Dr. Change Agent: How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love Committees
by Kentaro Toyama
This piece is a part of our Spark series: University Faculty Are Change Agents
Before I joined academia, I spent twelve years in the private sector as a research scientist and research manager. At conferences and other research gatherings, I would often hear my university colleagues complain about endless committee meetings and the tribulations of being a faculty member. They would grumble about how little time they had to do research. At the time, I took these complaints at face value. After all, I had a great job in industry, with no formal teaching requirement and no management duties. It did seem that I had much more time for research!
But since I arrived inside the walls of the ivory tower, I’ve found that, as far as committee work goes, our complaints about it are disproportionate to the expectation. In focusing on the lost time, we underemphasize our ability to have meaningful impact on our work environment and possibly beyond.
Full-time professors actually have it pretty darn good. Few other jobs have the combination of steady paycheck with minimal supervisory oversight. Committee meetings can seem endless at times, but I suspect most faculty spend only a fraction of the time in meetings that their private-sector, knowledge-worker peers do. (One survey of US office workers finds them spending almost 30% of their time at work in meetings and administrative tasks — that would be 12 hours of a 40-hour work week all year round.) And, unlike corporate employees, faculty get to claim credit for their committee work. “Service” is a section header on our CVs, which, though eclipsed by research and teaching in importance, makes it sound as if the effort to sustain the organizations enabling our work were a noble sacrifice. In modern companies, few people count how many committees they’re on. Managers care only about results delivered; meetings and committees are an expected part of the job, but rarely explicitly acknowledged.
Intellectually, we faculty members obviously understand the benefits of our profession or we’d find other careers, but some combination of peer norms, projected modesty, inexperience with other working environments, comparison with PhD life, and the very real pressures of academia cause us to undervalue the committee work we do. And that’s a shame, because it is through that work — strategically engaged with and applied — that faculty can influence their universities and their fields, sometimes dramatically.
At least in North America, tenure-track faculty are empowered like royalty. Though ostensibly there is a line of command through chairs, deans, and provosts, up to the president, in reality, university culture is that faculty are their own bosses and generally acknowledged as the soul of their institutions. University administrators fear faculty ire in a way that CEOs of private firms do not fear of their employees. For this reason, faculty members — and tenured ones in particular — wield a degree of power and agency that few other frontline employees of other types of organizations enjoy.
Yet, many of us are oblivious to this power. Perhaps habituated to the patterns of authority from our days in school and through our PhD programs (when our futures did rest in the authority of often just one possibly mercurial mentor), we’re a little like farm animals constrained by flimsy fences that we could easily push over if we but tried. Thanks to the flexibility of our time, the guarantee of academic freedom, the absence of day-to-day supervision, and the collegiality of our colleagues, faculty can start and engage with peer groups focused on just about any cause we wish. Should your department purchase a new refrigerator? Should students have more interaction with the surrounding community? Is sexual harassment a hidden scourge at the university? There is a good chance issues like these — ranging from the trivial to the deadly serious — can all be addressed by faculty-initiated committees.
My own experience with one such committee started like this: I was asked to join an advisory committee for one of our university administrators. At our first meeting, there were a dozen of us. I had little idea what to expect from the group, or how we could each contribute. At the time, our school had just experienced several incidents of bigotry and racism, and they became the focus of our first discussion. I mentioned offhand that while there were official statements from university leaders, there didn’t seem to be a public expression from the faculty, the people who were the face of the university for most students. Perhaps we could draft one? There was assent around the table, and with little fanfare, drafting that statement became one of the key priorities for the committee that year. At subsequent meetings, others kept turning to me when they had questions, even though I had no special expertise on the topic, and I ended up becoming the de facto coordinator for the effort. I imagined the scene from some television cartoon where a line of cadets is asked for a volunteer and all but one takes a step backward.
The group worked together throughout the academic year. It was surprisingly difficult to converge on a single draft, even though we were largely in agreement on the big principles. We held monthly meetings, but those were not enough. I spent time editing drafts between meetings, sending out revisions by email, and having phone conversations with individual members. Some months, we seemed to make significant progress, but other months we would rehash issues I thought we had long settled, or get stuck deciding on the choice of a single word. It seemed like committee work of exactly the kind that one could complain about.
Two years after we started, our final draft — with a few modifications along the way, of course — was accepted as a resolution by the Senate Assembly, the university body that represents the entire faculty. The process took longer than we had hoped, but in the end, the result was satisfying in a way that other scholarly activities don’t always deliver. It felt like we had contributed to the mission and the ideals of the university — in a small, but tangible way — by strengthening the institution itself. And as some research suggests, institutions are what cause lasting change in the world.
As a former private-sector employee who joined the academy, the lessons I learned are…
- If there’s a problem you care about, volunteer for a relevant committee, or propose a new one. (But in the latter case, beware that you might then end up running it!)
- Start by joining or forming a group of like-minded people.
- Plan meeting agendas so that they generate forward momentum. Meetings are great for deciding the next course of action, as deadlines for individual action, and as opportunities to discuss things that are difficult to settle offline. Other work, however, can be split up and completed individually — either allocate time during meetings to do that, or keep meetings short and let members work on their own.
- Seek broad-based support by reaching out to potential supporters and related groups.
- Remain optimistic and persistent — universities, and probably other institutions, too, are more malleable than they appear.
Over time, our group began to see the faculty statement as just the first step toward more meaningful action. A number of us continue to be involved, but we haven’t yet laid out our next steps. For that, it might require… starting a committee!
Part of a series, University Faculty Are Agents of Change.
Kentaro Toyama is a W.K. Kellogg Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He is also a member of the Diversity Scholars Network at the National Center for Institutional Diversity.
