One of the great problems with Boondoggle University, I have decided, is the way they thoughtlessly fail to schedule Spring Break in order to coincide with certain holy seasons. Conference tournaments and March Madness -- not to be confused with Purim -- are a huge impediment to my teaching. Sure, my students and I have survived the week after Spring Break -- they have light tans and a serious case of short-term memory loss, I have acute crankiness and a whole lot of new light fixtures / dimmer switches / outlet -- but it's been difficult. When I have tenure I plan to take any first-round Thursday afternoon classes and turn them into flimsy excuses to watch games seminars on ritual theory. Or, you know, I could just avoid teaching on Thursday afternoons -- easier, but less fun.

Thanks to a lot of ill-considered football-motivated bleep-bleep-bleeping conference shuffling, my home conference, the ACC, is probably enjoying its last NCAA for awhile with two-thirds of the conference in. I didn't bother filling out brackets this year -- there were no pools at work, I don't have cable, and I don't follow the western and minor conferences enough to make really intelligent picks -- but I feel pretty good about the conference as a whole. Also, the brackets have been thoughtfully set up so that it will be at least three games before I might need to trash-talk my way through an N.C. State-Maryland matchup with Cousin A.J.* My March Madness affiliations are simple: North Carolina teams over non-North-Carolina teams (although I confess to rooting for Maryland in the ACC tournament), ACC over non-ACC, anyone over Kentucky. And Louisville.

I cannot play basketball to save my life, and this is only partially due to my being the same height as Muggsy Bogues, but I have spent most of my life watching basketball (by which I mean "college basketball"; if the NBA moved to single-elimination playoffs and called traveling on marquee players now and again I might watch it more regularly, but then again why bother?). The first game I can remember details of was the 1982 NCAA final, with Carolina beating Georgetown sometime after I fell asleep (I was six, okay?). Although we have family ties of some sort to most of the original ACC schools, my father is a long-suffering Carolina fan. So the next year I decided to irritate Dad by rooting for N.C. State. I've loved watching basketball ever since.

One of the major problems with inadvertently settling in the Midwest is that they show all the wrong games on broadcast TV. Oh, sure, it's nice that I can keep all the "I" teams in the Big Ten straight now. Sure, I feel some mild interest in the Atlantic 10 and the Big Twelve, both tournaments I saw on TV here for some reason. Heck, Boondoggle U. even has a Division I basketball team (and if they ever get out of the NIT -- and don't play any ACC teams -- I'll be cheering them on). But I am a regional sports fan at heart, and this is not my region. This is about two regions away from my region. If I were just slightly less stingy about supporting the poorly-run monopoly that is cable, or if I had had more time to research dish alternatives, I'd be watching ESPN like any sensible person.

Luckily, this is the 21st century, and I have other alternatives. Right now I am glued to the computer -- admittedly, not so much different from my usual routine -- switching back and forth between ESPN and Yahoo real-time updates with occasional trips downstairs to deal with laundry or into another window to work on a book review. The book review shouldn't really take me all weekend, but there you go. Yesterday I did more or less the same thing in my office (without the laundry) and made it to Talmud study while calculating that I'd still catch most of the Carolina game afterwards. Sometime today I'll even get around to various Shabbat-related tasks (and believe me, the part where I plan to spend most of tomorrow not watching TV is a statement about the sad lack of TVs at my synagogue, not my position on avot melachot). Somehow, though, remembering the five different trupp sequences to identical descriptions of the Tabernacle menorah is losing out at the moment. Go figure.

I was going to say that the halakhic-change post is coming sometime soonish, but then again this will be a busy weekend. Chalk it down to the customs of my fathers.

* -- No, I don't really believe there will be an N.C. State-Maryland matchup -- Stanford, Syracuse, Connecticut, and even UL-Lafayette (it's halftime of that game as I write this) are not to be collectively ignored. But it's a nice thought, isn't it?

If you discount academia, government, and religion, there are few institutions as roundly derided by Western culture* as that of the committee. Try Googling "quotes committees" if you don't believe me. That's how I came up with this post title, which derives from a line in John Le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: "A committee is an animal with four back legs." One is expected to laugh at the witticism, but my response, I am afraid, is to assert that the animal in question simply needs to be taught how to walk backwards. I am even willing to claim a certain zoological expertise at this point. After all, if you discount photocopying, imbibing at free receptions, and teaching the occasional Class of the Living Dead, there are few activities which feature quite so prominently in academic life as committee meetings of one sort or another.

I was interested in committees long before I joined the academic establishment, though. Back when I was (very briefly) a trade journalist, I covered a lot of committee meetings, most of them vaguely federal in nature and featuring members from industry, government, and academia. I developed an abiding respect for anyone who could make a group composed of these "stakeholders"** do, well, anything. And I saw some brilliant committee leadership, including one guy who successfully used Robert's Rules of Order to completely stymie a large group of state regulators out to vote his privileges away for three solid hours. I mean, it was amazing. They should've showed it on ESPN. Anyway, I appreciated good committee work, and then I experienced plenty of so-so committee work in graduate school, and then I tried my hand at running a committee, and -- well, I'm still speaking to some of them. No, actually, I don't think I did too badly, but it was a valuable learning experience. Now I demand power along with my responsibility, and I recognize just how important good committee leadership is.

Returning to Le Carré, there is something unnatural about an animal walking backwards, but there is also something unnatural about committees -- in the sense that they do not suit our basic human instincts. (Well, neither does bathing. I am not particularly fond of "natural.") As far as I can tell, the default mode of decision-making for most human societies is autocracy. This has been mitigated (in various places at various times) by bureaucracy and by the fact that eventually the autocrat will need to sleep, eat, or die (regardless of his or her officially declared divinity). The autocrat is also likely to call on advisors to expand his or her (usually his) base of knowledge. Nevertheless, it is fundamentally a bit screwy to have an entire committee making decisions; it approaches democracy (depending on how the committee has been selected), and, like democratic institutions, committees tend to oscillate between the extremes of autocracy and anarchy. Moreover, they require leaders: a functioning committee can no more be leaderless than a democracy can, and the more continuity in leadership the more smoothly things tend to run (although there's that autocracy problem).

It is fashionable to moan about one's committee entanglements in academia, but I've decided that I rather like committees which are constituted and led competently. To begin with, a committee should have no more than five active members if it hopes to reach a decision with any sort of timeliness; it can have infinite numbers of passive members, provided they stay quiet and (preferably) do not come to meetings. Many of my favorite committees are small and therefore highly efficient. My department, unfortunately, does not correspond to this description, but on many topics only five or so people will speak up. When everyone wants to speak up, we have a problem, because discussion never changes anyone's mind at a committee meeting: if you insist on having a committee larger than five active members and expecting it to decide something, you should pre-orchestrate things so that you have secured the necessary number of votes beforehand.

Of course, not all committee meetings need to reach a decision. Some of them are simply held to brainstorm, or gauge support (although that's why we have email, telephones, and allegedly unplanned meetings in stairwells), or simply let people get their discursive ya-yas out. I chaired a committee meeting recently at Temple Boondoggle which was intended to fulfill all these functions -- we will be making decisions at the next meeting, by which time I predict that a lot fewer people will show up and whereupon I will promptly divide those who do into two subcommittees addressing the two major tasks of our committee. (This is usually the best way to deal with an oversized committee with multiple tasks; tactics such as getting all the useless people drunk or convincing them to go to the bathroom simultaneously are more trouble than they're worth.)

Then there's the question of information flow. In this day and age -- by which I mean the day and age when we have reliable postal service, so from about 221 BCE in China -- there is no excuse to hold a meeting simply in order to tell people things. We have "technology" for that -- not just email, but paper, not to mention telephones. Naturally, you will want to show up to your committee meeting with additional (paper) copies of whatever you already distributed to the members the previous week, but these should be handed out only if asked. In special situations, such as the dreaded open meeting when you have no idea who will show up, there should at least be informative handouts to go over quickly at the beginning of the meeting. Most of my meetings involve professionals if not academics, and paper makes us all feel safe and secure. Having someone read off said paper for the first two-thirds of the meeting simply makes us feel bored.

The ideal committee meeting should have non-crunchy food and non-alcoholic drink beforehand; in case of time constraints, these offerings can be passed around during any introductory spiels. The ideal committee meeting should also take place in a room with sufficient space and tables and comfy chairs, but an oppressively small space can be useful in expediting the decision-making process. (More obvious psychological torture is a bad idea, though, unless this is your last committee meeting -- and even then I am constitutionally opposed to bridge-burning.) The ideal committee meeting should run no more than an hour and a half before a break, and that's assuming a committee which is taking up a whole slate or urgent issues: the ideal meeting focuses on one issue, reaches a decision, and ends slightly ahead of time with everyone feeling good about their participation.

This last is probably the element I see ignored most frequently by incompetent committee chairs: even when they do not turn "dialogue" into a verb (see Gandhi, infra), they labor under the impression that a committee meets in order to facilitate communication or some such malarkey. If you just want to chat with people, you call it a party and you bring a lot more food and drink, okay? A committee meets in order to discuss and ultimately make one or more decisions. These decisions will be made by the people who actually show up, which is why committees work at all. (The history of the U.S. Constitutional Convention is particularly instructive in this regard.) Meeting after meeting of decision-less discussion, however well-intentioned, will sap the life from any committee. Indeed, an undeclared filibuster is a brilliant way to stop the committee from accomplishing anything, which is presumably why a call to question cannot be debated or amended in Robert's Rules of Order.

Sadly, very few of the committees I serve on use any rules of order, which means that they have to be led by (a) completely transparent honesty or (b) some unholy combination of persuasiveness, charisma, and cunning. Very few committee chairs the nerve for (a) -- I seldom do, although it depends on the committee -- but when a chair abandons (a) and doesn't succeed in (b) either, the result is a meeting which is boring to the point of toxicity. This is where most of the committee jokes come from: it is nearly impossible to have a satisfactory committee meeting with an incompetent chair (and, yes, there needs to be one person running the meeting -- whether or not it is the person who is formally supposed to be running the meeting is another matter altogether). I firmly believe that every candidate for any administrative responsibility which might ever lead to running meetings should have to audition by doing just that; after all, some institutions have potential teaching candidates teach a sample class or potential researchers deliver a presentation. And, as I'm sure we all know, many otherwise wonderful people cannot run a committee meeting for spit.

Today I have one informational meeting (blah), one decision-making meeting (yay), and one discussion-centered meeting (hmmm). They are chaired, not necessarily respectively, by incompetent, adequate, and marvelous chairpersons. I will be able to make it through the informational meeting only by contemplating the fascinating human artifice that is the committee, the fascinating human document that is the class syllabus I work on during particularly dull meetings, and the not-so-fascinating human, uh, hand which I seem to have scratched here and there in the course of last week's DIY bonanza. Or I could just doodle. But I still think committees have the potential to be pretty nifty -- when they're done right. And I'll have you know I can walk backwards pretty darn fast.

* -- You know, the kind that grows in cows'-milk yogurt. Or are sheep more Western? I always have trouble with this one.
** -- The correct response to this term, unless it is being used to describe a vampire slayer's assistant, involves something like Buffy's impression of Gandhi.