Secrets of Committee Work

Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has encountered the dark side of academic life:

I was assigned to the curriculum committee, so I went to the meeting today. (I don't go to committee meetings for my health.) I learned that one of the tasks before us was demonstrating that we have assessments to show that introductory physics courses satisfy the University's "quantitative science" requirement.

Now, I know what you're thinking: HOW THE HELL COULD PHYSICS NOT BE A QUANTITATIVE SCIENCE? Well, I got past that. I had told myself that I would just accept the bullshit and do whatever needs to be done. So, I went into the meeting and said "OK, what do they want us to do in the classes, or show from the classes, or whatever, to demonstrate this? What sort of data, or evaluations, or whatever, should we collect? What sort of documentation should we keep?" And people replied with all sorts of vague things, much of it involving accreditation and committees and all that. And I fired back with "OK, I understand that, but what do you want me to do?" And I got more vague stuff.

This is probably a good place for some Pratchett, from the new Making Money (aka Going Postal 2: Electric Boogaloo):

What the iron maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive, far less messy, considerably more efficient, and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the iron maiden.

The maddeningly non-specific committee meeting is a familiar experience for most academics, and it's particularly irritating for people in the physical sciences. Scientists and engineers tend to be more irritated than humanists and social scientists by this sort of thing, but there's a secret to dealing with it. I'm going to make you click down below the fold before I reveal it, though.

Of course, scientists and engineers are generally more hostile to committees and meetings than humanists and social scientists. Some of this has to do with the personalities of the type of people who are drawn to the different fields, but our late dean of the faculty had a good explanation that has to do with work patterns: For humanists and social scientists, scholarly activity consists of reading and writing, and can be done at home. When they want to focus on research, they don't even come to campus, and when they do come to campus, it's in order to teach and socialize.

Scientists and engineers, on the other hand, do their scholarly activity in on-campus labs and offices, using resources that aren't available at home. They come to campus in the expectation of getting work done. This means that committee meetings are particularly irritating to scientists and engineers, because you're directly cutting into their research time, whereas the humanists and social scientists weren't expecting to get anything done on campus anyway, so they might as well be in a meeting talking to other people.

Of course, that doesn't really get to the maddeningly non-specific committee problem, which also crops up a lot, usually in areas involving terms like "Assessment." It's absolutely maddening to a scientist to ask "What are we supposed to do?" and get airy vagueness back.

But here's the secret to dealing with this sort of thing: When requirements are phrased in terms of vague generalities and undefined terms, whatever you're already doing is probably fine. The vague generalities get broken out because nobody really has a solid idea of what they're after, so anything at all might qualify as whatever it is that they're looking for. The trick is not to ask for some new thing that you're supposed to do, the trick is to think of how to cast whatever you're already doing in terms of the same airy generalities. If they don't know what they're looking for, it might as well be whatever you have to give them.

In the specific case of "assessment" of whether physics is a quantitative science or not, a big pile of papers with numbers on them ought to do the trick. They don't have to be terribly meaningful numbers, but there should be numbers involved, and the stack should be big. And whatever cover copy you write up should use the same content-free buzzwords as the poorly-defined specifications of the original request.

And there you have it: the secret of dealing with maddeningly non-specific committees. Use this knowledge only for good.