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.<\/p>\n
And, of course, this process is interrupted periodically by the need to go to meetings.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I realize this is hardly a unique complaint– meetings are the bane of all white-collar workers, including professional assassins<\/a>— 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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n If, as several people have said in the course of complaining that we don’t have enough<\/em> 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?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In many ways, online media are better<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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… Continue reading “This Union, Is There Gonna Be Meetings?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}