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Entering the Fog

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By Frank Midler

I was an undergraduate at a small New England college. It was like being at a Wilco concert in a small club where you see the band up close and personal. Students, professors, and administrators stood -- if not exactly shoulder to shoulder -- then within spitting distance of one another. In comparison, in my tenured job at a huge public research university, my position is more like that of a roadie working on Megadeth's national comeback extravaganza, "Gigantour."

The audience -- our students -- watches the show from their far-flung arena seats. Some of them are lucky enough to get something real out of the experience. But all too often I feel as though I'm helping put together and market a giant product line over which I have no control and which places students in the role of passive consumers. Nowhere has that been more obvious than in my service on campus committees.

All faculty members receive an information packet listing the various committee options. Just before my fifth year on the tenure track, I filled out the form, indicating that I would serve where needed, but that I had a few preferences.

Primarily, I wanted to serve on the athletics committee. I have an interest in maintaining the academic integrity of big-time athletics programs. But let's face it, I also coveted the perks, which included season tickets to football and basketball games. I pictured myself in excellent seats.

Knowing that many of my colleagues pursued that same line of thinking, I also requested placement on the library committee. My research is library dependent, I reasoned, so working on that panel would benefit my work, too.

I got two envelopes that fall. One told me that I would be serving on the student-conduct committee, the court of last resort for students appealing the decisions of the student judicial board. The other informed me of my appointment to a vaguely named panel that sounded like I was being drafted for law enforcement, but that turned out to be the curriculum policy committee.

I have learned a lot about the university, and about what my job really consists of, from those committees.

Serving on the student-conduct panel was obvious enough work. The sad number of students who get drunk, resist arrest, urinate on campus administrators' houses, bring guns -- pellet or otherwise -- to their dorm rooms, drink in their dorms, buy liquor with fake IDs, drink on the street, mix alcohol with drugs, drink and beat up fellow students, plagiarize, and drink and drive on campus is astounding. I suppose I really knew that, but serving on the committee was eye opening.

I had no idea what the curriculum-policy committee actually did. My chairman, who put me up for the panel, said it did important work. But when I mentioned my appointment to a colleague, he snickered, "Ah, yes, I served on it in my day, too. I call it 'entering the fog.'"

With those two potentially conflicting remarks, I went to my first meeting, where I met some familiar faces (other untenured faculty members) and some unfamiliar ones. The latter, I learned, were grizzled veterans of the committee, who had represented their departments, in some cases, for 20 years. An associate dean and his crew of selected college advisers (the people who knew the regulations inside and out) came in and sat at the head of the table.

I soon realized that both of my colleagues were right about the committee. Its membership consists of one representative from each department in our College of Arts and Sciences. In some cases the representative was a department's director of undergraduate studies; in others, an interested and experienced faculty member; and in still others (like mine), a green colleague who needed seasoning.

And it was like entering the fog. I had no idea what was going on. The advising staff and long-time committee members were bantering about policy or gossiping about colleagues (weirdly, I couldn't tell the difference) while the associate dean was bouncing a large multicolored Super Ball with frenetic energy off the table in front of him. The ball escaped only once or twice, at which point one of the advisers would run after it.

I began to bring the undergraduate catalog to our meetings, as it was the only way I could follow the discussion. That I was the only member with a catalog at first made me question the commitment of my fellow committee members. It's true, though, that when I would raise an issue from the catalog an adviser, or the dean himself, would often say, "Yes, Frank, it does say that. But in practice ..."

I quickly learned that "faculty governance" was a misnomer. We never voted on anything. We never even reached informal conclusions, or so it seemed at the time. My fantasy about university life was exploded.

I had fervently believed that faculty members could write the academic regulations that define general education, set graduation requirements, rule on conflicts among departments, and generally ensure that students receive the best, most useful, and most intellectually stimulating education our state could provide.

In practice, the advisers and the dean seemed to decide everything, based on pressure from central administrators whose province was often student life and bean counting rather than academics. The committee seemed to exist to publish edicts (in a remarkably inefficient fashion) to the college's constituent departments. Ours was top-down rather than bottom-up governance.

Last year, my second on the committee (my desperate plea to join the athletics or library panels having been once again rebuffed), I had tenure and a bit better grasp of how the committee functioned. I had the temerity to try to effect change, and I proposed a small measure that (I thought) would make life easier for students and would indeed make it possible for them to have minors as well as majors and fulfill the college's general-education requirements. I was going to press forward and ask for a vote.

On my side, I had logic, national "best practices," and some thought of genuine benefit to students. But against me I had the oppressive weight of institutional tradition, a possible harmful side effect for smaller departments, and the associate dean.

We discussed the measure over the course of two or three meetings, finally holding a vote. Inevitably my motion went down to defeat, but by a surprisingly slim margin. I was stunned and pleased with the close vote, and secretly relieved that I wouldn't be the author of a measure that could harm, even remotely, my colleagues in smaller departments.

At the end of the school year I once again filled out my "service" request, asking once more for appointment to the athletics committee. I now realize that such an assignment would likely be a dream unfulfilled during my lifetime, but it never hurts to ask. Unsurprisingly, I got the envelope dooming me to another year in "the fog."

The real surprise came in an e-mail message I received last summer from the associate dean, asking if I would consider serving as chairman of the committee this year. My department head encouraged me, and the dean told me that there was barely any work involved, so I said yes.

I don't know why I believe people.

Almost immediately I started receiving a stream of e-mail messages from the associate dean and other administrators: Should we provide college credit for "orientation courses"? Student life says yes, of course. Hard-line faculty members scoff at the notion. If we do, how much should that credit count toward our graduation requirements? And so on.

Individually the issues are small, but they are real, and they affect student lives and, in the long run, faculty teaching assignments and research support. I began to detect a structure underlying the issues we were considering.

Recently, I sat down with the associate dean and three members of the advising staff to set our committee's agenda for the coming year. The dean ran the meeting like a class. He would raise an issue: "Should we allow our students to enroll in other colleges and universities while they are students here"?

"No," I said, "of course not. They'll take easier courses elsewhere to fulfill requirements. We need to protect the integrity of our degree. And we need to keep the credit hours in house."

"That's right," the dean said, "and it's why we have a prohibition against 'dual enrollment' in place." But he then explained that arts and sciences was our university's only college that did not allow such mixing and matching. Students were confused, and in some cases were told after the fact that their earlier courses might not count. So in practice, the advisers have had to circumvent our published regulations and offer waivers for classes that students have already taken elsewhere.

I understood. "Our policy is not sustainable," I said. All of the heads around me nodded.

The conversation was fascinating, and in the course of an hour and a half, I learned more about the university's structure and operations than I had in 10 years of teaching full time. It also awakened in me a profound respect for the associate dean and for the advising staff, who do the front line work of making sure students can negotiate our megaversity's myriad academic requirements.

I now understand how the complexity of our university's structure reflects the mass of unresolved conflicts and uncoordinated curricular decisions our committee is charged with handling. Like a biologist peering through a microscope, I see that the life of our university is made up of small cells that interact in ways imperceptible at a surface glance. It's not exactly faculty governance, but our departments and colleagues need to know how all of it works and have some input, lest we lose all say in the way we teach and learn.

Now I'm not just lost in the fog. I'm helping to operate the fog machine.