Hypocrisy in Leadership

I find it funny that a new department chair can criticize his predecessor for polling the department members individually (calling for more meetings as always a better way to discover what the department truly believes) and then in the next breath proclaim how important he found it to poll all the department members individually about previous decisions the department discussed in depth at a series of meetings.  Why do you need to poll them individually if meetings are always better?  We already had the meeting. Which is really the better way?

Another example is taking what used to be a routine task at the first department meeting of the year to assign various departmental duties where each member could ask for various tasks and turning it into a serious of individual conferences to ask people to do certain tasks.  If you truly think everything should be in the open, why don't we discuss the tasks together as we have done for years?

Irony in Writing Statements

I find it ironic when a task force of professors (including professors who specialize in teaching remedial composition) lead a college-wide effort to create a college writing statement, and the document they produce both says we value correct grammar and punctuation and also demonstrates that we cannot actually employ them.

Happy Birthday, US Constitution!

Today is Constitution Day in the United States.  Today marks the 222nd anniversary of 39 men signing the Constitution.  Few people recognize this day--far fewer than recognize Flag Day, even though the Constitution is much more vital to our nation than the stars and stripes.  However, perhaps it is fitting since so few people have any idea what the Constitution says--including many who have sworn to support and defend it, both in uniform and in Washington.

Demographic Information and Anonymity

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an interesting blog entry on how gender, zip code, and birth date are unique for approximately 87% of the US population.  That means that releasing medical records with just this demographic information is enough anybody to find out the medical records for the vast majority of people in the US.  So much for anonymity.  It's too bad policy makers don't understand mathematics.

More here at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/what-information-personally-identifiable.

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings

The life of a professor, particularly at a small liberal arts college, means many meetings: faculty meetings, division meetings, department meetings, committee meetings, etc.  Not only are there many meetings, they tend to drag on and on.  Meetings can be useful, but they can also be a waste of time, particularly if the person chairing the meeting likes to ramble and intimidate his colleagues and wear down those who dare speak in opposition to him until they eventually realize they cannot get a word in edgewise, submit to his will, and stop arguing.  Even worse is when the chair then decrees the deliberative (I use the term very loosely) body has come to a unanimous decision.  This tactic of consensus by attrition is a perfect example of why rules or parliamentary procedure are so important to understanding the true will of a deliberative body.

We could easily spend less time in meetings if we worked more efficiently in them, stuck to the agenda, and only covered business that required the entire body to participate.  I think Hobbes had a point when he said a leader should take advice from his counselors individually and in private so that each would give him his true opinion and not be bullied by the assembly into either not talking or misrepresenting himself so that he more closely aligned with what he thought was the general opinion of the assembly.  Unfortuantely, an unscrupulous department chair could easily use this tactic to hide the true will of the department.

Welcome

Welcome to this new blog. I intend to post my thoughts freedom, liberty, life, the academy, the artes liberales, and being a professor at a liberal arts college. In particular, I will probably comment on the state of my department, my college, the academy, and the world in general. I am new to blogging, but not to writing. I cannot promise I will post something regularly, but I hope I will. Some posts may be very short, and others may be longer essays. We will have to wait and see.

“τὸ εὔδαιμον τὸ ἐλεύθερον, τὸ δ᾽ ἐλεύθερον τὸ εὔψυχον.” Θουκυδίδης