The Two Meeting Personalities

A while back, I wrote about the secret life of committees and mentioned an article about why you should never invite seven colleagues to a meeting. Later I mused about a meeting-driven life. There is yet more science to be explored on the topic I discovered today in Science Daily. The article dates from 2006, and explores the question of whether workplace meetings are a good thing or evil. It is based on research led by psychologist Steven G. Rogelberg of University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

The research team found that in public, most of us decry meetings as time-wasters, but our true feelings may be different:

"When speaking publicly, people generally claim that they hate meetings," said Rogelberg, "but in the surveys you see a different story -- some people's private sentiments are much more positive.

One important factor turns out to be whether or not the meetings are well led. In my experience, that's about half of the picture. The other half is the communication styles of those present. I'm an Act III kind of guy--I'll ask for Act I and Act II if I'm interested, but normally one act is enough. I may not be typical, because there is often far more explanation than I can stand in one meeting. But back to the article's findings.

Apparently there are two kinds of us. Some really don't like meetings because of the sense of not getting things accomplished. The other type actually likes them because they are not burdened by an itching agenda, and they enjoy the social aspects of meetings.

"People who are high in accomplishment striving look at meetings more from the perspective of seeing them as barriers to getting real work done," Rogelberg said. "But the others may view meetings as a way to structure their day or a way to network and socialize. As a result, these people see meetings as a good thing."

As a practical matter, then, perhaps we should all identify ourselves as belonging to one camp or another. Pins or arm patches would do the trick, or little markings on staff rosters. Those who don't like meetings breaking up their day (Type I) could be scheduled accordingly, in blocks, but only when absolutely necessary. The meeting-social types (Type II) could gather frequently in exclusive groups for their sort. Of course these 'talky' committees might not accomplish much. Another Science Daily article notes about workplace groups that:

From the operating room to the executive board room, the benefits of working in teams have long been touted. But a new analysis of 22 years of applied psychological research shows that teams tend to discuss information they already know and that "talkier" teams are less effective.

The authors advise that the remedy is:

[T]eams communicate better when they engage in tasks where they are instructed to come up with a correct, or best, answer rather than a consensual solution.

In other words, don't make it a social event. This would make our Type I committee members less grumpy, at the expense of the Type II's enjoyment. I guess the lesson is that if anyone in the room is enjoying the process, the meeting isn't proceeding efficiently. Perhaps the Type II crowd could benefit from the new drug Despondex, which is designed to take the edge off of people who are too cheerful.

The good news, I suppose, is that groups still function better than individuals, according to this article and this one. Scientific proof that committees are here to stay.

But the Internet has created a whole new kind of group. In a graphic novel, it would be the committee that fell into the vat of toxic waste and woke up with new powers and strange motivations. As a force for good, see the power that is the Mechanical Turk. As a force for the strange, see this article about 4chan's hack of an online TIME poll. For both of these examples, the whole being greater than the parts on a large scale. Imagine if your whole institution met as a committee and actually got something done. Scary, isn't it?

Creating Meeting Discipline

Anybody reading this blog has probably sat in generous number meetings. I'm guessing you haven't had a lot of those meetings I read about where everyone stands rather than sitting, in order abbreviate the proceedings. I've blogged here before about various aspects of meetings, which you can find here.

I like meetings where you walk out with a sense of accomplishment. There's this particular feeling that comes with successful group-decision-making that must be a pale shadow of what it's like to be a node in a hive mind, if such a thing really exists. One of the striking realizations I had in reading My Stroke of Insight was that our brain hemispheres are like two very closely cooperating minds. When the right people and right habits of mind combine something magical occurs. I think I remember first reading about it in Michael Herr's Dispatches, but I can't be sure that's the book. After searching on google books, I couldn't locate the quote. [Edit: it's A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo, and the quote is here.] Like the rest of my generation, Vietnam was the "last war" and held a certain fascination that led me to read a lot of books about it. In any event, the scene I remember is a platoon leader recollecting the experience of directing his troops in a sweep, and his description of an exalted feeling of the extension of his own body, almost a proprioception, into the men following his direction. This, of course, isn't exactly the same thing as colleagues deciding general education around the table, but sometimes it seems like it.

Sci-fi has lots to say about the idea of group minds (as opposed to group-think, which may be its opposite), and naturally pushes the envelope. See the excellent novel A Darkness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge, for example. Science itself does too, if you will tolerate one more digression before pulling the chair fully up to the table of "what to do about bad meetings."

The term "complexity" became more confusing at some point because it came to mean, in addition to the extant meanings, the study of how systems emerge out of goop. Of course, this is not the technical definition, which you can find here. I've made a lot of hay in this blog with another kind of complexity: computational complexity, but the two are different. John Holland, who works at the Sante Fe Institute now (think Manhattan Project) developed some cool ideas about intelligence. Well, artificial intelligence, anyway, but who's counting. The idea that sticks in my mind is that of competing algorithms (like voices) that sound an alarm when they think they can contribute something useful. If their input is actually valuable, it's rewarded. Otherwise they may be ignored the next time, like the proverbial boy who cried "lupus!" or some other auto-immune disease, I forget. This is very like the members of a team or committee, who have to individually decide when their input is valuable, and slowly accrue or leak social capital with their reputation for effective contributions. With humans, of course, there are many other complexities, like how to speak, what words to use, how to interact with others, and so on. There are lots of things that can go wrong. I think mostly they do, in fact, because the meetings that are exceptionally productive seem few and far betwixt. This certainly cannot be a limitation of the people involved, but one of method, I present to you. But what method? By what cryptic scheme can a meeting be set in order?

I don't know. But, practicing what I preach--viz., that complex problems can be approached through an evolutionary method--I herein propose a starting point. I think the genesis for this was something I read long ago in the C User's Journal or Dr. Dobbs. Or not. Anyway I read about a protocol for conducting a meeting. And I don't mean Robert's Rules of Odor. Nothing is more annoying than the pedantry with which meeting minutes get presented and approved, after which all rules disappear. Nothing against Robert, 'natch. I just don't think the answer is complicated bureaucracy. Douglas Hofstadter created a game out of rules of order whereby one tries to bring the whole system to illogic, a frozen halting state. That's what I think of when I think of rules of order: a computational engine guaranteed to lock up.

No, what I have in mind is more like a game. We may as well call it the Committee Game. Here are the first draft rules. They aren't meant to be comprehensive.

1. A referee is assigned to loosely enforce the following rules, with a liberal dose of common sense. It would be best if this were the committee chair, at least to start with.
   
2. The meeting agenda needs to spell out the level of detail an item will be addressed in. Typically, "tactical" or "strategic" suffice to do this, but you may want "administrative" to talk about office functions or "meta" to talk about the functioning of the committee as a whole. Roll your own.
3. Someone--probably not a committee member--is tasked to take timings. This consists of watching a second hand and noting how long each speaker talks. Doesn't need to be perfect. Simple statistics are generated from this for feedback later.
4. At the end of the meeting, if anyone spoke longer than 30 seconds continuously, the longest speaker is fined a buck.
5. If someone seems to go off topic, the referee should note this immediately by holding up some symbolic object, like a stuffed animal. Once the referee has the floor, he or she asks the group if they really want to take up that topic. If not, the offending member gets the off-topic symbol to 'own' until the next offense.
6. A particular type of "off topic" is when someone begins to talk about tactical considerations during a strategic discussion or vice-versa. The procedure in #5 should be applied, and the scope (tactical, strategic, meta, whatever) explicitly noted, so that there will be a greater awareness of the level of discussion the committee is engaged in.
7. Responsibility for being referee should rotate, so as to build a culture where time and effectiveness are valued.
8. Defer to the chair of the committee when extraordinary measures are required, such as changing the agenda during the meeting, or suspending the rules. The chair is ultimately responsible for setting and executing the agenda, but defers actual meeting discipline to the referee.
   
9. Periodically, the committee reviews its performance, considering how well agendas have been executed, the timing statistics, and other general considerations that apply. Improvements to the rules are made as deemed reasonable. Sample questions are:

• Rate the overall effectiveness of the committee.
• Are contributors getting to the point quickly enough?
• Do you feel that decisions are being reached quickly, but with due consideration?
• Do committee members feel fairly treated?
• Are deadlines being met?
• What could be improved and how?
• Do you enjoy coming to meetings?

Even this level of formality may not be necessary. In practice, I've noticed a marked improvement in the deliberations of one of my standing committees simply by the group acknowledgment that meeting time is valuable. We agreed not to tolerate digressions, for example. It happened anyway, but I noticed that there was an awareness of it: "I know this is a digression...". At the end of the meeting we informally evaluated our own performance. We had accomplished a rather complex task in record time, leaving an hour for a sub-committee to polish the proposal. I think there was a general good feeling about the effort to make our deliberations more efficient and then seeing the outcome of that effort. It's evolution in action, and a pretty thing to watch.

Bad Meetings: Brainstorming

We've probably all been in a strategy session where we're advised to relax our minds and let a stream-of-consciousness flow of ideas emerge while someone writes this group product on a whiteboard. According to this "The Brainstorming Myth" in Business Strategy Review, that technique is ineffective. The abstract reads:

Research shows unequivocally that brainstorming groups produce fewer and poorer quality ideas than the same number of individuals working alone. Yet firms continue to use brainstorming as a technique for generating ideas. This continuing use of an ineffective technique is interesting psychologically. From a practical viewpoint, understanding why brainstorming is usually ineffective, and why people still do it, gives a basis for suggesting how managers can improve the way they use it.

I didn't pay $50 to read the whole article, but I did find a review of it on PSYBLOG here. The article notes that although brainstorming is supposed to foster creativity, "experiment after experiment has shown that people in brainstorming sessions produce fewer and lower quality ideas than those working alone." Three problems are cited:

• Slacking off, letting the "rest of the group" do the work
• Being afraid of being evaluated on the quality of one's ideas
• Not being able to get one's ideas written down because others are talking

The real point is to see what can be done to improve the process. One answer is to use technology. The method suggested in the review article is similar to what I've been using lately. Rather than having an idea meeting I just email the group a link to an Etherpad document (screenshot below).
Etherpad is free for a public pad--not appropriate for sensitive documents, but very handy for everything else, and you can buy private access if you want. The pad excerpted above was a project list for the Dean's Council I created in order to allow us to assign ownership of tasks and set due dates. The different colors are different authors. This isn't precisely brainstorming, but it's similar. This technique is particularly suited for online brainstorming, however, because multiple people can be logged in at the same time. Because output is color-coded by participant, it's less easy to be present and not say anything (social pressure works for you). Also, you can revise, amend, or delete your ideas on the fly; you're not dependent on someone else to write them down for. Finally, all this happens in real time, with multiple people editing the document simultaneously. It's a very dynamic feeling to see a bunch of busy editors adding, revising, and commenting on each other's work. There's a sidebar chat window for the latter. Authors are identified in a color-coded index:

I think it's important to set a meeting time initially, rather than trying this asynchronously. I can't prove that scientifically, but it's certainly more fun to work when others are obviously busy with the task and you have a chance to chat with them about it. To keep track of my Etherpad conversations and other documents and links I use a mind map to organize and share the information (Mindmeister is shown here. The little arrows are hyperlinks, some to Etherpad docs):


On the other hand, meetings ARE good at killing bad ideas, according to the article.

[I]t emerges that groups do have a natural talent, which is the evaluation of ideas, rather than their creation. The conclusion of the psychological literature, therefore, is that people should be encouraged to generate ideas on their own and meetings should be used to evaluate these ideas.

Since an evolutionary approach to problem solving depends on both the creation of lots of good ideas and then the ruthless selection of only the best, this nicely complements the online brainstorming idea. An additional benefit is that the process of group decision-making bonds the group to the outcome by making it a social affair. This feeling of involvement (I'm interpolating here) is good for carrying forward the decision, especially if it has political implications. And in a university, what decisions don't have political implications?

For more about meetings, see my posts: Creating Meeting Discipline, Meeting Salad, Managing Meeting Entropy, The Two Meeting Personalities, The Secret Life of Committees

Also of interest from PSYBLOG: 10 Rules that Govern Groups

Managing Meeting Entropy

I end up having a lot of meetings--more than I used to. And I'm beginning to drown in meeting notes, which usually consist of an agenda with doodles, circles, arrows, and almost indecipherable half-sentences. Then there's some yellow pad page that is associated with more asterisks (circled), boxes, and more scribbled instructions to myself. Frankly, it can become a mess very quickly, and these things start to form a depressing pile of "meeting goo" after a while. It reminds me of a line from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: a "salad of despair."

I googled around for suggestions about how to manage such a mess, but didn't come across anything particularly useful. So yesterday I created a meeting note template, shown below.
Eight of so of these will fit on a single hole-punched sheet. The L M H is priority, and my code for the little boxes is action item (*), information (i), question (?), and idea (light bulb). Under that is "ticket," meaning it needs to be formally tracked in the ticket system. Underneath is the destination--the areas of my responsibility. There's just enough room for a few sentences of description on the right. I explained this all to my project coordinator yesterday, and we're trying it out, but in the meetings I had yesterday I can already feel a calm descending from this minimal bit of organization.

The next step is to create a simple database to keep track of these, so I can retrieve them from my phone or other browser.

From the archives, see also: The Secret Life of Committees.

Meeting Salad

The other day I mentioned that I was trying to bring some order to meetings with a new form I'd created. This all started from "meeting salad." If the image below of papers randomly drawn from my briefcase seems familiar, then you too have produced your share of the stuff.
The name "meeting salad" is one I drew from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Here's the quote, describing what was swept out of "Mucho's" car (emphasis added):

[Y]ou had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused [...] and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, rags of old underwear or dresses [...], all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair [...].

The description seems apt. I had googled "meeting notes" to see if someone had published an open-source solution, and found this as the top link:

A common bad habit I have come across with managers and executives in recent years is the accumulation of unprocessed meeting notes. It is heartbreaking to see so much effort go into the creation of meetings and the capturing of what goes on, and the stress created and value lost from irresponsible management of the results. At least 80 percent of the professionals I work with have pockets of unprocessed meeting notes nested away in spiral notebooks, folders, drawers and piles of papers.

So it seems that meeting salad is being produced in mass quantities. The site's recommendation was basically to have more self-discipline and to go through the notes once in a while. I need more than that. Using the form as a start, I will build a little database and form application on top of it, so that my project coordinator or other assistant can enter the data. The beauty of this is that each little leaf of meeting salad will be tagged with a destination, like IT or Assessment Committee. Then, when I'm going to meet with some person or group I can simply query the database for unresolved items and have fodder for a meeting agenda. Right now I'm just carrying the notebook around with me everywhere, but when there are many pages it's not convenient to scan through looking for Earthquake Prevention Committee or whatever.

Once it's built I'll post it at meetingsalad.com, and you can use it too, if you want. I bought the domain name yesterday for a sawbuck, but there's absolutely nothing there yet. If you have comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

On a related note, organizing email is an equal pain. I know that google is coming out with their Wave thing to replace email soon, and maybe that will help (if you haven't heard of it, you've been under a rock). But this morning I stumbled upon Xobni--a tool that integrates with MS Outlook, which I use for email. The problem with traditional email, Outlook included, is that it produces what we may as well call "email salad" -- heaps and heaps of data that are only loosly organized. Yes, you can sort and you can search, but I often find myself dreading sifting through two weeks of messages to find the attachment I was looking for. (Of course, we should be archiving docs with something like openIGOR, and my group does that, but not everyone does.)

Xobni is a free tool that looks like it can help with email salad by providing more intelligence about correspondence. Primarily this is done by focusing on individuals and networks as the main unit of analysis, rather than an individual email. You can see screenshots at their site. It's very pretty and installed cleanly on my machine (although the install dialog was hidden behind another window, which caused me to think it was frozen for a while). The image below (from their website) hints at some of the features, including integration with social networking sites, threaded conversations, message statistics, and easily browsed attachments by person.

Pricing Higher Ed

My last post included a link to "Admission, Tuition, and Financial Aid Policies in the Market
for Higher Education" by Epple, Romano, and Sieg from 2003. In the paper, they test economic models against actual data and reach some very interesting conclusions about how pricing works. One of the assumptions is "In our model, colleges seek to maximize the quality of the educational
experience provided to their students."

I thought about this for a while. It's not obviously true, is it? I'm trying to remember how many meetings I've sat in where someone talked about the quality of educational experience. Of course, in many small ways programs, individual instructors, chairs, and so on do bits and pieces that impact this quality. And the SACS Quality Enhancement Plan is supposed to turn this into a visible project.

But by and large, I think most of my meeting time has been spent on solving problems, grinding away at the routine bureaucracy, or (once in a while) trying to make the bureaucracy work better. Of course, outcomes assessment is supposed to lead to continual improvements in the quality of education, but it would be a wonderful thing if board meetings were opened with the sentiment: we're here to improve the quality of educational experience.

As it turns out, I'm in the middle of a project to improve the "experience" part of that by helping organize strategic planning action items along those lines, and I'm going to start using that language.

In the article, the authors give some dependencies for quality:

1. peer ability of the student body
2. a measure of peer-student income diversity
3. instructional expenditures per student
   

Quality is relative, and two of the dependencies listed above are intuitive: students don't want to attend classes populated with students who are all less able than themselves. They also perceive the institution's ability to spend money in the classroom. This one is reflected in college rankings too (see "Zza's Best Liberal Arts Schools"), which probably has some affect on decisions. The second dependency, however, is surprising to me.

They see a distinct stratification that bestows economic benefits to the top schools:

Colleges at low and medium quality level have close substitutes in equilibrium and thus a limited amount of market power. Admission policies are largely driven by the “effective marginal costs” of educating students of differing abilities and incomes.

Colleges with high quality have more market power. These colleges do not face competition from higher-quality colleges. Hence, they can set tuitions above effective marginal costs and generate additional revenues that are used to enhance quality.

This suggests a Darwinian struggle for schools at the low and mid-levels of means and quality. In a catch-22, they lack the pricing power to enhance their position much. But once breaking through a ceiling, it becomes easier. At least that's my interpretation.

On the subject of price, the authors illuminate the second dependency (financial diversity):

We also find that colleges at all levels link tuition to student (household) income. Some of this pricing derives from the market power of each college. This allows colleges to extract additional revenues from students that are inframarginal consumers of a college. However, as noted above, our empirical findings suggest that market power of lower and middle ranked colleges is limited. This suggests that pricing by income may be driven by other causes.

I found an explanation of what an "inframarginal consumer" in another source "The inframarginal consumer is willing to pay more for the good than is the marginal consumer." So, if your college has a good market position, you can charge a premium. But the authors argue that that this isn't the whole story:

In this paper, we then also explore the role that income diversity measures play in determining college quality. Our findings here indicate that colleges and students believe that the quality of a student’s educational experience is enhanced by interacting with peers from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.

Obviously there are many reasons for wanting a diverse student body, but the authors propose to actually use that as a factor that contributes to the price model. This begins to make more sense in Section 6 of the paper, where they verify empirically that college quality increases with income diversity, stating that "To attract students from lower-income backgrounds, colleges give financial aid that is inversely related to income as detailed below." While this is no doubt true for some institutions, others have a more directly self-interested reason for giving need-based aid: to increase enrollment in those students who couldn't otherwise afford to attend. I talked about the revenue-generating effect of this "gap filling" in "The Power of Discriminant Pricing."

Also in Section 6, they make an observation about college size:

Absent scale economies, peer effects and endowments create a force for colleges to reduce size to increase student quality–in the limit maximizing quality by admitting a handful of brilliant students and lavishing the entire endowment on educating those students. The countervailing effect of scale economies is captured in our cost function primarily by the c3 term in the cost function.

This outlines a good strategy for an elite school: keep it small because it's easier to maintain a high level of average student quality, but not so small that the economies of scale drive up costs unreasonably.

A hundred points of SAT is worth between $4688 and $10363 in merit aid (in 2003), according to the model output. The difference depends on what tier of college the applicant applies to.

Conclusions: First, remember I'm not an economist. But the paper is clearly written, and you can skip the mathy bits easily enough. The model presented has errors, as the authors describe, but the approach seems to lead to some insights, like the relationship between size and quality, the effect of financial diversity on institutional quality, and price sensitivity by student ability and income. I have not delved into all of these in my notes above. I don't know how hard it would be to simulate their model numerically to actually use it to build your policies (e.g. by running scenarios), but it's probably worth showing it to your IR office. And if you have an economics department handy, maybe they can shed some light as well.

Meetings Made Practical

At least two of the problems with holding meetings are 1. scheduling the things, and 2. keeping conversations on track.  An article in Inside Higher Ed today cites an experiment at Ohio State University in trying to solve the second problem with Wikis.  It seems to me that a discussion board would be more suitable than a wiki, but never mind.  They report equivocal success, with more participation than anticipated, 

But the wiki idea also drew its fair share of skeptics. “I believe (and think most colleagues share this belief) that there’s a value in getting together in the same room to debate and to decide on issues,” wrote Jim Phelan in an e-mail. “The concentrated thinking and discussing is beneficial for group decision-making.”

 To solve the first problem, I discovered TimeToMeet.info,which has a nice interface for finding when a group can meet.  It works by email, and you just paint your available times on the grid.  It looks like the shot below when everyone responds:

Culturing Assessment and Scoring Cows

First, start with a Petri dish.  Leave it opened during a faculty meeting with a reasonable amount of humidity in the room.  After a day or so, you should see a culture of assessment that looks something like this:

Just kidding.  If only it were that easy.  I got an advertisement from Academic Impressions a couple of days ago entitled "Creating a Culture of Assessment." Its arrival coincided with a week here of assessment meetings, so it was interesting to read the advice in the flyer while I was living it.  Here's the premise:

It's clear that often the roadblock to action isn't a lack of data, nor is it the lack of an assessment process. The roadblock is the lack of a culture of assessment on campus. As one example, 66% of provosts surveyed said what they needed most in order to translate assessment into action was more faculty involvement.

It was gratifying this week to see how engaged faculty were with their assessments, both in programs and for general projects like liberal studies and our quality enhancement plan.  I'm still new here, and it's frankly amazing how seriously everyone took the exercise.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started the core skills survey and got a great response. 

But not all is peaches and screams, and the article outlines some of the issues I saw, but not in the way you might expect.  The author, Donald Norris, tells us that a central question that can head off turf battles and focus the discussion is:  "How can we use assessment tools to maximize our institution's performance and the success of our students?"

I think that's an okay question, but not the one I'd use.  It sounds too technical, and puts assessment tools front and center like a dentist's tray of gleaming pointy things.  It limits the discussion, and implies that we have to have an apparatus in place in order to improve teaching.  It sounds like business-speak.  To a professor, "institutional performance" is pretty abstract. 

The question I start with depends on the situation, but a good one is "Are your students demonstrating that they can think/communicate/work?"  This is the simplest place to start.  Here's a sample result from the question "How well can your students speak?"

I showed early results from this survey to about 30 faculty in an assessment meeting, and productive conversations sprung up immediately.  They compared notes about how they had rated students and why.  Do you take into account how they speak informally?  Maybe that depends on the class.  Are we communicating these expectations to the students?  For intellectuals, a good question  is worth a hundred directives. 



Another quote from the ad:

Building expectation for action across departmental silos starts at the top. Norris advises that institutional leaders -- president and provost -- need to set specific performance metrics and hold their direct reports accountable. "Make it transparent how data informs decisions," Norris advises. "Build a performance culture among top officials first, set expectations for improved performance. And always connect what you're doing back to how improved performance means improved success for the students."

Top-down pressure is unfortunately needed to launch assessment efforts sometimes.  In my experience, accreditation requirements help.  But that card can be overplayed.  However, I think Norris is off-base with the setting of performance metrics.  That probably works great in a pickle factory, but classrooms aren't industrial assembly lines. A performance culture is not an assessment culture.  They point in different directions. I saw this very clearly in one of the assessment meetings this week.  The faulty had spent two days analyzing standardized test scores and summative statistics from areas within the discipline.  As data goes, it was pretty comprehensive, and they had worked very hard on it.  There was some discussion about whether second readers were needed, given the high inter-rater reliability they had found before.  It was a sophisticated conversation about metrics.  But each one of the reports had a common problem: what to do with the results?  The graphs were pretty, and the percentages had +/-stderr on them, but in an operational sense they had little meaning.

One of the presenters spoke to me afterward.  "We did two days of work," she said.  "But I'm not sure we're getting anything out of this. It doesn't tell us anything."  This echoes the first paragraph of the piece I'm quoting:

A report by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment this week drew attention to the fact that while 92% of American colleges and universities are now using at least one assessment tool to evaluate academic programs, most colleges are having difficulty integrating the results into a system of continuing improvement.

Exactly, and the problem, not the solution, may be too much emphasis on metrics.  Norris has had success with using metrics and transparency before in the context of finances, where metrics are natural.  He wants to transfer that idea to learning outcomes. 

The expectation was communicated and reinforced that faculty and academic leaders would make decisions based not on personal values or anecdotal evidence but on analysis of real data and actual performance.

Norris adds, "This is happening in a lot of places. It's not always pretty. It's never pretty when someone's sacred cow gets scored, and there's a need to change." The key is to keep the focus on better outcomes for students.

I assume it was unintentional, but the phrase about someone's sacred cow getting scored (rather than an ox getting gored) is great.  Thank you Mr. Norris, I'll use that.  And I want to see your rubric for scoring cows. 

ability then you're in trouble again.  There are too many dimensions.  How about "percent of grammar mistakes (per word written) in a course-assigned literature review."  That you can count.  Setting performance goals probably won't work as intended, but at least the problem is tractable.  (Read up on teaching composition and go talk to the faculty to see how devilishly complicated this is.)

Well, what works then?  As it turns out, we're starting a new program in visual and performing arts.  So this week I was involved with helping the faculty construct their learning outcomes and assessments.  It's not finished, but after about three hours of talk and sketch, we're pretty far along. 

They started with a sad-looking rubric that had been handed down from True-Outcome days.  It had some learning outcomes listed down the side, and a generic rubric scale with no detailed description--exactly the kind of mass-produced "metric" that gets cranked out under pressure.  They didn't know what to make of it.  So we started over.  The question we started with is: what are the most important things you want your students to learn?  They talked, and I wrote on the white board, prompted with more questions, and tried to organize their response.  I'm not the neatest at the board, so don't laugh.  A piece of it is shown below.

The ability for students to critique another's work was on their list, as were Expertise, Presentation, Kreative work (I had to use a K because C was already used, and I needed to abbreviate with initials), and Job Prep.  After a relatively short time, we had  good descriptions of each.  I framed the next part of the conversation with these questions for each outcome:

1. In which courses or extra-curriculars is this outcome taught?
2. What evidence will we generate pertaining to this outcome?
3. How can we review it and give feedback?

Number one on the list led to a quickie curriculum map, not by course (that's their homework), but by year.  

It's probably impossibly to decipher, but we discovered what should go where, sometimes breaking the big outcomes into components.  Question two led to interesting discussions about what kinds of student performances happen when.  The faculty were very interested and engaged.  Then we got to the assessment part in number three.  We focused on authentic assessment based on classwork.  After all, if we're doing assessments and not sharing them with students, isn't it a waste? We talked about the value of setting expectations, tracking progress, and then having a formal evaluation.  That picture looks like this:

One of the components of performance was the evolution of the work toward a final product, so we looked at a performance as a longish process, with documentation along the way.  This varies by discipline.  For design it might be an work contract, a portfolio of contact prints, sketches, and other intermediates, an artist's statement and culmination in a gallery show.  The totality of this is then assessed and given to the student as feedback (and I assume forms part of the grade). 

Some parts of this might be suited to metrics, like course completion rates.  But that's more an administrative thing, suitable for a department chair's consideration.  The performance evaluation, on the other hand, is not suitable as a metric.  As faculty shape the program, they'll be setting standards and expectations for students, and creating a culture dedicated to the craft.  Because the assessment pieces are part of the process, it's natural that they will evolve along with the curriculum in response to results.  Stay tuned.

Ah...Simplicity

Distractions and bothers have been at the top of philosopher's lists as things to avoid for a long time. Here's Seneca on the lament that time is too short (quoted from here):

It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. Life is long enough and our allotted portion generous enough for our most ambitious projects if we invest it all carefully. But when it is squandered through luxury and indifference, and spent for no good end, we realize it has gone, under the pressure of the ultimate necessity, before we were aware it was going. So it is: the life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.

A bit later he's more specific:

How many have found riches a bane! How many have paid with blood for their eloquence and their daily straining to display their talent! How many are sallow from constant indulgence! How many are deprived of liberty by a besieging mob of clients!

His conclusion is perhaps self-serving, but at least it's consistant:

The only people really at leisure are those who take time for philosophy. They alone really live.

I thought about this admonition when I read an account of the creation and maintenance of Craig's List at Wired.com called "Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess." The ad site is vast, with more customers than either eBay or Amazon.com: about a quarter of the US population has used the site, according to the article. With that in mind, compare these statistics:

eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30.

Yes, you read that right. I didn't leave off three zeros. At the heart of the explanation is the unwillingness of the craigslist leadership to innovate. In the words of CEO Jim Buckmaster:

"Companies looking to maximize revenue need to throw as many revenue-generating opportunities at users as they will tolerate," Buckmaster says. "We have absolutely no interest in doing that, which I think has been instrumental to the success of craigslist."

If you've seen the site, you'll know what he's talking about. Web pages look like something out of the nineties--which they are. There are no fancy rating mechanisms or even modern searching and tagging capabilities. In a word, they've kept the site and the company simple.
If you read the whole article on Wired, you'll see how at one point the company was split in half, with the other half going the way of the typical dot-com at the time, trying to grow into a profitable monster. That half died, like something out of a Stephen King novel.

How do they get by with so few employees? Here it is with emphasis added:

The long-running tech-industry war between engineers and marketers has been ended at craigslist by the simple expedient of having no marketers. Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings. The staff communicates by email and IM. This is a nice environment for employees of a certain temperament. "Not that we're a Shangri-La or anything," Buckmaster says, "but no technical people have ever left the company of their own accord."

Even the users of craigslist are gently encouraged to live simply. Instead of the usual statements of policy and warnings that follow a user infraction, you get a haiku. The idea is that "The slight delays in cognitive processing that these haiku cause are valuable. They open a space for reflection, during which you can rethink your need for service." Example:

[S]art too many conversations in the forums and your new threads may fail to show up. Instead, you will see this:

frogs croak and gulls cry
silently a river floods
a red leaf floats by

I'm not sure what the stoics would have thought of working at craigslist, but as an example of simplicity as a virtue, I bet this example is hard to beat in the corporate world. I write a lot in this blog about complexity--with regard to learning outcomes, but also technology and processes. Unnecessary complexity comes at a greater cost that people generally acknowledge, I think. Or maybe I'm just to simple to deal with it all. Just imagine your place of employment being organized in such a way that you could run a virtual empire without meetings...

Opening Doors

"Opening Doors to Faculty Involvement in Assessment" is the title of a new paper by Pat Hutchings, published by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. Here's the thesis:

The assessment literature is replete with admonitions about the importance of faculty involvement, a kind of gold standard widely understood to be the key to assessment’s impact “on the ground,” in classrooms where teachers and students meet. Unfortunately, much of what has been done in the name of assessment has failed to engage large numbers of faculty in significant ways.

She ultimately suggests some remedies:

1. Build assessment around the regular, ongoing work of teaching and learning;
   
2. Make a place for assessment in faculty development;
   
3. Integrate assessment into the preparation of graduate students;
   
4. Reframe assessment as scholarship;
   
5. Create campus spaces and occasions for constructive assessment conversation and action; and
   
6. Involve students in assessment.

There's a lot to dissect here. Let's start with the big picture: what is faculty-driven assessment supposed to achieve? If the answer is better classroom instruction, that's one thing. That's easy. If the answer is to ensure that graduates are prepared for the work force in the name of accountability, that's another issue entirely. In this paper, the ultimate outcome isn't clear to me. I've asked this question at conferences--including once to Peter Ewell (who wrote a forward to this piece), asking for the government to give us summative information about employment histories of graduates by institution (from the IRS, I presume) so that we could actually see what happens to them, at least in terms of earning power. I wrote an article for U. Business with the same plea. I've asked at the state level. Forget about standardized tests--this would give us actual information, not proxies--for something close to accountability. We could look at total cost compared to financial outcomes and employment chances. This matters because it could affect big curriculum changes in a way that classroom-centered assessment cannot. We can debate whether such a mercantile view of education has merit, but the results could be surprising, as this Wall Street Journal report, and my analysis of it, shows. The article does not give us a hard goal as the outcome of assessment, which ironically typical of discussions about assessment.  This confusion between micro and macro is one of the obstacles to getting anything done.  In his forward, Peter Ewell writes:

Now we have creative and authentic standardized general skills tests like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and the Critical-Thinking Assessment Test (CAT), as well as a range of solid techniques like curriculum mapping, rubric-based grading, and electronic portfolios. These technical developments have yielded valid mechanisms for gathering evidence of student performance that look a lot more like how faculty do this than ScanTron forms and bubble sheets.

The assessment techniques here range from general standardized tests suitable (maybe) only for comparing institutions to archival techniques for individual student work, encompassing a spectrum of approaches to assessment, and more or less suitable depending on the ultimate outcome.  The descriptors "authentic" and "valid" are contingent on what the use is. The CLA isn't useful for determining if a math major has learned any math, or a dance major has learned any dance.  Is it useful for predicting employment?  Who knows? Although it doesn't look like a bubble sheet, it correlates very highly with SAT, so the effect is arguably the same.  Mechanisms, of course, can't be valid (only propositions can), and I think the excerpt more than anything is a statement about what is fashionable in the view of top-down assessment management. 

The author talks explicitly about  the management of assessment activities (pg 9):

“If one endorsed the idea that, say, a truly successful liberal arts education is transformative or inspires wonder, the language of inputs and outputs and ‘value added’ leaves one cold” (Struck, 2007, p. 2). In short, it is striking how quickly assessment can come to be seen as part of “the management culture” (Walvoord, 2004, p. 7) rather than as a process at the heart of faculty’s work and interactions with students.

I think this is accurate, and one has to admit that assessment is largely driven by management, starting with accreditors in many cases. The best classroom-assessment cultures are probably built bottom-up from the faculty, but the impetus for assessment is top-down. This is not helped by the language and culture of the community of assessment professionals, which is heavily influenced by the testing = measurement = reality philosophy home to Educational Psychology programs and standardized testing companies. 

The view from a discipline expert is naturally dubious of the claims that learning can be weighed up like a sack of potatoes, and the neural states of a hundred billion brain cells can be summarized in a seven-bit statistic with an accuracy and implicit model that can predict future behavior in some important respect.  Aren't critical thinkers supposed to be skeptical of claims like that?

Management can be hypocritical too.   The standard line is that grades aren't assessments, implying that grades are independent of learning.  If this is true, the whole schema for assigning and recording grades is a colossal fraud that the management (from the feds down) ought to be rooting out and replacing with assessments they believe in.  How many institutions other than WGU don't give grades?  And why do test makers use GPAs in making arguments for validity? (Edit:  CLA, for example.)

On the other hand, it makes perfect sense to a faculty member to focus on what happens in the classroom.  Good teachers, chairs, and program coordinators, already make improvements on what they see.  It makes sense to institutionalize this by rewarding the activity, advertising techniques that seem to work and focusing attention on learning.  "Opening Doors" primarily focuses on how this might be done, and is recommended reading for assessment directors who work with faculty as a facilitator.  One of the problems is that PhDs are given degrees for knowledge of a discipline, not teaching effectiveness.  Once employed, they find out about routine administration, and questions identified by the author "what purposes and goals are most important, whether those goals are met, and how to do better" are left out in hyperspace:

Ironically, however, they have not been questions that naturally arise in the daily work of the professoriate or, say, in department meetings, which are more likely to deal with parking and schedules than with student learning.

Have you ever thought about how much bureaucracy there is in a university?  All the apportionment of time and resources, the forms and signatures, accounting and correspondence, distractions and procedures?  And what is the management approach to inducing a culture of assessment?  More bureaucracy.  Like giant databases that are supposed to give measurements of layered dimensions of learning outcomes.  From page 12 we have:

Some campuses are now employing online data management systems, like E-Lumen and TracDat, that invite faculty input into and access to assessment data (Hutchings, 2009). With developments like these facilitating faculty interest and engagement in ways impossible (or impossibly time consuming or technical) in assessment’s early days, new opportunities are on the rise.

Anyone familiar with this sort of system knows it doesn't facilitate faculty interest and engagement; it sends most of them running to higheredjobs.com. Turning teachers into bureaucrats isn't the answer.

On the other side, the author talks about anecdotal evidence for (pg 7)

[...] assessment’s power to prompt collective faculty conversation about purposes, often for the first time; about discovering the need to be more explicit about goals for student learning; about finding better ways to know whether those goals are being met; and about shaping and sharing feedback that can strengthen student learning.

A couple of paragraphs earlier she quotes one faculty member as saying “assessment is asking whether my
students are learning what I am teaching.”  This makes sense.  I gave a lecture once on the fundamental theorem of calculus that I thought was simply brilliant in clarity and exposition.  My bubble was burst almost immediately--I realized from their reactions and Q&A that the students hadn't understood it.  It was all a bunch of gobble-dee-goop symbols on the board to them.  It makes sense to try to fix that.  Please just don't try to do it like No Child Left Behind's ubiquitous bureaucracy or other top-down arrogance.  At the top, please just clearly articulate a goal that you can provide real, unequivocal evidence for (employment statistics, salaries, graduation rates, family size, language fluency, NOT some vague learning outcome--that's only a means to and end if it even can be said to exist).  Even then, remember that higher ed might be compared to the final process in an assembly line where the finishing touches are put on a car.  Outcomes like employment typically start right after graduation, but that doesn't mean that higher ed can be solely held responsible for the result.  If you want to raise the intellectual capacity of the country, figure out how to turn off all the vacuous "flickering lights" entertainment that inundates young minds--I bet that would have a massive effect on literacy rates.  But I'm probably biased because I grew up without a TV.  At any rate, this is not a higher ed problem, this is a societal problem--one that أبو زيد عبد الرحمن بن محمد بن خلدون الحضرمي wrote about in The Muqaddimah in the 14th century: dynasties fail because the success leads inevitably to failure (my paraphrasing).

The author sorts through some of the reasons for slow adoption of assessment.  One is that the "work of assessment is an uneasy match with institutional reward systems."  I think this is on the money.  If you look at your institution's way of evaluating teaching, chances are it relies heavily on a "customer-service" survey in the form of a standardized teaching evaluation done by students.  A formal version of ratemyprofessor.com.  This might seem fair, since everyone gets the same survey, but it's not--it's just easy.  The author mentions later on the Peer Review of Teaching Project, which was new to me.  This looks like a rich and healthy approach to teaching evaluation that would naturally involve assessment activities.  I'm looking for something like this to start a conversation at my university.  Here are some key questions identified from the website:

• How can I show the intellectual work of teaching that takes place inside and outside of my classroom?
• How can I systematically investigate, analyze, and document my students’ learning?
• How can I communicate this intellectual work to campus or disciplinary conversations?

In my "view from the battlefield," the author makes a mistake in endorsing standardized testing as an answer--a lurch back into the bureaucratic viewpoint (pg 12):

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), for instance, forgoes reductive multiple-choice formats in favor of authentic tasks that would be at home in the best classrooms; CLA leaders now offer workshops to help faculty design similar tasks for their own classrooms, the idea being that these activities are precisely what students need to build and improve their critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Here's an example of one such CLA prompt on a "make-an-argument" item, taken from one of their advertisements:

Government money would be better spent on preventing crime than in dealing with criminals after the fact.

Feel free to gasp with horror, but this sort of thing would not be at home in any of the classes I've ever taught in math or computer science.  Am I supposed to stop teaching computer architecture for a day and hold a discussion about rhetoric?  The prompt is obviously too general to have a correct answer, so I suppose the point is to see whether or not the respondent can argue well.  That's all wonderful, but it's not what the student studies math for.  Let me put it another way: would you rather fly on a plane that was designed by an engineer who knew a lot about engineering or one that got top marks on the prompt above?  To propose to compare institutions or give a measurement of "value-added" based on this stuff is ludicrous in the space where discipline-based instruction happens.  Maybe it makes sense in political science or a rhetoric class.

On the other hand, this sort of thing would look really great to politicians who deal with questions like this every day.  To them, this may be authentic.  To discipline experts, probably not.  But I have a solution: shouldn't they be learning that stuff in high school or even earlier?  I realize it's the antithesis of No Child Left Behind-style thinking, but maybe it's worth considering...

The second half of the quote above is frightening, implying that it's a good thing that the test maker can become a consultant on how to improve scores on the test.  Let's take that as a critical thinking exercise of the sort that CLA espouses.  Here are my hypotheses (I wrote about this first here):

1. CLA is taken seriously as a way to assess valued added learning and compare institutions (this is what they advertise)
2. CLA consultants can effectively increase an institution's scores on the test (this isn't hard to believe, since they know how the thing is scored).

Conclusion: there is economic benefit to using CLA + consultants in that it makes your institution look better relative to those who don't.  This conclusion is independent of any assumptions about learning.  It creates a system where the testing company controls the inputs and the outputs, much like SAT and SAT prep.  It's a successful business model: create a problem and sell the solution.  Unless you're really, really sure that your conclusions about the test results are useful, it's not smart to be on the receiving end of this unless you can just afford to blow the money and call it advertising.

Despite the odd misstep into virulent bureaucracy and too much enthusiasm for top-down assessments not tied to objective top-level goals, the article gives excellent advice for building the culture of assessment our accreditors are always going on about.  The recommendations are practical and useful, and can address the assessment problem at the troop level.  The big issue of getting the top-down approach fixed is not the topic of the article, and given where we are, is probably too much to hope for.

Bringing Noncognitives into the Curriculum

I was browsing the assessment blogs this morning and saw Pat William's post at Assess This! on the AAC&U initiative "Bringing Theory to Practice." From the website, the project's mission is to use student engagement to enhance both cognitive and noncog development. If you haven't heard of noncognitive assessment, you can start here. In one well-developed model by William E. Sedlacek, there are eight dimensions that can be used to predict academic success as measured by persistance, grades, and graduation. I'm presently starting that up at my home institution.

But beyond using noncogs for predictive information, shouldn't we also be introducing such skills as leadership and realistic self-apprasial into the curriculum itself? The answer is that we probably already to in orientation-type courses, or perhaps a full-blown freshman seminar. But what about a bolder idea: integrate them throughout the curriculum.

The AAC&U proposal goals center on health and civic engagement. These are certainly not traditional cognitive goals like reading, writing, and math. The LEAP initiative also has noncog dimensions in its list of goals, if you look closely.

How would you do it? The distribution requirements/general education/liberal studies compenents are probably chock-full of criss-crossing goals already. How can you add more without the whole edifice collapsing? Very carefully, methinks. The first step would be to show that there is value to the proposition and start a conversation about it.

We had an exercise in January, asking faculty to describe the kinds of students they wanted. It was amazing to me to see that at least two thirds of the descriptions were about noncognitives. Faculty want students who care, who work hard, work well with others, are interested in academics, and so forth. Yes, they also want talented young minds to work with, but attitudes and behaviors play a large role. So in our case, it would likely be an easy sell--they already care about the outcomes.

To start a conversation, my prescription is to try what has worked for me before--building a dialogical assessment piece. This has to be very, very easy for facultly to use, and the reports have to be understandable when the results come back. This is all quite doable if one doesn't get hung up on rubrics and alignment and reductionism. Once the conversation is underway, we can contemplate changes.

People do things for reasons that make sense to them. I have to remind myself of this all the time. In order to get traction on this project, or any number of others, the ones doing the heavy lifting really need for the project to make sense. And it can't waste their time--because that makes no sense at all. I've started holding some meetings asynchronously (sometimes with Etherpad) to show committee members that I respect their time.

I mused yesterday that our outcomes assessment is more philosophy than science, and can easily fall into We-Say-So-ism (WSSism). For the fuzzy problems of philosophy, there is no axiomatic approach (many attempts to build one notwithstanding) nor other deductive process of arriving at the right answer. One has to convince. It has to make sense. This is a lot harder than WSSism in the short term, and certainly is more prone to becoming stalled along the way. But if we can't convince our colleagues that a project is worth their time, then we should consider that 1) we haven't developed our position very well, or 2) perhaps it's really not worth their time. You want writing across the curriculum, math across the curriculum, assessment of liberal arts skills, student engagement, and now noncognitives in addition to delivering the traditional curriculum? There has to be a case made for it. It has to make sense. Obviously, I have my work cut out for me.

The Idea Pile

I've been musing lately about using the hive mind of an organization to crowdsource problem-solving. In plain English, encourage sharing ideas at all levels of an organization with a democratic way of gathering, evaluating, and publishing them in a useful way. I mentioned EtherPad as an interesting tool for collaborative editing. Online forums can be made at forumsland.com, or probably dozens of other places. I looked for a diagram creator to make org charts and the like, and found AutoDesk's online tool for doing that. I created the chart below in a few minutes, and published it to the web.

You can also create mind maps online at mindmeister.com. It's so easy to use it's fun. You can create maps and share them as read-only, like the one below, or allow wiki-style editing to other users.



For synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, there are a couple of nice tools. One is for real-time (synchronous) meetings at vyew.com. Yesterday, my friend Jon told me about another site called Nexo that lets you create a variety of web sites for the asynchronous part. Nexo's power comes from its flexibility. You can create multiple pages devoted to things like calendars, forums, and resources, and then customize those pages with sections like RSS feeds, books on Amazon, forums, tasks, comments, and so forth. It looks promising. Everything I've cited in this post is free for individual accounts.

There are lots of ways to collaborate online. The trick is to figure out how to pull the best of these tools together into one pile. Ideally, any user could highlight and tag one of these objects and have it naturally integrated. This is too much to hope for currently,but I'm hoping to converge to some way to usefully assemble and connect rich content. Everything interesting is due to combinatorics, after all. It's not what it is; stuff is ubiquitous. The uniqueness comes from how these bits are arranged in relation to those bits.

The Ugly Truth about Aid

Imagine you're a plumber who fixes leaky public buildings for the state. You charge $150 per pipe to fix. One day you learn that the plumbing budget has been increased. The state hopes this will allow more pipes to be fixed. Would you not consider raising your prices to reap some of this windfall? Wouldn't all the other plumbers try to do the same thing?

This admittedly contrived example mimics what I've seen around the table during planning meetings. There never seems to be enough money to do what a college needs or wants done, so if the state raises aid by $500, guess what the revenue discussion quickly leads to. An article in The Chronicle puts the point on it:

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, former education secretary, and former college president, said many members of Congress worried that increases in Pell Grants were too often offset by increases in tuition.

It surprises me that it wouldn't be the standard assumption that this would happen at private institutions that are tuition-driven. The argument would go like this:

We currently have N students, paying T tuition each, and receiving an average aid package of F. If F goes up $500, we can raise T by $500 and be in the same market as before. The current students won't notice, and we haven't put ourselves at an additional market disadvantage by raising costs. In practice, of course, the tuition may go up by more than $500, but the same logic applies.

In effect, increases in state and federal aid subsidize new expenses at institutions, or help them cope with new costs. I would argue that the last decade has seen a growth in administrative functions and costs, an increase in projects not directly related to the classroom, and generally a mission creep away from the core educational product. This is not just because of increases in state and federal aid, but also because of the availability of loans.

The stimulus package may provide some hope of another cash infusion from the government. I think it's best not to be fooled by this false spring. I see the current financial storm as something like the K-T boundary in evolutionary history--a time where most of the existing biological designs didn't make the cut. The ones that did (including our ancestors) flourished. From the article:

"Use this time of retrenchment to try something new," Mr. Alexander told the gathering. "You'll probably have to anyway because of the way the economy is."

This is excellent advice--rapid evolutionary changes are coming to those that will survive. It's a good time to be nimble. Machiavelli noted that during stressful times, one can make radical changes. Okay, he was talking about wiping out the opposition after a rebellion, but the same principle applies. Good, strong leadership will be the key to the transitions ahead.

My recent research project on survival leads to a novel conclusion: we can't be solely concerned with external threats. Internal threats are just as bad--particularly the way in which we make decisions. Free exchange of ideas and ability to challenge the boss on a bad idea are essential to this kind of ongoing internal audit.

The only thing I take issue with in the last quote above is the use of the word "retrenchment." I think a trench is the wrong image to conjure. Trench warfare gave way to the Blitzkrieg, and that's a better image: mobility is better than stasis.

An Academic Short Story

Nightmare in Mauve

(With apologies to John D. McDonald)

*** 9:15 am Monday ***

Tatiana stared across the brown conference table at the object of her ire. Exactly three hairs graced the dome of Rocke College’s Assistant Dean for Efficiency, Harry Hapollonian. She thought he resembled the plaster cast of Napoleon’s deathmask, sunken cheeks and all. He rumbled rather than spoke, sounding like James Earl Jones with strep throat.

“It won’t do to have all these distractions from the main point. We have to stay on target here. The simple fact is that we have only around 400 students in the day program. Yet in a year, we teach more than 400 individual classes in the day program, eye, ee, more than one class per student. That simply can’t continue.”

Tatiana half rose from her chair.

“You’re the one missing the point, Harry! How can we call ourselves a college, let alone a liberal arts college, without an Existential Studies program?” None of the other department chairs would meet her eye. Sheep, she thought, but she knew it wasn’t fair.

The scene was far from bucolic. Eight of her colleagues, campus leaders from all disciplines, surrounded the table—itself a symbol of Rocke’s advertised ‘brown table’ educational approach. The soothing darkness of the faux oak was supposed to induce a state of near hypnotic stupor, into which a knowledgeable guide could inject antidotes to ignorance. Assuming, of course, that the guide herself avoided the siren call of the table, a feat not within most of the gathered division chairpeople at the moment. Tatiana thought she saw a bit of drool on the representative from PE, a nearly senile woman named Gertrude Gertrod. There wasn’t much to work with, Tatiana thought, yet she knew she couldn’t afford to alienate these people if she was going to accomplish anything with her argument.

“The next order of business is consideration of reducing class meeting times from fifty minutes to forty,” the assistant dean said, ignoring the pesky Chair of Existential Studies. “This has the effect of increasing efficiency by 20%. Now let’s talk about pedagogy—what goes on in the classroom—how you teach your classes. I’m sure this will be a minor adjustment, but the dean and I want to make sure, ABSOLUTELY sure, that the faculty is on board with this.” He paused and stretched out his arms to include the whole campus in his warm embrace. “So let’s have it. What comments have you solicited from your departments? Your respective departments. Gertrude, let’s hear from PE—eye, ee, physical education.”

“Eh?” Gertrude roused herself and looked around. “Harry, you are a pedantic ass,” she announced to all who hadn’t noticed. Then she opened her mouth and let forth a stream of profanities, general in nature, but revolving around nuns from a certain parochial school. As the volume and anatomical specificity escalated, Harry’s eyes began to bulge and the tendons on his neck strained.

“Thank you for that report!” he attempted, but it was no good to interrupt her. She had to run her course, which she did after a good two minutes, at which point she had to breathe, and promptly fell asleep on the table.

“Ahem. Any more cogent—eye, ee, thoughtful reactions?” he asked finally.

“Well, I do have one tiny observation,” Tatiana said.

Harry glared for an instant, but there was little he could do, so he adopted a cameric smile and nodded for her to continue.

Tatiana began to speak very quickly and fluidly.

“I tried this in class—eye, ee, where I teach my students—tried talking 20% faster than usual and just running sentences together to economize on the empty spaces in conversation I had heretofore left as time for thought but which I realize now is completely unnecessary especially in Existential Studies as time for reflection can only subvert our true motives, and I have found that the result is amazingly good—the only problem is how to maintain this energy level for a whole forty minutes, eye, ee, two thirds of an hour, without collapsing from exhaustion.” She took an ostentatious breath and continued. “So I think it is only fair to prorate this time at a higher level than the comparatively luxurious fifty minute hour allows. Since we are expected to deliver the same content in less time, at a higher energy rate, we should be paid at a commensurately higher rate, eye, ee, we should all get 20% pay raises.”

Harry blanched and fixed her with his most lethal assistant deanship gaze. She did not turn to stone, however, but continued to speak.

“Also, I think this principle should be applied to all committee meetings, foreshortening the Brownian bureaucratic horror we face every Tuesday. Oops, look at the time! By my watch, newly accelerated, we are over time here. I’ve got to go put up my Christmas decorations.” She left the meeting agenda and her sparse notes lying on the table, and exited the room as gracefully as she could. Her head was spinning with the realization of what was happening. She was about two semesters from being out of a job—she and the whole Existential Studies department, except for maybe a stub left to teach the required Zen Cheerleading distribution requirement. She mused about who it might be. As she inserted the brass key in the doorknob to her office, she saw with dread that Milton Morton was shambling up. The large round man swayed with each step, an earnest expression plastered on his face as always.

“I was wondering if I could have a word, Doctor Tolstov,” he said, almost wringing his hands.

“Sure, Mil, step into my lair.”

As Milton settled into a creaking chair, he turned to make sure the door was shut behind him. He deposited a sheaf of wrinkled and besweated notes on the subject of transcendental frenetics on a table, and spoke.

“I heard a rumor, Doctor Tolstov, that we’re all going to be fired. Is it true?”

Amazing, Tatiana thought. The grapevine here was so good that news got out 3.5 milliseconds before it was actually created. She wondered if she should do a paper on endochronic communications for the annual conference. Automatically, the right words came to her lips.

“Well, you know how this place is, Mil. A butterfly landing on the president’s hat causes an earthquake in the locker room thirty minutes later. You can’t put any stock in what you hear from...where did you hear this?”

“Tick-tock’s secretary told me,” he said. Tick-tock was the nickname of the assistant dean for efficiency, eye, ee, Harry Hapollonian.

“Brenda?” Tatiana squelched her next remark as unsuitable for Milton’s ears. Brenda Bender took sadistic pleasure in meting out bad news. A perfect match for her boss.

“Look, Mil, we’ve been through this before. Every five years or so, they suddenly realize again that the traditional program is horribly inefficient and only stays afloat because it’s subsidized by the non-traditional program in the evening. So they do a reductionist bottom-up analysis and find a few arteries to cauterize. Meanwhile the patient needs an organ transplant.”

“So it’s true? I’m too old to go looking for jobs.” Milton’s face began to scrunch up.

“Don’t you dare cry on me again! Look, Mil, you’ve been here longer than any of us. So you only have a Master’s, believe me, that will actually put you ahead of the game. They aren’t going to fire you.”

“You think?” one sniffle escaped, to be absorbed by a generously stained sleeve.

“Sure. Think about it. They still have to cover the distribution requirement. Do you think any self-respecting Ph.D. is going to stick around for that alone, if they eliminate the majors? No offense, naturally. I’ll be out of here in a Shanghai second.”

“I wouldn’t want that,” Milton said sadly. Tatiana had never seen the man happy, but this was too much.

“Cheer up bud, things are darkest just before the execution.” She crinkled her nose to show him she was joking.

“Maybe we could get a petition together. Call a special faculty senate meeting? I’m sure our colleagues won’t stand for this.”

How little you know them, Tatiana thought. But she smiled anyway, at his optimism.

“Sure Mil, I’ll be the first to sign it. Now I’ve got to get some coffee.” The gentle hint was enough to get her guest to leave. She was completely surprised, moments later, when Milton reappeared with what looked exactly like a petition.

*** 10:15 am ***

Yvette Yakkit, Rocke’s one and only economics professor, cursed the ancient copier that had mangled yet another assignment. Red hieroglyphics theoretically showed her how to fix the problem.

“I’m an academic, not a mechanic!” she glared at the machine, as if to will the whole industrial revolution back into the genie’s bottle.

“Doctor Yakkit, would you like to sign my petition?” Milton thrust a clipboard at her. She turned to him, eyes still blazing, and cursed beautifully in Farsi.
“Sad-hezaar La'nat bar Sheytun!”
Then she realized her childishness.

“I’m sorry Milton, it’s this, ...this, machine.”

“It’s okay. I can come back later.”

“No, please, let me sign it. What is it?”

“It’s to call a special senate meeting to discuss the ongoing efficiency study.”

“Efficiency?” her eyes showed a trace of interest.

“You know—Tick-Tock’s committee,” Milton sneaked a peek to each side to make sure no administrator had heard him use the pejorative name for the assistant dean.

“Sure, then. Do you know how to fix this thing? I’ll kiss you if you do.”

*** 10:30 am ***

Bill Baglia was amazed that someone was knocking on the bathroom stall. He lowered the folded Wall Street Journal and forgot mutual fund listings for the moment.

“Yes? It’s occupied. Just a minute.”

“Doctor Baglia, I’m sorry to bother you, but you weren’t in your office, and I thought I might find you in here...”

“Milton? What the hell? What’s so important—is it Kay? Oh, my God, is—”

“—no, no, there’s no emergency. I’m sorry. I can wait.”

“Well, hell, man, out with it! What’s so important?”

Without saying a word, Milton slid the clipboard under the stall, where it was reluctantly retrieved. There was silence from within for a moment.

“Yes, I’ll sign it. About time someone did something about this! Our Biology budget is continually underfunded, while we have to put up with parasite programs like Existential Studies. What the hell is that anyway? Does anyone know? Sure I’ll be there.”

“It’s an important branch of ethics,” Milton attempted, taken aback by the assault on his turf.

“Ethics my arse.” He slid the clipboard back, ending the conversation with a significant rustling of his newspaper.


*** 11:00 am ***

“You got Baglia to sign?” Tatiana couldn’t hide her amazement. “He plays golf with Tick-Tock, you know.”

“Uh, he wasn’t exactly supportive of our agenda. I kind of annoyed him, I think. It was in the bathroom. He was in a stall.”

Tatiana laughed at the image. She shook her head.

“This is wonderful, though, Mil. When people see his signature on here, they’ll think the dean is on board too. Nice work! I think you’re going to get your meeting. How many more names do you need?”

“Seventeen,” Milton said proudly.

“This just might work,” Tatiana said with a grin. “Tell you what—do you have another clipboard?” The normally embarrassing idea of soliciting signatures on a petition had become a Quixotic mission, a last tilt at el molino de viento. She laughed at herself after Milton left, for being sucked into his project by the shear romantic absurdity of it. It felt good to be doing something, even if it was obviously futile. She wondered how many of the women on the Titanic had fixed their hair as the ship was going down.

*** 9:30 am Tuesday ***

Ezra Ebeknedzer, the president of Rocke College, was not a big man. He had a presence, though, and when he spoke, people tended to look around to see where the compelling strains of his voice originated. He met Tatiana at the door and shook her hand with both of hers, lingering just a bit too long for strict political correctness. A large custom carpet in the college’s colors, mauve and yellow, showed a sturdy oak with branches interwoven with a Latin banner proclaiming the academy’s motto: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. The president’s paneled oak desk was polished to an impeccable shine, and neatly arranged with piles of papers. There was no ugly computer monitor to destroy the aesthetic. Computers were for minions.

Ezra guided Tatiana to a round oak conference table, and sat her in one of the leather chairs.

“Coffee?”

“Black, thanks.”

“Two coffees, Miss Iona,” he addressed the open door, using the southern affectation he favored.

“Miss Tatiana. Tell me, how are things over in Existential Studies? Is the department pushing us forward or holding us back?”

The blunt question was a standard one, and Tatiana was expecting it.

“Forward, sir. We grease the psychic gears of mind machinery. Expect great things. Hoo-ah.” This last bit was obligatory homage to the CEO’s military career prior to coming to higher education.

“Hoo-ah, indeed. Well then—here’s the hot black stuff. Thank you Miss Iona. We’ll be in conference now.”

Ezra’s most powerful weapon as an executive was his patience. It was he who had called headstrong Chair of ES here after hearing about the bothersome petition, but now that she was here, he simply sat and waited for her to speak. The silence didn’t make him the least uncomfortable, and he had the uncanny ability to infect others with this calm. The silence endured long enough for Tatiana to settle automatically into her committee-trance. Her visual mantra was the image of dozens of memos rolling themselves into tubes and spontaneously assembling a long tunnel into which she was propelled. Blurred To: and From: lines in various fonts escorted her into that otherness of self communication through her internal meta-language (Wittgenstein was full of bratwurst in her opinion). Normally the drone of mindless verbiage from her colleagues and the brown table effect aided her on her journey, but today she had something better: the hypnotic gaze of the president. Time went hyperbolic for a while, and she wasn’t surprised to find herself talking at the end of it. She let the words flow, feeling them burp up from her chest, settle on her tongue, and float off in puffs, but making no sense of them whatever. The president was nodding, taking notes now and then.

“Would you like some more coffee?” he asked finally, breaking the spell. It was rhetorical because she hadn’t touched the stuff.

“Sorry,” she said, somewhat embarrassed. “I babbled, didn’t I?”

“Not too badly. You said what needed to be said.”

Tatiana sat, suddenly drained. The petition seemed like such a silly thing. What the hell had she been thinking? She gave her best sardonic grin.

“So how long do I have to live, doc?”

He threw his head back and laughed like it was the best joke he’d ever heard. A hearty, me-too kind of laugh that turned heads.

He’s so damned good, Tatiana thought, it’s impossible not to like this guy. Even though he’s about to fire me.

“So here’s the way it is, Miss Tatiana, since you’ve asked. Your classes are too small. Not just yours, but practically everybody’s. It’s just that ES is more expendable than, say, English.”

“But small classes are what we sell here...”

“I know, I know. But small and too small are different things. Do you know how much it costs to teach a class?”

“Ummmm.....”

“About eight grand in your department. Do you know how much tuition we get out of a class with four students in it? About $3,600.”

The coldness of the inequality left her defenseless. What good pitting philosophers against accountants? The outcome was clear.

“What if I give you bigger classes?” she asked. She sounded pathetic to herself. I should go buy myself a pocket protector and clip-on calculator, she thought.

The president narrowed his eyes to slits and steepled his fingers, calculating the politics of works in motion. Memos were already in flight to board members, key committee members were primed with the right bias, and a compliant Institutional Planning office had the proper reports prepared.

“I can’t make any promises,” he said. There was no more than a token of warmth left in his voice, and Tatiana knew the interview was over. She nodded, looked stupidly at the surface of the cold coffee, and stood to go.

“Hey,” he said to her back, “Try it. It’s worth a shot.”

“Sure. Thanks for your time.”

“Any time, Miss Tatiana. My door is always open.”
She gave Iona Isis half a smile as she left. She considered giving up, as she walked back to her building. But the thought of telling Milton was too much. Better to play the hand out. At least no one would think her a coward.

*** Lunch ***

Fried Spam quesadillas, folded neatly in half, leaked denatured cheese around the edge of Roland Rhumba’s plate. A half-destroyed textbook, veteran of hundreds of religious wars against ignorance supported the plate like a mythical array of elephants supporting the earth. From this ersatz pedestal he sawed at the tortillas.

“What’s news?” Tatiana asked, sliding in beside him. She was still upset from her meeting with the president, and had taken only salad. Only from the top of the bowl, of course. Underneath the healthy green stuff was the ‘less fresh’ greenery, commonly referred to as ‘compost.’ In the dining hall, any meal you could walk away from was a good meal.

“The news, my dear Tatiana, is that our students, to use an overly optimistic description of the primates I attempt to communicate with twelve hours a week, are insipid, completely materialistic, spoiled dimwits.”

“Uggies,” she replied superciliously, forking a safe-looking carrot.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Undergraduates. Uggies. That’s what I think of them as. It fits. Say it.”

“Uggie. Uggies. I have class on Comparative Religion with twelve uggies in it. Hey! I like it! Much better than ‘student’.”

“Thought you’d like that. It’s more accurate too. ‘Student’ implies learning. ‘Uggie’ just implies that they’re paying us to stay in the dorms and play lacrosse.”

“This you learned in Ukraine?”

“Nope. In my home town of Stanislav, just west of Odessa, we had no uggies. Only students. Anyone who fell by the way ended up smelling like рыба for the rest of her life. I learned about uggies when I came here.”

“I believe it.”

Tatiana sighed.

“Listen Roland, would you like to sign a petition for a called senate meeting? This efficiency thing is getting out of hand. Today it’s Existential Studies, tomorrow Comparative Religion. We have to hang together.”

“Yeah, I heard about this. Quite the rabble-rouser is your colleague Milton. Heard he rousted that insufferable Baglia person from the bathroom.”

“True,” she laughed again.

“I sent Milton packing when he came skulking around with that ridiculous clipboard. He should get a job as a meter reader.”

“His heart’s in the right place.”

“Look, Anna, what’s the point? You know how it works. We’ll have a big meeting, lots of expectations but no real agenda. The usual blowhards will let off steam. We’ll hear about the parking problem, the athletic program, the tuition level, all the usual crap, the complete catalog of emotional tics that parasitize our dear colleagues. Why in God’s name would I want to volunteer to listen to it again?”

Tatiana nodded. Any of her remaining enthusiasm had vanished. He was right, she knew.

“Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way,” she said.

“Right. Maybe there’ll be a burning bush to tell us God’s will.”

Tatiana stared at him. She was suddenly covered with gooseflesh. For the first time in a long, long time, she knew exactly what to do. The amorphous complexity of EVERYDAMNTHING had suddenly rolled over and in an instant shown her a soft underbelly where the rules didn’t apply anymore. She remembered finally to breathe.

“See a ghost?” Roland asked. Something in his eyes told her he was no stranger to the transcendental.

“What did Archimedes say about hammers?” She left the salad uneaten and prophesied as she stood to leave: “Don’t eat all that or it will kill you.”

“Don’t worry about me. And it’s levers, not hammers. Big enough to move the world. You just need a place to stand.”

Tatiana just grinned. She felt like Thor. Hammers indeed.

*** 4:15 pm ***

Milton grinned from Tatiana’s office door. She didn’t think she’d ever seen his teeth before.

“We did it!” he said, holding out the now-infamous clipboard.

“Yeah?” Tatiana stood from behind her desk and gave him a high-five. “When’s the meeting? Have they scheduled it?”

Milton wilted a bit.

“Man, was Penny mad! I mean Dr. Proctum. I thought she’d bite my head off.”

“Ah, yes, I imagine it’s more work for her. Being chair of the faculty senate is not a fun job even ordinarily. What’d she say?”

“She said it was a waste of time. That if even half of the people on the petition even showed up, she’d be shocked out of her underwear.”

“She may have a point about that. What do you suppose we could do to pack them in?”

Milton looked at her blankly.

“A scandal,” Tatiana mused. “We need a good scandal.” She thought for a minute until an idea came to her. There was no good in telling Milton, though. He could only screw things up. “You think of a good one, tell me, okay?”

“Okay,” Milton said, still puzzled. He seemed deflated now that the news had been delivered. “The meeting is on Thursday.”

“This Thursday? Good lord, that’s only two days! Oh, I get it. This is another way to make sure we don’t have a quorum. Very clever. I think dear Penny may have been chatting with the president.


*** 9:00 Wednesday ***

Brenda Bender looked across her cluttered desk at the chair of Existential Studies with the perfect fake smile. Tatiana glanced at the placard on her desk: Assistant to the Assistant Dean for Efficiency.

“Good morning,” Tatiana said. “Is Tick-Tock in?”

Brenda contained her irritation at the use of THAT name.

“No, DOCTOR HAPOLLONIAN is in a meeting.”

“Really? I didn’t see his car in the parking lot. Probably stayed up late playing poker and is sleeping it off. That’d be my guess.”

“What exactly do you want, Professor Tolstov?” Brenda shuffled some papers and turned to her computer.

“Oh, I just need a copy of the appendix to the Program Efficiency Report. My copy had the appendix omitted.” She waved a manila folder stuffed with papers.

Brenda sulked for a moment. “It’s in a file in his office. Just a minute.” She unlocked her boss’s door and vanished inside.

Tatiana quickly stepped to Brenda’s laser printer, slid open the bottom paper tray, and lifted out a thick sliver of the assistant dean’s personal letterhead. She slid the paper into the folder she’d brought. She shut the printer tray just as Brenda reappeared. Tatiana lifted the phone and pretended to dial.

“Sorry,” Tatiana said, “I forgot to call the cleaner’s this morning.”

Brenda just glowered. She ran off a copy of the missing appendix, and handed it to her tormentor.

“Not picking up... Guess I’ll try later. Thanks so much dear. Hope to see you again soon.” Tatiana left. Her heart was beating fast.

Back in her office, she locked her door and started composing.

*** 10:00 ***

Tatiana walked to the science building, remembering a time when she’d made the trip much more frequently. Inside, she stopped outside the office door with the placard for Professor Francisco Fandango, Chemistry. The lights were off. She inspected the course schedule on the wall.

“He’s in lab, down in 205,” a student with white coat and goggles volunteered.

“Thanks.” She knew well where the lab was.

“Cisco?” She called over the lab tables, glass tubes, and mysterious electronic machinery. The smell of the place brought back poignant memories for her.

“Anna?” the familiar voice called from the adjacent storeroom.

Cisco appeared with a beaker of some clear liquid swishing around. There was a crinkle of pain showing around the corners of his eyes.

“What brings you to these parts, stranger?” he attempted.

“Oh Cisco, I’ve missed you. You know that. That year we were on Curriculum together... I was sitting in my office, and it just hit me—it’s been too long since I’ve seen you. I was thinking maybe, if you’re interested, I’d cook something for you, and we could just talk about the ‘good ole’ days.”

“I’d like that,” he said. He squinted in thought. “Why now, Anna? It’s been almost a year since I’ve heard from you. It’s almost as if when our joint committee assignment was over, so was our relationship.”

“You’re so silly, Cisco. It sounds like you’re implying I was using you to get votes favorable to my department or something. What do you think I am?”

“Good lord, no! I wasn’t thinking that, really.” It was pretty clear what he was thinking from his roaming eyes.

“Well I hope not. So Friday night? I was thinking maybe Sea Bass with pomegranate sauce. Do you think Sauvignon Blanc is too light for the sauce?”

“Absolutely. I’d go with a red, in fact. I found a wonderful Chilean wine I’d be happy to bring.”

“It’s a date, then! Say eight o’clock at my place—oh, wait, better make it nine. I’ve got to stop by the mall and exchange something. There was a tear in my new silk pajamas. Can you imagine? A hundred dollars I paid for the things—not that there’s that much silk in them, if you know what I mean. Quite the rip off. Anyway, I’m babbling. See you Friday then?”

“Sure. Absolutely. Nine o’clock. You can count on it.”

Tatiana blew him a kiss and waved over her shoulder as she left. She stopped at the door, though, and turned.

“Oh, I almost forgot. Do you think you could do me a tiny favor, Cisco, my love?”

*** 8:15 Thursday ***

Fred Fromfeld, professor of Applied Ambiguities, paused, key in hand, before his office door. Two sheets of paper were stuck under the door. One was folded, and obviously expensive paper. The other was a plain white sheet with just the corner sticking out. He was a tall man, and his back creaked as he bent over to retrieve the items. He pulled reading glasses from his pocket as he pushed the door open.

The plain sheet was a reminder of the special called senate meeting at ten O’clock. He snorted and wadded it up to toss in the trash bin. He took more time with the thick cream letterhead, absorbing the words.

From: Harry Hapollonian, Assistant Dean for Efficiency
To: Faculty
Subject: Recommendations for improvements

The Efficiency Committee has completed its study, and is about to release the full findings to the Board of Trustees. Here is a brief summary of proposed changes that could impact the faculty, provided to you as a courtesy.

1. Classes will be reduced from 50 lecture minutes to 40 lecture minutes plus 10 minutes of student-to-student communication, which does not require the presence of a professor. The number of credits will remain the same for purposes of counting hours, but professors’ (respective) loads will be proportionally increased to account for this change. I.e. instead of teaching 12 credits at 50 minutes per credit in a semester, you will teach 14 credits at 40 minutes per meeting. There will be, of course, no pay increase, since you are teaching for the same amount of time either way.

2. No classes with fewer than seven students will be offered except as ‘extra’ unpaid offerings volunteered by the faculty. Instead, students will be expected to be lumped together in more generic ‘schoolhouse’ type classes at the upper levels. These may need to be interdisciplinary in nature in order to come up with the requisite number of students.

With the savings in efficiency from these two initiatives, we expect to be able to fully fund both men’s and women’s football teams in the fall. As a side note, all faculty parking spots will be eliminated to make room for the coaches.

Prof. Fromfeld gave a bellow that would have made any bull moose proud and headed straight for his department chair’s office.


*** 9:30 ***

Dining Services had not asked any questions when Tatiana had requested a large bowl of punch to be placed outside the auditorium for this morning’s meeting. All they wanted to know was what department to charge it to. She had gleefully given them the account number for a certain assistant dean.
The crew set it up efficiently, with plenty of ice and paper cups, and left. Tatiana stirred the pink liquid with the ladle and looked into the large ornate mirror on the wall. No one was around. She reached into her bag and retrieved the vial that Cisco had made for her. It had ended up taking a lot more convincing than she had figured on, but she had gotten what she wanted. She quickly emptied the clear contents into the bowl, dropped the vial back into her bag, and then stirred the punch some more. Then she went to the ladies’ room to dispose of the evidence and wait. It didn’t take long for an angry buzz of professor’s voices to be heard. It escalated quickly.





*** 10:10 ***

Penny Proctum banged the senate chair’s gavel for the fourth time.

“Can I have order please? PLEASE!”

The room was packed. Tatiana had never seen a faculty senate meeting so well attended, or so animated. She glanced at her watch, wondering how long it would take the drugs to start having effect for those lucky individuals who had drunk from the punch bowl. Just looking around, she saw that about half those gathered had paper cups in their hands. They would each shortly begin to feel the effects of the combination of a mild hallucinogen, a narcotic, and something like a truth serum, a cocktail produced late during the night by a certain chemist she knew. She was surprised to find that she felt no trace of guilt or fear. Francisco slid into the seat beside her.

“Exciting, huh?” he said, looking down her dress.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet, hon. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

“HOO-AH!” the president’s voice boomed through the auditorium like an artillery shell. All voices muted. Ezra stood at the front of the room and put his paper cup on the podium, next to Penny’s. He spoke into the microphone.

“I would hope that you would show your elected chairperson a little more respect than this. Madame chair?”

“Thank you Mr. president. I hereby call this special meeting of the faculty senate to order.” She was clearly enjoying her role at the center of this storm. “And I believe that the president has an announcement to make concerning a certain memo that you may have received this morning.” She stepped away to give him the microphone.

“Thank you. Yes. Let me first say that I realize there is a lot of false information circulating out there. I can think of no better forum than this to set a few facts straight.”

He paused to take a sip of punch.

“When I was a boy,” he began, “I had a goat. It was a Billy goat and it would eat everything in sight. Nobody liked the goat but me, and my father in particular would take every opportunity to say what a stupid animal it was, and how it should be made into glue. His name was Goaty—the goat, not my father.” Those assembled laughed just enough to assure the president that they were still here. Almost everybody present had heard some version of the goat story at least once.

“One day,” he continued, “Goaty took a hankering to my father's workshirt. My father worked for the railroad, and they had provided him with a shirt. I remember that it had his name sown into the pocket. Donald, it said. That was my father’s name. My mother took some red thread and put ‘jr.’ after the name, because my grandfather's name was also Donald, and he worked for the railroad too. That shirt was special. Well, you can probably guess what Goaty did.”

Boy, can we, thought Tatiana.

“Goaty ate my father's workshirt. All except the buttons, which he left laying on the ground next to the clothesline in a neat little pile. He even ate the red thread that my mother had sewn into the pocket. I was the one to discover this act of consumption, and I had to decide what to do. On the one hand, I could tell my father what had happened, and suffer the consequences, or I could lie, and say that I didn't know what had happened to the shirt. I knew that if I told the truth, Goaty would be sold or given to Mr. Swanson, the butcher. I didn't say anything at dinner that night when the topic came up. Mother was worried because she couldn’t find the shirt, and allowed as to how it might have gotten caught in a gust and flown away due to the inferior clothespins she had to make do with. I just ate my carrot and potato pie in silence. But I knew I had to tell the truth eventually. And I did so the very next morning. And Goaty left our family for greener pastures.” Ezra looked heavenward for a second, and then started to get around to the point of this recitation of the Goaty saga.

“I believe that when the truth has to be told, the best thing is just to tell it.” He paused for effect.

“We have problem. Last year, despite our best efforts, we have not been able to match revenues with expenses for the academic year.

“The board of trustees has advised me that we will have to make some cuts. This will not be easy. As you know, last year we added several positions in anticipation of higher enrollment. Now those decisions will obviously have to be reviewed.” He took another sip of punch, and Tatiana thought she saw him twitch once.

“Now as to this, uh,..., this memo here. It appears that someone has played a little joke on you. This memo, on the Assistant Dean for Efficiency’s letterhead,” he wagged one of the offending documents over his head, “is a,...,a, uh,...” he swatted at the air in front of him a couple of times. There were scattered chuckles from the faculty.

“I lost my train of thought,” he said. Penny whispered in his ear.

“Ah, yes. My friends...” he leaned forward to be intimate with his audience, “there IS no such thing as women’s football! That was clearly a typo by that frigid excuse for a woman who types Tick-Tock’s memos because he never learned how to do it himself, the boob.”

The senate erupted in laughter. It went on until the president practically screamed into the microphone.

“AT EASE! I will have respect in my own house! Well, now I’ve said my piece. We’re all friends here. Except for a few of you—you know who you are—insufferable academics. Pains in the ass, if you want to know the truth.”

Penny frantically tried to get him to move away from the podium, and ultimately succeed with a powerful bump from her hip that almost sent him sprawling. More laughter greeted this bit of slapstick. No one had ever seen such an entertaining meeting. Professors looked around at each other to see if others were enjoying the carnival nature of the event. About half of them were appreciating it in a preternatural way, enhanced with bits of chemical magic.

“My god,” Cisco whispered to Tatiana, “What’s with these people?” His eyes were as big as bagels. Tatiana smiled a crooked smile and patted his hand.

“So, so, so, I think maybe we should, heh, get on with the completely useless business at hand,” Penny continued. “Milton, would you like to present the reasons for your, uh, petition?”

Milton stood. He swayed a bit, but his voice was strong in a way that Tatiana had never heard. She marveled that there could be a bit of iron in the man after all.

“NEVER in the course of world affairs has a group of people been treated so disrespectfully,” he said, throwing his arms up dramatically. The sight was so out of character and so completely absurd that it shocked some people back to reality. What the hell is going on here, you could almost hear them thinking. Milton continued on with one rhetorical device topping the next until wars had been rumored and declared and the horsemen of the apocalypse were in full gallop. Then he abruptly sat down again. There was dead silence.

“May I make a suggestion?” the mousy professor of Ceramic Meretriculation, Gerald Greer asked. Heads turned to look at him. He cleared his throat nervously.

“We obviously have several serious challenges to the curriculum here, in this memo, and really, in previous attempts to do the same thing. Rather than reacting purely emotionally, and destroying what good will we have with the administration, why don’t we accept that there is some truth to the fact that economic forces have to be considered as well as our philosophical principles.”

“Go on,” someone said.

“Well, I was just thinking. If we broke up into small groups of four or so and workshopped ideas, we might just come up with something that worked.”

Tatiana watched, amazed, as a kind of self-organization happened right before her eyes. Without any bureaucracy at all, professors formed small working groups, whipped out their red pens, and began brainstorming. The combination of drugs had apparently hit some ‘sweet spot’ in the collective consciousness. A buzz of creative energy filled the auditorium. Occasionally arguments broke out, but were quickly muted. The white walls of the auditorium became instant whiteboards, with new mission statements, curriculum flow charts, and cost/revenue ratios competing for space. It went on for hours. Tatiana left to get something to eat, and came back.

When she returned only about half of the faculty were still there. Cisco was gone, and had probably fled the country by now, not being entirely stupid.
There was an impressive diagram on one of the walls, and Carla Carlos, a biologist, was using a laser pointer to explain it to the others.

“This is a brewing vat, used to ferment the grain. See the filters here and here—and coils to maintain a constant temperature. Beer is not distilled like whiskey is, so there’s no need for high pressures or high temperatures. Biology students at all levels will be working closely with Chemistry to make sure that the beer is not only safe to drink, but tastes good too. That concludes my presentation. Who’s next?”

“I think that’s us,” Yvette Yakkit, from Economics, said. “Business majors will be required to have at least twelve credits of internship in the project. This will include financing, accounting, advertising, marketing, and market research. I have just discussed with the Graphic Design folks, and they will be doing logos for the product line.”

Tatiana watched in amazement as each department presented its contribution to the proposal. PE majors would be bouncers for the bar, to be established. English and Drama majors would be bartenders and servers, respectively. At the end of it, there was exhausted silence as the Accounting professors presented the bottom line: given certain conservative assumptions, the income from selling the bottled beer retail and wholesale could generate just as much revenue as the proposed changes from Tick-Tock’s committee would save. The many hours of internships that the students would have to take would be like free tuition dollars because of the low cost of instruction. It was a beautiful scheme. Tatiana left them as they debated what the beer should be called (‘Rocke Rolling Brew’ was the leading contender). She felt completely drained, and started to wonder what she had done.

Later, with a perfect martini at the perfect distance, Tatiana began her nightly self-analysis. She heard the beep of the answering machine from the other room, followed by the voice of a hysterical chemist. She tuned it out, and started down her mental Escher staircase. The question she would not ask and could not answer was the obvious one: Of what use is an Existential Studies major in a brewery?