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.