Death by Committee

The expression “death by committee” usually refers to good initiatives (and bad ones, I hope) that will never become a reality because of the stifling effects of the bureaucratic process. But the load of committee assignments I have taken upon myself has me seeing that phrase in a different light.

As faculty members we find ourselves susceptible to a life-threatening excess of committee work for all sorts of reasons.

New hires know they need to busy themselves with scholarship, teaching, and service in order to build a strong case for tenure. Eager to make a good impression, they volunteer for committees, task forces, and other forums of busy-ness to fill the hours of their workday not spent in the classroom.

Then there are those who truly care. For many faculty members, having a stake in the college and its programming turns on the issue of job security. Once they have tenure, their interest in committee assignments wanes. But those who care beyond their own self-interest will never find themselves short of committee work.

And woe to those faculty members who are actually good at it. Being well-spoken in a faculty forum or impressing an administrator with your bureaucratic skills can lend you the unmistakable stink of competency. And that competency can only be stifled by an overload of extra assignments.

In my case, when I first arrived at my tenure-track job, my participation in an academic-integrity hearing led to a slot on an academic-policy committee, which came with an appointment to an additional subcommittee. Handling those duties well soon garnered me the committee chairmanship, which also meant joining a committee composed of other committee chairs.

Then other assignments piled on: annual search committees, a commencement committee, a secondary-education certification committee, a vague future-plans committee, and finally -- the mother lode -- a general-education review committee. If competitive committee climbing were a sport, I would be a star athlete.

“You’d be so great at this,” or “You are just what we’ve been looking for,” or “I have something to ask you, and I hope you’ll say yes,” can sound like compliments or, even better, what every new faculty member craves: approval, recognition, acceptance. And a simple “OK” seems a small price to pay.

But at some point after the duties have been divided and the deadlines start rolling in, the kiss of welcome starts feeling like the kiss of death.

The meaning of those compliments, once you read between the lines, is: “You look like you can pull hard. Why don’t you try this harness on for size? Still going strong? Let’s load a little more on the sledge. Maybe some of us can even ride.”

If you look like a committee hound, your colleagues who know how to mush will take note. And like the dogs in the Iditarod, committee members start out many, but not every dog in the pack crosses the finish line. As the weak or injured are loosed from the sled, the work increases for those remaining.

Some of the old dogs like to pretend they’re passing on the mantle: “We’ve done our share of committee work; our colleagues have heard our ideas; some of the younger folks deserve to have their chance,” they modestly beg off.

I used to take such expressions as genuine, but doubts crept in over time. When a newly tenured colleague invoked that exemption, I caught on. A veteran’s translation of those code phrases might be: “I’ve done my bit of pulling and finally crested the hill. Now I’d like to ride for a while. Surely some eager young pup who wants to feel like part of the big dogs’ pack would rather have my slot.”

If I’m honest with myself, I can admit that my motivations for accepting so much committee work mixed principle and ambition.

The principle is that if an issue is important to me, then I should help to make sure it’s handled right. From elementary school on, I always felt like one of the smartest kids in the class. By the time I was in graduate school, I had learned that I couldn’t necessarily trust all of my classmates to deliver an acceptable outcome. In those years, I remember watching the NBA championships during the Chicago Bulls’ ascendancy. The camera caught Michael Jordan in the closing seconds summing up the whole game plan for his huddled teammates: “Give me the ball.”

That stayed with me because, while I’m no Michael Jordan (except in competitive committee climbing), I, too, trust myself more than others not to blow it when it matters.

As for ambition, I’ve let myself believe that more things matter than actually do. And as I’m lugging my laptop to yet another meeting, it starts to feel like a harness I’m just leaning into, not pulling with all my heart.

Alternatively I’m reminded of the Kurt Vonnegut short story “Harrison Bergeron,” a dystopian vision of an egalitarian society, in which the talented have been handicapped (by bags of sand tied to dancers’ ankles, for instance, or padded gloves on musicians’ hands) so that no one achieves at any more than an average level.

I feel equalized all right. One or two committee assignments ago, I quit trusting my ability to keep details straight and deliver at crunch time. I’ve gone from rarely missing deadlines to rarely remembering where I’m supposed to be and what I was supposed to have done by then.

I could kick myself for agreeing to join the vague future-plans committee, an assignment that I initially had the good sense to refuse. I realize now that any undergraduate could have handled the responsibility, which mostly entails listening to an administrator expatiate about campus trivia.

Yet I did relent, voluntarily tying on another harness, or sandbag. The panel’s organizers had pleaded with me, appealing to my vanity; there was no one better qualified than I to serve.

Now I understand what that meant: “No one else seems ambitious enough to accept yet another committee assignment on such short notice. Mush! Mush!”

There’s death by committee, and sometimes there’s rescue by committee -- such as when an emergency session of one panel comes at the same time that another normally meets. Choosing between conflicting committee meetings may be shabby consolation to the overcommitted, but it’s a luxury all the same.

That is, unless you forget to send notice to the jilted committee, a lapse that leaves the overachiever seeming no more than a slacker. Fine. Anything for a break from vague planning.