I'm deep in editing mode at the moment, and faintly depressed at the number of words I have managed to remove by changes like turning "was [verb]ing " to "[verb]ed." It's a tedious and labor-intensive process that is weirdly exhausting-- all I'm doing is sitting in a cafe somewhere reading text with a red pen in hand, and yet I'm completely drained at the end of the day.
And, of course, this process is interrupted periodically by the need to go to meetings.
One of the great frustrations of my job is the number of meetings in academia. It's gotten slightly better in the last couple of years, but for a while it seemed like there was an hour-long general faculty meeting just about every week, with various committee meetings filling in the rare weeks without. What's particularly irritating is the number of these meetings that are completely unnecessary-- discussions of trivial changes in policy, or discussions of lengthy and detailed documents that we somehow attempt to squeeze into a one-hour slot between class periods, etc.. An amazing fraction of what we do in meetings could and should be handled via email.
I realize this is hardly a unique complaint-- meetings are the bane of all white-collar workers, including professional assassins-- but it's particularly galling for academics. After all, our entire professional reputations are based on books and journal articles-- that is, the presentation and discussion of complex ideas in text. That's also one of the things we're supposed to be teaching our students to do, and one of the main things we grade them on.
If, as several people have said in the course of complaining that we don't have enough meetings, "it's impossible to have a meaningful discussion in email," why do we do what we do? After all, email is just a medium for the exchange of text, which is what we are supposedly dedicated to producing and interpreting. If it's impossible to have a meaningful discussion in email, what does that say about the huge and ongoing discussion that is academic literature in general?
I probably don't need to tell this to anybody reading blogs, but electronic media-- including email-- are as well suited to meaningful discussion as any other. I've been having serious discussions over electronic media since 1993. I even met my wife via an online book discussion group.
In many ways, online media are better for some kinds of discussion. On several occasions, we have had people at general faculty meetings stand up and read pre-written statements, and if that's not an implicit argument in favor of online discussion, I don't know what is. If you believe that your arguments are more effective when you sit down and write them out in advance, you should be in favor of online discussion-- you could perfectly well email that speech to everyone in advance, and not take up our limited in-person meeting time reading it out loud.
The only reason email doesn't work as a medium for serious discussion is that too many people refuse to consider the idea of using email as a medium for serious discussion. In an ideal world, it's perfect for a lot of the stuff we try to cram into in-person meetings: the asynchronous nature of the conversation allows for greater thought and reflection, and the crafting of more coherent and convincing arguments than you get in person. If you need time to think something over and come up with a considered reply, you can take that time.
There are, of course, purposes for which email and other online media are not well suited. If you need to process a lot of information to reach a decision in a short period of time, in-person discussion will be far more efficient. But that's not usually the situation we have-- most of the time, we're debating policy changes that won't take effect for months at the earliest. Online is a perfect forum for this, and has the additional advantage of not taking productive time out of the middle of everyone's day.
Our late Dean of the Faculty had a theory that scientists and engineers resent meetings more than scholars from the social sciences and humanities because research in science and engineering is done in labs on campus during the day, while research in the social sciences and humanities is done reading and writing at home. That's always rung true to me, and even more so now that SteelyKid is an active and attention-demanding toddler-- if I'm going to get anything at all done, it has to be either during the day when she's at day care, or late at night after she's gone to sleep. So an in-person meeting in the middle of the work day is, essentially, taking away from my sleep time, which ticks me off even more than it used to when I had some chance of getting work done between 5pm and 10pm.
But really, I'm annoyed because it's 2011. After nearly 20 years of email being a general part of working life, the fact that we're still hearing arguments that nothing meaningful can possibly take place via electronic media is ridiculous. Email is a tool, and like any tool it can be used for serious work just as easily as frivolity. The Internet is here, use it.
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So social sciences and humanities faculty are suppose to resent the extra time not spent with their family and/or losing sleep, because they 'can' read at home instead of on campus? Do all social science and humanities professors either have teenage children, who avoid spending time with them anyway, or no family so it doesn't matter? An hour out of one's workday is an hour out of one's workday; it's going to push regular work to some other time.
I think his theory on the resentment angle has merit but I have problems with assuming anyone wants to take work home every evening, we have lives outside of our research/work. (Obviously, this last bit doesn't apply to grad students.)
Sorry, I should have said "more work home". I'm sure most faculty take work home at least occasionally.
Well, let's see--you're rewriting your book because your first drafts aren't well written. Books and articles are carefully crafted texts, written and re-written. First drafts of articles and books don't get published, because they are not an adequete "presentation and discussion of complex ideas in text".
How many people do you know who re-write their emails?
Emails are not articles; the process of writing email and the process of writing articles are radically different. If every email in an on-line discussion was as polished as an article, then you might have a valid argument.
Running a small software company over the internet for the last 15 years, I've now worked with several folks for years that I've never met or in some cases even spoken to, thanks to e-mail.
There are plenty of faculty members (as well as people in general - this applies to every workplace I think) who manage to simply ignore a decent percentage of their emails. In a meeting, even reading from a prepared text at least gets it heard (if maybe not actually paid serious attention.)
I have worked with and do work with people who routinely ignore email, and you have to physically go find them to get anything done. This, in a university - one of the current offenders is in IT!
Bill@3: Baloney. Much of the discussion in meetings includes off-the-cuff comments which have had even less editorial attention than e-mail. Your average e-mail program has (and has had for over a decade) some kind of built-in editor which allows the user to refine what he is saying. I'll grant that too many people do not actually use this capability, but it nonetheless exists.
The real reason for many of these meetings is that East African plains apes have a significant need for social interactions, and the need to decide something by consensus is a frequent excuse for such social interactions to take place. It's the same reason why scientific societies still sponsor major conferences, and why business travelers will often jet across the country or around the world to do a deal that could have been done, if not by e-mail, then at least by a conference call.
E-mail is a fine medium in most cases if you are dealing with grown-ups who are interested and engaged in the topic at hand. If any of those conditions is false, e-mail loses utility very quickly-- e-mails go unanswered; questions get terse, stupid, or non-sequitur responses; focus gets lost; deadlines pass, etc. Then someone gets frustrated, makes a decision and runs with it, and half the participants get all upset that they weren't consulted, taken seriously, got overrun, etc.
Note that active, involved grown-ups is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. There are some meetings where, yes, you need the richness and denseness of at least full audio (telephone conference) or full audio and visual (video conference) and if you're at the same campus you might as well get up and meet physically. E.g., I don't bother to participate in design reviews that aren't in real-time, as they turn out to be a waste of my time.
Also: A whole meeting? Every week? Poor kid, you.
marciepooh: So social sciences and humanities faculty are suppose to resent the extra time not spent with their family and/or losing sleep, because they 'can' read at home instead of on campus? Do all social science and humanities professors either have teenage children, who avoid spending time with them anyway, or no family so it doesn't matter? An hour out of one's workday is an hour out of one's workday; it's going to push regular work to some other time.
Her claim was that since humanities and social science faculty do their work at home, they only come to campus to teach and socialize, and thus don't regard time spent on campus as research time to be jealously guarded. Meetings, as others have noted, include some aspect of socializing, and so aren't resented in the same way.
She was a classicist, by the way, who raised at least one child while a faculty member, so this was not a case of a childless male physicist speculating wildly about how the other half lives.
bill: How many people do you know who re-write their emails?
Well, for starters, there's me. On those occasions when I send email to the faculty about some issue of general interest, I spend a good deal of time revising it. On particularly contentious issues, I will even ask Kate to look at it for me, just to make sure I haven't been snarkier than I intended.
That's because I recognize that if email is going to be used for serious conversations, it needs to be treated as a serious medium. Which means being careful about the wording, etc.. The fact that most emails are not serious does not mean that the medium is inherently unserious, any more than the fact that most of the telephone calls I make these days involve SteelyKid talking to her grandparents means that it's utterly impossible to conduct interviews over the phone.
flea: There are plenty of faculty members (as well as people in general - this applies to every workplace I think) who manage to simply ignore a decent percentage of their emails. In a meeting, even reading from a prepared text at least gets it heard (if maybe not actually paid serious attention.)
I have zero sympathy for this.
Again, if people treated the telephone this way, they would get no sympathy. "I don't listen to my phone messages" would quite rightly be treated as a completely ridiculous position that would essentially forfeit the right of the speaker to be taken seriously.
Email is the same way. If you miss some critical announcement because of a principled refusal to read email, tough shit. Carve your grievances into a stone tablet, and leave it in my mailbox.
Q: How many people do you know who re-write their emails?
A: Dozens based on first hand knowledge, maybe hundreds.
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re: "I don't listen to my phone messages" would quite rightly be treated as a completely ridiculous position that would essentially forfeit the right of the speaker to be taken seriously.
I have a handicap that makes it nearly impossible for me to understand recorded messages. Between the awful sound quality and lack of interaction as in conversation, I wind up having to listen dozens of times to get a vague idea of what the speaker is saying. Forget about return phone numbers, dates or times. Those just get lost. I'd often give up in frustration, and, as you might imagine, only consider engaging in this unpleasant and trying chore when people started sending me emails telling me my voice box was full. Then, I would just call them.
"Again, if people treated the telephone this way, they would get no sympathy. "I don't listen to my phone messages" would quite rightly be treated as a completely ridiculous position that would essentially forfeit the right of the speaker to be taken seriously."
Actually, wasn't it just last month that the NYT published an article about the studies and statistics showing that phone use has dropped dramatically?