Intangible rewards
Answer these two questions to decide which committees to sit on.
by Christine Overall
In academia the so-called service component of faculty responsibilities tends to be about 20 percent of the expected workload for tenured and tenure-track faculty. We all know people who do more – the conscientious good citizens who contribute above and beyond the call of duty. We also know those who do less, sometimes much less.
First, there are the free riders. If a committee they sit on is sufficiently large, they may do little or no work, even skip meetings. Yet the committee membership still appears on their CV. Then there’s a phenomenon on the part of some faculty that might be called deliberate helplessness. If you act sufficiently incompetent and undependable, fairly soon your committee invitations will decline and maybe disappear altogether.
So there may be a moral element to our decisions about serving on committees.
The amount of service is growing all the time. More and more of what happens at universities is not directly connected to our core responsibilities of research and teaching. Instead it is about generating performance indicators, running program reviews, producing academic plans, promoting favourable publicity for the university, making do with severely limited resources, and raising money from individual and corporate donors.
This work grows in volume, but the number of permanent faculty members may not. Instead, universities hire sessional instructors, whose contracts may not include committee work and who can’t be expected to serve on committees as a favour. Thus, declining numbers of permanent faculty must take up more committee work. This plethora of service “opportunities” may be even greater for women, members of visible minorities, persons with disabilities or aboriginal people. Every committee must have its token representatives.
Those on the tenure track may either be protected from inordinate demands by department chairs or unions or else forced to do double duty as newbies who fear they will not earn tenure unless they accept every request. For the tenured, the situation appears less dangerous. Yet, even though committee work seldom brings tangible rewards, failure to meet some unwritten standard for service may be punished by declining merit awards or reduced access to such academic perks as good teaching schedules, preferred courses, teaching assistants or even new office furniture.
Other than self-protection, are there any reasonable ways to decide how much and what kind of service to engage in?
When I’m invited to join a committee, I now use two questions to determine whether to accept. First, does this committee make a difference? A legitimate and positive difference, that is. Some committees feel like make-work. They exist because some long-ago document says they should, or to ratify a decision that has already been made but for which the imprimatur of the faculty is deemed necessary. Committees falling into either of these categories are committees that I turn down. If I’m going to do service work, I want to contribute to the creation of policies and the making of academic decisions that will genuinely benefit students, faculty and staff, and enhance our mandate of teaching and research.
Of course, there is an epistemological problem of knowing which committees actually engage in real work, and which committees do make a difference.
My second question is easier to answer, although it does require self-knowledge: Will I make a difference to this committee? Will my experiences, skills and observations help to advance the work of the committee? Or am I simply there so that people can say that there is an “X” on the committee, where X stands for whatever underrepresented group the committee wants to say it has consulted.
I’ve been happy to find that answering these questions has had three good results. First, it diminishes the number of committee invitations that I’m at all inclined to accept. Second, it gives me a cogent, well-justified answer that I can use in response to invitations I decline. (How much I say is a matter of judgment. No committee chair wants to be told that his committee is a rubber-stamp machine, so I prefer to tell people that I’m not a good fit for certain committees.) And third, it makes it more likely that I will serve on committees that really do contribute, however modestly, to the wellbeing of the university.
Christine Overall teaches in the department of philosophy at Queen’s University and is our regular columnist on philosophical issues in the academy.
