Any employee will tell you that workplace meetings stink. But there is something especially rank about faculty meetings, complete with gaggles of Ph.D.s seated before a rotating cast of administrators and their jargon-laden PowerPoint slides.
Lisa Nikolidakis, an assistant professor of creative writing at Indiana’s University of Evansville, took a stab at distilling that foul stench by creating a “First Faculty Meeting of the Year Bingo” card, which was published online last month by the publication McSweeney’s. Among the spaces to be crossed off? “Experiential learning.” “Assessment.” “It’s great to see everyone (FREE SPACE).”
The fake bingo cards were too good to go unmarked. So we asked readers to attend their first faculty meetings of the year with the cards in hand. Then, when they were good and marked up, to send them to us.
It should surprise no one that many of you gleefully achieved bingo.
What were the most-checked boxes (aside from the free space)? “Assessment” came in at No. 1, followed closely by “someone is texting.” The least-checked box: “Obviously a toupee.” (Good job, fellas.)
But some of you went above and beyond, sharing pithy commentary along with the completed boards. Wrote a researcher at Central Piedmont Community College, in North Carolina: “Instead of ‘that guy with the short shorts’ can I get ‘that guy with the ripped jeans and flip-flops’? That department chair with the ripped jeans and flip-flops!”
An associate professor at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, wrote that she would have had bingo, if she had been able to check the “general sense of doom” square (“we’re in the arts, so ‘General Sense of Doom’ is both constant and unspoken”). She added that she had hidden her ballot in a folder to avoid alerting colleagues.
An M.F.A. student at the University of South Florida wasn’t as surreptitious, showing her completed bingo card to the English department’s chairman (he “laughed graciously”), and scrawling the name of the department across the top:
Several of you went even further, annotating the card with musings and frustrations. From the College of Charleston professor:
And from an associate professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Texas (note the annotation to the “general sense of doom” square):
Why stop here? How about convocation bingo, commencement bingo, or tenure-committee bingo? The possibilities are endless.
Andy Thomason is a web news writer. Follow him on Twitter @arthomason.
