometimes I can't help it.

Because we really do need more money in our photocopying budget than some of those other departments, and because I really think our seniors would enjoy potato salad more than guacamole dip.

And, worse, because sometimes -- and it is a rara avis indeed -- something really important comes up at a meeting, something that will actually affect the lives of the faculty members in my department or the students: sabbatical policies; eliminating or adding new courses, majors, and programs; internships and fellowships for our students.

In those moments, like all of my colleagues, I do my best to lay out what seems like the most sensible course of action to me, and I do my best to listen to them when they do the same.

And this is the place in which my hatred of meetings clashes with my better intellectual sense. Of course it makes sense to bring important departmental issues before the faculty, and it makes even more sense for intelligent and educated people to express their views, so that we can all have a better sense of the range of possible options before us. I have even sat through a meeting once in which a persuasive speech by one of my colleagues changed my mind.

So I know I should value that intellectual exchange, and see it as an extension of the sort of intellectual exchanges we are engaged in both with our students and with our colleagues at other institutions through our publications. I could even see it as more important than those other forms of exchanges, since at our meetings we make decisions that directly and immediately influence the lives and futures of our students.

But I don't. Instead, I wish I could be the designated vote-caller at the meetings, the person who was responsible for deciding when debate would end and for making the initial motion to call for a vote. My first meeting in such a role might go something like this:

Chair: "Well, good afternoon and welcome to our second departmental meeting of the year. We have a number of important questions to --"

Me: "Call for a vote."

Chair: "But we haven't --"

Me: "Any seconds?"

Draw an impatient line. Draw a conflicted line. Draw the line for wishing I was playing freeze tag in the front yard.