Committee work

Part of any faculty member's job, a part not many non-faculty people know about, is service to the institution. One form this service takes is committee work: joining and participating on committees that make up the infrastructure of the institution, committees that do the red-corpuscle work, delivering oxygen to the institution's vital organs so it continues to exist.

At universities and colleges with a traditional tenure-and-ranking system (with assistant-, associate-, and full-professor levels), this work is quantified and used for granting tenure and approving promotions. Some institutions even suggest the appropriate allocation of a faculty member's time: 30% of your work should be devoted to service, for instance, with 20% to teaching and 50% to research.

At a community college, however, this vital work is not required or rewarded in any way. At my college, for example, no faculty member is required to do anything at all other than be in a classroom for a certain amount of time each week and post some office hours when s/he is supposed to be available on campus outside of class.

So those of us who are temperamentally wired to contribute to our community, to make our workplaces work, choose to do so for the personal satisfaction it affords.

Or something like that. Maybe we choose committee work because we're easily bored and need variety.
Or maybe teaching our classes is easy and we need challenging work to fill our time.
Or maybe we crave conversation with human beings who are not our students.
Or maybe we used to have a research agenda but now don't (because it's not rewarded at a community college) and so we channel that research energy into other activities.
Or maybe we feel guilted into this work by our deans or department chairs.
Or maybe we feel an obligation to improve the health of the institution within which we work.
Or maybe we're adding lines to our CV so we can apply for jobs other places.
Or maybe a dean *is* rewarding us in a non-fiscal way for our work.
Or maybe we just like committees.

In my 20+ years in higher education, I've always been on at least two committees a year. The one I'm currently on, which is important and I'm very, very happy to be on, met for the first time this week. As I listened and participated in our conversation, I was reminded of a quotation, "All theory is autobiography," which I had read was attributed to Nietzsche (although googling it, I found Valery also credited, and the quotation as "every theory is autobiography" -- I'll have to do some more digging).

Thinking back to committees I've been on, this quotation also applies to decision-making: all *decisions* are autobiographical, in that we often decide something is the right way to go because we've experienced it before. Even in higher ed, where we'd hope that folks would make decisions based on logic or empirical evidence or objective reasoning because that's what we purport to teach, we are still human beings who make decisions based on association, personal experience, and our own reasons.

Plato and Aristotle -- and Quintilian and Cicero -- were right: logical reasoning *must* be taught formally, extensively, rigorously because it does not come most easily to human beings. We weak humans rely on logic least often when making decisions, yet to be truly educated, we should rely on it most often. It's a constant and ongoing project, this "education" thing. And ultimately, *that's* why I, personally, do committee work: for the education.